For-Profit School Opening in For-Profit ICE Family Prison

A for-profit virtual education company accused of defrauding investors and other harms is set to run a new school at an immigration prison in Texas, according to job advertisements. Stride, Inc., an S&P 600 corporation based in Virginia, is hiring across various positions, including a school principal, counselor, and teachers for English, math, and science. All will work on-site at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, one of the largest detention centers in the U.S., the job ads state. The facility is managed by CoreCivic, one of two major for-profit prison operators, whose fortunes have risen drastically under the Trump regime, as I reported in August. More from Whitney Curry Wimbish The establishment of a school is an effort to sanitize the extended detention of hundreds of children at Dilley, which violates a court settlement established 28 years ago. Under that settlement, children may not be held in immigration prison for more than 20 days unless the facility is nonsecure and licensed. But a recent court filing claims that ICE has held hundreds of children for well beyond that limit, in some cases for multiple months, and subjected them to neglect and abuse. Immigration prisons are not licensed child care facilities, and even if they were, living in one “is going to be harmful and detrimental to kids in lasting ways,” RAICES legal director Javier O. Hidalgo said in an interview. “You’re in jail, and you’re going to school in jail. It’s never going to be appropriate and adequate.” There’s no indication how big the school will be or when it will open. A spokesperson for Stride said in an email response to questions that details about the program, “including staffing, enrollment, and timing, are being finalized by CoreCivic and will determine the specific nature of service we may provide them.” The posting for the school’s principal says whoever holds that job will directly supervise 15 to 30 full-time equivalent regular employees and/or contractors. Postings for instructors, such as one for a high school English teacher, say they will be responsible “for a minimum of 20 students” in two daily four-hour sessions. Immigration advocates said they expect the school to open in January. “As part of our mission to provide equitable, high-quality education to all students, Stride Learning Solutions is opening a new school site at an ICE Detention facility in Dilley, Texas,” says a posting for a special education compliance coordinator. The ads note that the company is “currently seeking to create a pipeline of experienced Educators.” The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment on the court filing or to provide details about the school. (UPDATE: DHS responded to an email requesting information after press time, but failed to answer specific questions, including whether the school in the Dilley immigration prison would open in January. Instead, the email provided a lengthy statement attributed to an unnamed spokesperson, saying in part: “Another day and another hoax about the South Texas Family Residential Center. Nearly every single day, my office responds to media questions on FALSE allegations about illegal alien detention centers.” The email said immigrants should self-deport using the glitchy CBP Home App, which they said gives them “the potential ability to return the legal, right way and come back to live the American dream.”) STRIDE, ALSO KNOWN AS K12, INC., is a $2 billion online education company that reportedly served 220,000 students in 31 states last year. Former McKinsey & Co. consultant Ron J. Packard founded the company in 2000 with $40 million in venture capital backing from Oracle’s Larry Ellison and junk bond king Michael Milken, among others. Earlier this month, securities law firm Bleichmar Fonti & Auld LLP announced a class action lawsuit against Stride and its senior executives for defrauding investors by lying about enrollment figures and failing to disclose “a catastrophic technology failure.” Stride told investors that it was “increasing growth in our business,” there was significant demand for its products and services, and that customers “continue to choose us in record numbers.” In fact, the plaintiffs claim, Stride “inflated enrollment numbers by retaining ‘ghost students,’ ignored compliance requirements for its employees,” and had such poor customer service that it drove away students. Two events prompted the claim. The first was in August, when New Mexico’s Gallup-McKinley County Schools announced it had severed all ties with Stride, which it had contracted to provide online education to its students, most of whom are Indigenous, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the school district, during its tenure Stride repeatedly violated state law and failed to provide adequate education to such an extent that graduation rates plummeted, along with academic proficiency in all subjects. During the 2023-2024 school year, the proficiency rate for reading dropped to less than 23 percent and math dropped to less than 6 percent, while fewer than 23 percent of students graduated. District officials said rates would decline again for the 2024-2025 school year because of Stride’s failures. After news broke in September that the board of education filed a complaint against Stride, alleging “fraud, deceptive trade practices, systemic violations of law, and intentional and tortious misconduct,” the company’s stock dropped 11 percent. A month later, Stride’s stock dropped again, after the company said its outlook was “muted” because “poor customer experience” had caused between 10,000 and 15,000 fewer enrollments. This time, the drop was more than 54 percent. Plaintiffs also allege that Stride failed to disclose a “disastrous” tech upgrade that blocked access to 10,000 students. The Prospect in your inbox Subscribe for analysis that goes beyond the noise. The Daily Prospect A daily dose of the ideas, politics and power that shape our world, in your inbox weekday mornings. Today On TAP Weekday newsletter features commentary from Robert Kuttner, Harold Meyerson and more, plus links to what's trending at Prospect.org. Weekend Reads The best of the week, curated by the editors of The American Prospect, delivered Saturday mornings. Pop-up newsletters Limited series newsletters on timely topics, such as the debt limit challenge, budget negotiations and more. Email Address Sign up These complaints join a pile of others dating back for most of the company’s entire 25-year history. In 2011, for example, The New York Times profiled one of K12’s online schools, saying that by “almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing.” Six years later, a group of students from Yale published a study titled “K12 Inc.: Virtually Failing Our Students.” They found that “With no exceptions, students enrolled in K12 schools performed worse in math than their district and state counterparts. With only one exception, they performed worse in English and language arts.” Yet during this period of repeated failures, Stride Chief Executive Officer James Rhyu got a raise. His compensation for fiscal year 2025 was $21.5 million, according to the company’s proxy statement, up from $15.6 million the year before. Rhyu joined the company in 2013 from Match.com with zero experience in education. The Stride spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about the alleged fraud, only saying that their goal is for “consistent, high-quality instruction from dedicated educators” where the “focus is on students first.” It makes sense that a private prison company would attract such a private education company, said Hidalgo. “You’re profiting off of putting certain people into these jail settings, which is already disgusting, so it doesn’t surprise me that other companies that are in the business of profiting off people would be aligned with that,” he said. “The intent absolutely is to be harmful … and try to punish these families for being here. It tracks.” THE TRUMP REGIME IS USING the South Texas Family Residential Center, which was constructed by the Obama administration in 2014, to imprison hundreds of children for more than a month, according to a court declaration filed Monday in a lawsuit against the federal government. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained nearly 400 children for more than 20 days in August and September alone, it says, including 150 who were imprisoned for more than a month. 2025.12.08 – Flores Response Download That violates the Flores Settlement Agreement, the 1997 legal requirement for the government to meet basic standards of care and oversight for children it holds in immigration prisons. Under the agreement, the government must provide education to immigration prisoners 17 years old and younger, along with adequate food, water, clothes, and medical attention. The government also must transfer children to a licensed, nonsecure child care facility after 20 days. There’s no adequate education or recreation at the prison for children, a fact that ICE itself admitted in a recent supplemental report. Children reported that the educational program that currently exists is little more than an hour of drawing in a classroom so crowded that some children are turned away. Opening a new school is meant to resolve this inadequacy. But even if it is instituted, the facility would still not be licensed, and children would not be able to leave the facility, violating both tests set up by the Flores settlement. President Trump has tried twice to overturn the Flores settlement. A federal judge in August rejected the most recent attempt; a panel of judges in 2019 rejected his first try, during which his administration argued it shouldn’t have to give children showers, soap, toothbrushes, or towels. In 2016, Texas tried to license Dilley as a child care facility, but a state judge overturned the designation. The following year, the Texas legislature attempted to pass a bill written by a lobbyist with GEO Group, the other major private prison company, establishing family detention centers as child care facilities. That effort failed as well. Monday’s court filing included multiple reports from children and their families describing conditions at Dilley, which it says have worsened in recent weeks, “with families reporting horrific concerns, such as denial of critical medical care, worms and mold in their food resulting in children becoming ill, and threats of family separation by officers and staff.” The declaration includes multiple reports of abuses, including instances where CoreCivic staff members hit children until they bled, intentionally broke their bones, and ignored and aggravated the trauma of imprisonment. Children living in the prison “are weak, faint, pale, and often crying because they are hungry,” and they “report feeling like prisoners locked up in isolated, cell-like trailers,” according to the filing. One said, “We know we are like prisoners here.” Another said, “It’s a prison here—it is truly a living hell.” Families report that their children are anxious, stressed, depressed, and regressing in development, including wetting themselves after years of being potty-trained. One child reported that they “feel very sad and stressed to be here. Sometimes I have anxiety attacks here. My nerves are so high. I don’t know what is happening. My muscles will twitch because I’m so nervous and on edge.” That has always been the reality, Hidalgo said. Clients of RAICES who have attended school in immigration prisons report that classes are a joke regardless of the facility, with so-called teachers giving high school–age students coloring books. Even when programs are fully staffed, they are “extremely inadequate, not age appropriate, at times laughable,” Hidalgo said. The administration is forcing more longtime U.S. residents into immigration prisons, and plans to increase the number of prisoners even further next year. The South Texas Family Residential Center, where Stride is gearing up for its new school, had been closed under the Biden administration. But CoreCivic announced in March that it would reopen “to resume operations and care for up to 2,400 individuals,” executives said in their first-quarter earnings call. The reopening will bring $180 million to the company’s balance sheet. It’s part of the Trump regime’s mass deportation campaign, which will significantly expand next year with more than $150 billion in tax dollars, including $45 billion for more facilities, a funding boost delivered in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. “What you’re seeing now, families have been here for years, decades, kids have been going to school, they have a life here and they’re being ripped out of that life,” Hidalgo said. “Putting them into this school process, that’s an extra layer of harm that we’re going to start seeing.” For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/