This and That, March 10, 2026
Looks like Rainier Beach High School took the state Class 3A championship for boys basketball.
Naturally it was a great team effort but when you have a recruited ringer, that tarnishes the win a bit.
KUOW has a pod cast called Focus and this episode is called Adults in the Room.
Seattle, 1999. At Garfield High School, Mr. Hudson is a legend. With a thundering voice and imposing stature, Mr. Hudson — or “Tom” as select students call him — teaches biology and leads an elite outdoors program. But when teen reporters at the school paper start exploring a rumor that he sexually abused students, all hell breaks loose. Adults close ranks, and schoolmates turn on the young journalists. And then one day, a voice on the school intercom announces that Mr. Hudson is dead.
Isolde Raftery is one of the students who first hears about and reports allegations against Mr. Hudson. Three decades later, she is an investigative journalist in Seattle. In Adults in the Room, Raftery re-reports the story to understand what really happened in 1999. Was a whole school community groomed by a charismatic predator? Or was she part of a whisper campaign that cost the life of a great teacher?
That reminds me that I want to revisit a murder involving SPS students from the early 2000s.
State
From Seattle's Child:
Lawmakers question schools chief on gender identity disclosure policiesInformation request follows US Supreme Court ruling
In a March 4 letter to Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal, House GOP lawmakers argue that there is “no meaningful difference” between California’s challenged policy and Washington’s.
The lawmakers request an explanation of the agency’s policies by March 9, a few days before the Legislative session ends.
Reykdal’s office asserts that Washington’s guidelines are different from California’s and that school districts should continue to follow them.
National
From Disability Scoop:
The U.S. Department of Education dismissed the vast majority of discrimination complaints it received — likely including many based on disability — all while spending millions in an effort to fire staff charged with investigating such cases.
A new report from the Government Accountability Office finds that between March and September 2025, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights resolved more than 7,000 of the 9,000-plus discrimination complaints it received. In about 90% of cases, complaints were dismissed.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has offered a consistent message: It’s getting the feds out of the way of schools by trying to abolish the Education Department. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has vowed to “break up the federal education bureaucracy,” “return education to the states,” and “empower local leaders.”Yet many local and state leaders whose politics differ from Trump’s are not feeling empowered — quite the opposite. “We have seen unprecedented federal interest,” says Aaron Spence, the superintendent of Loudoun County schools, a suburban Virginia district outside Washington D.C. that has been at the center of a number of high-profile culture-war controversies.
“The Trump administration will keep coming after us because that’s their values, and I understand that,” says Chris Reykdal, the superintendent of Washington state. “But it’s totally inconsistent with their idea of returning education and policy back to the states.” Trump is investigating Washington, and a number of other states, over policies to allow transgender girls to compete in female athletics.
To be clear, many voters agree with Trump’s approach to these social and cultural issues. Some observers also contend turnabout is fair play: Democrats wielded federal power in aggressive ways, so it’s more than fair for Republican presidents to do the same.
Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, who has criticized some of Trump’s moves, says it was predictable that conservatives would use the tools pioneered by progressives. “There’s a degree of schadenfreude,” he says.
Rough going for LA Unified School District Super Alberto Carvalho - his home and office were raided by the FBI. From the NY Times:
The federal government has not said exactly who or what is under investigation. So far, Mr. Carvalho, who was placed on paid leave, has not commented.
The inquiry appears to stem from a prior investigation into an education technology start-up that won a contract from Los Angeles Unified under Mr. Carvalho. The company, AllHere, tried to build an A.I. chatbot for students, but quickly collapsed into bankruptcy. Its founder was charged with fraud. The deal between the school district and AllHere had been brokered with Mr. Carvalho by a longtime associate and friend from his years in Miami.
The investigation has upended Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second-largest school district, and raised fresh questions about the tech world’s pursuit of public education dollars and about how well school districts vet their leaders. Some in Los Angeles wonder if it’s also about politics.
"Everyone’s initial reaction was, Oh my God, this is a Trump retaliation,” Ms. Dahan said. “For 24 hours, we were all waiting for Trump to tweet something. And he didn’t. And now it’s so scary that Trump going after him might be the best-case scenario.”
From the NY Times:
What’s Driving the Spike in College Students with Disabilities
Universities from Harvard to Hampshire have admitted significantly more students with disabilities over the last decade, as diagnoses for A.D.H.D. and anxiety increase.
The number of college students reporting disabilities rose more than 50 percent over the last decade across a wide swath of schools, including at some of the most selective universities in the nation, according to a New York Times analysis of government data.
The rise, which has corresponded with an increase in A.D.H.D., autism and other diagnoses, has also meant an increase in the number of students requiring accommodations, such as more time to take tests. While some colleges and students have embraced the trend, saying it shows schools are opening their doors to students who might previously have been shut out, it has raised worries that some could be gaming the system.
At some colleges, more than a third of students have registered physical or mental disabilities, signed off on by doctors. For those students, the schools generally provide the students legally required accommodations that others may not receive, such as special testing rooms and note-taking services.
International
Right at the start of the Iran "War," there was a girls' school hit that was near a military compound. No one has taken responsibility for that bombing. Trump says it was a Tomahawk missile that is "generic" so it could be anyone (again for him, wrong) and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth keeps saying it's being "investigated."
The strike killed 175 people, most of them children.
From the NY Times:
But a body of evidence assembled by The New York Times — including newly released satellite imagery, social media posts and verified videos — indicates the school building was severely damaged by a precision strike that occurred at the same time as attacks on an adjacent naval base operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
And official statements that U.S. forces were attacking naval targets near the Strait of Hormuz, where the I.R.G.C. base is located, suggest they were most likely to have carried out the strike.
U.S. officials say the strike is still under investigation. If it’s confirmed to be an American bomb that hit Shajarah Tayyebeh, one question is likely to be whether the school strike was a mistake or whether it was targeted based on outdated information.
“Given the U.S.’s intelligence capabilities, they should have known that a school was in the vicinity,” said Beth Van Schaack, a former State Department official who teaches at Stanford University’s Center for Human Rights and International Justice.
A likely war crime that will never be adjudicated.
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