How hard is it to keep one brand associated with the one thing they do well? I’d understand it if you only have one brand your trying to expand, like Spotify starting to add video content. But when Google own a wide range of apps each with their own brand and identity, they really don’t need to get everyone in one place like YouTube.
YouTube for me will always be about short video. When they stopped letting my buy movies on Google play, I didn’t start using YouTube and just use Amazon now. When they stopped music, I didn’t start to use YouTube music and stuck with Spotify. And now they are stopping Podcasts, I won’t move to YouTube. I’m not that bothered but I don’t see why they keep doing it, they must hemorrhage users every time and surely the value of YouTube with all these extra features etc is still less than the potential sum of the original parts.
Schools have a duty of care to their students and there are plenty valid reasons to not want your face on the internet. E.g children who have been adopted from abusive families, threats made to children or their parents etc.
You can be polite about it and not confrontational. Just tell them that you’re unable to provide further information on it at the moment, but that you need them to take any photographs of you off the internet and refrain from posting anything in the future.
Let them fill in the blanks with whatever story they want.