Hi! Lily and Erica here, on the national desk with your weekly update. Today’s big story is about the difficult decisions district leaders across the country are making this budget season. Read on for lessons learned from an apprenticeship program that fell short, the sudden closure of Colorado’s “public Christian school,” and more.

And if you’re wondering if the Trump Administration has really returned education to the states, Ideas Editor Matt Barnum will discuss this question with Rhode Island Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green and Indiana Education Secretary Katie Jenner at our next Ideas event June 11. RSVP here and submit your own questions.

School budgets nationwide are squeezed this year. 

A Chalkbeat analysis of the 50 largest districts in the country found that more than half of those districts are planning to or already have made budget cuts, or are facing some kind of budget deficit.

Take Philadelphia, where our friends in the Philly bureau reported last week that the school district passed its $4.6 billion budget with millions of dollars in cuts that will result in schools losing teachers, counselors, and substitutes. In New York City, the mayor’s quest to trim city spending will hit the education department. (Our New York bureau, by the way, wants to know where you think the district could save money.)

This can be a fraught set of facts in some circles. Because it’s true that a lot of states have, on paper, record per-pupil funding. And it’s also true that inflation and other factors make it so budgets are hard to balance.

You can’t trace budget challenges shaping up in the country’s largest school districts to one single source, but rather a combo of a lot of complex forces at work. One of the prevailing forces is enrollment decline, something that’s been happening for over a decade due to lower birth rates in the U.S. 

But there’s more happening: Costs of employer-sponsored healthcare plans are up (maybe, in part, because of the cost of popular GLP-1 medications). Gas prices are up. Schools may have fewer students to educate, but they may still need to employ the same number of teachers if the enrollment loss isn’t evenly distributed.

As the superintendent of Broward Public Schools, Howard Hepburn, told Chalkbeat, it’s not that administrators enjoy making cuts. They have to. And they’re trying to trim budgets thoughtfully, he said, including by closing schools.

“We’re spending more money on operating the school rather than spending a lot of money on actually educating kids in that school,” he said.

Read the full story.

A red-state Democrat is making vouchers a wedge issue. Iowa State Auditor Rob Sand is eschewing calls for Democrats to embrace private school choice. Instead, in his run for governor, he’s borrowed language from conservatives to describe vouchers as an example of wasteful government spending.

Ten years ago, Colorado set off on an ambitious plan to have 20,000 young people participate in apprenticeship programs. Modeled after vaunted Swiss apprenticeships, these would be high-quality, multiyear programs that started in high school and continued after graduation, that in some cases allowed students to earn college credit, and included careers in finance, healthcare, and education, in addition to the trades. 

But a decade later, just 1,200 students have gone through CareerWise apprenticeships, Chalkbeat reporting found. The program claims another 2,000 apprentices who went through programs started by or inspired by CareerWise — but that still leaves the program 16,800 students short of its goals.

Looking back, CareerWise founder Noel Ginsburg describes the effort as “well-intentioned and ill-informed.”

There are a lot of reasons why CareerWise failed to meet its goals, and they suggest lessons for other states amid a bipartisan push to expand youth apprenticeships and career education more broadly. 

Some businesses decided they weren’t well-equipped to support teenagers and dropped out of the program. School counselors say they’ve struggled to convince families of the value of apprenticeships. Many parents still hope their children go to college, and they also worry about students balancing school and work for two to three years. Apprenticeships also compete for students’ time and attention amid a wide range of options, including internships and less intensive career education programs that might not have the same pay-off.   

Lack of commitment or interest from employers is a widespread problem in scaling apprenticeship programs. 

“What we don’t have are the companies that see this as not just an imperative to do the right thing for their community but how important this is to their bottom line,” Ginsburg said.

That, in turn, means students have fewer options.

“The chicken and egg challenge we have is until you have enough opportunities, it’s going to be very hard for the youth and for parents to feel like this is an option,” said Vinz Koller, vice president of the Center for Apprenticeship and Work-Based Learning at Jobs for the Future.

That was Adrian Moore, a transgender young man and recent graduate of Katy Independent School District in Texas, speaking to The 19th. Texas Senate Bill 12, which requires teachers and school staff to use the name and gender on students’ birth certificates, went into effect as Adrian was starting his senior year. The change in the law made Adrian’s gender a bigger deal at school than it had been previously — he’s one of several young people suing over the law — but Adrian also found a surprising amount of support among his classmates.