Pedestrians look toward a Waymo autonomous self-driving Jaguar taxi stopped at a red light in Los Angeles. States are trying to prepare for more widespread use of self-driving cars in the future with new laws. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Early one morning last year, as state Rep. Josh Bray left his small town of Mount Vernon in southeastern Kentucky to make his way to the Capitol in Frankfort, he decided to count how many drivers he saw texting or distracted by something else.

He quit counting after 24 when he saw a truck driver reading a newspaper while going down the road.

The incident spurred the Republican lawmaker’s effort to pass a bill this spring in the Kentucky legislature that sets rules for self-driving vehicles, including the largest commercial trucks after July 2026. Bray thinks the rules will ensure that self-driving vehicles are safer than those operated by often-distracted human drivers.

The new law for fully autonomous vehicles — those designed to function without a human driver present — requires owners to file a safety and communication plan that law enforcement can use and to have a minimum of $1 million in liability insurance per vehicle, roughly 10 times higher than the amount for regular personal vehicles.

“I felt like it was necessary to have something on the books in Kentucky because we are kind of a logistics hub,” Bray said. For example, he said, self-driving baggage handling vehicles at a northern Kentucky airport now will be able to cross a state road.

The legislature approved the bill in late March and a few weeks later overrode a veto by Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, who said the bill advanced too quickly and that there should be a testing period before fully autonomous vehicles are allowed to drive in the state.

While no fully autonomous cars are in regular use in the country yet, some states have allowed limited testing and pilot programs on public roads. Many state legislatures are trying to get ahead of self-driving vehicles that eventually will be on their roads by setting standards for operating the vehicles and rules for law enforcement if they see an autonomous vehicle breaking a traffic law. And many laws require, as Kentucky’s does, a minimum insurance requirement to protect drivers, passengers and pedestrians, should the vehicles be involved in an accident.

This year, five states and Washington, D.C., enacted bills dealing with fully automated vehicles, according to Douglas Shinkle, associate director of environment, energy and transportation for the National Conference of State Legislatures. The new laws in Alabama, Kentucky and South Dakota allow for the operation of fully autonomous vehicles, while California’s new law deals with safety requirements. North Carolina’s brings the vehicles under updated dealer regulations for all cars.

Updates to current laws

About half the states already have statutes regulating vehicles operated by some degree of autonomous technology — ranging from the fully autonomous vehicles that are not on the road yet to those that have some driver-assist functions, Shinkle said. But many of the laws are being changed already.

“There’s been a steady progression of bills,” he said, “with some going back and refining some of the language. Every year some new states are getting into the mix.”

Most of this year’s new laws have to do with commercial vehicles, he said. States hope to bring in manufacturers of the vehicles or other industries that would use the technology.

“A lot of this is motivated by states that don’t want to be left behind,” Shinkle said. ”They hope this may lead to jobs in their states.”

But labor unions worry that driving jobs might be lost to the technology.

Dustin Reinstedler, president of the Kentucky chapter of the AFL-CIO, testified against the bill in his state, saying at a legislative hearing that his union preferred alternative legislation calling for a study of the “effects of autonomous vehicles on our roads and the jobs of over 50,000 workers.”

Already, autonomous ride-hailing vehicles from Waymo, formerly known as the Google self-driving car project, dot the landscape in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco, allowed to drive within limited areas.

Safety concerns

Fully autonomous vehicles have raised safety concerns. California enacted a law this year that will, among other things, require manufacturers to continuously monitor every autonomous vehicle on the road and designate a remote human operator to immobilize a vehicle if necessary. The law also allows law enforcement to issue a notice of noncompliance when autonomous vehicles violate local traffic ordinances.

Earlier this month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began an investigation into four crashes of Teslas operating with a partial-automation system (which can navigate highways and steer the car on city streets but requires a licensed driver to be present), including one in which a pedestrian was killed. In a news release, NHTSA said reduced visibility may have led to the crashes.

A NHTSA spokesperson said in an email that in each incident, the Tesla entered an area with reduced roadway visibility due to sun, glare, fog or dust. She would not elaborate nor be further identified.

Bray, the Kentucky lawmaker, argued that the self-driving vehicles and driver-assist vehicles are “much safer than human drivers.” He added that fully autonomous vehicles, such as large trucks, could run in the middle of the night, taking traffic off the roads during peak hours and lowering the risk of tired drivers falling asleep.

The idea of semitrucks without drivers makes Kentucky Republican state Sen. Greg Elkins uneasy. He opposed the bill and supported the governor’s veto.

“My reasoning was I just don’t think technology is there yet, particularly with 18-wheel vehicles,” he said in an interview. “I would have been OK with the bill that would have restricted [it to smaller vehicles].”

Alabama’s new law requires a minimum of $100,000 in liability insurance for fully autonomous vehicles, about the same as ordinary cars.

California’s new law requires $5 million in insurance for manufacturers testing autonomous vehicles on state roads, should any one of them be in an accident.

Robert Passmore, a vice president at the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, a trade group for insurance companies, said that should individual autonomous vehicles come into regular usage, the insurance companies still have to answer the question of “who was driving at the time.” He argued that the liability coverage should mirror that required for regular cars with drivers.

“Our position is that these vehicles should be insured the same,” he said. “The things that can happen as the result of driving are pretty much the same. Whatever the minimum limits are for that type of vehicle, those are probably appropriate [for autonomous vehicles]. Most people carry more than the minimum anyway.”

This article is republished from Stateline, a sister publication to the Kentucky Lantern and part of the nonprofit States Newsroom network.

A young boy walks down a hallway at Carter Traditional Elementary School in Louisville, Ky. Kentucky is one of three states with school choice questions on the ballot this fall. (Jon Cherry/Getty Images)

Supporters of school choice in Kentucky are hoping voters will do what the state courts wouldn’t — allow a new path for state-supported payments to private schools.

Kentucky is one of three states, along with Colorado and Nebraska, with school choice questions on the ballot this fall. Voters will be asked to decide whether public money should go to support private education. Opponents say the measures would undermine public schools by shifting money from them, while backers maintain that state aid would give parents more control over their kids’ education.

In West Kentucky, people like their schools, ponder ‘choice’ amendment’s implications

The measures come as school choice gains momentum across the country. Thirty-three states plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico already have at least one kind of school choice program, according to EdChoice, a nonprofit that advocates for the programs. They range from education savings accounts sponsored by the state to voucher programs to various types of tax credits that help provide scholarships or cover educational expenses for private schools.

But the measures have sparked some controversy. In Arizona, which in 2023 became the first state to make all students, regardless of family income, eligible for a school voucher, parents have tried to use the voucher money for dune buggies and expensive Lego sets.

Teachers unions and other public school professionals generally oppose the school choice plans, while many conservative politicians, religious institutions and private educational groups are in favor, along with some people of color in districts with underperforming public schools.

The choice programs have had difficulty gaining traction in rural areas, where there are fewer private schools than in cities and suburbs.

To overcome that resistance in Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has worked hard to elect like-minded allies to the state’s legislature. He led a multimillion-dollar political offensive that resulted in six Republican House members who opposed his school choice initiative being defeated in primaries this year. Stateline reported earlier this year that Abbott is within a couple of votes of being able to enact a school choice program when the legislature reconvenes in January.

Ballot measures

In Kentucky, the Republican-dominated legislature approved a program in 2021 to give tax credits to individuals or businesses for donations to nonprofits that provide scholarships for students who attend private schools.

GOP leaders say policy debates are to come as Democrats decry Amendment 2 as ‘blank check’

Lawmakers narrowly overrode Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of the measure. But the state’s Supreme Court ruled the plan unconstitutional in December 2022.

And last year, a circuit court judge struck down a 2022 Kentucky law that would have allowed public funding of charter schools. Kentucky currently has no operating charter schools. Such schools are publicly funded but run by outside organizations that operate them autonomously, without many of the rules governing traditional public schools.

Now, advocates want Kentucky voters to approve Amendment 2, which would change the state Constitution to ?allow the tax credits and public funding of charter and private schools.

The proposed constitutional amendment would give the legislature authority to pass laws providing state funding for the education of students outside the public school system. It says lawmakers could do so despite the parts of the Kentucky Constitution that forbid state funds to be used for “any church, sectarian or denominational school.”

The ballot measure would give the legislature the authority to pass laws similar to the ones that were thrown out, according to Republican state Sen. Damon Thayer, a strong supporter of the referendum.

“We passed [private education] scholarships in the past,” Thayer said in a phone interview. “Those would be on the table in the near future if the amendment is passed.”

He said it would give parents “the ability to send a child to a different school if the public school isn’t giving them what they need, private or parochial.”

But a coalition of public education advocates formed the group Protect Our Schools KY to oppose the amendment. Tom Shelton, a retired Kentucky school superintendent and a leader in the campaign effort, said it is a travesty to send public money “to unaccountable private schools” when public schools in the state could use the funds.

He said rural areas would fare particularly poorly under a proposal that would allow public money to go to private educational entities. Shelton said the vast majority of the private schools in Kentucky are in the two biggest cities of Louisville and Lexington — meaning that rural public schools would lose money diverted to private schools and that rural students would be less able to take advantage of the change.

“Who’s going to lose most? The rural poor kids,” Shelton said.

In some cases, private schools have raised tuition in states with school choice. And The Wall Street Journal has reported that vouchers tend to mostly benefit families who already have students in private schools.

In Nebraska, voters will choose whether to partially repeal a law enacted this year that allows the state to run a $10 million educational scholarship program for private school students.

The state’s highest court determined in September that the referendum can stay on the ballot.

State Sen. Dave Murman, a proponent of school choice who identifies as a Republican in the nonpartisan Nebraska legislature, said he’s disappointed that the referendum was allowed to proceed.

Murman said he expects the referendum vote to be close.

He postulated that public schools are “afraid of the competition. They are afraid they will lose students to private schools.” But he said he hopes public schools will improve in the face of competition.

But Tim Royers, president of the Nebraska State Education Association, which supports the referendum, said there is already competition among public schools.

“In 1989, Nebraska created ‘option enrollment’ that allows any family to attend any public school in the state as long as they are not at capacity,” he told Stateline.

He said the teachers union could have fought the law directly in the courts, but thought it would be better to put it on the ballot and let the voters decide. Teachers think parents and students are happy with the public school choices they have now, he said.

In Colorado, the ballot measure would enshrine a school choice option in the state constitution. It would add language saying that each “K-12 child has the right to school choice” and that “parents have the right to direct the education of their children.” School choice would explicitly include neighborhood schools, charter schools, private schools, homeschools, open enrollment options and future innovations in education.

Northern Kentucky developers, teachers unions fuel Amendment 2 money race

Conservative advocacy group Advance Colorado proposed?the amendment. Colorado already allows students to attend any public school — even outside their district — for free and has long had charter schools. Critics of the ballot measure say it would open the door to private school vouchers, though backers argue that’s not their intent and that it’s simply meant to protect charter schools. Some Colorado Democrats last year proposed tightening requirements on charter schools.

Ongoing disputes

States with existing school choice programs have encountered pushback this year.

The South Carolina Supreme Court last month threw out the state’s voucher program, leaving parents who already have received funds scrambling. State education officials and Republican Gov. Henry McMaster asked the court to reconsider the ruling, but the high court refused to rehear the case in early October, likely ending any possibility of resuming private tuition payments this year.

In Arizona, reports of misuse of funds to buy equipment not directly tied to a curriculum prompted the state attorney general to open an investigation. The state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program allows parents to use state money for various educational costs, including tuition and school supplies.

School voucher proponents spend big to overcome rural resistance

But after the school system clarified documentation requirements that purchases be tied to a curriculum, the Goldwater Institute, a conservative Arizona think tank, sued the state Department of Education over the requirements, on behalf of some homeschool parents. The institute called the verification requirements an “absurd new burden” on homeschooling parents that would prevent them from buying pencils, flash cards and other equipment not specifically called for in homeschool curricula.

The Grand Canyon Institute, a centrist think tank focused on economics, found in a report last month that Arizona’s voucher accounts had $360 million unspent by parents as of June.

“These parents have chosen not to spend the money on their children’s education,” Dave Wells, research director for the institute, said in a phone interview. “There’s no follow-up to see if the kids are doing well.”

The institute recommended that the state follow up on the money to see whether and where it is being spent.

Responding to the report, education department spokesperson Doug Nick told Arizona radio station KJZZ that the department administers the program as directed under state law.

“If the legislature makes changes to the law, we will comply with those changes,” he said.

This story is republished from Stateline, a sister publication to the Kentucky Lantern and part of the nonprofit States Newsroom network.

Child care worker Marci Then helps her daughter, Mila, 4, put away toys to get ready for circle time at the Little Learners Academy in Smithfield, Rhode Island. A state program for child care workers subsidizes Mila’s tuition. A handful of other states, including Kentucky, have similar programs, which advocates say has beneficial ripple effects through the state economy. (Photo by Elaine S. Povich/Stateline)

SMITHFIELD, R.I. — Child care worker Marci Then, 32, looked over at two 4-year-olds in her care who were tussling over a toy plate in a model kitchen set. “Are we sharing?” she gently asked them. They both let go.

Then works at Little Learners Academy child care center near Providence, Rhode Island. Her daughter, Mila, 4, is enrolled there, so Then is able to keep a watchful eye on her in addition to about a dozen other 4-year-olds. Mila calls her mother “Miss Marci” at school, but “Mom” at home.

Most of the time, Mila is in another room with a different worker at the center, adhering to rules that don’t allow parent caregivers to watch their own children in a licensed setting. But for today, Mila is around her mom for a bit to show a reporter around.

Mila proudly chirps her age, then helps put toys away so the kids can quietly gather for circle time.

Then said that without help she would not have been able to afford the $315 a week for Mila to come to Little Learners. But she is taking advantage of a one-year state pilot program that authorizes the use of federal funds to pay for care for the children of early education workers.

“It’s been life-changing for me,” said Then, a single mom who is also responsible for a disabled young adult whom she adopted. Without it, “I’d have to rearrange my life.”

In 2022, Kentucky lawmakers changed the employer child care assistance program to specifically include child care workers at all income levels who work at least 20 hours a week. Other states, including Rhode Island, have since launched programs modeled after the one in Kentucky. The Kentucky program was to end Sept. 30, but Stephanie French, spokesperson for the state’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services, wrote in an email that the state will be using a combination of federal and state funding to continue the program.

At least half a dozen states now have similar programs or are considering legislation to start them, according to EdSurge, a news site that covers education issues.

Supporters, including Republicans and Democrats, see retaining child care employees as a benefit not only to the workers and the centers facing worker shortages, but also to the states’ economies. For many people, the lack of affordable child care is a barrier to joining the workforce.

Charlene Barbieri, founder and owner of four Little Learners Academy locations in Rhode Island, said in an interview that it is difficult to hire and keep qualified employees. The child care subsidy program helps, she said.

“Early learning here is very expensive as we know, right?” Barbieri said. “So any supplemental programs, monetary or otherwise, are exceptionally beneficial.

“We have had many teachers come to us to say that if this program wasn’t here, we could not afford to send our children to child care and still help our families by bringing in additional income,” she said.

Rhode Island lawmakers added the child care subsidy to its fiscal 2025 budget this spring, moving the program out of the “pilot” category. Democratic Gov. Dan McKee is expected to sign the budget this week.

“It’s a good program, and we’ve seen great results with it,” Rhode Island House Speaker Joseph Shekarchi, a Democrat, said in an interview. “We have a labor shortage across the whole spectrum of our labor market. So, by giving [caregivers] free child care, they’re able to get back in and take care of other kids, which allows more people to enter the workforce.”

Other states that have launched programs or are considering them include Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa and Nebraska, according to EdSurge.

The Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, a research center at the University of California, Berkeley, estimated that if every state followed Kentucky’s lead, some 234,000 workers with children under age 6 could benefit.

“We see it as a no-brainer,” said Anna Powell, senior research and policy associate at the center, who co-authored a report on the program. “The educators are parents — why shouldn’t they be at the front of the queue? Every time an educator stays in the field, it benefits many parents.”

Budget challenges

In some states, though, budget woes are challenging lawmakers who want to make their pilot program a permanent one.

Arizona had a one-year Education Workforce Scholarship program that assisted child care workers and public school teachers with paying for their own kids’ child care, but that program was funded with federal pandemic dollars and ends June 30. It’s unlikely to be renewed because of state budget shortfalls.

Child care workers who now get that assistance would instead need to apply for aid through the state’s broad child care assistance program. That program, administered by the Arizona Department of Economic Security, is based on income levels, Tasya Peterson, a department spokesperson, wrote in an email to Stateline.

Barbie Prinster, executive director of the Arizona Early Childhood Education Association, a nonprofit that represents child care centers, said 3,541 children were approved for care subsidies under the early educator program this year, about three-quarters of them from families with a child care worker. The rest are from teachers’ families.

She predicted that hundreds of workers may have to quit if the subsidy isn’t renewed.

“I think providers are employing more moms that have young children because of this subsidy,” she said.

In Nebraska, state Sen. John Fredrickson, a Democrat and the dad of a 5-year-old son, introduced a bill this session that would have granted no-cost child care to employees of state-licensed child care programs, whether in-home care or at centers, who work at least 20 hours a week.

He estimated the potential subsidy, which he modeled on Kentucky’s idea, could have brought in 2,175 parent-providers. If each worker cared for eight children, there would be 16,000 children receiving care, and at least that many parents working, he estimated.

Fredrickson said the initial fiscal estimate for the bill was about $20 million, which proved to be a heavy lift, so he halved it to $10 million. But even that proved to be too much, he said, and the effort failed. He plans to reintroduce his bill next year.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, approved a bill May 1 extending a child care subsidy pilot program for early childhood caretakers and educators, regardless of income, for two years at a cost of $10.2 million using the state’s Childcare Development Fund.

Colorado agreed to continue a program for child care providers with children ages 6 weeks to 13 years old, giving them full child care benefits, regardless of the employee’s income.

And Indiana agreed to study the issue of child caregiver and early educator compensation.

‘Good for Rhode Island’

Sitting together in a hearing room just off the Rhode Island House chamber earlier this month, Democratic state Reps. Mary Ann Shallcross Smith and Grace Diaz said they understand the issue of caring for children firsthand. Both are mothers, though their children are grown now, and both are experienced child care center owners.

Shallcross Smith remembers putting up flyers in the local drug store, advertising her in-home care. She now owns 15 centers. When the issue of paying child care workers for their own kids’ tuition came up this year, she was all for it, and went to House Speaker Shekarchi with her arguments.

“No. 1, it’s good for Rhode Island,” she said, adding that it’s also good for business.

Diaz, a mother of five, said she, too, talked to the speaker. But perhaps the biggest driver in getting the program into the state budget, she recalled, was the day that they brought a bunch of little kids from various child care settings to the Capitol to be a living example of the need.

“When they saw the little kids at the State House, they all wanted a picture,” Diaz said.

Back on the Little Learners playground, care worker Kayla Champagne, 39, of Lincoln, Rhode Island, smiled up at her 3-year-old son, Jaxson, who peeked over the top of a climbing structure. Champagne, who has three other children ages 18, 14 and 8, is relieved that she can take advantage of a program that helps her pay for Jaxson’s care.

She used to work at another day care place but could only afford to send Jaxson there a few days a week, she said. At Little Learners, staff helped her apply for the state subsidy.

“That’s one of the reasons I left my other child care to come here,” she said. “Now I can work full time while having four kids.”

Rhode Island Current reporter Nancy Lavin contributed to this report.

This story is republished from Stateline, a sister publication to the Kentucky Lantern and part of the nonprofit States Newsroom network.

A student helps identify a classmate for a substitute teacher at Frye Elementary School in Chandler, Arizona, in May. Several states, including Kentucky and Arizona, have cracked down on disruptive student school behavior in this year's legislative sessions following an increase in incidents. (Darryl Webb/The Associated Press)

Parents in Boone County, Kentucky, were outraged this past January when a ninth grader who had been suspended a year earlier for threatening violence against his fellow students returned to class as soon as his punishment time was up.

The parents packed a school board meeting, excoriating the county superintendent and other officials for the decision and calling for change. By March, change had come from the state capitol in Frankfort: Kentucky enacted a new school discipline law that makes it easier to suspend students and harder for them to get back into the classroom.

“The kid had a ‘kill list’ which named students — friends he was going to kill,” Republican state Rep. Steve Rawlings, R-Burlington, who represents Boone County and championed the new law, said in an interview with Stateline. “The superintendent felt pressure to return him to class after a one-year suspension.”

Kentucky is one of several states to enact stricter punishments for disruptive students amid a post-pandemic spike in school discipline problems. Eight states have considered student discipline legislation this year, according to law professor Thalia?González, co-director of the Center for Racial and Economic Justice at the University of California Law San Francisco, who tracks the bills. Arizona, Florida, Nevada and West Virginia joined Kentucky in approving new laws, while lawmakers in Nebraska, North Carolina and Texas considered them.

In 2014, the Obama administration issued guidelines urging school districts to use suspension and expulsion “only as a last resort and for appropriately serious infractions,” noting that “youths of color and youths with disabilities are disproportionately impacted” by those punishments. Even though the Trump administration rescinded the guidelines in 2018, many schools continued to follow the earlier guidance.

Critics of suspensions and expulsions cite research showing that school officials are more likely to hand them out?to students of color, disabled students and English learners. They also point?to studies showing that students who are suspended or expelled are?more likely to end up in the criminal justice system.

Instead, many districts placed a greater emphasis on counseling and advising disruptive students. In some places, the approach included a so-called restorative justice strategy that gives classmates the opportunity to tell disruptive students how their behavior is harming everyone.

But now, as they grapple with students whose socialization skills suffered during the isolation of pandemic lockdowns, many school districts and states are reviving stricter strategies. In some places, school shootings and the so-called parents’ rights movement have helped fuel the shift.

Kentucky’s new law states that students can be suspended or expelled from school for, among other things, “willful disobedience or defiance of the authority of the teachers or administrators”; using profanity; assaulting another student or a member of the school staff; threatening violence; using alcohol or drugs; or defacing school property. And it requires schools to expel students for at least a year for threatening violence or bringing a weapon to school.

The law also requires “disciplinary actions, up to and including expulsion” for dealing prescription drugs at school and assaulting other students or school personnel on school property or at school functions.

Carrie Ballinger, superintendent of Rockcastle County Public Schools, testified at a February committee hearing that the Kentucky measure would give administrators more flexibility in dealing with student punishments, including suspensions.

“What happens a year later, when that suspension is complete, and that student comes back into my district? There’s no soft landing for these students. They go from being expelled to placed right back in our classroom,” she said. Ballinger endorsed the measure’s alternatives, such as virtual instruction, to allow the district to keep tabs on?students who have been disciplined while protecting other students and staff.

While the vote in Kentucky was overwhelming and bipartisan, Louisville Metro Council member Kumar Rashad spoke against the bill in the hearing, noting that students of color are disproportionately suspended and suggesting that ratcheting up the punishment might lead to an increase in crime.

“We are disproportionately represented when it comes to disciplinary issues, and we have to be really careful,” said Rashad, who is also a teacher in Louisville. “When we talk about expelling the student for a whole year, that’s going to send these students out on the street. You want crime to go up? Let’s do that.”

Other approaches

A 2019 study by González, of the Center for Racial and Economic Justice, and others asserts that “punitive, exclusionary, and zero tolerance approaches (e.g., suspensions, expulsions, and use of force by school resource officers) not only deny students important educational opportunities, but also may compound existing social, economic, and health disparities.”

The researchers also noted that such punishments “can compound health inequities for marginalized students (i.e., students of color, LGBTQ+ youth, and/or students with disabilities) who already experience higher rates of adverse childhood experiences and other traumas.”

A pair of 2021 papers from Rice University’s Houston Education Research Consortium found that Houston students who were suspended were more likely to be involved in the juvenile justice system both before and after a suspension. The study also found that students were at the greatest risk of suspension in the ninth grade, at the beginning of the transition to high school.

Erin Baumgartner, director of the Houston Education Research Consortium, said in an interview with Stateline that suspensions prompt many students to drop out, often dooming them to a life of low earnings and dead-end jobs. She said that positive behavioral programs such as restorative justice are a better strategy.

But lawmakers in some states are increasingly disinclined to follow that advice.

In Nevada, lawmakers this year repealed a 2019 law that required schools to try restorative justice before expelling a student. Instead, the state enacted a new law laying out tough penalties for misbehavior, including requiring the suspension of students who are 8 or older who bring a firearm to school. The law states that students younger than that may be suspended for the same offense.

A new West Virginia law states that teachers of students in sixth through 12th grades have the authority to remove disruptive students from the classroom. If a student is removed three times in a month, the principal can issue a suspension or place the student in an alternative learning center.

“We are in a period of retrenchment in this country,” said González. “There’s a new climate around school discipline because of the rhetoric [on the political right].”

Schoolwide impact

But Rawlings, the Kentucky lawmaker, said a tougher approach is necessary. In Boone County, he said, many teachers reported feeling unsafe in the classroom, which hurts recruitment and retention at an already difficult time coming out of the pandemic years. He noted that some Democrats, including Gov. Andy Beshear, supported the changes.

Before, Rawlings said, “teachers felt that under Kentucky law they were constrained. They had to keep the student in the classroom. The new law allows teachers to go through a process, which involves parents and principals, and a series of steps to put that [disruptive] child in an alternative setting.”

Beshear told local reporters he signed the bill because of safety concerns “at a time when we’ve seen some really scary incidents across the country,” according to The Associated Press.

Similar arguments carried the day in West Virginia, said state Rep. Marty Gearheart, a Republican and the House majority whip.

Gearheart, a sponsor of the bill, said teachers, principals and other school officials were adamant that something had to be done to tame disruptive classroom behavior.

“What was happening, you would have a class with 20 children in it. There would be one child in that class whose mission wasn’t to receive information that day, it was simply to be disruptive,” he said in an interview. A teacher would send the kid out of class, he said, but that student would shortly return, only to disrupt the class again.

“When someone is disruptive to the point where you can’t teach or learn, you have to get that student out of the classroom,” he said.

Following the Uvalde school shooting last year, Texas lawmakers opened debate on a group of school discipline bills, among them a measure to allow students to be removed from school based on just one disruptive incident — including harassing a school staff member — and to allow longer suspensions.

The bill’s sponsor, Republican state Sen. Charles Perry, stirred controversy when he said that “not all kids belong in the classroom anymore.” (A review of the case showed the Uvalde shooter wasn’t considered disruptive in school, but had been expelled in ninth grade for truancy, several years before the shooting.) None of the bills passed in this year’s session.

The argument that all students suffer when one is being disruptive won out in states that approved the new laws. However, a study this year by researchers at the University of Michigan and Harvard University found that eliminating suspensions resulted in higher test scores for the entire school population.

Using data beginning in 2012, when New York City eliminated suspensions for nonviolent disorderly behavior, researchers Ashley Craig and David Martin found that replacing suspensions with “less disruptive” punishments such as short-term removals from class led to slight increases in both math and reading scores over three years. They attributed the rise to a change in school culture, with the more supportive punishments enhancing student-teacher relationships and perceptions of school safety.

“I think one set of concerns that the paper speaks to directly, is that we might see decreases in student achievement [if schools go back to suspensions],” Martin said in an interview. “In New York City schools … reducing suspensions by a fairly small amount improved test scores at those schools. The concern would be if you go in the other direction, back to higher suspension levels, you might see test score losses.”

This article is republished from Stateline, a sister publication of the Kentucky Lantern and part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact editor-in-chief Scott S. Greenberger at [email protected].

Kentucky is one of 17 states that allow students without permanent legal status to access in-state tuition, according to the Higher Ed Immigration Portal. Shown here is the Albert B. Chandler Hospital on the campus of the University of Kentucky. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)

When Cristian Dubon Solis?was getting ready to graduate from a Boston high school in 2020, he started planning to apply to college. It was only then he realized that as an immigrant lacking permanent legal status, he wouldn’t qualify for in-state tuition at Massachusetts state universities, nor for state-sponsored financial aid.

With no way to afford a four-year school to pursue his dream major, environmental science, he put those plans on hold.

“I took a few gap years afterward,” said the now 21-year-old from East Boston, a community where about half the residents are Hispanic or Latino. Solis now advocates for young immigrants as a student coordinator for a nonprofit group called SIM, which formerly stood for Student Immigration Movement.

One of four siblings, Solis came to the United States from El Salvador at age 3. His three younger sisters were born in the U.S., he said. Family and friends didn’t discuss their immigration status, so he never heard about the tuition restrictions.

“In families of the immigrant community it’s very hush-hush, you don’t talk about it,” he said. “It’s hard to figure out what options I had or didn’t have, because nobody talked about it.”

But now Solis is about to apply to colleges in Massachusetts, including UMass-Boston.

Democratic Gov. Maura Healey signed the state budget this month with a provision that will allow certain immigrants without permanent legal status — those who have attended high school in Massachusetts for at least three years or who have earned a GED certificate — to pay in-state tuition rates at public universities. The law takes effect immediately.

The idea has bipartisan appeal, with some conservative supporters this year saying it helps reduce workforce shortages and boost tax revenue.

In June, Nevada Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo enacted a law allowing immigrants who have been granted status under the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Act, or DACA program, to qualify for in-state tuition after living in Nevada for 12 months. That action expanded on a law that allowed high school graduates lacking permanent legal status to do so.

And in Florida this year, state lawmakers rejected a proposal from Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to scrap in-state tuition for students without permanent legal status. He had wanted to include it in a bill to tighten restrictions on immigrants living in the country illegally.

But critics of the in-state tuition changes argue states are facing an influx of immigrants and already are stretched thin to pay for needed housing and services. Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, in June signed a 2024 budget that included a boost for higher education funding but prohibited students without permanent legal status from getting in-state tuition or state scholarships.

Massachusetts became the 24th state to grant immigrants without legal status access to in-state tuition, according to the Higher Ed Immigration Portal, a website run by a coalition of 18 higher education and immigration organizations to provide information and resources to immigrant students.

In-state tuition is generally thousands of dollars less per year than for out-of-state students. For example, the undergraduate tuition and fees at Massachusetts state schools averaged $10,036 for state residents and $28,813 for out-of-state residents in the 2022-23 school year, according to College Tuition Compare, a nationwide college evaluation website.

Seventeen of the states granting in-state tuition, which includes Kentucky, also allow the students to be eligible for financial aid, as does the District of Columbia, according to the Higher Ed Immigration Portal.

Four states — Delaware, Iowa, Michigan and Pennsylvania — restrict the number of public universities at which immigrants without permanent legal status are eligible for in-state tuition, according to the portal.

Five states — Arkansas, Idaho, Maine, Mississippi and Ohio — provide that tuition discount only to young immigrants who have DACA status. The Obama-era DACA program allows immigrants who were brought to the United States as children and who meet other qualifications to avoid deportation and obtain work permits. New applications for the program are on hold while long-running court battles play out.

By contrast, nine states specifically block access to in-state tuition or state financial aid for residents lacking permanent legal status, the immigration portal found. They are: Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. The last three have laws that prevent students without permanent legal status from even enrolling in all or some public colleges, though there may be some exceptions for students with DACA status, according to the portal.

Opponents of extending in-state tuition argue that scarce state resources should not be spent on immigrants living in the country illegally, particularly when states are dealing with a wave of new immigrant families that strains the states’ safety net.

While the Massachusetts law garnered wide support in the Democratic-controlled state, some Republican opponents pointed out that the Healey administration recently called for the federal government to speed funding to provide shelter and services for immigrants in the state and encouraged state residents to take families into their homes.

“It’s the wrong priority at this date and time,” said Republican state Sen. Ryan Fattman in an interview with Stateline. “The governor declared a state of emergency for migrant influx into the state. We have a lot of shelters that are overrun. [At the same time,] we are providing a lot of benefits to people who are not lawfully in Massachusetts, in-state tuition being one of them.

“The question is can we continue to afford this?” Fattman said.

But advocates for granting in-state tuition say the state must educate young immigrants if it wants to make up for the number of residents who are leaving the state and taking tax revenue with them. Massachusetts lost 110,900 people to out-migration from April 2020 to July 2022, according to the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a nonpartisan research group. In-migration in 2022 was about 43,000, the organization found.

“What Massachusetts did is good for the people of Massachusetts, it’s good for the ‘Dreamers’ who get a chance to go to school and pay in-state tuition,” said Don Graham, a founder of TheDream.Us, an organization that gives scholarships to students who came to the U.S. illegally before age 16 and before Nov. 1, 2017. (“Dreamers” refers to young people brought to the United States illegally as children by family; the term stems from never-passed congressional legislation called the DREAM Act.)

“They become a health care worker, they become a teacher, they become a computer programmer. Seems to me that’s good for the ‘Dreamers’ and good for the state,” said Graham, who also is chair of the board of the Graham Holdings Company and former publisher of The Washington Post.

Miriam Feldblum, co-founder and executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, a group comprised of university leaders, said consideration of in-state tuition for students without legal status has become increasingly important in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to end affirmative action programs on campuses.

“As colleges and universities look at how to attract diverse populations, it is incumbent upon all institutions to look at immigrant students,” she said in an interview with Stateline. “It is one important strategy to attract a diverse and talented crop of students.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: [email protected]. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.