This week, W/A SVP and Head of Postsecondary Communications Ted Eismeier is filling in for Ben.

In the early 1970s, disability activists in Berkeley pushed the city to cut ramps into its curbs so wheelchair users could cross the street. The ramps worked. They also helped parents pushing strollers, travelers dragging luggage, and just about everyone else. Researchers now call it the "curb-cut effect": design for people at the margins, and you often design better for everyone.

Higher education has plenty of curbs. Most institutions were built for the "traditional student": 18, living on campus, enrolled full time, with no one depending on him or her. That student is increasingly hard to find.

September is Student Parent Month, which makes it an opportune time to consider the curbs faced by a growing portion of the higher education population: student parents. 

Start with the numbers. Roughly one in five college students is raising children while pursuing a degree. Student parents tend to earn GPAs on par with or higher than their peers, yet just 18 percent earn a degree within six years. Complete College America has long argued that time is the enemy of completion, a grim reality for parents juggling work, school, and child care — a state researchers call "time poverty." 

As former Massachusetts Governor and longtime education advocate Jane Swift and EdTrust-West's Christopher Nellum argued in Governing last week, college is still built around the 18-year-old living on campus with few outside responsibilities, while childcare policy has been built around workers, not students. The good news is that a rare bipartisan consensus around parenting students is emerging, with red and blue states alike expanding childcare access and requiring colleges to support student parents. 

Institutions and organizations are also starting to cut curbs on their own. Last week, National University opened its second Nest center inside the Escondido YMCA, offering child care alongside veteran support and other services. The evidence backs that investment: student parents at Monroe Community College with on-campus child care were nearly three times as likely to graduate or transfer within three years. 

Others are focused on the human side of persistence. One Million Degrees’ holistic model shows what consistent student support can do. In the Chicago Tribune, OMD's Rita Raichoudhuri noted that nearly a third of participants in a recent onboarding round chose evening or weekend slots, many of them parents who could only meet after their kids were asleep. Similarly, The College of Health Care Professions designed their academic calendar on the premise that minimizing travel time to campus would improve graduation rates and postgraduate employment outcomes. Class schedules may sound like an in-the-weeds detail, but for some students, it's the difference between a diploma and debt with nothing to show for it.

Technology is extending that support beyond traditional classroom hours. InsideTrack and its parent organization, LEMNIS, are pairing coaching with technology to reach students when and where they need it. Uwill's 24/7 digital mental health tools are now available to 16 campuses across the Technical College System of Georgia; at early adopter Gwinnett Tech, roughly 35% of sessions happened outside traditional counseling hours.

Funders are pushing the field to take two generations seriously at once. As Imaginable Futures' Enyi Okebugwu wrote in Fortune this summer, seven in 10 employers are struggling to find talent, and many of the workers they need are student parents pushed out before they could finish. Supporting them, he argued, "is not generosity; it is smart strategy."

That's the lesson of the curb cut: solving for student parents rarely comes at anyone else's expense. More often, it's how we build systems that work for everyone.

Next month, I'll become a parent myself and get my first real taste of the juggling act millions of student parents manage every day, on top of coursework, exams, and countless other commitments. Even the prospect has given me a new appreciation for their persistence.

Student Parent Month ends this week. The work of cutting curbs never stops.

Robin Gonzales joins W/A VP and Editor of The EdSheet Matt Tower for a discussion of her path from the classroom to industry, CSA Education’s acquisition of BetterLesson, and her plans as CEO of the newly formed entity, BetterLesson Learning.

Chicago Public Schools reported 11,537 fewer students on its 20th day of school than it had at the same point last year. Hours before officials presented the count, community leaders called for an extension of the city's moratorium on school closures, which expires at the end of this school year. [WTTW News]

That tension is playing out well beyond Chicago. Districts have fewer students to serve, but deciding what to do with their schools is rarely a matter of dividing enrollment by the number of buildings.

Driving the news: Enrollment losses are reaching budgets and school board agendas across the country.

The big picture: This is more than a post-pandemic enrollment dip. The New York Times found that public school enrollment has fallen in 30 states since the mid-2010s. Fewer births are a major reason, particularly in the early grades. Housing costs, migration and families' school choices add pressure that varies by community. [The New York Times, subscription required]

Consider Idaho. Its population has grown over the past 5 years, yet public school enrollment is down more than 5,000 students from its 2022–23 peak. The decline is concentrated in the youngest grades, which suggests some districts have more adjustments ahead as those smaller classes move through the system. [Idaho Education News]

Why it matters: When enrollment falls, state revenue can fall with it. A district may have fewer students but still need to operate the same buildings, run bus routes and offer a full range of courses and services. Los Angeles Unified's enrollment is nearly 1% below what it budgeted for, a revenue loss of about $60 million. The county office of education has warned that LAUSD won't meet its minimum required reserve in either of the next two fiscal years. This is leading districts to attempt drastic actions to cover revenue shortfalls, like closing schools. Nationally, more than 1,000 public schools closed in 2025–26, up from 755 four years earlier, according to preliminary federal data reported by The Washington Post. [K-12 Dive; District Administration]

Yes, but: Closing schools is no guaranteed budget fix. A new Stanford study of California districts found that districts cut spending after closures, but they also lost revenue as more students left. On average, their overall financial position did not measurably improve. The findings don't rule out closures. They do complicate the savings estimates often used to justify them. [Stanford Graduate School of Education]

What to watch: This fall's enrollment counts will sharpen the picture, especially where early enrollment has missed budget projections. Miami-Dade's traditional public schools, for example, opened with about 15,100 fewer students than on the first day last year, though the count rose in the days that followed. Florida's funding count comes in October. [Miami Herald, subscription required]

At least one in four K-12 students has been chronically absent in recent years. But federal data can't reliably show how the problem varies across schools, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Wednesday.

What GAO found: The Education Department asks states to count chronically absent students over a full school year but calculates rates using enrollment from a single day. The mismatch can produce implausible results, including rates above 100%.

Why it matters: Thirty-six states use chronic absenteeism in school accountability, and all states must report it. Families are seeing the numbers, too. This year, GreatSchools began adding attendance trends to school profiles in select states using state data. 

What's next: GAO recommended that the department align reporting periods, clarify reporting for part-time schools and resume fuller state monitoring. The department agreed to issue guidance on part-time schools but disputed the other two recommendations. Officials plan to introduce a new monitoring approach this fall. [Education Week, subscription required]

People on the Move

Check out W/A Jobs, which features 3,295 career opportunities from 304 organizations across the education industry. A few roles that caught our eye over the past week:

Jobs That Caught Our Eye This Week