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John W. Borkowski

 

Coming from a family of teachers, John knows that educators are dedicated to serving students and society. His lifelong passion for education underlies the insightful counsel he provides to colleges, universities and school districts.

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The President’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released: America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again. The Budget Blueprint provides an overview of the President’s budget priorities for fiscal year 2018.

With respect to education overall, the Budget Blueprint proposes $59 billion in funding for the U.S. Department of Education (ED). This would represent a $9 billion (or 13%) reduction from the current funding level. Among the few proposed increases in the face of such massive cuts are measures to promote school choice at the K-12 level.

Schools and districts are being inundated with parental questions about how their schools will respond to inquiries or visits from immigration officials.  To best answer, schools and districts should plan ahead.  These are complicated legal, political and educational questions.  We highlight some key issues below.  For a fuller discussion of the legal issues in particular, check out the pamphlet that one of us wrote for the National School Boards Association.   Husch Blackwell clients and members of the Council of the Great City Schools may also want to participate in our March 23, 2017 webinar on the legal rights of immigrant students.

On Friday, February 10, 2017, the Trump Administration announced that the United States will no longer challenge the injunction against enforcement of the joint Department of Justice and Department of Education guidance on treatment of transgender students that was issued last year. We expect further developments in the coming weeks and months, but for now…

On January 11, 2017, the Supreme Court took up its second case this term dealing with the educational rights of students with disabilities, Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District. The case involves an autistic student, whose parents were not satisfied with his individual educational plan (IEP). The parents placed him in an expensive private school and sought reimbursement from the school district. The lower courts denied their request.

Amidst the flurry of post-election political news and speculation about K-12 education policy over the next four years, supporters of diverse public schools should not overlook two opportunities to garner federal financial support for their efforts. In its last months the Obama administration has set in motion two competitive grant programs designed to promote efforts to encourage racially, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse enrollments in public schools.

Fry v. Napoleon Community Schools is one of two important special education cases the Supreme Court will decide this year.  Fry involves the parents of a student with quadriplegic cerebral palsy who sued the school under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Rehabilitation Act. In this case, the school refused to allow the student’s service dog to accompany her to classes. After this refusal, the parents pulled the student out of the School District and later sued in federal court in Michigan.

The Supreme Court of the United States somewhat unexpectedly agreed on Oct. 28, 2016, to take on the question of whether Title IX requires public school districts to allow transgender students to use single-sex restrooms corresponding to their gender identity rather than that of their birth sex. The issue has generated widespread controversy between the…

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Education (the “Department”) released guidance regarding services and resources for English learners (“ELs”) to be provided under the Every Student Succeeds Act (“ESSA”). ELs are among the fastest-growing populations in public schools in the United States, making up nearly 10 percent of the student population nationwide. A growing concern for the Department is the graduation rate of ELs; in the 2013-2014 school year, the high school graduation rate for ELs was 62.6 percent, which was almost twenty percentage points lower than the graduation rates of all students at 82.3 percent.

Yesterday, the White House released a Fact Sheet: Ensuring Safe and Supportive Schools for All Students. The White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault in partnership with the U.S. Department of Education (the Department) announced additional materials to help school districts address sexual assault misconduct in elementary and secondary schools. These resources demonstrate the continued commitment of the Department and White House to addressing the issue of sexual assault on campus. It also underscores that the Title IX requirements to prevent and address sexual misconduct are not just an issue for colleges and universities, but also for public school districts as well.

The U.S. Department of Education (the “Department”) yesterday published proposed regulations in the Federal Register concerning the supplement-not-supplant requirement of Title I of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). This is the first time that the Title I supplement-not-supplant requirement contains an express legislative directive regarding how a local education agency (LEA) must demonstrate compliance. For this reason, the Department proposed the regulations to provide clarity about how LEAs can demonstrate that the distribution of State and local funds satisfies the statutory test. Based on the Department’s Fact Sheet, the proposed regulation would mean up to $2 billion annually in additional funding for the highest need schools and students.