Jennifer Smith Richards

3 days ago | propublica.org | Matt Krupnick |Aliyya Swaby |Jennifer Smith Richards |Jodi S. Cohen

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The Trump administration has proposed cutting funding for tribal colleges and universities by nearly 90%, a move that would likely shut down most or all of the institutions created to serve students disadvantaged by the nation’s historic mistreatment of Indigenous communities.

1 week ago | propublica.org | Aliyya Swaby |Paige Pfleger |Jennifer Smith Richards |Jodi S. Cohen

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. A Chattanooga, Tennessee, public charter school has agreed to pay the family of an 11-year-old boy $100,000 to settle a federal lawsuit claiming that it wrongfully reported the student to police for an alleged threat of mass violence.

1 week ago | propublica.org | Jodi S. Cohen |Jennifer Smith Richards |Aliyya Swaby |Becca Savransky

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. Illinois legislators on Wednesday passed a law to explicitly prevent police from ticketing and fining students for minor misbehavior at school, ending a practice that harmed students across the state. The new law would apply to all public schools, including charters.

1 week ago | propublica.org | Aliyya Swaby |Jennifer Smith Richards |Jodi S. Cohen |Becca Savransky

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. Schools must use threat assessments to determine if a threat of mass violence is “valid,” but they often carry them out inconsistently. Tennessee is supposed to track how effective schools’ threat assessments are, but the state does not release that information to the public.

2 weeks ago | propublica.org | Jennifer Smith Richards |Jodi S. Cohen |Becca Savransky |Asia Fields

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. A short video taken inside an Illinois school captured troubling behavior: A teacher gripping a 6-year-old boy with autism by the ankle and dragging him down the hallway on his back.