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(JASPER, Texas) — A local school district in Texas has announced plans to reduce students’ school weeks from the traditional five days to four days for the upcoming 2022-2023 school year.

The Jasper Independent School District cited teacher shortage and retention when it announced the change in a Facebook post last month and said it had conducted surveys with parents, teachers and staffers before the change was voted on by its board of trustees.

The change to a four-day school week was motivated, in part, by burnout among current teachers and difficulty recruiting new teachers, according to John Seybold, superintendent of the Jasper Independent School District.

“Teacher burnout has been an issue for a long time, but since COVID, it has seemed to expand, and it’s becoming more and more of an issue,” Seybold told ABC News’ Good Morning America. “The four-day week kind of makes it a little more manageable for them because there’s so much pressure placed on our teachers.”

He continued, “As a school district, ultimately the best thing we can do for kids is put the best possible teacher in front of them every day.”

The school district in Jasper, Texas, a city about 134 miles northeast of Houston near the eastern Texas and western Louisiana border, also plans to give teachers and school staff members a financial incentive if they stay in their positions.

Teachers would get a $3,000 stipend while staff members, such as librarians, would receive $1,500 if they remain with Jasper ISD. The funds allocated would come from the public school district’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) grants, a federal grant program under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

According to Seybold, the school district is now down to just one teacher vacancy. Prior to the changes, he said, open high school science positions “had been unfulfilled for two years.”

“Where we used to post a job and get no applications, now we’re getting multiple applications for every position. So it’s kind of worked so far,” Seybold said.

During the past two years of the coronavirus pandemic, school districts across the country have reported not only a shortage of teachers but also of substitute teachers and school support staff, such as bus drivers.

According to a study conducted last year by the American Federation of Teachers with the Rand Corporation, one in four teachers were thinking about quitting their job by the end of the school year. Teachers were also more likely to report experiencing regular job-related stress and symptoms of depression than the general population, according to the study.

Jasper’s school district serves over 2,230 students in pre-K through 12th grade, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Education, which also showed there were 175 teachers and 196 full-time staffers in the district.

All students in Jasper’s public school system would be subject to the four-day school week.

Jasper ISD isn’t the only district to have changed students’ school weeks. Other Texas school districts that have adopted four-day school weeks include Devers ISD and Athens ISD, which promotes its “four-day instructional week” on its district homepage.

Other states — including Oregon, Montana, Colorado and Oklahoma — have also implemented four-day school weeks with mixed results.

According to one study from researchers at Oregon State and Montana State University, which examined 2005-2019 test scores from over 341,000 Oregon high schoolers, students’ math test scores appeared to decline on average after switching to a four-day school week in a non-rural district.

In other states, such as California and New Jersey, school districts have prioritized different changes, like starting school later in the day, in a push to address the growing mental health crisis among students.

The conditions of a four-day school week also vary based on a school’s district and state mandates. Some districts have added more time to each of their four days or included more days in the academic calendar.

In Jasper, the next academic year would kick off on Aug. 10 and run through June 1, 2023, but the four-day schedule wouldn’t begin until the week of Oct. 3, according to an academic calendar posted on the district’s website. From October through the end of April, students would report to school only from Mondays through Thursdays, and teachers would use Fridays as professional development days.

“The kids are going to school virtually the same amount of time,” said Seybold. “They’re still getting their required minutes.”

Two of the downsides to a four-day school week are an increased risk of food insecurity among students and that parents and caregivers could find it harder to secure child care with an extended weekend, according to a 2021 study and research compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures respectively.

Seybold said the Jasper ISD is working with a local YMCA to secure additional programming for kids and with a food bank to make sure kids who qualify have food to cover long weekends.

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(NEW YORK) — Awoman who attacked a Black teen at a luxury New York City hotel after falsely accusing him of stealing her cellphone has pleaded guilty to hate crime charges.

Miya Ponsetto, 23, was charged with child endangerment, attempted assault, attempted robbery and grand larceny after she wrongly accused and physically attacked the 14-year-old son of Grammy-winning trumpet player Keyon Harrold on Dec. 26, 2020, at the hotel where Harrold and his family were staying.

In a video recorded by Harrold, a woman later identified by authorities as Ponsetto could be seen yelling at the teen and lunging at him. Harrold’s son could also be heard denying that he stole the phone as numerous witnesses attempted to intervene.

Ponsetto’s cellphone was later found by an Uber driver, national civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the Harrold family, announced after the incident.

Ponsetto was arrested on Jan. 7, 2021, in her hometown of Piru, California, after fleeing from Ventura County Sheriff’s Department deputies as they tried to make a traffic stop on a fugitive warrant for her arrest, officials said. The next day, she agreed to be extradited to New York.

On Monday, she pleaded guilty to unlawful imprisonment as a hate crime.

Ponsetto apologized for her actions in an interview with “CBS This Morning” that aired in January 2021.

“I don’t feel that that is who I am as a person. I don’t feel like this one mistake does define me,” she said during the interview, which was filmed shortly before her arrest. “But I do sincerely from the bottom of my heart apologize that if I made the son feel as if I assaulted him or if I hurt his feelings or the father’s feelings.”

Ponsetto’s former attorney, Sharen Ghatan, said in a statement to ABC News in January 2021 that she was “extremely concerned” about Ponsetto’s mental state.

“It is clear that she is emotionally unwell,” Ghatan said.

Ponsetto was previously arrested in California three times in 2020. In February 2020, she was arrested for public intoxication after getting into a fight outside a hotel, charging documents show.

In May 2021, she was charged with driving under the influence after someone called police when they saw her get into a car leaving a grocery store while apparently intoxicated. Police found open containers of alcohol and marijuana in her car when they pulled her over, according to charging documents.

Ponsetto was arrested a third time in October 2020 after she allegedly got into a physical altercation with her mother after leaving her car abandoned at a nearby intersection and then tackled a responding officer to the ground. She was charged with DUI, driving with a suspended license and resisting arrest, and her blood alcohol limit was 0.14, almost twice the legal limit, police said.

In a statement Monday, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg described Ponsetto’s behavior at the New York hotel as “outrageous.”

“As a Black man, I have personally experienced racial profiling countless times in my life, and I sympathize with the young man victimized in this incident,” Bragg said. “This plea ensures appropriate accountability for Ms. Ponsetto by addressing underlying causes for her behavior and ensuring this conduct does not reoccur.”

Currently, Ponsetto faces up to four years in prison but can plead down to a misdemeanor after abiding by the terms of her probation in a separate case in California for the next two years.

ABC News could not immediately reach an attorney for Ponsetto for comment.

ABC News’ Meredith Deliso and Marlene Lenthang contributed to this report.

 

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(NEW YORK) — During the past two years of the coronavirus pandemic, during which federal student loan payments were put on pause, Marquita Prinzing, of Renton, Washington, said she went through a divorce and bought a home on her own.

Those are two things Prinzing, a mom of two who works full-time, said would have been difficult or impossible to do had she had to pay hundreds of dollars of student loan payments each month to pay down her approximately $100,000 remaining debt.

Now, as Prinzing looks to her future, she said she feels like her life is on hold as she waits to learn whether her loan will be forgiven or whether she’ll have to continue to repay her loans starting in the fall, when the current pause is scheduled to end.

“It means I can’t really think of a different or bigger future,” Prinzing, 38, a first-generation college graduate, told Good Morning America. “It means I am where I’m at, stable right now, because I have to deal with the loan payments and all of what’s going to come back.”

Ameshia Cross, 34, of Washington, D.C., said she, too, is living in flux during the payment pause as her family’s primary provider.

A first-generation college student who adopted her siblings after their mother died, Cross said she has the thought of payments resuming on her six-figure student debt looming over her as she tries to make decisions like whether to move her grandmother to a better care facility or how to care for her brother, who has a developmental disability.

“That this process has been kind of a stopgap measure and not knowing when it might end completely is a very scary place to be,” Cross, assistant director of communications for The Education Trust, a nonprofit focused on student equity, told GMA. “Because you don’t control the family issues or the family situation or the economic situation you’re born into, you do the best with what you have.”

The Education Trust released a report earlier this month, “How Black Women Experience Debt”, that found Black women receive little help when it comes to repaying their student loans. According to the report, 12 years after starting college, Black women owe 13% more than they borrowed, while white men, on average, have paid off 44% of their debt.

Brittani Williams, a senior policy analyst in higher education at The Education Trust and a co-author of the report, is a mother of three who said she currently owes tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, a number that will continue to grow as she is pursuing her doctorate degree.

“There is great anxiety around how will we repay these student loans back, majorly because I am a parenting student,” Williams, 32, of Washington, D.C., told GMA. “While maybe a non-parenting student may have ‘discretionary income,’ I don’t necessarily see that … so sometimes it comes down to what bills are going to be paid.”

On April 6th, President Joe Biden announced another extension in the pause in federal student loan payments — until Aug. 31 — marking the sixth extension to the program in the two years of the pandemic. It comes less than a month before payments were scheduled to restart on May 1, potentially affecting millions of borrowers who have not been making payments.

Bank surprises single mom by paying off $150K in student loans

“If loan payments were to resume on schedule in May, analysis of recent data from the Federal Reserve suggests that millions of student loan borrowers would face significant economic hardship, and delinquencies and defaults could threaten Americans’ financial stability,” said Biden, who faced pressure from top congressional Democrats to extend the pause or cancel student loan debt altogether, a position that has divided the party.

Senate Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, progressive icons Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and many others in their party have been calling on Biden to use executive authority to cancel $50,000 in student debt for all borrowers, though House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said the president lacks the authority to cancel this debt. Biden pledged to approve $10,000 in student loan forgiveness for every federal borrower during his campaign, but he has yet to do so, expanding parts of existing loan forgiveness programs instead.

Why Black women are so impacted by student debt

As the political debate over student loans continues and the pause remains extended, it is Black women like Prinzing, Williams and Cross who remain disproportionately impacted, data shows.

In the United States, women hold nearly two-thirds of all outstanding loans, according to an analysis by the American Association of University Women.

And Black women are the most likely of any gender group to have student loans, with around one in four Black women having student debt, according to the Census Bureau.

According to the Association of University Women’s analysis, Black women have the highest average total of student debt, at $41,466 for undergraduate and $75,085 for graduate school one year after graduating.

Why Black women are so impacted by student debt is attributable to several factors, including the change decades ago when financing for college began to fall more on individual families, according to Laura Hamilton, professor of sociology at University of California, Merced, and co-author of a report on student debt cancellation.

“When you think about shifting the burden of financing higher education to families, black families in the U.S. have historically had less access to wealth and income, so they haven’t been as able to finance their students’ education because of structural racism and historical discrimination,” Hamilton told “GMA.” “And now Black women are really leading the way in attending college, but they’re doing it without having as much family support because of those structural barriers.”

Many Black women are also first-general college students, which means they may have less knowledge of applying for financial aid and less knowledge of the ins and outs of repayment, experts said. That is what happened to Prinzing, who said she accumulated the majority of loans while getting her master’s degree in education.

“I’m a first-generation college graduate, so I had no idea about college. I had no idea about applying for anything,” Prinzing said. “I had no idea after graduating what consolidation was. I had no idea about loan forgiveness. I had no idea how to navigate the system to work in my favor.”

Once Black women graduate college, they face both a gender and racial wage gap that sees them typically being paid 63 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men, according to the National Women’s Law Center, a policy-focused organization that fights for gender justice.

As a result of the wage gap, Black women, on average, lose $2,009 each month, $24,110 annually, and $964,400 over the course of a 40-year career, according to the law center.

“Black women are borrowing more because they lack family wealth and they are paid less to do the same jobs at the same educational level as white men and other people other genders and races,” said Victoria Jackson, co-author of the report with Williams and assistant director of higher education policy at The Education Trust. “Those things are coming together to create this crisis for Black women.”

Williams and Jackson said they applaud the Biden administration for extending the payment pause, and would like to see him continue to extend it through the end of the year. Ideally they said they would like to see student loans forgiven, which would give an advantage to Black women, who are so disproportionately impacted.

“If federal policymakers don’t figure out a way to end this, this student debt crisis, I’m afraid we’re going to end up right back in the same situation that we were in right before we received the pause,” Williams said.

According to Hamilton’s research, released by the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank, forgiving student loans could, “play a critical role in addressing the racial wealth gap and building the Black middle class.”

“The people who would really benefit are upwardly mobile, Black and Latinx people who are in the 50th to 98th income percentiles,” Hamilton said. “These are folks that are seriously striving, facing lots of barriers, attempting to be secure, but are being really held back by these enormous debts.”

Jamie Walker-Sallis, of Davenport, Iowa, made her final student loan payment this year, at age 50. She said the burden of student loans loomed over her entire adult life, impacting decisions she had to make, like not pursuing a doctorate degree for a fear of more loans to not having a choice to stay home while her two children were young.

Walker-Sallis said her nearly $100,000 remaining debt was forgiven after the Biden administration expanded eligibility guidance during the pandemic for a student loan forgiveness program for public service workers. She said student loan debt was not even “really a conversation” when she started college over three decades ago.

“It’s first and foremost now because it’s such a hindrance and it can change your trajectory,” Walker-Sallis said. “I hear kids saying now they don’t want to go to college because they don’t want student loan debt.”

“No one wants this burden,” she continued. “It is a true burden.”

ABC News’ Trish Turner, Molly Nagle and Rebecca Gelpi contributed to this report.

 

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(NEW YORK) — A major spring storm hits the western U.S. Monday with snow, high winds and blizzard conditions.

The storm will move into the central U.S. on Tuesday and Wednesday, bringing a multi-day severe weather outbreak to millions.

Another storm system in the mid-South will bring the first round of severe weather Monday night, before the more widespread severe weather moves in.

Residents located in areas from Texas to southern Illinois, including major cities like Dallas, Little Rock and Memphis, can expect to see damaging winds, scattered hail and a few tornadoes Monday. Little Rock has the highest chance for very large hail and a strong tornado or two.

By Tuesday night major cities such as Dallas, Kansas City and Des Moines can expect to see strong tornadoes and huge hail.

The highest threat for tornadoes on Tuesday will likely be areas north of Kansas City and across much of Iowa.

On Wednesday, a severe threat will move east, heading into the Great Lakes, Ohio, Tennessee Valleys and the Gulf Coast.

Major cities such as Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Nashville, Little Rock and Jackson will be in the bull’s-eye for strong tornadoes, huge hail and damaging winds.

Severe weather will extend all the way to the Gulf Coast, including New Orleans, through Wednesday night.

After a weekend of heat waves in the West, a new storm is expected to bring in heavy snow and strong winds. Some areas throughout the West could see more than 2 feet of snow and wind gusts up to 80 mph. In addition, blizzard warnings extend from Montana to the Dakotas this week.

 

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(NEW YORK) — As COVID-19 cases continue to tick up in the United States, the Northeast appears to be fueling the increase.

Four of the five states with the highest seven-day case rates per 100,000 are in the Northeast. In the 10 states with the highest seven-day rates, seven are Northeastern, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Rhode Island currently has the highest seven-day case rate at 172.4 cases per 100,000 people. This is nearly three times higher than the national rate of 59.4 cases per 100,000 people.

As of Friday, the Ocean State has also seen its average daily number of cases increase 53% over a two-week period from 170 per day to 260 per day, CDC data shows.

Other Northeastern states seeing increases include Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Maine and Connecticut.

In particular, New York and New Jersey have seen their average daily cases increase by 64%, the CDC data shows.

Experts said one of the reasons for the rise in cases is the spread of BA.2, a subvariant of the original omicron variant that is more transmissible.

In the Northeast, BA.2 accounts for more than 84% of COVID-19 cases that have undergone genomic sequencing, more than any other region in the country, according to the CDC.

Dr. Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist with the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, told ABC News that early evidence suggests people who were infected with the original omicron variant during the previous wave may now have some immunity against BA.2.

He suggested states that were able to have better control of cases earlier may currently be more vulnerable to infections.

“States that did a good job controlling infections with mandates, most in the Northeast and West, are more susceptible now with BA.2,” he said.

Mokdad compared Maine and Florida using data from the institute, which projects COVID-19 cases around the country.

“We estimate that 54% of people in Maine have been infected at least once as of April 4,” he said. “So, we estimate that 60% are immune. We estimate that 87% of people in Florida have been infected at least once as of April 4. We estimate that 80% are immune.”

Another reason Northeastern states may be seeing case increases is due to the lifting of mask and vaccine requirements, the experts said.

“Not only is BA.2 extraordinarily transmissible, but now, consistent with CDC guidelines, many people are going to crowded indoor events and outdoor events without wearing a mask and not social distancing,” Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, told ABC News. “In anticipation of summer … people are eager to see family and friends and engage in near-normal activities again.”

However, the experts warned the true number of cases could be even higher as some states shift their COVID-19 testing strategy.

In late February, the Rhode Island Department of Health announced that — starting March 7 — state-run testing sites would not accept asymptomatic patients unless they had been in close contact with a person who tested positive for the virus.

“Focusing testing efforts at Rhode Island’s state-run testing sites on people who are symptomatic and people who are close contacts will ensure that people who are positive and eligible for treatment can be quickly connected to treatment,” the department said in a news release.

Schaffner said he expects that the rise of cases in the Northeast will be followed in the next few weeks by increases in the Midwest, the South and the West.

“This is reminiscent of the very beginning of COVID here in the United States,” he said. “The Northeast led the rest of the country; they had the most infections for quite a period of time before the COVID virus spread to the rest of the county. So perhaps this is a little bit of history repeating itself.”

However, the doctors reiterated that unvaccinated people are at the highest risk of severe illness and death from BA.2 and stressed the importance of getting vaccinated and boosted.

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