The top issues facing schools as a new academic year is set to begin

Students and educators across the country are heading back to school this month with a fresh set of challenges for the academic year, as well as some lingering from the last one. Educators face new laws to obey and varying instructions on how to do so. Students plan to get back to protesting the Gaza war and will have to negotiate the grown problem of bullying fueled by artificial intelligence (AI).   Here are the top five issues going into the new school year:  Student protests Colleges were rocked this year as students set up scores of campus encampments to protest Israel’s actions in its war against Hamas and demand that their schools divest from the country.   Thousands had been arrested by the time commencement season ended.   Schools were on the edge of their seats as Columbia’s president was called to resign by bipartisan lawmakers over the protests, fights broke at the University of California in Las Angeles (UCLA) and a House hearing was called with the leaders of Northwestern, Rutgers and the UCLA over the chaos. But the battles with police do not seem to be slowing student activists down.   “What we will see [is] the students will continue their activism, will continue doing what they’ve done in conventional and unconventional ways. So not only protests, not only encampments, kind of any — any available means necessary to push Columbia to divest from from Israel,” Mahmoud Khalil, student negotiator on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, told The…The top issues facing schools as a new academic year is set to begin