Chalkbeat

IPS superintendent highlights ‘excellent choices for everyone’ in State of the District speech

2023-09-21T01:20:55+00:00

Aleesia Johnson, superintendent of Indianapolis Public Schools, said she’s never been as excited for the State of the District speech as she was on Wednesday, when she invited all Indianapolis families to see the options IPS offers.

Her speech touted options available to students, largely through Rebuilding Stronger, the district’s overhaul plan, as the district aims to attract students and families.

The plan was unveiled at the State of the District last year, and this year’s speech is about keeping those promises, she said.

Johnson expressed her gratitude to the Indianapolis community for answering requests from the district including passing a capital referendum, sharing ideas, and giving the district grace and patience as changes were implemented, which included closing and merging some schools.

Johnson called the offerings now available to students “historic.”

“For as long as I can remember, our most exciting and comprehensive offerings were concentrated in neighborhoods that were whiter and wealthier,” she said. “Now, for the first time, every family in our city can access our best stuff. What was once a privilege is now a right.”

Here’s what to know from Johnson’s speech:

IPS is ‘making up ground’

Johnson highlighted the district’s recent academic gains. In 2023, a greater share of the district’s students scored proficient on both the reading and math sections of the state ILEARN test than before the pandemic in 2019. (Passing rates on IREAD declined from 62.8% last year to 60.6% this year.)

“While much of the country is still experiencing major academic setbacks, we at IPS are already making up ground. We now have a greater share of students at or above pre-pandemic performance in both reading and math, and we’re the only district in Marion County that can make that claim,” she said. “This is a nationally significant achievement.”

Additionally, Johnson said the graduation rate has grown to 80%, which cut in half the gap between IPS and the state graduation rate, which was 86.61% in 2022.

That is “a direct reflection of the work our team began in 2018 to reinvent our high schools and transition to college and career pathways,” she said.

District extends an invite to ‘every family in Indianapolis’

Every family with school-age children will receive an invitation in the mail, Johnson said. That invitation, expected in two weeks, asks families to “choose your IPS” that is “tailored to your child’s needs, interests, and hopes.”

In addition to the mailer, Johnson said IPS will have a “showcase of schools” in early November where all schools will be open for families to visit. Plus, school staff will reach out to current families to answer questions; there will also be open houses and information sessions.

This “whole new chapter” is the payoff for doing hard things as part of the district’s reorganization, she said. And it’s ending ways that “reinforced old patterns of haves and have-nots, of segregation, of intentional disinvestment.”

“Every family in Indianapolis is invited,” she said. “Every family.”

Offerings reflect that students’ ‘talent is everywhere’

Johnson said options available to students previously varied from neighborhood to neighborhood, meaning some students and families were left out.

“The way we did it before would have made perfect sense — if all the future violinists were born in one neighborhood, and all the computer coders in another,” she said. “But I’m pretty sure talent is everywhere so we need to make sure opportunity is as well.”

The new approach includes more pre-K options and more high-demand instructional models for elementary school such as Montessori, dual language immersion, and others. For older kids, all middle school students now have access to band and orchestra, world language, algebra I, computer science, and music, she said. This is a change from the past, when not all schools offered these programs.

At the high school level, options continue, Johnson said, listing choices from “Law and Public Safety to Media Arts and Design to Computer Science and Advanced Manufacturing.”

Plus, she said programs in health care, IT and cybersecurity set students up for internships, industry certifications, and dual credit programs.

Beyond academics, Johnson said athletic offerings are expanding, including girls flag football at all four district-managed high schools as well as more elementary and middle school sports camps and clinics next year.

Investments also include updated buildings – by the end of September, 30 schools will have updated HVAC systems and design work is underway for other buildings, she said.

Nearly $100 million of capital referendum projects will be facilitated by a minority-, women-, or veteran-owned business, she added.

Johnson looks to the future needs

While Wednesday’s speech largely centered on touting exciting parts of the future, Johnson said she knows she’ll likely have speeches where she’ll have to make tough asks.

She also acknowledged that she’d likely have to make more tough requests of the community. And she called for the community to come together more for students.

She noted that resources are needed for students who are non-native English-speaking learners, students with disabilities, and 3- and 4-year-old early learners.

“We can invest in solutions that make it possible for working parents to support their families while their children learn,” she said, adding that investing in students is also investing in a strong economy of the future.

“It’ll take all of us, fighting for what our students need. But there are solutions and, together, we have them,” Johnson said. “Indianapolis has shown me that time and time again.”

Chalkbeat reporter Aleksandra Appleton contributed to this article.

MJ Slaby oversees Chalkbeat Indiana’s coverage as bureau chief and covers higher education. Contact MJ at mslaby@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee school district sues social media companies over student mental health ‘crisis’

2023-05-26T16:22:07+00:00

A Tennessee school district has joined a growing list of school systems across the nation that are suing major social media companies like TikTok and YouTube over a crisis in student mental health.

Clarksville-Montgomery County Schools filed its lawsuit earlier this month through California-based Frantz Law Group and Tennessee-based law offices of Lewis Thomason.

Chris McCarty, a Knoxville attorney who is helping to coordinate litigants, said other Tennessee districts are interested in joining the suit.

The case’s arrival in Tennessee comes as the nation’s top health official issued a warning this week about the risks of social media to young people.

U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said that while social media can be beneficial, its effects on adolescent mental health are not fully understood and it “can also have a profound risk of harm.”

His 19-page advisory could strengthen the case of school systems complaining that they’ve been left to deal with the fallout of apps that they contend are harmful to the social and emotional health of children and adolescents.

In Clarksville-Montgomery County, school officials say they’ve fought an “uphill battle” in recent years against cyberbullying, mental health disorders, classroom disruptions, threats of school violence, and young people’s access to inappropriate content. Located along the Kentucky border and near a U.S. Army base, the district operates 45 schools for its 38,000 students and is Tennessee’s seventh largest school system.

“It is time for social media companies to be held accountable for the lack of monitors, controls, and cooperation to protect children and our society,” the district wrote in a May 11 email notifying parents, employees, and other stakeholders about the lawsuit.

Among other things, the district is seeking changes to the companies’ products, funding to pay for education and treatment programs on excessive use of social media, and an unspecified award for damages.

“This is an effort to bring about real change,” McCarty told Chalkbeat on Thursday.

Problems tied to social media are ‘a daily thing’ in school

The school system’s 109-page complaint charges that social media giants like the owners of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube are causing harm to students who use their products via algorithms that are designed to cause addiction.

The lawsuit also contends that the companies have caused a mental and emotional health “crisis” among students that is marked by an increase in anxiety, depression, thoughts of self-harm, and exploitative content that encourages disorderly behavior, unhealthy social comparison, and cyberbullying.

“If you ask any principal or teacher how often they deal with problems related to social media, it’s not a monthly or weekly thing. It’s a daily thing,” McCarty said.

A spokeswoman for Google, which owns YouTube, called the complaint’s allegations “simply not true.”

“Protecting kids across our platforms has always been core to our work,” said Ivy Choi. “In collaboration with child development specialists, we have built age-appropriate experiences for kids and families on YouTube, and provide parents with robust controls,”

A Snapchat spokesman said the safety and well-being of the app’s users is a top priority and that Snapchat is not designed to encourage passive scrolling.

“We aren’t an app that encourages perfection or popularity, and we vet all content before it can reach a large audience, which helps protect against the promotion and discovery of potentially harmful material,” the company said in a statement. “While we will always have more work to do, we feel good about the role Snapchat plays in helping friends feel connected, informed, happy, and prepared as they face the many challenges of adolescence.”

The other companies named in the lawsuit did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Suit follows school district cases against Juul Labs

In January, when Seattle public schools became the first district to sue tech giants over student mental health, legal experts were split on the potential impact.

One expert told Chalkbeat the suit could lead to sweeping changes in the industry. But others said it could fizzle out.

In the months since, dozens of other school systems have filed similar lawsuits charging that social media companies are maximizing profit at the expense of the mental health of young audiences. Those audiences spend significant amounts of time on the platforms and report associating them with stress and anxiety, according to plaintiffs.

An attorney for Frantz Law Group, which specializes in class-action and mass-action lawsuits, said Thursday that about 500 school systems in 32 states have retained the firm to pursue similar litigation.

The firm represented more than a thousand school districts in earlier lawsuits against Juul Labs Inc., which makes nicotine vaping devices, over claims about the company’s marketing to adolescents. A series of settlements in recent months have funneled billions of dollars in payouts to individuals, states, cities, and school systems.

Many of those same school systems, including Clarksville-Montgomery County Schools, are now working with the same lawyers to pursue legal action against social media companies.

“When we mentioned social media was the next fight, the district was the first one to jump out of the gate,” said McCarty about Clarksville-based school system.

Proving a mental-health link could be difficult

William Shinoff, the attorney leading the litigation for the Frantz Law Group, said this week’s U.S. surgeon general advisory backs up many of his firm’s claims.

“It’s extremely helpful,” Shinoff said, “as it restates what we are alleging in our lawsuit.”

But while there’s significant frustration with social media companies in the court of public opinion, drawing a direct connection between their products and student mental health isn’t necessarily straightforward. For instance, what about the pandemic’s emotional effect on children and teens, as well other stressors and the role of parent supervision?

“We’re having a mental health crisis in general and everybody wants to point the finger at social media,” said Pamela Wisniewski, a social media expert and Vanderbilt University associate professor of human-computer interaction.

She noted that a severe shortage of therapists and affordable treatment options contributes to a public health threat spanning racial and ethnic groups, urban and rural areas, and the socioeconomic divide.

“We should look at reform holistically,” Wisniewski said, “to better support schools, provide more mental health training, and create stronger communities to create a network of social support.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a response from Google.

What happened to the social-emotional screening tool that NYC schools began using last year?

2023-05-25T18:00:00+00:00

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New York City’s education department plans to ditch a controversial social skills assessment for the coming school year, Chalkbeat has learned.

The tool’s proponents believe it’s a missed opportunity to help shift school culture to become more responsive to children’s social-emotional wellbeing, particularly at a time when needs are high.

In many ways, however, the tool’s rollout was doomed from the start.

Officials knew that students would have increased mental health demands when they returned to classrooms last year. They promised to be ready.

It was December 2020, long before the start of the new school year, when officials released a “mental health and wellbeing plan,” highlighting how schools would use a five-minute assessment to quickly identify significant emotional issues. The results would help flag individuals who needed more intensive interventions and support.

About eight months after that announcement, the city approved a 3-year $18 million contract to Aperture, an education technology company that created a platform to administer what’s known as the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment, or DESSA.

A few months later, in October 2021, education department officials shared the assessment tool with teachers, giving them a short runway to figure out how to utilize it.

The backlash against the DESSA was swift. Teachers feared they didn’t know their students well enough and that their responses could be biased. Many revolted against the directive to administer it, asking parents to opt out. Parents from various ends of the political spectrum refused to have their kids assessed. Some had concerns about privacy and data security, others worried about the questions’ overreach and the time it would take teachers away from building relationships with their children.

Many questioned the cost of the tool — though broken down by school, it came to roughly $3,300 a year for each school.

This year, the education department quietly backed off the initiative, making it optional for schools to administer the DESSA. Many educators told Chalkbeat that their schools ditched it. Education department officials declined to disclose how many schools continue to use it, but confirmed that the citywide DESSA program is expected to be discontinued in the coming school year.

“Broad implementation of the screener was only a temporary initiative,” education department spokesperson Jenna Lyle said in an email. “While the screener will no longer be administered city-wide, the practice has helped schools to understand the importance of identifying students who may be in need of additional support and prioritizing wellness among the entire school community.”

Schools can continue to implement social-emotional screening assessments, if they choose to, and the department is available to assist with that process, she said.

For David Adams, the CEO of Urban Assembly, a network of about two dozen schools across the city that have long incorporated the DESSA, the assessment tool is critical, especially at a time when many kids don’t feel like they have a trusted adult on campus.

Of the sixth through 12th graders across the city who responded to last year’s school survey, more than 1 in 5 did not have at least one adult in the school they could confide in.

The criticism from teachers about not knowing their students well enough to fill out the assessments is precisely the reason that it’s needed, Adams said.

“The tool becomes the intervention,” he said. “A teacher who is paying attention to student interactions will be able to fill it out. A teacher who doesn’t know their students, isn’t collaborative with them… that’s where you’re seeing the opportunity.”

Problems with DESSA rollout

The messaging around the initial announcement of the mental health plan laid some of the groundwork for pushback. Educators and parents worried about overstepping boundaries when it came to evaluating kids’ mental health.

The DESSA, however, is not about identifying mental health issues. It aims to gauge social skills such as decision-making, self-awareness, and taking personal responsibility. Among the 40 questions: During the past four weeks, how often did the child keep trying when unsuccessful? Get things done within a timely fashion? Show good judgment? Offer to help somebody?

It also often took more than five minutes for a teacher to fill out the questions for each student. Teachers were expected to fill it out in the fall and spring to track a student’s social-emotional arc over the year. It often felt like one more burden, teachers said.

Moreover, several educators told Chalkbeat they didn’t know how the results were used and didn’t think that schools got more support for counselors if they ended up flagging students who needed more help.

“Vague promises were made about school-level support that might materialize depending on the results of the DESSA screeners,” said Brittany Kaiser, an art teacher at the Earth School, an elementary school in Manhattan’s East Village. “We were, and are, in desperate need of more guidance counselors and social workers, more funding for other support positions, and trainings on trauma-informed teaching, de-escalation strategies, restorative justice implementation, and conflict resolution strategies.”

That support, however, never materialized, she said.

When the tool was made optional this year, Kaiser’s school dropped it.

Overall, fewer Manhattan schools filled out the DESSA than their counterparts in other boroughs, according to fall 2022 data obtained by Chalkbeat. Roughly 67% of Manhattan schools used the tool in the fall, while about 75% in Brooklyn and Queens did. Schools in Staten Island and the Bronx had the highest rates at 84% and 80%, respectively.

New York City schools are trying to focus more on social-emotional learning. The DESSA was supposed to help.

The education department tried to make it easier to administer the DESSA, giving high schools the option of having students fill out the questionnaire themselves, while elementary and middle schools could allow parents to fill out the questions, according to updated guidance sent to principals earlier this year. Officials also told schools they could tap federal relief funding to pay teachers extra for filling out the tool beyond the school day.

Allowing students and parents to fill out the form dilutes the intent, Adams said. He sees the tool as a way to get teachers to pay closer attention to their students through a “strength-based” framework and give educators a common language on how to discuss those skills.

Adams compared the assessment to an approach that a coach uses for athletes, observing and giving suggestions based on those observations. Rather than a screener, Adams views the DESSA as a “feedback tool.”

“The goal is not ultimately about having people rate kids,” he said. “It’s about every kid having social emotional competence and teachers learning to see and give feedback on that. Feedback drives learning.”

Teachers are often giving feedback on social-emotional skills that’s tied up in grades, Adams said. They might, for instance, conflate mastery of a topic with things like deadlines. The tool provides a way to tease that apart and enable a teacher to discuss the importance of responsibility and turning assignments in on time. Rather than simply taking 10 points off on an assignment, for example, it gives the teacher “the language and the clarity” to talk about certain skills a student needs to be successful.

According to Adams, about 47% of a student’s grade is linked to social-emotional competency scores, and the DESSA, he believes, can help schools address issues, such as goal-setting, which affect academic performance.

Using the tool to change teaching and learning

The Urban Assembly network began incorporating the DESSA years ago, after seeing how nonprofit youth development organizations, such as the Children’s Aid Society, were using it to focus on social-emotional outcomes. The network employs 14 social-emotional learning specialists that fan out to schools to assist them with how to use the DESSA. (Meisha Porter, who was chancellor at the time the city selected the DESSA, had been a principal of an Urban Assembly school — after taking over from current Chancellor David Banks.) But the intensive assistance from the Urban Assembly was never scaled across the system, leaving many schools adrift when it came to incorporating the tool.

“If it feels like an add on…it’s not going to be useful,” said Delia Veve, principal of Manhattan’s Urban Assembly Media High School. “If people are doing it out of compliance and begrudgingly, then it’s about checking a box. What does that accomplish?”

The school goes all in on the tool. Before they administer it for their students, the adults at Veve’s school study the skills on the DESSA, to help them reflect on what they mean and how they might show up, the principal explained. Then, each of the roughly 350 students are assessed twice a year by at least two different adults, including the teacher from advisory, to help address possible biases in responses.

“I recognize that’s a heavy lift,” Veve said, “but it does make that data that much more reliable.”

Her school uses results from the DESSA less for identifying individuals who need more dedicated support and more for identifying trends across the grades to change teaching practices.

The school noticed last year that relationship skills were a bigger area of weakness than previously, which was unsurprising given the prolonged isolation during the pandemic and the continued COVID mitigations last year that prevented a lot of group work. So this year, the school bolstered opportunities for kids to work collaboratively.

Rather than view the responses as an issue where students aren’t demonstrating certain competencies, it reveals where the school might not be creating the space to meet their needs.

It helps her see, Veve said, “Is it a reflection of the kid or is it a reflection of the school?”

Need for a holistic approach to help kids

Without a lot of support, however, many schools floundered with the DESSA. One Bronx administrator explained that her school dropped the DESSA because it felt redundant to what they already had in place. The school prides itself on having a robust team for social-emotional support: It has three guidance counselors and two social workers who help lead weekly advisory groups and small group counseling for its roughly 600 students.

The advisory groups, in particular, focus on social-emotional learning and peer relationships, and they provide insights to the counseling team when issues might arise, said the administrator, who requested anonymity. Whether a school offers an advisory period often comes down to carving out space in the schedule and making tradeoffs, the administrator explained. For them, it meant giving up other electives, like robotics.

If her school’s team didn’t have such a strong counseling infrastructure in place, she might have found the DESSA more helpful, she said. She thought it was worthwhile to figure out a way to measure social-emotional learning metrics, she said.

The ways schools have incorporated the DESSA was uneven, with some schools more focused than others on how to use the tool to identify students who need help, said Kevin Dahill-Fuchel, executive director of Counseling in Schools, which provides counseling services at roughly 70 schools across the city.

Yet, while the tool might not give a parent a definitive answer about how their child is doing, Dahill-Fuchel didn’t think it seemed harmful. But there’s not always a clear plan on what should happen next with the data.

“There’s not a robust accountability system,” Dahill-Fuchel said.

Having such a system is important to shift a school’s culture toward a more supportive environment, he said.

“Where we need to get to ultimately,” Dahill-Fuchel said, “is that schools get held accountable for social skill development and emotional wellbeing in the same way they do for academic progress.”

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago schools tapped hundreds of academic interventionists to catch students up after COVID. Is it working?

2023-05-25T11:00:00+00:00

In a classroom on Chicago’s West Side one morning last November, Teresa Przybyslawski sat side by side with a soft-spoken sixth grader. She read a script off her computer screen while he peered at his own tablet.

“On your screen, you will see some addition problems,” read Przybyslawski. “I want you to do as many of them as you can in one minute.”

She glanced at the sixth grader, John. His back was taut, his face tense.

Down the hall, the boy’s classmates at Brunson Math and Science Specialty School, a high-poverty elementary school, geared up to tackle dividing fractions. But here, alongside Przybyslawski, one of the district’s new interventionists tasked with helping students who fell behind during the pandemic, John was about to work on math normally taught in first grade.

“Are you ready? Three. Two. One.”

Numbers flashed on John’s screen: “2 + 7. 5 + 10. 10 + 4.”

At the start of this school year, John, whose real name Chalkbeat is not using to protect his privacy, read at a first grade level and did second grade level math. It would be Przybyslawski’s job to get him caught up – fast.

School districts around the country are pushing to help students bounce back from the pandemic’s profound academic damage: expanding literacy tutoring in Detroit, cutting class sizes in New York City, and buying science-backed reading curriculums in districts across Colorado.

Instructional materials are seen inside Brunson Elementary School in Chicago. School districts around the country — including Chicago Public Schools — are pushing to help students bounce back from the pandemic’s profound academic damage.

Chicago Public Schools has turned to academic interventionists — a cadre of hundreds mostly classroom teachers already on the district’s payroll, tapped this year to turbocharge the learning of struggling students one-on-one or in small groups.

These newly-minted catchup specialists are tackling three years of COVID fallout layered upon pre-pandemic learning gaps and traumas, at schools that experts and educators agree should have been staffing interventionists all along.

Research has backed Chicago’s intervention approach, and emerging data here and in other cities shows school districts are making headway. But experts say the effort is in its infancy: A recent study by nonprofit test maker NWEA found students are rebounding, but schools are likely a few years away from returning to pre-pandemic achievement, especially for younger learners.

Meanwhile, educators face their own version of Przybyslawski’s countdown.

Three, two, one. Before children like John arrive in high school unprepared, lowering their odds of graduating, starting college or careers, and escaping poverty.

Three, two, one. Before districts like Chicago run out of federal COVID relief dollars.

Three, two, one. Before society at large moves on, and the energy required to remain in full-on recovery mode fades.

As Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, put it at an academic recovery event this past fall: “If we fail to act differently to catch students up, to ensure every student graduates with everything they need, we will have failed this generation and future generations of students.”

One school on Chicago’s West Side tackles academic recovery

Brunson Elementary is in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, one of the hardest hit by COVID and by a surge in the city’s other epidemic: gun violence.

Of Brunson’s 400 students, almost 90% are Black, and almost all are poor. Almost 60% were chronically absent last year, meaning they missed roughly 20 or more days. This year, Brunson has deployed “attendance heroes” — teachers, paraprofessionals, and cafeteria workers — who check in daily with truant students. But across the district, attendance and disruptive behaviors continue to interfere with learning.

“It’s heartbreaking what kids here carry on their backpacks that we can’t see,” principal Carol Wilson said.

Principal Carol Wilson at Brunson Elementary School on Friday, February 24, 2023 in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago. The school was one of the hardest hit by COVID and by a surge in the city’s other epidemic: gun violence.

Since the pandemic hit in 2020, Chicago Public Schools — like districts across the country — has seen drops in the portion of students meeting reading and math standards on a required state assessment. The district’s latest scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as “the nation’s report card,” showed nearly a decade of growth in math had been wiped out while reading results held fairly steady.

When Chicago schools tested students this past fall to gauge where they stood, two-thirds of John’s sixth grade peers districtwide did not hit grade-level benchmarks in reading. A third were flagged as needing urgent interventions. The picture was similar in math.

Przybyslawski used to teach a classroom of 25 students math and science. Now, her focus is on 15 or so struggling middle schoolers at Brunson.

She set out to create an orderly, efficient operation, using new digital platforms that constantly size up how students are progressing in mastering skills they should have learned in earlier grades — and dictate what they work on next.

In her role as an interventionist at Brunson Elementary, Teresa Przybyslawski works with struggling students one on one or in small groups. She also “pushes into” classrooms to help fellow educators build academic interventions into their routines.

In reading, the school piloted an artificial intelligence program that gave students passages to read back to it based on their level and flagged mistakes they made.

She wanted John to divide fractions along with his peers eventually. But in the meantime, Przybyslawski, who also supervises the school’s new team of three tutors, all Brunson grads, measured progress in small increments.

During that session in November, John hesitated briefly before answering 6 + 5.

He was stumped on 3 + 8.

But on the rest, he rattled off the correct answers before Przybyslawski had even finished reading them out.

“We got to the third row,” she told the boy when the minute-long assessment was up. “Very nice work!”

After students left, she logged in their results into Branching Minds, a new platform used for tracking interventions.

Wilson, the principal, and district officials lean on the technology to monitor the progress students are making. Soon, Wilson would also get a second round of standardized tests — administered around the middle of the school year — she hoped would tell her if the school’s efforts were paying off.

‘How can we reach more kids?’

In the bid to speed up students’ academic recovery, Chicago leaders have bet on an arsenal of strategies. They’ve expanded after-school programs, started an in-house tutor corps, and poured millions in teacher training and a new in-house lesson bank called Skyline.

They also tapped some 250 educators to serve as new academic coaches. There are more counselors, social workers, and other support staff.

All in all, the district earmarked $730 million in COVID recovery dollars this school year for its recovery efforts.

Academic interventions — by tutors, classroom teachers, or the new interventionists — are at the heart of the strategy. The district budgeted for at least one interventionist on each of its roughly 500 campuses, though not all schools used the money for such positions, and some schools combined the duties with existing positions. And it required all schools to use the same digital platform to track interventions that Przybyslawski is using.

Across the district this past fall, new interventionists chipped away at catching up tens of thousands of students. One math problem and one sounded-out word at time.

“How do we get students a lot of extra support with so few people?” -Teacher Elizabeth Battaglia

At Moos Elementary on Chicago’s West Side, where most of the 430 primarily Latino students enrolled needed intervention in the fall, Elizabeth Battaglia and the tutors she oversees could reach about 60 students across all grades — not nearly enough.

“How do we get students a lot of extra support with so few people?” she kept asking herself, even as she was encouraged by her students’ growth.

In reading, Battaglia tried a blitz tactic: 20 minutes each day over two weeks when stronger readers are paired with struggling peers to read passages to each other and help correct each other’s mistakes. It helped.

At Sadlowski Elementary on the Southeast Side, where most of the school’s 620 students were flagged as needing intensive help at the start of the year, Emily Gasca has 38 students on her caseload — some of them third and fourth graders reading at kindergarten level.

She enlisted fellow teachers to build interventions into daily classroom instruction, but some colleagues felt she was laying more work on already full plates.

Interventionist Teresa Przybyslawski at Chicago’s Brunson Elementary School combines technology and old-school methods such as flashcards in working with students who are behind grade level in math or reading.

Gasca tried to remind herself she was helping build from scratch a sort of academic safety net that the district has needed all along.

Even before COVID, many Chicago students made it to high school unable to read well. The pandemic just made it harder to look away.

To experts and educators such as Gasca, it’s clear that trauma and social-emotional challenges — that invisible load in students’ backpacks — complicate academic catchup. But struggling to keep up in the classroom is also a daily source of stress, eroding students’ confidence — baggage they carry back home.

Educators search for signs interventions are working

By February, John’s sessions with Przybyslawski were a well-worn routine.

“On your screen you will see a story to read,” Przybyslawski read off her screen to him one morning that month. “I would like you to read this story for me.”

“We’ll begin in three, two, one.”

John looked relaxed in a black face mask, hoodie, and Nikes as he read a passage about a family visit on a farm. At the one-minute mark, a bell dinged, and Przybyslawski smiled broadly. John’s reading had been largely free of mistakes — a huge leap from the start of the school year when he struggled to make it through a sentence or two during those fleeting 60 seconds.

“Good job overall,” she said. “I’ll get your score in a few minutes.”

“We’ve seen kids make leaps and bounds but still remain below the benchmarks. We’re catching kids up constantly.” -Principal Carol Wilson

Przybyslawski’s students were making headway. But now, her caseload looked different.

A few students “graduated.” They still need added help, but should be able to get it in the classroom. A few left the school, part of the customary churn at a high-needs neighborhood campus. And some were no longer on Przybyslawski’s caseload after being identified as needing services for students with disabilities.

Around this same time, Wilson, the principal, had gotten the school’s midyear test results.

Students in all grades were showing solid growth except eighth graders, on that all-important cusp of high school, who were flagged across the district for making little midyear progress.

Wilson was encouraged. Still, these tests predicted that fewer than 10% of Brunson students would meet state standards this spring.

“We’ve seen kids make leaps and bounds but still remain below the benchmarks,” Wilson said. “We’re catching kids up constantly.”

Districtwide in the early grades, there were double-digit increases in students scoring at grade level. Overall, Chicago Public Schools’ scores were in line or better than other urban districts. But much work remained: In the second grade, for example, more than half of students remained one grade level below in math, and a quarter were still two grade levels below in both math and reading.

Paul Zavitkovsky, an expert on testing at the University of Illinois at Chicago,

“If the kids at the lower levels of achievement are only making expected gains, that’s not moving the needle for them. Average gains are not going to be enough.” -Paul Zavitkovsky, assessment specialist at the University of Illinois Chicago’s College of Education

said standardized tests are a helpful snapshot of how students are doing, but he cautioned against relying on them to drive recovery efforts. Remediating one skill at a time based on test results must happen alongside engaging, grade-level instruction — a tough balance to strike, Zavitkovsky said.

Based on an analysis of results on a standardized test named STAR 360 many Chicago elementary schools are giving three times a year, Zavitkovsky found almost all schools made four months of gains in the first four months of the year in math — an encouraging return to a pre-pandemic pace of growth.

But, he said, “Average gains are not going to be enough.”

Dan Goldhaber, who leads the University of Washington’s Center for Education Data & Research, said it’s not clear how long schools can remain in full recovery mode, which requires resources and sustained effort.

When the COVID money runs dry, Chicago’s army of interventionists hired in recent years could land on the budgetary chopping block, leaving classroom teachers to pick up the difficult work of recovery.

Bogdana Chkoumbova, the district’s education chief, says the district is encouraged by testing, grading, and other data; it will cover interventionists at each school and grow the tutor corps next year.

That’s because there’s more work to be done, Chkoumbova recently told the school board. Data show 20% of students have gotten some intervention, and of those, only about a third are on track to meet their goals — an improvement over earlier in the year.

But, as district leaders have noted, a lot of intervention work is not captured by the data. At Brunson, a girl recently asked Przybyslawski for help with multiplication and division off the screens. The interventionist set up stacks of flashcards, quizzing her the old-fashioned way.

“Confidence!” she told the girl. “Just be confident.”

Behind them, in the back of Przybyslawski’s classroom, a bulletin board was covered with certificates of achievement.

One was John’s. It showed a figure looking over a wheat field, a mountain peak rising in the background.

“Congratulations!” the certificate read. “Your reading POWERS are getting stronger, and it’s time to celebrate your hard work.”

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Public Schools wants more students in summer programs. They’ll even pay some to attend.

2023-05-24T22:20:53+00:00

Chicago freshmen at some high-poverty high schools will earn money to attend a summer orientation program — part of a broader district push to boost summer school participation amid the pandemic.

The district saw lackluster enrollment in its summer orientation and academic catchup programs in 2022, even as school-based enrichment programs drew record numbers of students. In an update to the school board Wednesday, district officials said they will offer the paid version of the freshman orientation, called Earn and Learn, at more than 30 high schools in a partnership with the nonprofit After School Matters. Students will get free transportation and a stipend for completing the program.

Board member Elizabeth Todd-Breland applauded the move, saying it can entice students who otherwise might choose to work through the summer.

“We know our young people want to make money for themselves and to be able to be involved in our programming,” she said.

The district did not immediately respond when asked how much the stipend will be.

Some board members said they want to see more central office support for schools trying to get the word out about programs as the district is poised to continue a major summer school expansion this year.

“We can always do better,” board president Miguel del Valle said. “We should be aggressive to maximize the level of participation in all our programs during the summer.”

Teachers union and other officials also voiced concern about a more than two-week gap between school and summer offerings. Chicago Public Schools’ last day is June 7 and the start of both school district and Chicago Park district programming June 26. With just two weeks left before summer break, the district is working on offering some enrichment and other activities during that stretch with philanthropy dollars, officials said.

City leaders have previously held up summer enrichment programs and job opportunities for youth as key in warding off a rise in gun violence during the summer months.

Like other districts, Chicago has boosted the dollars and energy it pours into summer programs, seen as a key strategy to recover from the pandemic’s academic and social-emotional damage. In 2022, the district spent an unprecedented $40 million on summer programming, 50% more than the previous summer.

District data showed about 73,000 students, or a fifth of the district’s overall enrollment, signed up, many for multiple programs. That included a record 42,500 students enrolled in enrichment, or Out of School Time, programs designed at the school level, sometimes in partnership with local nonprofits.

But Chalkbeat’s reporting has also found that the district has struggled to track enrollment and attendance in summer programs. It relies on three separate systems for reporting enrollment numbers with sometimes overlapping data, and doesn’t have a good way of capturing actual attendance — making it harder to gauge if these investments have paid off.

District officials told Chalkbeat earlier this year they are stepping up efforts to track summer participation.

Meanwhile, some summer programs — such as ones that help students catch up academically or make the transition to kindergarten and high school — have been plagued by low enrollment. District officials said Wednesday that the district will offer such transition programs — Preview to Pre-K, Kickoff to Kindergarten, and Freshman Connection — at more schools this summer.

Referring to under-enrollment in some programs last summer, Todd-Breland asked officials how they are ensuring schools are filling those summer seats. Ali Muhammad, deputy chief of the office of college and career success, said campuses are largely handling outreach to families, with his office playing backup.

“We are really relying on the schools to make sure students know about these programs,” he said. The district will have a central hotline for summer school inquiries during the weeks after school ends but before summer school begins.

In previous years, the district faced some criticism from families who say they get information on summer programs too late in the spring, with some half-day options that can be a tough fit for working parents.

Jackson Potter, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union, voiced concern at the board meeting about the weeks-long gap between the end of the school year and the start of summer programming.

With money raised through philanthropy, he said the district and union are working on offering some programs during that stretch.

He noted that such opportunities might be especially important as the district continues to welcome dozens of newly arrived migrant students. Potter suggested that schools such as Zapata Academy, an elementary on the Southwest Side, that have seen new arrivals in recent days could remain open during those two weeks to offer enrichment and other activities as students adjust to their new district.

Del Valle, the board president, also encouraged the district to ensure there are more summer job options for students, about 20,000 of whom landed positions through a city program called One Summer Chicago in 2022.

“There are ‘Help Wanted’ signs everywhere,” he said. “I just want to make sure we are stepping up our efforts to identify those job opportunities.”

Programs run from June 26 through Aug. 4. Families can review all summer opportunities at www.cps.edu/summerprograms.

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.

I never thought my child would need a school social worker, but I’m so glad she’s in our lives

2023-05-19T12:00:00+00:00

Walking my eldest daughter to school in the mornings is one of my favorite things to do. We use this time to talk about her friends and the subjects that excite her, like art and music. When we reach the school and say our goodbyes, I remind her that I love her. I wait in the schoolyard until I see her pass through the doors; sometimes, she turns back to wave again but usually just heads right in.

Fabiola Mejia

The school shooting in Nashville, on the heels of too many other school tragedies in recent memory, has added a sense of foreboding to our morning routine. I find myself praying for her safety as I watch the kids follow one another into the colorful hallways. Despite how well my daughter does academically, there are times I wish I could wait in her schoolyard until the end of the day just to make sure she’s OK.

Having gone through some difficult events in the past few years — from a student threatening her with a weapon at school, to the pandemic shutdowns, to a tragic fire that broke out in front of our home last November and claimed a little girl’s life — it’s no wonder why my 9-year-old daughter developed anxiety.

I knew something was up after she started complaining of stomachaches. When multiple trips to the doctor showed no physical ailment, I wondered if there was something she wasn’t telling me. Was she being picked on at school? Her father and I did our best to reassure her that she could talk to us about anything. She couldn’t put a name to her feelings, but we could see the worry on her face. There were periods of pensive silence and nights when she struggled to sleep.

Nervous about receiving judgment rather than empathy, I didn’t talk about this situation with family or friends. So I was hesitant when the school social worker, Mrs. D, contacted me just before the holidays last year, asking to have regular meetings with my daughter. Filled with wrongheaded ideas about what a school social worker does, I worried that I had failed my daughter. The possibility filled me with shame.

At the same time, I was relieved to have someone supporting my daughter — and our family. I choked up during our initial phone call as I explained the traumatic events my daughter had experienced, including her twin sisters’ multiple hospitalizations for respiratory issues in the last year. I told Mrs. D that I felt guilty that I could not protect her from things over which I had no control.

Mrs. D listened to me patiently, never once interrupting to tell me she had to go or that she didn’t want to hear our life story. I could hear the empathy and grace in her voice as she told me that I had a lovely daughter who was doing her best in school and just needed a little help coping with her fears. We agreed that Mrs. D would meet weekly with my daughter and would be in touch if she saw any red flags. As our call wrapped up, she made sure to ask me to take care of myself, telling me to call her if we needed anything.

Before working with Mrs. D, I thought school social workers were only for families experiencing homelessness, abuse, or in need of major interventions. Social workers do so much more. For our family, Mrs. D was a lifeline — helping us navigate scary and painful moments.

For a time, my daughter refused to leave the house without a mask, even after the mask mandate had been lifted and her father and I told her she could go to school without one. She became fearful of passing on any germs that might cause her little sisters to get feverish. Mrs. D. worked with her to overcome this fear, informing her that some germs are necessary to strengthen our immune systems. Gradually, my daughter went a few minutes to a few hours without a mask at school. Now, she no longer panics if she forgets to wear one.

I’m grateful that I put aside my notions about what it meant to work with a school social worker. I’ve learned the valuable services that school social workers can offer students and families — those in crisis, yes, but also those like ours who just need a little extra support.

There were periods of pensive silence and nights when she struggled to sleep.

My daughter is slowly starting to enjoy school again and has gotten better at expressing her emotions. She has learned some coping mechanisms for when she feels anxious; they range from simple breathing exercises to writing down her fears and tossing the paper in the trash as a way to release the fears from her mind. It’s reassuring to hear her say that she looks forward to her one-on-one and small group sessions with Mrs. D.

Mrs. D has also identified school activities that might interest my daughter and walked me through getting a referral for counseling services. Most importantly, though, she has reminded me that it’s OK for parents to seek out support. In doing so, we demonstrate to our kids that there’s power, not shame, in asking for the help we need.

Fabiola Mejia is a freelance writer and HR coordinator from Boston who enjoys traveling, reading, and gardening. When she’s not at her desk, she’s either experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen or taking walks with her family.

High-dosage tutoring is still hard. Here’s what schools have learned.

2023-05-17T16:40:31+00:00

Christy Borders is frank about the “pain points” Illinois has faced while working to get an intensive tutoring initiative up and running.

Officials underestimated how much they’d have to pay tutors. Some schools offered tutoring after school, but few students attended. Even with training, tutors didn’t always use the tried-and-true strategies for helping students.

To course-correct, state officials boosted pay to $50 an hour, helped schools redesign their programs to offer tutoring during the school day, and coached tutors who needed support.

“The truth is that there are a lot of scabbed knees and bruises in this work,” Borders, who oversees the state’s tutoring effort, said at a conference held last week at Stanford University about the future of tutoring. “Not going to sugar coat this, guys. It’s hard work.”

Early in the pandemic, experts identified high-dosage tutoring — the kind that’s offered multiple times per week, in small groups, with a consistent tutor — as a potentially successful strategy for helping students plug learning gaps. But more than two years into a national push to expand the reach of tutoring, many schools are still struggling with basics, like how to staff and schedule their programs.

Now, as COVID relief funds dwindle, some big questions remain, including: What are the best ways to get high-dosage tutoring to more students? And how can schools keep their programs going when those federal dollars are gone?

A key group of researchers, school leaders, and tutoring organizations attempted to answer some of those questions at the recent convening hosted by the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford program that shares research and helps schools launch tutoring programs.

Here are some of the major takeaways from that event:

Some schools are ditching after-school tutoring

School leaders from New Mexico, Tennessee, Texas, and elsewhere said they tried to tutor students outside of regular school hours, but attendance was lackluster. As a result, some schools are changing their programs to offer extra help during the day — which typically involves overhauling school schedules.

“You have to blank slate it, start over, and redesign based on what is necessary for students,” said Penny Schwinn, the outgoing Tennessee education commissioner, who has overseen a statewide tutoring initiative that involves 87 districts and some 200,000 students. “For us, it is: Do the tutoring during the school day. That’s the only thing that has worked.”

In Tennessee, many schools are making that work by using academic intervention time that was set aside before the pandemic. Schools also are leaning on full-time tutors, who can make it easier to reach more students during school hours, Schwinn said.

Some districts had success changing elementary school schedules, but got tripped up trying to create classes for middle and high schoolers. In Ector County, Texas, school leaders slotted in virtual tutoring time at one middle school this school year and will be working that into the master schedules of more middle and high schools this fall. Doing that work in advance is key, educators said.

“We’ll hopefully have better attendance,” said Carina Escajeda, who oversees virtual tutoring for the district. “Those have been tough schools to really reach the students.”

There’s a push to use AI, but it’s unclear how much

Several researchers pointed to emerging evidence that has found schools can pair human tutors with software that uses artificial intelligence and still get strong results for students. That’s good news, they say, because it means schools could potentially offer tutoring to more students at a lower price.

In one recent study, for example, researchers found that ninth graders in Chicago and New York City who got daily math tutoring could spend about half their time with a tutor and the other half using a computer program and see results similar to students who spent an entire class with a live tutor. But there’s no consensus yet on exactly how much time students need to spend with a human tutor for it to remain effective.

“If we go too far it’s not going to be great,” said Jonathan Guryan, a professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University who was involved in that research.

Research is underway to see what the right balance may be. Though there’s broad agreement that students will still need a human connection.

“AI can support high-impact tutoring by making materials better, by giving tutors really good information on students,” said Susanna Loeb, a Stanford education professor who’s involved in numerous tutoring studies. “Most students are still likely to need relationships to get them to work on the AI platforms and to help them thrive more broadly.”

Schools are measuring effects of tutoring in different ways

While some state and district leaders are working with researchers to rigorously study their tutoring programs, others say that’s not practical and are turning to things like attendance data, test scores, and student surveys to see if tutoring has moved the needle for students.

Experts say while that kind of descriptive data can be helpful, it won’t show whether it was the tutoring that made a difference, or not.

“If you don’t have the data, you can’t say if it’s not working,” said Shanitah Young, a director with the North Carolina Education Corps, which recruits and trains tutors to work in schools across the state. The organization’s program is being evaluated by Duke and North Carolina State universities. “It’s allowing us to say ‘Yes, these students have grown through tutoring,’ or ‘No, they have not.’”

There are several studies that are expected to be published this summer and fall that could help school districts make their programs more effective. That includes two gold-standard experiments looking at whether the tutor’s race or gender affect academic outcomes for students, and another rigorous study looking at whether student group size affects the quality of live virtual tutoring in reading.

Schools are preparing for the fiscal cliff

Schools and states had to set aside a large chunk of their COVID relief funds to address pandemic learning losses, and many put that toward tutoring. Still, by some estimates, only 1 in 10 students or fewer are getting that extra help.

Now, as those funds run out, school districts are looking for alternate ways to pay for their tutoring programs, or planning for cuts — raising questions about how many more students schools will be able to reach.

Some states, like Tennessee, have budgeted money to continue paying for high-dosage tutoring after federal COVID funds expire, while others, like Connecticut, are ramping up data collection to lobby state lawmakers for ongoing tutoring dollars.

Meanwhile, some school districts, like Texas’ Ector County, will be deciding whether they should cut ties with some of their more expensive tutoring providers, while other districts, like Guilford County, North Carolina, are taking on some longer-term costs by staffing a four-person department to oversee their tutoring work.

“Money is about to get very, very tight,” said Robin Lake, who heads the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which has been tracking district academic recovery plans. “What we’re hearing from districts is they are overwhelmed by the challenge of core instruction. They can’t even get their heads around the idea of interventions and standing up new tutoring programs.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

How Colorado is filling gaps for its ‘most vulnerable’ children as last-resort schools dwindle

2023-05-14T11:00:00+00:00

Help is finally coming to Colorado’s facility schools, which often serve as a last resort for some of the state’s most vulnerable students.

A new state law will cut red tape and boost funding for the collapsing system, which serves children with intense behavioral, mental health or special education needs. The law also aims to train local teachers and staff, especially in rural areas, to serve such students closer to home.

While experts are hopeful, they acknowledged it won’t entirely fix the problems that led 50 privately run facility schools to close in the past 20 years, leaving just 30 open today.

“It’s a huge, complex system, and it’d be naive to think one piece of legislation is going to fix everything,” said Paul Foster, the executive director of exceptional student services for the Colorado Department of Education. “But the legislation is trying to take that into account.”

Lawmakers hope to see 12 new schools open in the next three years. But some of the likeliest candidates to become facility schools — small private programs that already serve students with disabilities — have said they’re not interested.

Meanwhile, public school districts have been starting programs of their own. But the new legislation does little to support these “missing middle” programs. The leader of one regional consortium said the state should be funneling money to them instead.

In a state that has long underfunded both education and behavioral health, there are gaps everywhere and no shortage of work to be done. However, there are also models, here and elsewhere, that point toward a better way to serve what can be a forgotten population.

New rules make it easier to form facility schools

The Learning Zone is a small specialized school in Littleton for nonverbal students. It’s in the process of becoming a facility school. It’s also a case study in how an irrelevant layer of bureaucracy can slow down that process — something the new law aims to fix.

Until now, specialized private programs had to become licensed day treatment facilities through the state Department of Human Services before the Colorado Department of Education could approve them as facility schools. The new law eliminates that first hurdle.

The Learning Zone teaches students who have rare genetic disorders and other disabilities to use devices that allow them to communicate by pushing buttons that convey words or phrases. It’s been a game changer for students who are often left behind in public schools.

“Some went from not reading to first-grade reading levels within nine months of being here,” said Amanda Attreau, executive director of Real Life Colorado, the nonprofit that runs The Learning Zone. “They actually get invited to birthday parties that are for their actual friends.”

But when The Learning Zone sought licensing as a day treatment center, it was subjected to a checklist of safety requirements and psychological goals geared toward an entirely different population: students with mental health issues and trauma.

“We had to become a day treatment even though all of the requirements of a day treatment don’t apply to our school or our population of learners at all,” Attreau said.

“You’re needing to check a thousand boxes for part one just to get to part two, even though the second box is the one that makes sense for you.”

Getting approval is important because school districts are more likely to pay for state-approved programs. However, the process was onerous enough that advisers suggested The Learning Zone wait for the new law to take effect. But Attreu feared losing students and money.

Districts that had been willing to pay part of The Learning Zone’s $60,000 tuition when it started as an alternative to remote school in 2020 had become “antsy,” Attreau said, and given The Learning Zone an ultimatum: become a legitimate school or we’ll take our students back.

“We don’t want the services we are offering to be limited to the people who are wealthy and elite and capable of paying for this,” Attreau said.

Third Way Center’s Joan Farley Academy, a facility school in Denver, tries to create a supportive environment for teens coming out of youth corrections and the foster system.

Not all private programs want to become facility schools

While state approval can be a powerful incentive, not all private programs say they want or need it.

School districts that once balked at the $96,000 annual cost for Firefly Autism in Lakewood are now more likely to pay, even though it’s not a facility school, said President and CEO Amanda Kelly. That could be due to a 2017 U.S. Supreme Court ruling. The high court found the Douglas County School District, which was refusing to pay for a student to attend Firefly, violated that student’s right to an education. It could also be due to Firefly’s 20-year track record.

“We have such a brilliant relationship with our districts,” Kelly said, adding that Firefly has students from 14 different districts. “I think that’s trust built over time.”

And Firefly doesn’t want to become a facility school, in part because it doesn’t see itself as a school. It doesn’t have teachers or students. Instead, the 42 children and young adults who spend their days there — who range in age from 3 to 21 and have a combination of autism and intellectual disabilities — are called “learners.”

They work one-on-one with certified behavior experts to learn life skills, chief among them how to communicate and advocate for their needs. Firefly is a day treatment program, but to become a facility school, it would have to hire teachers and a special education director and follow a curriculum aligned to state academic standards.

“To make such a massive change, we just don’t know if that’s what Firefly should do,” Kelly said.

Humanex Academy, a private middle and high school in Englewood, has another reason for not wanting to become a facility school. The leaders at Humanex, which serves neurodiverse students with autism, ADHD, and other disabilities, disagree with the goal of facility schools, which is to teach students the skills they need to return to public school.

“We didn’t want districts to say, ‘How soon can you fix them and give them back to us?’” Principal Kati Cahill said. “I always was a proponent of public education. But unfortunately the existing system isn’t set up to meet the needs of these kids.”

Students attend class at Third Way Center’s Joan Farley Academy in Denver.

School districts filling the gaps with their own programs

Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES, are regional associations of school districts that pool resources to provide a service they would not be able to alone.

Sandy Malouff is the executive director and special education director for the Santa Fe Trail BOCES, which serves six rural school districts in southeastern Colorado. Malouff started a day treatment program years ago because metro Denver facility schools were too far away, and students who did attend those schools often struggled to transition when they returned home.

The Southeast Alternative Learning Academy in La Junta serves students as far as 70 miles away. Over the past five years, about 30% of students have gone back to their local schools.

Malouff based her program on the Pikes Peak BOCES School of Excellence, which serves students who would likely need a facility school from more than a dozen districts around Colorado Springs.

Executive Director Pat Bershinsky said most districts would rather send their students to the School of Excellence “because they still have a connection to that kid. The kid’s not just put in a facility somewhere and forgotten about.”

In addition to the main location in Colorado Springs, a satellite location in the tiny town of Calhan puts services within reach for rural families. One student, Bershinsky said, had previously spent about four hours in a car every day going from Limon to a facility school in Denver. Calhan is less than an hour from Limon.

Bershinsky said lawmakers should have directed money to rural BOCES so they can “stand up their own programs like I have.”

Many metro area districts also have separate schools for students who struggle with behavior. In the Cherry Creek School District in suburban Denver, the Joliet Learning Center is often students’ last stop before going to a facility school or their first stop when they transition back, said Tony Poole, the district’s assistant superintendent of special populations.

But Cherry Creek is going further. Using $14 million in voter-approved bonds and $1.5 million of federal funding, the district is building its own treatment program that officials say is unlike any other.

Traverse Academy is set to open this fall.

Traverse Academy will serve 60 students in fourth through 12th grade in three separate wings: one for kids in mental health crises that will be heavy on therapy and light on academics, another for students with moderate needs that will balance the two, and yet another for students getting ready to transition back to their home schools.

Children’s Hospital Colorado and the University of Colorado Department of Psychiatry will provide clinicians to work alongside the educators.

Opening Traverse Academy this fall won’t eliminate the need for facility schools, Poole said, but he hopes it will alleviate some of the pressure, especially for students who are suicidal.

“With the closure of these facilities, we just have more kids in crisis who are left with no option,” Poole said. “It means we have kids in significant crisis walking our hallways every day.”

A student writes answers on a worksheet during science class at the Hilltop Day Treatment, a facility school in Grand Junction. Facility schools seek to balance academics and therapy.

Advocates want more inclusion, not just more institutions

Some advocates say the real solution lies with helping public schools support students in traditional classrooms, not in creating more separate programs.

“When you build it, they will come,” said Diane Smith Howard, an attorney with the National Disability Rights Network. “What we have learned is: Anytime you create a program, the slots get filled. And they don’t necessarily get filled with kids who want to be there.”

In California, the CHIME Institute’s Schwarzenegger Community School in the Los Angeles area has been so successful at educating students with disabilities alongside peers without disabilities that CHIME staff provide technical assistance to schools and districts across the state.

If Executive Director Erin Studer could give advice to Colorado, it would be to fund model schools, “those bright spots of practice” that other educators can visit and observe, alongside a technical assistance center.

When students do go to specialized settings, supporting transitions back to their home school is critical. Teachers at Brook Valley South in Nebraska show teachers at students’ home schools how to carefully track behavior through the day and watch for patterns.

Teacher Carrie Fairbairn recalled one student who would run up and down the aisle of the bus badgering other students until they assigned him a seat behind the talkative driver who chatted the whole way to school.

“Lo and behold,” Fairbairn said. “Zero bus issues.”

“Sometimes folks are so quick to see that label on a kid: [emotional disability] or behavior disorder,” she added. “And you’re like, ‘move his seat.’”

Artwork decorates the walls at Skyline Academy, a facility school in Denver. The school tries to help children build social and emotional skills.

‘There’s nothing wrong with kids’

The story of Jack, a fourth-grader with autism, shows how short staffing in public schools can set off a spiral that requires more significant intervention. It also shows how tenuous progress can be and how critical it is to have a range of options.

Not long before Denver Public Schools recommended a facility school for Jack, his special education team thought he was doing so well in a separate classroom they wanted him to start going to the traditional classroom for math, his mother said.

But Jack’s elementary school didn’t have a one-on-one aide to shadow him, and the plan never happened. Disappointed, Jack returned to behaviors he’d mostly overcome: running away from school or refusing to go inside at all.

His mother, Heidi Laursen, lost her job — and her family’s health insurance — because she spent so much time trying to coax him through the schoolhouse door. The school called the police when Jack pulled a paper towel dispenser off the wall.

All last summer, Jack’s family thought he was on a waitlist for a facility school.

Instead, the Friday afternoon before school was supposed to start, Laursen said she got a call saying Jack would have to go back to the separate classroom at his old elementary school — the place that was short-staffed, that had called the police on him, and where Jack spent most of his time with the patient art teacher instead of learning.

“I couldn’t send him back to the school he had been running away from,” Laursen said.

So the family transferred Jack to Boulder, where his father lives. He was placed at Halcyon School run by the Boulder Valley School District.

Principal Matt Dudek describes Halcyon as a small, safe space for students who might otherwise turn their frustrations outward or bottle them up to learn skills to manage overwhelming settings — like a traditional public school with hundreds of peers.

“We don’t fix kids,” Dudek said. “There’s nothing wrong with kids.”

The average stay at Halcyon is about a year. In 15 years, Dudek said he’s only referred one student to a facility school.

Jack’s fourth grade year has gone well, his mother said. Now 10, Jack has earned Matchbox cars and tiny Tech Deck finger skateboards for good behavior. When he’s overwhelmed, he has a “safe tree” outside where he can go, shadowed by a watchful staff member, until he’s ready to return to class.

Jack was doing so well that his team began talking about transitioning him back to a larger public school. Perhaps remembering the disappointment last time, Jack began acting out again, his mother said, running away or refusing to go into the building.

“In the end, we decided that maybe he wasn’t ready to transition, because of the behavior he was showing,” Laursen said. “Maybe he needs more time to feel safe.”

Melanie Asmar is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado, covering Denver Public Schools. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Rae Ellen Bichell is a reporter with KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN). Contact Rae at RaeB@kff.org.

Colorado is pouring more money into schools for kids with behavioral health issues and disabilities, but are they helping?

2023-05-13T11:00:00+00:00

Colorado is doubling the funding next year for schools that enroll students whose mental health or medical needs are too intense for regular schools to handle, calling for 12 new schools to open within the next three years.

The number of these specialized schools, which operate as day centers or are part of residential treatment facilities or hospitals, has fallen over the past two decades to 30 from 80. They offer a combination of therapy and academics in an effort to stabilize thousands of students a year so they can return to their home schools.

But even as the state attempts to shore up a system that’s been sapped by staff shortages, inadequate state funding and other challenges, it is nearly impossible for parents and other members of the public to get answers to a fundamental question: Are students enrolled in the schools safe and learning?

Facility schools are intended to act as temporary programs of last resort to stabilize students so they can successfully return to their home schools. Yet, the state does not keep track of how many students return to regular school or how many eventually graduate.

The state requires facility school students to take its standardized tests, but does not provide individual school results, citing student privacy because the classes are so small.

The schools exist at the intersection of the educational, mental health, and juvenile justice systems. Multiple state agencies are responsible for monitoring the schools, but those visits in some cases happen only every two years and reports from the state education and human services departments aren’t readily available to the public. The Colorado Sun and Chalkbeat Colorado filed multiple requests under public records laws to receive reports, some of which were redacted, that offer a glimpse into the facility school environment.

Maintaining separate schools for children who act out aggressively, frequently run from school, or have severe medical or intellectual needs is controversial, with some parents and disability rights advocates questioning whether they are holding centers for kids with behavior problems. It’s clear Colorado needs more facility schools to accommodate the growing number of children with behavioral health struggles, but advocates also want enough information to ensure kids are safe and learning.

Facility schools offer a mix of academics and therapy. The goal is for children to stabilize enough to return to traditional classrooms.

‘We don’t really have a choice but to make them better’

The prime sponsor of the new law that will pour an additional $18 million into facility schools next year, increasing their funding by 2.6 times what’s in current law, agrees that Colorado needs more data about whether facility schools are working.

Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, an Arvada Democrat and chair of the Joint Budget Committee, hopes her legislation will force the various state agencies that oversee the schools to cooperate and report better data on outcomes within a few years. It also requires that schools earn accreditation in order to receive state funding through the new law.

“There are some facilities where we do question whether they are simply warehousing kids and whether they offer good programming,” said Pamela Bisceglia, executive director of Advocacy Denver, which speaks up for Denver Public Schools children with special needs. She has visited several facility schools over the years with parents who are deciding where to place their children. Some are clean, calm, and excelling at teaching children, she said. And some are not.

Bisceglia recalled visiting one Denver school where children ages 5-17 were all in the same room, some lying on the floor, no one interacting with each other, while several staff members in the room were scrolling on their phones.

“They were simply trying to keep them from hurting themselves or others,” she said. “There wasn’t any learning going on. There wasn’t any individualized therapy.”

“Sometimes it’s a moving target for them to try to meet to get back into that neighborhood school. Sometimes they just never learn the skills that the school feels that they need.”

The Arc Pikes Peak Region believes all children should attend their neighborhood schools rather than facility schools where they end up cut off from their peers, said Connie McKenzie, an advocate for children with disabilities. If children do end up in a facility school, their time there should be temporary, with the goal that they will gain skills so they can return to their neighborhood school.

“In actuality, I don’t think that happens as often as anyone would like,” McKenzie said. “In my experience, a lot of times when kids are sent to facility schools, they never return to their neighborhood schools. Sometimes it’s a moving target for them to try to meet to get back into that neighborhood school. Sometimes they just never learn the skills that the school feels that they need.”

Maureen Welch, a member of a task force that studied facility schools for the past year and whose son attended one, said Colorado needs “a lot of light and sunshine” to illuminate the process of approving facility schools in the next few years. She wants to make sure the state is bringing in quality programs ranging from small, neighborhood startups that serve a handful of students with related issues, to large, national operations.

“We need to actually have them learn and move forward,” Welch said. “Yes, it’s expensive, but we don’t really have a choice but to make them better. What are we going to do? Put these kids in the correctional system? There is no place to put them because there are not institutions anymore. We will always have a population of kids that can’t be served in a public school district situation.”

Under the new law, schools must receive accreditation based on recommendations from the state facility school board, a panel created in 2008. Board chairperson Steven Ramirez did not return multiple requests for comment from The Colorado Sun and its partners.

The Office of Facility Schools, within the Colorado Department of Education, pushed back on the characterization that facility schools are just a place to keep kids that school districts don’t want to deal with anymore.

“Are there facilities somewhere out there that exist that maybe aren’t being as effective as they need to be or warehousing kids? I don’t think we can eliminate that as a possibility,” said Paul Foster, the executive director of exceptional student services for the education department. “I think we can pretty safely say if they’re in our facility school system, that that’s not the case.”

If it were the case, he said, monitoring visits by the department would have turned up “serious or even egregious” violations instead of the more pedestrian problems that they more commonly find.

Skyline Academy is operating under capacity because some children have needs beyond what the Denver facility school can manage.

Facility schools are not rated based on their test scores in the same way that traditional public schools are, Foster said. While students at facility schools are required to take state standardized tests, state officials take into account that students have “unique and pretty significant needs — and that’s why they’re in a facility school setting,” Foster said.

Callan Ware, the executive director of student services for Englewood Schools, a small district south of Denver, said that when she sends a student to a facility school, it’s because their behavior is so dysregulated — they’re skipping class, getting kicked out, or harming themselves — that they struggle to concentrate and learn.

“While we do absolutely have academic expectations of facility schools, the No. 1 goal is, let’s learn the skills you need to be successful in a public setting,” Ware said.

She recalled one student who struggled with boundaries and impulsiveness and who routinely got sent home from public school for touching other students in class. After less than a year of daily therapy in a facility school, the student “totally turned it around,” she said. His engagement in academic tasks skyrocketed and when he returned to public school, “we could see the kind of student he could be because he wasn’t getting kicked out of class all the time.”

Human services reports reveal safety issues involving cleaning chemicals, restraints

The job of ensuring students are safe and getting a quality education in facility schools falls to multiple state agencies.

The Colorado Department of Education is charged with making sure the schools are following curriculum guidelines and the components of students’ individualized special education plans. The state Department of Human Services, which includes the child protection division, monitors schools to make sure students are safe. Human Services licenses schools in day-treatment or residential centers, while the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment licenses those in hospitals.

When Colorado lawmakers implemented the Office of Facility Schools at the state education department in 2008, they ordered the office to create curriculum standards, graduation guidelines, and an accountability system for the schools. While those standards were written, some of the performance data isn’t tracked or is not easily accessible to the public.

In response to a records request, the Colorado Department of Education provided average standardized test scores across all facility schools — they are lower than the state average, which state officials attributed to their intense behavioral health needs. Colorado’s strict student privacy law requires redacting data about small student groups, and the state wouldn’t provide any test data for individual schools.

Teacher Timi Meyer goes over a worksheet during science class at the Hilltop Day Treatment facility in Grand Junction.

The Colorado Sun and its partners gleaned what data we could by seeking documents under state open records laws. The state doesn’t track graduation rates or keep a count of how many students return to their home districts after attending a facility school. The Department of Human Services charged $90 for redacted reports on child safety. One police department said it would cost $4,700 for copies of reports that could shed light on why police were called so frequently to a facility school and the residential center where it’s housed in Colorado Springs.

The state human services department conducts regular inspections of schools in day-treatment and residential centers, focusing on whether children’s rights are protected. When the division receives a complaint about the way a child was restrained or injured, a state monitor investigates to determine if the school violated state regulations regarding child abuse or neglect. The Colorado Sun reviewed a year’s worth of school monitoring documents after receiving redacted reports through state open records laws.

The reports shed light on the often chaotic, and at times unsafe, environment at schools for students with a history of behavior problems deemed too much for regular schools to manage.

The Tennyson Center in Denver has operated as a home for children since 1904. It’s currently a day treatment facility school.

Mount Saint Vincent, a Denver day treatment center with a school, was cited last summer after a child was able to get ahold of cleaning chemicals and spray them at staff, sending a worker to the emergency room with possible eye and inhalation injuries.

The school was cited again in September after a father of one of the students complained about a red mark on his child that he said was from being held down by staff members on a “hot sidewalk.” A state report says the child threw a water bottle and began hitting two workers after being told to complete math before playing. The staff members restrained the child in a supine hold, face up on a paved courtyard, as the child screamed “Let my arm go” and “The concrete hurts.”

Tennyson Center, another Denver day treatment center, was cited in January for failing to supervise a child who had a known history of cutting herself. The girl hurt herself in a bathroom after staff failed to check on her, according to one Colorado Department of Human Services report.

Devereux Cleo Wallace, which has a day treatment school in Westminster that is closing at the end of this school year, was investigated after a worker chased after and collided with a child running toward a maintenance shed containing tools.

12 schools cited by education department in past five years

In the past five years, the Colorado Department of Education has ordered 12 facility schools to take corrective action for violations ranging from not uploading individualized special education plan documents, using curriculum not aligned to state standards, and cutting into academic time by pulling students out of class for therapy, according to monitoring and corrective action reports reviewed by Chalkbeat Colorado

Five of those 12 schools are closed now. That means seven of the 30 facility schools currently operating — or about 23% — have had violations in the past five years. Most were addressed by the next time state monitors visited.

Poplar Way Academy, inside a behavioral health hospital in Littleton, was cited for cluttered and dirty learning areas, “minimal structure,” and lots of downtime for the 17 students who were there when the monitors visited last June.

“Students had control over the radio and music was playing loudly as they worked,” said the report, which was by far the most egregious of 88 monitoring reports reviewed for this story. “There were no redirections for inappropriate language or behaviors, and students were often left unsupervised or allowed to walk out of the classroom with no redirection. Inappropriate boundaries were noted among students,” who were male and female.

The school is different from most in that it’s for teenagers who have been admitted to a hospital on mental health holds, meaning they were deemed a danger to themselves or others. The average length of stay is just four to five days, the report says.

The school’s director of special education, Deon Roberts, said that since state officials’ last visit, the school has hired more teachers, increased staff training and expanded the curriculum. The school is “committed to continuous improvement while providing much-needed educational services to a challenging population of students,” she said in an email.

Skyline Academy’s “chill space” provides a separate room where students can find a darker, quieter environment to decompress.

The majority of the violations, however, are for “quick fixes” that schools can address with more training or resources, said Judy Stirman, director of facility schools at the state education department.

State education officials try to help schools with a background in mental health treatment understand their educational obligations, said Foster, with the state education department. “If I’m a therapist or someone at a facility school, I’m looking at the whole package, and so I may not understand that the school side of it has committed to a certain plan for this child in addition to the treatment plan you’re doing.

“Special education is pretty technical, so you can have technical violations,” he said. “Don’t hear me say that technical violations don’t need to be treated seriously. But a technical violation that is quickly remedied is not usually harmful to the student.”

Facility schools with violations get a visit each year from a pair of state monitors. Schools without violations get a visit every other year from monitors who use a 98-item checklist. In addition to whether schools are complying with the mounds of federal requirements related to special education, the monitors determine whether teachers are properly licensed and staff are using positive behavior interventions with students and not punitive ones, for example.

The reports provide a window into what the schools look and feel like. Many describe bright classrooms with student artwork on display. They note that most schools use a reward system where students with good behavior earn tickets that they can redeem for prizes. Some schools hold events like talent shows and carnivals. One has a basketball team. Another has a student choir. A few have therapy dogs, gardens, or culinary arts programs.

Juvenile records laws shield information about safety

Several of Colorado’s facility schools include a mix of students who live at home with their parents and students who are in foster care and live in the residential treatment center that contains the school.

This clouds transparency about the safety of the schools, since police regularly visit residential centers for young people who might have lived in multiple foster homes and juvenile justice centers.

Public records requests from The Sun to police departments in Colorado Springs and Denver revealed a constant drumbeat of emergency calls to facility schools or programs housed in the same complexes.

Between April 2021 and the end of March, for example, Colorado Springs police responded hundreds of times to the J. Wilkins Opportunity School, 10 Farragut Ave., and the residential program across the street, 17 Farragut Ave., police records show.

More than 100 emergencies were reported at the school, including 18 assaults as well as sexual assaults, threats, harassment, 911 hangups, and suicide attempts. The residential facility, where some of the students live, accounted for more than 470 police calls during that period, with dozens more reports of assaults, threats, indecent exposure, missing children, and sexual offenses, the records show.

No details were provided beyond the time, date, and nature of each call. Police said a request for more records of those calls would require an estimated $4,700 payment for research and redaction fees.

“We’re less likely to press charges than a school would. If they’re here, we’re not suspending them, either.”

Managing outbursts and aggressive behavior is nothing new at the J. Wilkins Opportunity School, said Lauren Campbell, the chief operating officer of the Griffith Centers, which runs the school and residential program.

“Some of that behavior is why these kids — a good portion of them — are here,” Campbell said. “It’s not an ideal piece of learning, clearly, but unfortunately it’s the safest place for most of these students to be in general.”

When police are called, the children involved in the emergency are separated from other students, so officers aren’t entering classrooms, Campbell said. That minimizes disruptions and allows staff to restore order and return to teaching, she said.

A threat that might get a child suspended or even kicked out of another school often results in a safety plan involving special accommodations, such as a temporary transfer to a different classroom.

Campbell said calls to police had increased in the past two years, citing a staffing shortage that made it harder for workers to defuse conflicts on their own.

Skyline Academy’s peace room is one place students can get some time apart from their classmates.

The campus used to operate five residential centers, housing up to 40 children. But they closed all but one after the passage of the federal Family First Prevention Services Act, which pushed states to send fewer children to residential care.

The closures reduced the campus staff by roughly 50%, and the only remaining residential center was reserved for the kids with the severest needs, leading to more frequent calls for help, Campbell said.

Still, the emphasis remains on keeping children safe, and on campus.

“They end up in less troublesome situations than in a school setting,” she said. “We’re less likely to press charges than a school would. If they’re here, we’re not suspending them, either.”

In Denver, police similarly logged thousands of calls per year to facility schools or the complexes housing them, also for reports of assaults, missing children and various disturbances, records show. But Denver police declined to provide incident or arrest reports that would disclose more detail, citing a state law meant to protect juveniles’ privacy.

McKenzie, with The Arc Pikes Peak Region, worries Colorado isn’t doing enough to make sure kids at facility schools are safe.

“There isn’t that oversight,” said McKenzie, who advocates for a handful of families each year whose kids end up attending facility schools, noting some students are terrified of returning to one.

“They were afraid,” she said. “They were legitimately afraid of what was going to happen to them if they went back to a place where they felt they had been abused.”

Lawmakers are hoping to see better coordination between the agencies that oversee facility schools.

Becky Miller Updike, director of the Colorado Association of Family and Children’s Agencies, which represents some of the largest youth treatment facilities in Colorado, is hopeful that this year’s legislation will set facility schools on a trajectory of better funding and more accountability.

“With this new investment from the legislature, facility schools will now track data and access technical assistance more robustly than ever before,” she said. “We will have new ways to measure what’s working and what’s not.”

Zenzinger’s legislation requires multiple state agencies to work together to help current schools function better and new ones open.

“Facility schools don’t neatly live under one department. That’s why they are such a challenge,” she said. “We are definitely mandating a new level of cooperation between these different departments so that they are each doing their part.”

“We want to make sure that children in facility schools are able to graduate and go on to college and have productive lives.”

As part of the new accreditation requirements, schools will have to report additional data showing student outcomes, and the new law provides funding for data collection because “we absolutely would like to track things a little bit better,” Zenzinger said. A task force that has studied facility schools for the last year and made recommendations ahead of Zenzinger’s legislation will continue to meet and help determine what data the schools are required to report.

“We want them to be accredited and deliver good quality public education,” she said. “Obviously they aren’t traditional schools. You are not going to have passing periods and a full schedule every day. But we want to make sure that children in facility schools are able to graduate and go on to college and have productive lives.”

One child out of 11 returned to a regular school

On a recent day at Skyline Academy in Denver, elementary school children read quietly at their desks as a flat-screen television at the front of their classroom played soothing music and showed a trickling waterfall.

The desks at Skyline, which is run by Denver’s community mental health center WellPower, have bungee rubber bands that stretch from one chair leg to the other so kids can put their feet on them and bounce as they study fractions or read aloud. Each child gets a plastic rainbow wiggle slug they silently twist and curl in their palm, helping them relieve anxiety. Children can use standing desks or “wobbly” stools inside of regular chairs. There is a “chill room” and a “peace room” containing bean bags and swings where students can hang out if the classroom gets too stressful.

Classrooms at Skyline Academy are decorated with student artwork.

The classrooms, decorated with cheerful colors and maps, are on one side of the building of the Dahlia Campus for Health and Well-Being. On the other side are the mental health center’s counseling offices where children get individual and family therapy.

The school has a capacity for 24, yet only 14 desks are full — even as school districts across Colorado are scrambling to find spaces for children whose needs are beyond what they can handle.

Program manager Erica Edewaard said that’s because many of the children who’ve been referred to Skyline in recent months have behavioral issues more intense than even Skyline can accommodate. Some of the kids referred by school districts, she said, need residential treatment.

Skyline, not far from busy Martin Luther King and Colorado boulevards, won’t accept children who repeatedly run away because they could get hit by cars. Under state law, schools like Skyline are not allowed to lock their doors and staff are prohibited from physically restraining students unless there is imminent risk of danger to themselves or others. Skyline also won’t typically take kids with a history of destroying property or assaulting teachers or other students, especially if they are nearly the same size as Edewaard’s staff.

“I also have to take into consideration the size of the student relative to the size of my staff,” Edewaard said. “If I’m always relying on just my two tallest staff members, that’s going to burn them out really quickly.”

The goal at Skyline is that students learn to cope with their anxiety, depression or attention disorder so they are able to function and learn in a regular classroom. For most, however, a direct transition to regular school is not that easy.

Eleven students have left Skyline in the past year, according to data provided by the school. Three students left for hospitalization or a residential treatment program, one “aged out” and a handful of others went to other step-down or specialized school programs.

Only one returned to a regular classroom.

Jennifer Brown is a co-founder and reporter at The Sun, where she writes about mental health, child welfare and social justice issues. Contact Jen at jennifer@coloradosun.com.

Melanie Asmar is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado, covering Denver Public Schools. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

As problem behaviors persist, is state testing making things worse?

2023-05-12T11:00:00+00:00

I could tell from her body language that she was angry. A student I’ll call Talia was standing by the door, tense. I approached her slowly and quietly said, “Hey, you don’t seem like yourself. Is everything okay?” She said she was going to hit another student as soon as she saw him. She wouldn’t tell me why. I knew I had precious little time to de-escalate. I called another teacher for help and asked Talia to take a few deep breaths, reminding her that nothing bad had happened yet, and it didn’t need to.

Ronak Shah

We held it together for three minutes, the rest of the class staring silently in disbelief. But when the other student walked past us, she lunged after him, me holding her back, grasping the door frame for support. She pushed past me and almost reached the student before he got into the other teacher’s room.

What transpired just two months ago is hardly unique to my middle school classroom in Indianapolis. Students, teachers, and families across the country have been grappling with an uptick in troubling student behaviors in schools. The trend is in schools of all types and in all communities, spanning minor behaviors like tardies to more significant incidents of violence and hate-based rhetoric. According to one national survey, “twice as many teachers witness violent classroom incidents today versus pre-pandemic.”

There’s no shortage of guesses as to the cause, among them academic and social skills gaps from online learning, residual trauma, cuts to social-emotional and equity-based education, unaddressed mental health, teacher burnout and shortages — it’s a long list. Although the problem is worse, it is not new. And schools have had a limited toolkit of incentives, consequences, services, and staffing to react to all of these challenges.

So I find myself asking: Is there something about the structure of school, about what we’re asking and requiring students to do, that plays a role?

The answer I keep coming back to is our state tests and what we must teach so students will pass. Too many students are disengaged and unhappy at school because the day is structured around assessments instead of what is relevant to their lives and futures.

During the pandemic, many hoped that the seismic shift would transform this status quo. In 2021, there was no shortage of prophetic think pieces heralding the coming revolution. “Integrate technology!” “Educate the whole student!” “Reimagine the school day!”

Students got a taste of how learning feels when schools prioritize relevant instruction above the test. But it was only possible because states set aside their tests. They held schools “harmless” for the results or canceled testing altogether. Fast forward to now, and we’ve reverted back to the pre-pandemic culture of testing.

Students got a taste of how learning feels when schools prioritize relevant instruction above the test.

Meanwhile, in most schools, you’ll find almost no mention of today’s biggest problems: political division, climate change, income inequality, resource scarcity, loss of biodiversity, artificial intelligence, misinformation. But you’ll find plenty of solutions to the problems of yesteryear in textbooks scarcely updated in a generation.

How can we expect students to engage in school if they don’t value what we put in front of them?

One bright spot: Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s proposed the More Teaching Less Testing Act, which would pivot schools away from a teaching culture built around annual testing. Instead, states could test representative samples of students or limit testing to once every three years. Most importantly, the proposal prohibits districts and states from using state assessments for teacher evaluations and school grades, which can have a chilling effect. That’s because poor test scores can lower a school’s letter grade and hurt teacher evaluations (which may be tied to compensation).

I know we need data we can act on, and that means testing at least a representative sample of students. But by limiting the time spent testing and lifting the stakes tied to it, we’ll see more schools like Ehrman Crest in Pennsylvania, which partners with a local children’s museum to make the school feel more like a curated set of experiences. We’ll see history, civics, career and technical education, robotics, physical education, health, music, art, and so many other enriching subjects make a comeback in the bell schedule. We’ll see students spending less time resisting lessons that they can’t connect to. We’ll shrink the disconnect between our teaching and the world in which students live.

For now, most lesson plans are guided by what state tests require. I’ve observed these lessons, and despite great teachers’ best efforts to teach students how to write an argumentative essay, for example, the prompts are often uninspired, and the process rote. Is it any wonder students are bored?

Every year, by contrast, my class holds mock trials about topics such as water pollution near a housing complex or deforestation in a state forest. Students develop an argument, analyze primary sources to compile evidence, and make their case. My students always rank this as one of their favorite activities, and every year, at least one student says, “I kind of want to be a lawyer now!” My real objective, though, is to teach them how to write an argumentative essay in a way that is absorbing and relevant.

But this kind of teaching and learning demands breathing room from the high-stakes testing we’ve relied on for decades. That approach hasn’t worked, and the data it produced didn’t teach us much we didn’t already know.

Talia is one of my brightest students, but like many young people, she couldn’t see herself in the learning, and the seed of frustration grew into something worse. Let’s move forward with what we have learned and free teachers to educate students for tomorrow. We want students to be engaged and excited to come to school, not bored and angry because of it.

Ronak Shah is a seventh grade science teacher in Indianapolis and a Teach Plus Senior Writing Fellow.

Students in rural Colorado left without options as specialized schools close

2023-05-12T11:00:00+00:00

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — At first glance, nothing seems particularly unusual about the four-room school in this western Colorado city. Inside, six students are learning about radioactivity. The walls of their classroom are plastered with motivational messages like “Determination” and “Courage” scribbled onto paper cutouts of stars and moons.

A closer look reveals that Hilltop Day Treatment is no ordinary school. There are no backpacks or lockers. Students are escorted to the restroom. Hugs aren’t allowed, a precaution against inappropriate touching by students who do not yet understand physical boundaries. And before lunch, the students break from their regular lessons for group therapy.

Hilltop is a facility school, Colorado’s term for specialized institutions that serve students with severe behavioral, mental health, or special education needs when their public schools can’t. And this school, with 12 students, is the last of its kind on the Western Slope, the vast territory west of the Continental Divide home to 10% of the state’s population. The other 29 facility schools are in the more heavily populated Front Range corridor.

“It breaks our heart to have a waitlist,” said Hollie VanRoosendaal, director of community programs at Hilltop Community Resources, the organization that runs the Hilltop Day Treatment school. “We really want to get those kids in and seen and getting their education towards their graduation as well as some really great therapeutic services.”

Disability rights and mental health advocates say facility schools are overused and can become dumping grounds for students with disabilities. But in rural Colorado, when the local school district can’t meet a student’s needs, the lack of spots in facility schools can mean students end up at home learning online, languishing in mental health facilities, or attending a residential school far from home.

Democratic Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill into law this spring that provides funds to prop up facility schools and strengthen services for students with severe needs in rural districts. But the sparse population and vast distances of the Western Slope and Eastern Plains mean serving these vulnerable students will likely remain a challenge.

“There are no services there. And so you get one student with autism that comes into this little tiny district, what’s going to happen? That child is not going to get what he or she needs, and they’re too far away from the Front Range,” said Barb Taylor, an educator turned consultant who serves as special education director for several Colorado facility schools.

According to a report submitted to lawmakers, among the main reasons students could not be placed at a facility school were lack of openings and, in rural areas, “prohibitive geographic location.”

A few rural patches of the state have figured out alternatives to serve students closer to home. For example, the Santa Fe Trail Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES, started the Southeast Alternative Learning Academy in La Junta for students in the eastern plains with emotional and behavioral problems.

But few other BOCES, regional associations of school districts that pool resources to provide services they would not be able to alone, have managed to start such programs.

Instead, across much of rural Colorado, “we have people that are trying to work with these kids that are not qualified or that are not trained, that don’t have the skills that they need to be able to do that in the district,” said Sandy Malouff, executive director and special education director of the Santa Fe Trail BOCES.

Sonjia Hunt, director of education at the Hilltop Day Treatment school, describes the services the school offers to children in sixth through 12th grade.

In the western half of the state, Sonjia Hunt, director of Hilltop Day Treatment school, said she has watched facility schools scale down or close: first in Rifle, then in Whitewater, Delta, Durango, and, last year, one inside a Glenwood Springs hospital.

After operating in the red for years, Hilltop had to scale back as well, shutting down its 16-bed residential facility in October 2020. Now, students on the Western Slope who require residential treatment must travel across the Rockies, if not out of state, Hunt said.

The new state law will allow Hilltop to hire another teacher, case manager, and therapist, and take on 12 more students, Hunt said. But Hilltop doesn’t plan to reopen its residential side.

When the residential facility closed, surrounding communities struggled to make up the loss, said Tammy Johnson, executive director of the Uncompahgre BOCES, which serves five rural western districts.

“There’s a big difference between being an educational entity and a therapeutic entity. We just don’t have the training that we need to meet these kids’ needs,” said Johnson.

The Hilltop Day Treatment school in Grand Junction is the only remaining school of its kind on Colorado’s Western Slope. It currently serves 12 girls and boys and always has a waiting list.

‘I just needed help’

Riley George, a 12-year-old with autism and disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, has had to cross a mountain range to get an education. After enrolling in and leaving multiple schools, Riley now lives in a residential facility in Colorado Springs, more than three hours from his home in Del Norte.

The slight preteen, whose tufty hair sticks up in the wind like a thistle, is an avid reader who tears through 400-page science fiction books.

He loves his dog and Baby Yoda, a character from the Star Wars TV series The Mandalorian. He goes for walks with one of his little sisters and plays action figures with his little brother. On a good day, said his mother, Kelly George, he’s “a good, respectful kid” who has no trouble getting himself ready for school.

But Riley’s brain works faster than his hands, which can make tasks like writing or tying shoelaces feel frustratingly insurmountable. He is only now learning how to play make-believe with others cooperatively, something other children tend to learn at a much younger age. And seemingly small things, like an itchy tag on his clothes, or loud noises, like his sister’s happy shrieks, can send him to a bad place.

“When he was younger, he would cover his ears and just immediately hit the floor and start screaming like he was in pain,” said George.

Now that he’s older, overload leads to aggression: hitting, cursing, kicking. “We had to design a code word for the other kids,” said George, to signal to her three younger children to barricade themselves in a room while the parents try to calm the eldest.

From preschool through second grade, Riley attended Bill Metz Elementary School in Monte Vista, one town over from where his family lives. Riley remembered how his teachers there gave him space when he was upset, as on the day his dog ran away. His special education teacher, Kellyn Ross, remembered him complimenting the cafeteria staff for a “divine” lunch.

On a good day, Riley George is “a good, respectful kid” who has no trouble getting himself ready for school, his mother said.

Riley was in the Pokémon Club and could earn points for good behavior that he could redeem for prizes. Riley and Ross developed a system to help him identify his feelings and others’, and to take a break when needed.

Monte Vista School District Superintendent Scott Wiedeman said the school takes a proactive approach to encouraging positive behavior in all students.

But when Ross got a promotion, the school couldn’t find someone with enough experience to fill her spot, and they were at capacity with special education students. In the decade since Ross had started as a special education teacher, her caseload had doubled. So, they had to send out-of-district students, including Riley, back to their neighborhood schools.

“The kicker is just having the resources,” Wiedeman said. “We need more people to deal with the mental health of students. That’s a big factor.”

After that, Riley started lashing out at others. The calls home ratcheted up, as did the use of force at school to restrain him.

When Riley was in third grade at Del Norte Elementary, he was on an individualized education program for serious emotional disability. Despite that, school officials frequently suspended him and whittled his classroom time down to one hour a day, the Georges said. When school districts in Oregon shortened their special education students’ school days due to behavior, experts determined it was as counterproductive as limiting reading time for students who are struggling to read well.

Aaron Horrocks, superintendent of the Upper Rio Grande School District, declined to comment on Riley specifically but said challenging behaviors are on the rise and schools need more support services and options — funding to hire paraprofessionals or a day treatment center within driving range.

One day, Riley slapped the side of the school bus and cursed, his mother said, and school staffers held him on the ground for an hour — Riley said one sat on him. The Georges filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education that alleged school officials had discriminated against Riley because of his disability. The department acknowledged that IEP documents show Riley was physically restrained three times over the course of a month.

A student cuts out a waving hand as she and her classmates create Fourth of July posters for seniors during their group therapy session at the Hilltop Day Treatment facility in Grand Junction.

Before an investigation got underway, the school district settled the complaint by adopting new protocols and training staff members on shortened school days and physical restraints. The Georges eventually chose to take Riley out of that school and enroll him in an online school.

That worked for about a year, with his father, Matthew George, staying home to help with schooling while Kelly George became the sole breadwinner.

But when Riley gave his mother a bruise the size of two softballs — and threatened to kill her while she slept — they were stuck: He had to go somewhere that could meet his needs, for his family’s safety. They contacted several residential facilities and even a few hospitals but ran into a string of denials: Some didn’t accept his insurance; others rejected him because he wasn’t yet a teenager, because of his aggressive behavior or his autism, or because they just had no beds left.

Schools in Utah, Arkansas, and Texas didn’t respond, and there was no room in Wyoming. By that point, Hilltop had closed its residential program, and driving more than four hours each way for a day program was out of the question.

In the meantime, Riley was in and out of short-term treatment facilities on multiple emergency mental health holds between September and January. Under Colorado law, emergency holds allow people to be kept for 72 hours for treatment and evaluation if they appear to be an imminent danger to themselves or others.

When Kelly George called her county’s social services department, she said, the response was that “unless he basically puts me in the hospital or is really aggressive towards one of his siblings and actually hurts them, there was nothing they could do, because it’s not an abuse or neglect case.”

So, they pressed assault charges against their own child.

“I just needed help, and it was the last card I could play,” said Kelly George.

Breaking the cycle of anger

Critics of facility schools condemn their segregated nature, but Riley wound up in even more segregated places over the next four months while his family tried to secure a bed at a residential school. After being criminally charged, Riley first went to Pueblo Youth Services Center, a detention facility. That was followed by a stint in a mental health hospital. His belongings moved with him in a garbage bag — the “essentials,” said Riley, plus 10 books about the military sci-fi franchise Halo.

Then, in late March, the Georges drove him to a Colorado Springs facility school called the J. Wilkins Opportunity School.

“I want to learn to control my anger better,” Riley said on his first day there. He missed his dog. He said he’d be ready to go home when anger no longer feels like “clenched fists.”

The Georges wish there were a place closer to home. “We can’t be the only family in our 200 square miles dealing with this,” said Kelly. A dream scenario, she said, would be to have a school that kids like her son could attend, with transportation to and from school, and therapeutic support at home.

Some provisions in the new Colorado law are intended specifically to help rural areas, such as establishing a statewide technical assistance center to help meet rural students’ needs.

Riley George stands beside his mother, Kelly, and father, Matthew, before he is dropped off at the J. Wilkins Opportunity School, a facility school in Colorado Springs.

It could provide anything from in-person training for school staffers to a behavior analyst available to coach people over the phone in a pinch, said Malouff, the Santa Fe Trail BOCES executive director, who participated in a stakeholder group that came up with the idea. The details have not yet been determined.

Malouff hopes the center will help rural districts gain the skills they need to keep students at home, and free up facility school spots for others with more severe needs.

Michelle Murphy, executive director of the Colorado Rural Schools Alliance, and others in rural education are skeptical that a single statewide technical assistance center can provide the support districts need when so much of the need is for boots on the ground.

“We have workforce challenges in virtually every aspect of our special education programs, from teachers to our special service providers to our paraprofessionals,” said Murphy. “It’s close to, if not an actual, crisis at this point.”

Pat Bershinsky, executive director of the Pikes Peak BOCES in Colorado Springs, said rural needs would be more effectively met if the money instead went directly to BOCES to create their own programs.

The Georges would have kept Riley at or close to home had they been able to get the right training, services, and support. In states like Minnesota, for example, it’s possible to get personal care assistance at home under certain circumstances, including for help with frequent aggressive behaviors for a home-schooled student with an individualized education program.

Such services were created to keep people in their communities and avoid institutional placement. Colorado does not appear to offer such services specifically geared toward aggressive behavior.

On move-in day in Colorado Springs, the Georges toured the campus with Riley and carried his belongings into his new room. Matthew George excitedly pointed out that Riley will be living mere blocks from a U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center.

“I can’t believe that, finally, after all this time — eight months — it’s finally happening and my family’s needs are finally, finally being met,” said Matthew George. But he was also apprehensive. He, too, was institutionalized as a child, bouncing for five years between foster care and the same mental health hospital and facility school organization as his son.

“I never thought I would be in a position where I would be an adult and witness my son going through the same things that I went through,” he said. “Something really needs to be done, because I don’t want to be going and visiting my grandkids in a facility like this.”

Riley’s move has the Georges’ other children worried, too. Kelly George recalled their 5-year-old daughter throwing a temper tantrum over ice cream, then wailing in fright: “I’m gonna get sent away! I don’t wanna get sent away.” But Kelly, too, is optimistic about Riley’s new chapter.

“It’s sad that we’re leaving him here, but at the same time I’m really hopeful that this is going to be what he needs to get him to where he can be OK and be at home with us,” she said.

When it was time to say goodbye, Matthew George hugged his son close. “You can do this,” he told him. And then the family drove away, back through the mountains, back home.

Chalkbeat Colorado senior reporter Melanie Asmar contributed to this report

KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

Matthew and Kelly George walk with their son Riley into the J. Wilkins Opportunity School, a facility school in Colorado Springs.

The schools that take Colorado’s ‘most vulnerable’ children are disappearing

2023-05-11T10:59:00+00:00

Erin Schneiderman used to get calls in the middle of the day two or three times a week to pick her son up from his Denver elementary school.

The third-grader had run away or was standing in the hallway screaming. Meltdowns could last for hours. School was just too loud and crowded, with too much unpredictability, for a child with autism who craved routine.

Denver Public Schools decided Schneiderman’s son should go to a privately run school that specializes in serving children with intense behavioral, mental health or special education needs. But when it came time to start fourth grade, he still didn’t have a spot. The boy spent two months at home, most of that time getting no education at all.

Today, nearly five years later, the few options for Colorado students like Schneiderman’s son have dwindled further. In 2004, Colorado had 80 of these specialized programs known as facility schools. Now there are just 30 that serve an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 children a year. A single school serves all of western Colorado. On the Front Range, another school is set to close soon.

Meager state funding, dire staffing shortages, and changes to federal law have pushed the system to the brink. Lawmakers hope a cash infusion and regulatory changes will spur the opening of new schools — even as school districts are seeking their own solutions.

When there’s no open facility school seat, children may languish at home. They may remain in a mental health facility longer than they need to, taking up a bed that could be used by another child stuck in a hospital emergency room. Or they may stay in classrooms, struggling to learn, coming undone, lashing out almost daily, and disrupting the learning of their classmates.

Parents pay the price in lost jobs, and children pay the price in squandered potential.

Public schools have an obligation to educate every child. Facility schools — which operate at the crosscurrents of education, mental health, disability, and trauma — serve as placements of last resort when public schools can’t or won’t meet a child’s needs.

“K-12 was set up to educate the masses,” said Cori Woessner, a career public school educator who isn’t sure her own son with disabilities would have finished high school without the more supportive environment provided in facility schools.

“We’re not talking about the masses. We’re talking about the kids with the most severe needs that need the most support to be a productive member of society. To even have a chance at it.”

Facility schools balance academics and therapy

Facility schools are neither mental health facilities nor schools in the way most people might think about them. Operating in day treatment centers or residential facilities or tucked into hospitals, they offer academic programs within larger therapeutic settings.

Some critics say facility schools too often end up warehousing kids who, with more support, could have stayed in their home schools. Oversight is spread across multiple state and local agencies. When a school district recommends a facility school, parents have no easy way to know if the school is good or safe, though they rarely get a choice about placement.

The goal is to help children stay on an academic path while developing the skills they need to function in a public school before sending them back.

Some facilities serve children in foster care who need mental health care, or children in the juvenile criminal system who need treatment before returning home. The more common scenario is that students live at home and school districts send them to day treatment programs.

“Once we make that decision, it’s not because we don’t like kids and we’re sending them somewhere else,” said Callan Ware, the executive director of student services in Englewood Schools, a small district south of Denver. “We are saying we like them so much, we care about them so much — and we’re admitting to you we don’t have what it takes to support them and we’re going to find it and we’re going to pay for it.”

The Tennyson Center for Children is a facility school located in a bright, modern building in a residential Denver neighborhood. It serves about 50 metro-area students in kindergarten through 12th grade. The staff seems to have endless patience for behavior that would likely get a student kicked out of public school.

On a recent Friday, a middle schooler raged in a stairwell and called the principal a “fucko” because the school removed the game platform Roblox from its computers.

A high schooler who couldn’t sit still tossed a foam basketball at a staff member’s face as she drank from a water bottle, soaking her shirt.

And an elementary student ran up and down the hallway letting out a series of screams between his spelling words and math problems.

The boy was working with a staff member in one of the “nooks” — a small recessed room without a door where students can retreat if they’re feeling overwhelmed.

“I don’t want to do any more work!” the boy said, coming out of the nook and kicking the wall.

“To earn our positive breaks with staff, we have to complete work,” the staff member said, reminding the boy that he was working toward earning computer time in the library.

“It’s hard for me,” the boy said. He asked why his classmates, who had just completed a worksheet on Presidents Day, were earning points for good behavior and he wasn’t.

“Because they stay in class,” the staff member calmly told him as he pouted and fumed. “Part of the expectation of being in school is staying in class.”

The boy went back into the nook and screamed again.

The Tennyson Center For Children, founded in 1904, provides community programs, schooling, and day services to children with intense needs.

When funding dries up, kids are funneled down

Children with these challenges were once institutionalized.

“Almost every general hospital had a kids’ psych unit, and they were all full,” said Skip Barber, a retired child psychiatrist who worked at state mental health institutions and facility schools.

The psychiatric facilities created their own schools. But since the 1990s, the philosophy has shifted away from institutionalization and toward community-based care. Residential treatment programs began receiving kids in crisis who previously would have gone to hospitals. Day treatment programs took kids who would have been placed in residential facilities.

And more kids just stayed in public schools.

The Medicaid dollars that supported the previous system dried up. Twenty residential treatment facilities closed in Colorado between 2007 and 2017, according to newspaper reports. On the heels of those closures, Congress passed the Family First Prevention Services Act, which sought to keep more children with relatives or foster families and placed limits on government-funded residential care.

More residential programs closed, taking their associated facility schools with them or reducing capacity. Options in rural Colorado — where the nearest school might be hours from home — became even scarcer.

“Great if we move away from facilities that aren’t cutting the mustard or doing what we need, but now we’ve gone too far,” said Becky Miller Updike, executive director of the nonprofit Colorado Association of Family and Children’s Agencies, which represents residential facilities.

More children in crisis are now funneled into day treatment programs. But the funding hasn’t increased in tandem.

In a 2020 survey, administrators at 19 facility schools told Miller Updike they were nearly or solidly in the red. One reported having to fundraise $1 million a year.

“The program loses money on a regular basis,” another wrote.

Most funding comes directly or indirectly from the state. Facility schools get $55.05 per student per day in direct state funding, an amount that’s barely increased in the last eight years, said Judy Stirman, director of facility schools for the Colorado Department of Education.

School districts pay tuition fees on top of that, ranging from $75 to $348 per day. Students come and go throughout the year, which means the daily funding comes and goes. But the salaries of the experienced specialists and one-on-one aides who make the system work are constant.

Students at Third Way Center in Denver, a facility school that primarily serves children in foster care and youth corrections, can earn points to “purchase” items like snacks, stationery, games, personal care items, clothing, and more.

Low funding means it’s hard to hire staff. Facility schools often pay their staff less than school districts, which struggle to fill the same positions. That limits how many students they can serve.

“Every hire, we can bring in a student,” said Amy Gearhard, founder of Spectra School, which started as a therapy clinic for children with autism. Most students need one-on-one aides.

But the job is hard, and new hires don’t always stay. The aides at Spectra take 40 hours of behavior technician training and often wear bite guards and spit shields.

Despite those precautions, Gearhard said in January that three Spectra staff members had suffered concussions on the job, and two were out on workers’ compensation claims.

“You can’t pay them $15 an hour,” she said.

Two longtime facilities that closed last year — the Hampden Youth Campus in Aurora, which ran three day treatment programs, and the Youth Recovery Center at Valley View Hospital in Glenwood Springs — cited low funding and staffing shortages.

“Last year this program lost over $300,000, which made it very difficult to be able to hire enough staff to work with the level of acuity that we were seeing in the students,” Aurora Mental Health Center Chief Clinical Officer Kirsten Anderson told the Sentinel Colorado.

Officials with Devereux Cleo Wallace, a day treatment program in Westminster that’s set to close this year, said in a statement that “the continued regional staffing shortages have made it no longer possible to operate our flagship programs at the levels our families deserve.”

But the staff who stay at facility schools say they’re drawn to working with this student population. Renée Johnson, executive director of Third Way Center, a residential facility that serves kids in foster care or youth corrections, said these kids are “used to being thrown away.”

“These alternative schools give kids chances to do it again and be successful,” Johnson said. “That feeling of success is so important to build on.”

Denver-area job postings fill a bulletin board at the Third Way Center’s Joan Farley Academy.

Fewer schools means longer waitlists

Colorado is not alone in its hiring struggles. A nationwide shortage of special education staff means it’s harder for schools to provide the consistent support that would help kids with severe needs be successful in their home schools. At the same time, the inability to hire and retain staff has caused specialized schools nationwide to close or reduce their capacity, leading to students with disabilities being put on long waitlists, according to an October letter to Congress from the National Association of Private Special Education Centers.

“We’re seeing a supply and demand crisis on a national level,” said Danielle Damm, the association’s executive director and CEO.

In Colorado, the number of students served by facility schools has decreased. Thousands of students come and go throughout the year, but there are only so many spots at one time. A statewide snapshot taken on Dec. 1 each year found 1,266 students in facility schools in late 2017 but just 769 students in these schools in 2022. That’s a 40% decrease.

It’s not because the demand has decreased.

“We’re all on waiting lists because the facilities can only accept so many students and they’re short-staffed as well,” said Courtney Leyba, senior manager of extended school support for Denver Public Schools.

In Jeffco Public Schools, the number of students in out-of-district placements dropped 35% — from 211 students six years ago to 138 students this school year. In Denver, it went from 254 to 119 students in the same time period, a whopping 53% decrease.

Fifteen years ago, when Leyba started working for the Denver district, she said students would wait just two or three weeks to get into a facility school. “Now we can wait anywhere between two, three, or sometimes even six months for a placement,” she said.

In the wait, students can unravel even more.

Until he got into a facility school two months into his fourth grade year, Schneiderman’s son would have meltdowns over literally anything, she said.

She and her husband struggled to cobble together care for him. Grandparents from both sides of the family flew in to help, but Schneiderman ended up having to take a leave from her job. An in-home tutor the district promised didn’t start working with him until he’d already been home more than a month.

“It felt like we were completely lost in a system that we had no idea how to navigate,” Schneiderman said. “That had to have been one of the worst periods of our lives for sure.”

Erin Schneiderman and her 13-year old son sit outside their home near City Park in Denver.

‘Effective in some cases, but not in all’

Many advocates and experts say students belong in their own communities, not separate schools that may be hours — or even states — away from home.

“Students don’t need to be segregated in order to have their needs met and be successful in school,” said Lewis Bossing, senior staff attorney with the Washington, D.C.-based Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. “We think that there are a number of different kinds of supports that can be put in place so that, for the most part, students can be served in general education settings.”

Advocates like Connie McKenzie with The Arc Pikes Peak Region worry about a lack of oversight, and about students getting stuck and never returning to public school.

One student McKenzie worked with attended a facility school from kindergarten through 12th grade. Another was a kindergartener who was referred to a facility school because the child kept running out of the classroom, she said. The child had gone through a traumatic event.

“Removing the child from the school, sending them to a different school, just reinforced to the child that they weren’t safe at school,” McKenzie said.

Facility schools, she said, “are effective in some cases, but not in all.”

People who work in the system say the typical stay is about a year, though it varies widely based on the facility and whom it serves — from less than a week for acute psychiatric hospitalizations to years at schools for students with intellectual disabilities.

The state education department doesn’t track how many facility school students return to their home districts or how they fare later.

But even critics acknowledge there are times when a separate setting is justified.

Zoe Gross, director of advocacy for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, said that while inclusion is ideal, “if your school district just refuses, or is unable to meet the needs of your kid, then you have really limited options outside of that.”

That’s how Woessner, the career educator whose son attended facility schools, feels.

Her son, now 18, was first referred to a facility school when he was 8. Woessner and her husband adopted him out of foster care as a baby, and he has several diagnoses, including fetal alcohol syndrome, which affects his cognitive ability.

He couldn’t read or write his name in second grade. At 7, he made a plan to kill himself by running out into the street. At 8, he put a belt around his neck at school.

“We were very fortunate that happened when he was 8 and there were still 70-some-odd facility schools and they popped him into a facility school because of the severity of his behaviors,” Woessner said.

Her son spent the next 10 years in six different day treatment and residential programs, including one out of state. He completed 12th grade at a Denver facility school and is now in a small transitional program for older students with disabilities through his home school district.

“He made it a lot further academically going through facility schools than he ever would have in a traditional school,” Woessner said.

Moving ahead toward an uncertain future

A state law signed by Gov. Jared Polis this spring boosts funding for facility schools and revamps the funding model so small schools are less vulnerable to fluctuations in enrollment.

A new technical assistance center will provide consulting services and training in rural districts so that more students could stay close to home. And a new way of approving new schools should make them easier to open.

In advocating for changes to the law, the working group described facility school students as some of Colorado’s “most vulnerable.” Parents, advocates, and special education experts all say that meeting the needs of these children will require more than just saving the schools, however: Families need more options all along the spectrum of inclusion and separation, and children need more care as they make precarious transitions from one setting to another.

Schneiderman’s son did so well at Tennyson Center in Denver that everyone agreed he should go to public middle school, she said. He enrolled at Denver’s Merrill Middle School. But even in a small program with a dedicated teacher and a classroom where he could go when things got overwhelming, going to school with 600 other students proved tough.

Wanting to fit in, Schneiderman’s son rejected help from an aide in traditional classes. He got into fights because he misunderstood regular kid banter as bullying. His meltdowns — which can turn violent and have landed him in the hospital — returned both at home and at school.

Schneiderman began getting calls again to pick him up midday.

Erin Schneiderman’s son, who is 13, plays Journey, an indie adventure video game.

The controlled environment at Tennyson had made it hard to predict how or if her son might struggle once he returned to public school, she said.

Partway through seventh grade, an advocate suggested Schneiderman’s son try something different. Evoke Behavioral Health is not a facility school, but a private day treatment program specializing in a type of intervention called applied behavioral analysis, or ABA. Evoke calls itself a “school alternative.”

Denver Public Schools and the family’s health insurance company agreed to pay — despite previously rejecting a similar placement.

“A lot of this feels like dumb luck,” Schneiderman said.

Evoke, she said, has been life-changing. Now that she’s not picking her son up midday, she’s able to work full-time again. And her goofy 13-year-old eighth grader, who loves video games, science fiction audiobooks, and skiing with his parents, is thriving.

He does ABA — which Schneiderman describes as “work-reward, work-reward” — eight hours a day and has both a one-on-one aide and a caseworker. He’s able to do schoolwork for 20 minutes without getting upset, and he’s working on not arguing with his teacher.

His meltdowns now happen once a month instead of five or six times a week, she said.

But that progress means his time at Evoke is coming to an end.

Because he’s doing so well, Schneiderman said the school district wants him back in public school. That probably means Thomas Jefferson High, which offers the same type of small program he had at Merrill — but in an even larger school with about 1,300 students.

“As a parent, that is terrifying. Absolutely terrifying,” Schneiderman said. “There’s no in-between options that we can find. We can’t figure out what our next step is.”

KFF Health News’ Rae Ellen Bichell and The Colorado Sun’s Erica Breunlin contributed reporting.

Melanie Asmar is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado, covering Denver Public Schools. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Erin Schneiderman’s 13-year old son walks the family dog, Ernie, in their Denver neighborhood near City Park.

Colorado promises $70 million over 3 years, hopes to see 12 new facility schools open

2023-05-11T10:58:00+00:00

Colorado passed a new law this spring intended to fix the facility school shortage by bolstering funding and encouraging more schools to open.

The measure signed by Gov. Jared Polis last month will increase funding for facility schools by nearly $19 million next year, then by $23 million in 2024 and $28 million in 2025. Lawmakers and legislative staff are predicting that four new schools will open in each of the next three years, which would mean a 40% increase in schools statewide.

The crux of the bill is a change in the schools’ funding model. The state currently funds facility schools based on a daily per-student rate of $55, which hasn’t been enough money for schools, especially small ones, to keep the doors open. Facility schools also get tuition from school districts for students in special education. The tuition ranges this year from $75 to $348 per day.

Under the new model, schools will also get base funding intended to support operational costs and staff pay. The smallest schools will get the largest increase.

It works out to 2.6 times the funding that facility schools receive under current law. But how much Colorado ends up spending depends on how many schools actually open.

The old funding model wasn’t working because enrollment at facility schools can vary dramatically, with kids moving back and forth between facilities and public schools in the same school year. The amount facility schools were paid depended on the number of kids in attendance on designated count days. Added to that is the fact that facility schools range in size from 70 students to fewer than 10, which makes it hard to piece together a staff and budget based on a per-student daily rate.

“In the rural areas, if you only have one or two kids that don’t really have anywhere else to go, they’re going to be in a facility,” said Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, an Arvada Democrat, chair of the Joint Budget Committee and prime sponsor of the legislation. “It’s hard to operate a facility school … for two or three kids, eight kids.”

Three-quarters of facility schools operate at a deficit, according to a Colorado Department of Education survey of schools statewide.

Besides new funding, the other key parts of the law are supposed to help school startups navigate a complicated system regulated by three state agencies. Right now, the state human services department licenses schools in day treatment or residential programs, while the state health department licenses those in hospitals. The law creates a new category of facility schools called “specialized day schools” and a new way for them to get licensed, which is intended to help small groups of parents create new options.

Schools will have to earn accreditation from the state facility school board in order to receive funding under the new law, which will lead to greater oversight and better tracking of student outcomes, Zenzinger said.

And the law sets up a state “technical assistance center” that will help school districts, especially in rural areas where there is no alternative school, create a plan to serve kids with behavioral health needs. The center would train local teachers and staff to operate classrooms for kids with high-level needs who otherwise would have to attend school in another town.

“We’re just not going to be able to have a facility school in all instances,” Zenzinger said. “So you have to use what is available to you, which would be the regular public school system, which if the student had the right supports and if the teachers and the educators had the right supports, it could totally work. Right now, though, they don’t, which means it’s not working.”

The law also sets up a grant program that allows facility schools to save money by banding together to pay for things like food and janitorial services, technology, security, and transportation.

Jennifer Brown is a co-founder and reporter at The Sun, where she writes about mental health, child welfare and social justice issues. Contact Jen at jennifer@coloradosun.com.

Dean Wayne Mason says there were ‘red flags’ before East High shooting

2023-05-09T23:11:53+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Sign up for Chalkbeat Colorado’s free daily newsletter to keep up with education news from Denver and around the state.

The moment Austin Lyle pulled the trigger and shot Wayne Mason inside Denver’s East High School on March 22, Mason said he forgave him.

“The regret I have right now is that he’s not here for me to tell him that,” said Mason, who was a dean at East when 17-year-old Lyle shot him and another dean. Lyle later took his own life.

Mason told his story publicly for the first time Monday at a weekly press conference held by a group called Parents - Safety Advocacy Group that formed in the wake of the shooting. The other dean who was shot, Eric Sinclair, hasn’t spoken publicly.

Mason also revealed new details about Lyle, including that another East student had reportedly seen Lyle with a gun in class a few weeks before the March shooting, and told East High staff. But when staff members tried to search Lyle, he ran out of the school, Mason said.

“That is the biggest red flag there,” Mason said, “and then he was allowed back into the school.”

Lyle had a previous weapons charge, had been expelled from another school district, and was supposed to be searched every day by East staff because of his past behavior — a protocol that was in place before another student reportedly spotted him with a gun, Mason said.

But Mason said he and Sinclair didn’t search Lyle that day. The Denver police and school district officials have said the shooting happened while the deans were searching Lyle for weapons.

On March 22, Mason said he was in the front office when Lyle came into school and asked for a specific assistant principal. Mason said he called for the assistant principal on the radio, but there was a school assembly going on and the assistant principal didn’t answer.

Sinclair offered to take Lyle into the deans’ office, Room 129, Mason said. Sinclair then tried calling for the assistant principal and for security officers. But still no one answered, Mason said.

“Shortly after that, Eric was yelling in the radio, ‘Wayne, Wayne, help me, help me!’” Mason said.

“I ran back to 129, opened the door. Eric and Austin were wrestling. I grabbed Austin, and Eric said, ‘Gun, gun!’ Austin fired off some shots, I think two or three shots.”

Mason said he saw Sinclair go down. Mason grabbed Lyle’s arm, he said, and then Lyle “turned his wrist toward me and he fired two shots and he hit me. Austin broke away from me and he stood there, staring at Eric and I, still pointing the gun at us. And then he ran out of the room.”

Sinclair was bleeding badly, Mason said. He grabbed some towels and began putting pressure on Sinclair’s wound. It was only after paramedics who happened to be at the school for an unrelated medical issue arrived that Mason told them he’d been shot too.

“I just started praying and I was holding Eric’s hand,” said Mason, who was shot in the chest.

“I’m sad that my friend had to go through that. There should have been procedures put in place that he did not have to be alone with Austin. But he was.”

Denver Public Schools spokesperson Scott Pribble said on Monday that the press conference was the first time he’d heard a different version of events and could not comment on whether Lyle had been spotted with a gun on campus several weeks before the shooting or why he was allowed back at East after that.

On Tuesday, Pribble confirmed that another student reported seeing Lyle with a gun in school about two and a half weeks before the shooting. But Pribble said that when school staff searched Lyle, they found nothing. That’s when Lyle fled the school, Pribble said. A followup investigation also found nothing, Pribble said, which is why Lyle was allowed back.

Mason said, “If that’s the case, then we should have had armed safety patrol every morning that Austin came into the school because we knew his history. … They should have met Austin at the door with a show of force and saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to search.’”

“Maybe, just maybe, that would have stopped that behavior.”

Melanie Asmar is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado, covering Denver Public Schools. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

This Colorado elementary school nearly closed. A math makeover helped it stay open.

2023-05-05T20:59:26+00:00

In 2019, Minnequa Elementary in Pueblo was on the brink of closing because of low test scores and declining enrollment. Today, the school is off the state’s “watch list,” has the state’s top “green” school rating, and recently won a $50,000 award for exceptional growth in math.

So, how did a school where only 8% of students scored proficient on state math tests in 2019 change course?

Principal Katie Harshman says it was a combination of factors, including a good math curriculum, regular coaching for teachers, constant data analysis, and a shift to having some upper elementary teachers focus only on math, while others teach reading and writing. Using state grants and federal money the school receives because it serves many students from low-income families, Minnequa also tapped outside experts, including the Relay Graduate School of Education and a math consulting group called 2Partner.

Harshman and her team say the yearslong math push has given students a better understanding of key concepts, pushed them daily to articulate how they solve problems, and pumped up their math confidence.

Minnequa students now post some of the highest rates of academic growth in the state, showing more year-over-year progress on standardized tests than the vast majority of their Colorado peers. Those gains are what earned Minnequa and 11 other Colorado schools state “Bright Spot” awards this spring — each coming with $50,000 in leftover COVID relief funds.

Educators and policymakers statewide are pushing to improve math instruction after sharp declines in scores on state and national tests during the pandemic. This spring, lawmakers passed legislation to offer after-school tutoring in math, expand teacher training, and encourage schools to choose high-quality math curriculum. State leaders also paid to provide a digital learning tool called Zearn Math to Colorado schools.

The work that has unfolded at Minnequa over the last five years illustrates how effective instruction can translate into student achievement.

Harshman and her colleagues say there’s more to do. While the share of students who are proficient on state math tests has more than tripled to 26% in four years, It’s still below the state average.

“We’re not done. We’re still going to keep going,” said Leslie Ortega, a fourth grade math teacher at Minnequa.

Still, after the threat of closure, the school’s progress is gratifying.

“It’s been like the light at the end of the tunnel,” Ortega said. “It just shows us what we as a whole school can accomplish.”

Coaches step in

A few weeks before state tests were given this spring, Harshman stood in the back of a fifth grade classroom watching carefully as the teacher reviewed fractions. She noticed that students weren’t answering in full sentences as they should, and as they would be expected to on parts of the upcoming test. Harshman caught the teacher’s eye, brought her hands together and pulled them apart — a reminder that students needed to stretch out their responses into complete thoughts.

“It’s a very silent signal. It’s nothing dramatic,” she said.

This kind of real-time coaching — by Harshman, the school’s math coach Christy Vasquez, and outside consultants — has become the norm at Minnequa over the last several years.

The idea is to provide on-the-spot feedback through a whispered suggestion, a quick side conversation, or a few minutes of co-teaching so teachers can practice immediately.

“I’m not there to be like, ‘Ah-ha! Gotcha!’ I’m just there for support,” said Vasquez, who started as a teacher at Minnequa six years ago and took the math coach job last year.

Jeanette Valdez, a fifth grade teacher who grew up in Pueblo and lives just two blocks from Minnequa, said it’s been nerve-wracking at times to have so many people stop into her classroom to observe and coach — sometimes even top district administrators.

“I told myself that all they’re there for is to make me better and that’s my whole reason for being a teacher,” she said.

All the feedback — a coach was in her classroom practically every day last year — has helped her improve, she said.

These days, when students work on math problems independently, she’s in “aggressive monitoring” mode. That means she’s walking through the classroom to watch how students are solving problems and exactly where they’re getting stuck. Previously, she’d watch students work, but wasn’t checking for anything specific.

“I had to learn to be all up in their business …. and to really hone in on what it is I’m looking for,” she said.

Creating math specialists

One of the biggest changes at Minnequa in recent years has been having some teachers in third through fifth grade specialize in math instruction — a practice often called departmentalization.

That means teachers like Ortega and Valdez teach math to all the students in their respective grades, while colleagues take on literacy instruction.

“I think it’s the best. I really do,” said Ortega. “I’m able to focus on one subject. I’m able to really dig deep into the math data and the math lessons.”

She said the switch has also given her more time for planning each day — 80 minutes, up from 40 previously. And while five years ago, she might have spent planning time cleaning her classroom, Ortega said Harshman ushered in a different expectation — that teachers use the time to look at data on each student’s strengths and needs.

Alongside the departmental structure, consultants have helped teachers organize their daily math block so students are actively doing math most of the time rather than listening to the teacher. That has meant tweaking the school’s math curriculum, EngageNY, which the school adopted about six years ago when it was rated “red,” the state’s lowest rating.

Vasquez, Minnequa’s math coach, said the curriculum is high quality, but contains a lot of material. Consultants for 2Partner helped teachers identify the most critical parts and pare down the program’s long teacher-led lesson introductions.

Brianna Mazzella, a consultant with 2Partner who’s worked with Minnequa staff for four years, also dissects Colorado math standards with teachers to ensure they’re covering key pieces and building a solid foundation for the next big skill.

In April, she met with a fifth grade teacher to talk about long division, a skill students will be expected to master in sixth grade. They talked about the need in the last month of school to ensure students have a conceptual understanding of what division is, the language of division, and how estimation and knowledge of place values can give meaning to the rote rules that students also learn.

Mazzella said she wasn’t surprised by Minnequa’s math growth on state tests or that it earned a green state rating last fall. She knew how much work teachers did and saw the results in student work.

With a closure threat like the one Minnequa faced, she said, “You either rally or you don’t, and that building rallied.”

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat, covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

How to get mental health help in NYC public schools

2023-05-04T09:00:00+00:00

This is part of an ongoing collaborative series between Chalkbeat, THE CITY, and ProPublica investigating learning differences, special education, and other education challenges in city schools.

As the pandemic upended our understanding of education’s role in society, one point became remarkably clear: schools are the first line of defense for student mental health support.

But what isn’t always apparent is what help is available to the city’s nearly 900,000 public school students — and how outcomes can vary depending on the resources schools provide.

Chalkbeat and THE CITY, along with ProPublica, have been examining how public schools are a de facto mental health system for many families. To help explain what services are available school-by-school, we tracked dozens of data points related to mental health resources, and talked to families, educators, and experts about navigating the system.

All of New York City’s roughly 1,600 public schools, at a minimum, have access to a social worker or school-based mental health clinic, officials say, and the city will soon offer teletherapy for high school students.

But many families say getting services can be a battle, especially as mental health needs mount. One in five New York City children ages 3 to 13 had one or more mental, emotional, developmental or behavioral problems in 2021, according to unpublished data from a city health department survey.

“It’s a crisis,” said Brittany Kaiser, an art teacher at Manhattan’s Earth School, who says she and her colleagues need more support as they’ve noticed their pre-K through fifth-graders’ behavioral issues worsening.

That picture seems consistent throughout New York City. More than 1 in 200 New York City children lost a caregiver to COVID, an analysis from the COVID Collaborative found. Many young people are still reeling from prolonged isolation and lost schooling. The threat of gun violence, climate change, racism, and poverty weigh heavily on many kids. On top of that, thousands of children from asylum-seeking families are arriving at city schools with significant needs.

These challenges affect what happens in the classroom — and whether kids show up at all. Chronic absenteeism, when students miss at least 10% of school, remains much higher than pre-pandemic levels. Crippling anxiety leading to school refusal — when kids have an extreme aversion to attending class — seems to be on the upswing, parents say.

“We’re really looking for resources and support,” said Rasheedah Brown-Harris, a leader with the Bronx’s New Settlement Apartments Parent Action Committee whose Healing-Centered Schools Working Group is pushing for school-wide trauma-informed approaches. “We’re all trying to figure it out.”

Here’s what to know about getting your child school-based mental health support.

If you’re looking for school-based counseling, where do you begin?

Start with the people who know your child best, whether that’s a classroom teacher or other trusted adult in the school. Parents can also reach out to a counselor or social worker at the school, an assistant principal or principal, or the parent coordinator. Every school has a counseling plan with contact information on its education department homepage under the “reports” tab.

School staff may also flag children with significant emotional needs — just as when children have academic needs — but it can take time. In such cases, a school might deem a child “at risk” and provide short-term counseling as part of a process called “response to intervention,” or RTI.

Schools, though, don’t get extra funding for at-risk students, and they triage based on need. So getting services can feel like an uphill battle, parents say.

“The process can look very different for different students, and can require significant time, individual attention, and resources, and the fair student funding formula doesn’t take this into account,” said Kaiser.

Often it can come down to whether a counselor or social worker has openings — and many have been working through their lunch periods to meet the increased demand, educators said.

Fourth grade teacher Miriam Sicherman, at the Manhattan’s Children’s Workshop School, was able to get counseling earlier this school year for one of her students who witnessed neighborhood violence. But Sicherman isn’t sure the process would have been as easy a few months later, after her school received nearly 60 children, largely from asylum-seeking families who experienced some form of trauma.

What if a student needs ongoing support?

Receiving temporary, at-risk services could be a first step while a family begins the evaluation process for an Individualized Education Program, or IEP, mandating services, such as counseling.

Children with anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges could be eligible for an IEP under the “emotional disability” classification. The state recently changed the label of that classification from “emotional disturbance” to reduce the stigma of the classification, which overwhelmingly is assigned to boys of color. Three-quarters of those with the label were boys; nearly half (47%) were Black even though Black students make up less than a quarter of students citywide, according to city data from November 2022.

Anxiety or other mental health issues might also qualify a student for a 504 plan, which under the Americans with Disabilities Act provides accommodations for children with disabilities or impairments that substantially limits a major life activity.

For example, a child with major depression who has trouble getting out of bed might not need an IEP for a special education teacher, but could benefit from a 504 plan with accommodations such as counseling, partial credit, reduced workloads, or movement breaks, explained civil rights attorney Miriam Nunberg.

However, schools don’t get extra funding for students with 504 plans, so they might make families jump through hoops to get them. They often put the onus on families to get outside evaluations to qualify rather than do school-based ones, and they often make families renew 504 plans on an annual basis.

“That’s not supposed to happen,” Nunberg said.

What’s the difference between a guidance counselor and a social worker?

Social workers are trained to provide more intensive student support from a clinical perspective in terms of prevention and treatment than counselors. But at some schools, social workers don’t work directly with children, and instead work on initial IEP evaluations by conducting social histories and classroom observations.

Some guidance counselors support at-risk and students with IEPs in one-on-one or small groups, but they also focus on students’ academic progress, including helping on applications for middle school, high school and college.

“Their objective, fairly universally, is to see that a child progresses through the school,” said Kevin Dahill-Fuchel, executive director of Counseling in Schools, which provides counseling services at roughly 70 schools across the city.

National guidance recommends one counselor and one social worker for every 250 students in a school. When students have more intensive needs, the preferred ratio is 1 to 50.

Systemwide, there are roughly 5,000 social workers and guidance counselors, an increase of 1,000 since 2014, education department officials said. Still, the citywide average is 277 students to one counselor and 456 students to one social worker, according to an analysis of public data.

The role of counselors and social workers can look different school to school, and some of these staffers are part-time, traveling to different schools. That means they might not be around on the day a child has a crisis.

Some social workers say their schools pull them away from counseling.

“I am ordered to fill in the gaps, from wake-up calls to data entry to disciplining students for dress code violations,” one social worker wrote in a Chalkbeat essay. “I’ve had to cancel counseling sessions to stand by metal detectors that children are required to go through, to monitor the hallways, or to ‘watch’ a group of suspended students.”

Are there other school-based resources for mental health services?

Nearly 390 schools have on-site health clinics that often include mental health services that are more robust than schools typically provide.

Another 330 schools have on-site mental health clinics, and the city is developing a $9 million telehealth program for high school students, a model becoming more common across the nation. (The school-based mental health clinics charge fees, but they take health insurance, Medicaid or offer a sliding scale for billing.)

There are also 421 “community schools” that partner with community-based organizations that often offer free counseling or connect students to services. (These counselors don’t factor into the student-to-counselor ratios.)

Very few schools, however, are able to provide long-term therapy, said Dr. Kelly Fradin, a pediatrician who worked in school health in the South Bronx and author of “Advanced Parenting: Advice for Helping Kids Through Diagnoses, Differences, and Mental Health Challenges.”

“What the schools are able to, or what I’d like them to be able to reliably provide, is to triage and bridge children to support…. To help families as partners, and say to the parents, ‘Is your child struggling with their mental health? Would they benefit from more resources?’”

School counselors play crucial roles responding to children in crisis, but also connect them to the right people outside of school, especially if a child is feeling suicidal, having restricted eating or possible anorexia, or experienced a trauma such as the loss of a parent.

But quickly getting outside services is not always feasible, as parents report long waitlists for therapists.

How to figure out if school supports student mental health

Other data points that could indicate how supportive a school environment might include “child in crisis” incidents (when schools call on police officers and EMTs to respond to students in emotional distress), as well as suspensions, which can be found in annual education department reports. In both of these cases, Black students and children with disabilities are disproportionately affected.

Changes to the discipline code during the de Blasio administration have curtailed the use of suspensions. But some educators say they need more training in alternative approaches, like restorative justice, which gives students space to talk through conflicts instead of more punitive discipline.

Some schools have restorative justice coordinators to help shift their culture toward this model. More recently, the city has looked to partnering schools with violence interrupters and mentors through its “project pivot” initiative.

Other factors can affect kids’ emotional wellbeing, like class size, school start times, access to outdoor space and gym, and whether a child is in an appropriate classroom setting, experts say.

“We know that when a child is not in the right learning environment, whether they’re too gifted for the class or struggling to keep up, they have more problems with self regulation and emotional regulation,” said Fradin.

What if you’re not getting the support your child needs?

If a school is refusing to give services mandated on an IEP or making it difficult to get or implement a 504 plan, parents can file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, Nunberg said. Though, she acknowledged that can be a slow process.

Parents can call their district superintendent’s office for help and speak with a student services manager, advised Jenn Choi, who channeled her parent advocacy into Special Support Services, a consulting firm for families of students with disabilities. These staffers help with student registration and transfers as well as act as liaisons between schools and students in hospital, homeschool, or other special situations, among other duties.

Some families have transferred out of schools to find more supportive environments, but the Office of Enrollment does not necessarily make it easy to do that, Choi said.

The education department lists something called a “guidance transfer” for families with concerns that their children are not “progressing or achieving academically or socially.” Parents have to contact the Family Welcome Center for such requests.

Families can also apply to new schools during the regular application season. For example, there might be openings for rising 10th graders at certain high schools as enrollment is often in flux. Additionally, the city runs nearly 60 alternative high schools, known as transfer schools, which focus on students who struggled to succeed at traditional high schools and are at risk of dropping out. They often offer individual support, small classes, and wraparound services to push students to graduation.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Las escuelas de Cherry Creek quieren ayudar a los niños de primaria en proceso de duelo

2023-05-02T17:00:00+00:00

Read in English.

Por años después de que Oliver Dean perdiera a su padre a los 5 años por cáncer, había cosas que le desencadenaban depresión.

Pero Oliver contaba con algunas ventajas: Tenía una madre que trabajaba en su escuela, un orientador escolar accesible y un psicólogo especializado en duelo infantil. Juntos, le ayudaron a sobrellevar recuerdos abrumadores y el dolor incapacitante.

Desde que comenzó la pandemia, más niños han sufrido la pérdida de un padre o cuidador, pero muy pocos de ellos tienen acceso a este tipo de apoyo.

El año pasado, el Distrito Escolar de Cherry Creek empezó un programa piloto con la organización sin fines de lucro Judi’s House en Aurora, dedicada a la atención al duelo, para ofrecerles terapia de grupo a los estudiantes de primaria. La Cherry Creek Schools Foundation está financiando el programa piloto.

Este año el programa atiende a 20 estudiantes en dos escuelas.

“Creo que hay mucha más necesidad, sin duda”, dijo Steve Nederveld, director de salud mental del Distrito Escolar de Cherry Creek. “Hubo escuelas que nos pidieron específicamente este tipo de programa”.

Dean conoce esa necesidad.

Un día en tercer grado, leer un libro sobre una niña que padecía alopecia (una enfermedad que provoca la caída del cabello) llenó la mente de Dean con dolorosos recuerdos sobre su padre calvo y sobre cómo no lo recordaba con pelo.

A menudo, los maestros sabían avisarle a Dean cuando un tema en clase podría recordarle su pérdida. Ese día, Dean no esperaba que le invadiera una oleada de dolor. Pero como había estado aprendiendo cómo manejar sus emociones, reconoció lo que sentía y decidió salir del salón de clases.

Ahora a los 19 años, Dean dice que tuvo suerte de contar con ese apoyo, en parte organizado de antemano por su papá, un trabajador social. Él sabe que la mayoría de los niños no son tan afortunados.

“Mucha más gente de lo que se espera pierde a un ser querido antes de cumplir los 18 años”, dijo Dean. “No conoces las circunstancias de todo el mundo. La gente que se siente identificada es mucha más de la que esperas”.

La necesidad de atención al duelo está creciendo

Si el ensayo de Cherry Creek demuestra que ayuda a los niños, los líderes dicen que les gustaría que pudiera convertirse en parte regular de los programas de Judi’s House para las escuelas. Para ello se necesitarían más datos que demuestren que el programa funciona, así como una forma de pagarlo, ya que el grupo no les cobra a las escuelas por el servicio.

Por años, la organización sin fines de lucro se ha enfocado en las escuelas intermedias, donde considera que sus limitados fondos pueden tener mayor impacto. Pero los líderes de otras escuelas conocían el programa y pidieron también servicios similares a su nivel, dijo Nederveld.

Es difícil obtener cifras firmes, pero las personas que trabajan en las escuelas dicen que cada vez hay más estudiantes que estudiantes que sufren pérdidas. Nederveld dijo que parte de ello está relacionado con el COVID, pero los estudiantes también están sufriendo las consecuencias de muertes por suicidio, sobredosis de drogas y violencia armada.

Un modelo desarrollado por Judi’s House calcula el número de niños que sufrirán la muerte de uno de sus padres o hermanos antes de los 18 años. En 2018, esa cifra fue de 1 de cada 18 niños en Colorado. En 2022, subió a 1 de cada 14 niños.

Eso representa más o menos un 7% de la población de niños.

Las escuelas consideran beneficioso ayudar a los estudiantes a superar el duelo

Judi’s House está operando sus grupos de terapia de duelo en la primaria Village East Community de Cherry Creek, donde casi un 70% de los estudiantes califican para comidas con subsidio (una medida de la pobreza) y en Rolling Hills, donde califica alrededor de un 15% de los estudiantes.

En otoño, el personal se comunicó con familias de estudiantes que sabían que habían perdido a un familiar cercano. Si la familia estaba de acuerdo, el personal clínico de Judi’s House entrevistaba al estudiante para ver cómo le estaba afectando el duelo y asegurar que el grupo podía beneficiarle. Los maestros también llenaron cuestionarios sobre el comportamiento de sus estudiantes en clase.

Luego los estudiantes se asignaron a uno de los dos grupos dependiendo de su edad.

Los lideres del distrito y de la escuela dicen que el hecho de que el grupo funcione en la escuela, durante el día escolar y de forma gratuita, ayuda a las familias que pudieran enfrentar barreras al tratar de conseguir esos servicios fuera de las escuelas.

Karen Arrowsmith, psicóloga de Rolling Hills, dijo que a mitad del programa de 10 semanas para estudiantes de tercero a quinto grado, los maestros informaron de que los estudiantes están entusiasmados.

“Ellos esperan con gusto participar en el grupo, están empezando a compartir más, y están checando para verificar que la reunión del grupo todavía va a ocurrir esa semana”, dijo Arrowsmith.

La meta es ayudar que poco a poco a los estudiantes entiendan mejor sus sentimientos y procesen sus emociones. Luego los estudiantes aprenden varias estrategias para sobrellevar el duelo.

“Cuando muere alguien cercano a un niño, su mundo se tambalea”, dijo Arrowsmith. “Yo diría que vemos una variedad de emociones: confusión, tristeza, coraje, preocupación. Los niños me dicen que es difícil dormir. Concentrarse en las tareas escolares puede ser difícil”

Para el grupo más joven, un curso de seis semanas les ayuda a definir y entender sus sentimientos y aprender estrategias para sobrellevarlos.

“La manera en que un niño entiende el mundo puede quedar destrozada o alterada”, dijo Emily Napier, la trabajadora social clínica licenciada y gerente de atención comunitaria de Judi’s House que dirige el programa piloto. “Es muy doloroso. Eso puede manifestarse en cambios de comportamiento. Es de ayuda que las escuelas puedan decir no queremos castigar a estos niños por este comportamiento, pero también necesitamos que ellos puedan funcionar y aprender.”

La mamá de Oliver Dean, Lisa Dean, dice que cuando Oliver estaba creciendo ella veía cómo su dolor se manifestaba de diferentes maneras. Los cambios, como el final del año escolar, eran difíciles. Los maestros notaron que estaba teniendo dificultades en su bar mitzvah, y ella se dio cuenta de que la razón era que echaba de menos a su papá.

“El duelo no es un acontecimiento, es un viaje que cambia con el tiempo dependiendo de la madurez del niño”, dijo Lisa.

Napier dijo que los grupos son una “poderosa oportunidad para que los niños se sientan vistos”.

“Especialmente con los niños pequeños, a veces como sociedad subestimamos el dolor que sienten, pero los niños pequeños sufren tanto como nosotros”, dijo Napier.

Oliver, que ahora está en la universidad, desea que más escuelas estuvieran preparadas para ayudar a los estudiantes que sufren la muerte de un familiar cercano.

“Vivimos en una sociedad que no quiere hablar de la muerte. Pero para las personas que están en duelo, es más difícil no ver que otra persona lo entiende”, dijo. “No es justo dejar a los estudiantes solos con la expectativa de que se desempeñen al máximo nivel, incluso cuando ya han pasado por tanto. A veces hay cosas en la vida que son más importantes”.

Yesenia Robles es reportera de Chalkbeat Colorado y cubre temas sobre los distritos escolares K-12 y la educación multilingüe. Para comunicarte con Yesenia, escríbele a yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

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Contributed to DocumentCloud by Yesenia Robles (Chalkbeat) • View document or read text

For instance, the district has already had trouble providing transportation for students due to the national shortage of bus drivers. It is currently contracting with HopSkipDrive, a vehicle-for-hire program, to get students to schools. The district is planning to seek grant money in order to continue providing free rides to school.

“We have to make sure we get a hold of every grant available to be able to help with transportation,” Ema Lyman, a McKinney-Vento liaison at the Boulder Valley School District, told Boulder Reporting Lab.

Lyman said the district used federal stimulus money from the American Rescue Plan Act to hire a second McKinney-Vento specialist, which helps connect students and their families to services. The school district is deciding whether to keep that position, which was temporary.

Even so, housing assistance is becoming more scarce. Boulder County ran out of federal rental assistance money this month, and the city of Boulder has spent nearly all its rental assistance money for the entire year in a matter of months.

“In theory and on paper, we have a lot of resources. But they are maxed out,” Lyman said.

Boulder County to give out limited rent assistance

On any given week, Van Domelen of the Emergency Family Assistance Association said about 600 households come to the food bank. That’s nearly twice as many people as prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. This year, the nonprofit is planning to spend $3.4 million in financial assistance, most of which is used for housing assistance, she said. That’s about three times as much money as in prior years.

“Safety nets like EFAA are supposed to be there for the vagaries of life — the shock to a household, a medical bill, a cut in hours,” she said. “None of our safety nets are really designed to substitute for full-time jobs that are not enough to pay for housing, food and basics. So I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Boulder County has $726,000 available for rental assistance through its Next Steps program, which is a collaboration between Boulder County Housing and Human Services, the St. Vrain Valley School District and the Boulder Valley School District. The money will be available to households earning up to 30% the area median income — about $26,000 for an individual living in Boulder County and more for families.

The county hopes to serve about 41 families with this money during the 2023-2025 grant cycle, providing them just enough support to help them move through a crisis, according to Jim Williams, a spokesman for Boulder County.

“For some families, that might look like assisting with arrears and three months of forward rental assistance to keep them in their current unit after they have experienced a financial setback due to illness,” Williams wrote in an email to Boulder Reporting Lab. “For other families, especially those that are already paying hotel expenses on their own, a deposit and housing navigation to overcome any lease up barriers they may be facing is what is needed.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the county gave tenants and property owners nearly $18 million in rental assistance. It stopped accepting applications in January 2023.

In recent months, the number of eviction case filings in Boulder County court has reached the highest levels in years. Many of the tenants showing up in housing court this month are already living in some of the city’s most affordable apartments, leaving them with few more affordable options if they want to stay in Boulder.

In the last decade, the median cost to rent a place in Boulder has increased faster than the median income of its residents, according to the U.S. Census. In 2021, the city’s rental vacancy rate was less than 2%, which is below the national average.

Lyman said she has worked as a McKinney-Vento specialist for 13 years. She said she has also lived in Boulder for more than 40 years.

“I’m fairly acquainted with how the demographics have changed, and how housing prices have gone up year after year,” she said. “A big percentage of students who are unable to get housing, for whatever reason, move away.”

John Herrick is senior reporter for Boulder Reporting Lab, covering housing, transportation, policing and local government. Reach John at john@boulderreportinglab.org.

It’s tough to build school community post-pandemic. Music helps.

2023-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

The gym was packed. Parents, aunties, grandparents, and cousins filled the seats and more stood in the back. As their child’s class came up to perform, they jostled to the front, cell phones in hand, ready to get a good video.

The kids were dressed up in their finest sparkly red dresses or shiny slicked-back hair, with creased pant legs and bowties. All for a little winter concert at an elementary school.

It almost seemed like a night from the before times, pre-pandemic. The students’ voices weren’t always in perfect pitch, and some of them were a little fuzzy on the exact words. But the scene, and the songs, were perfectly beautiful.

It was also a surprising turnout for this school year. I lead a two-school charter network in Denver, and our school community has been a paradox post-pandemic. When we ask for feedback from our families, they ask for more in-person events: movie nights, dad and child dances, parent workshops, festivals. But typically we rely on parent volunteers to help us host these events. This year, when we’ve asked for volunteers to organize these events, almost no one signs up.

At the last moment, a little flurry of people always agree to man the grill, run the popcorn maker, or be on the clean-up crew. But it makes each event feel like a heavier lift when there aren’t quite enough hands, and that makes parents and staff more hesitant to volunteer the next time.

Turnout for most school meetings this year have been sparse, too. Our School Accountability Committee, which is supposed to have as many parents as staff members reviewing our academic data, had only staff at several meetings. We held a parent education night and only three people attended, while seven teachers were ready to share their great curriculum work.

It feels like we are longing for the social events from before the pandemic but we have all changed our boundaries. People have re-organized their work-life balance. They are used to being home more and maybe less used to extending themselves outside their most intimate sphere. Just as so many people are reluctant about going back to the office, we are reluctant to shift back to our previous level of community engagement. It feels like no one wants to leave home after collecting their kids at the end of the day and even fewer want to jump on a Zoom meeting after work.

I can understand it. I feel resistance myself about going to as many evening events as I have in the past, and teachers are more hesitant as well. Maybe we are still exhausted — or depressed, scared, and traumatized — from all we’ve been through, from the pandemic to recent gun violence. It leaves few people, parents or staff, with the energy it takes to organize and volunteer.

It has also been hard to be a parent in this country for a long time. We do so little as a society to support people with young children. Maybe living through these last few years has taken that little bit of extra parents still had to give.

Still, it worries me. Those outside of school time events are where community gets built. It’s where we get to see each other as people, and not just a teacher and a parent.

It all felt different at our winter concert performances, though. We were not trying to educate our families, we were not trying to fundraise, we weren’t even asking them to set up game booths or make cupcakes. We just invited them to hear their children sing.

It was a simple event. Staff set up the chairs and the stage. Teachers shepherded the children from classrooms to the stage and back. Our office team bought trays of cookies, and the tech teacher set up the sound system. I was grateful that staff were willing to do a little bit more that night so that we could all hear the children sing.

Music is a healing force, and children singing together often brings tears to my eyes. It is an expression of innocence and hope wrapped up in nostalgia for our own childhoods. Recent studies have shown that creative expression helps relieve anxiety, stimulates the rewiring of the brain after trauma, and even just listening to music can reduce cortisol production and stress. So it is no accident that these assemblies drew us together in community like nothing else has been able to since the pandemic.

We need the medicine of music to breathe life back into our tired, traumatized parent brains. I think it might be time for a spring concert.

Christine Ferris is the executive director of Highline Academy Charter Schools in Denver. She founded and led Our Community School, a K-8 charter school in Los Angeles, from 2005 to 2013. Ferris has been a consultant for charter schools in Denver, Los Angeles, and nationally.

Math can be intimidating. Here’s how the National Teacher of the Year shares stories to reach students.

2023-04-19T22:25:15+00:00

Six years ago, teacher Rebecka Peterson started spending a lot of extra time sitting and listening to her students.

Peterson, who teaches math at Union High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and was named the National Teacher of the Year on Wednesday, starts off the school year by sharing personal successes and struggles with her students. That includes what it was like to grow up as an immigrant of Swedish-Iranian descent who moved around a lot as a kid and got teased when she was learning to speak English.

Then she meets with each of her students over the course of several weeks, inviting them to tell her about whatever they’d like for at least 15 minutes. Peterson credits the exercise with helping more students pass her calculus class.

“I learned to show up, to receive whatever they entrusted to me,” Peterson wrote in her Teacher of the Year application. “Their stories brought me to my knees — nearly every student had undergone some form of adversity or trauma, often more monumental than anyone realized.”

Like many math teachers, Peterson knows what it’s like to fill in gaps for her students who missed out on instruction during the pandemic. But COVID teaching has stuck around in other ways for her, too.

When many of her calculus students were learning virtually in fall of 2020, Peterson created over 100 video lessons that allowed students to watch her solve problems, then stop to answer problems on their own. Before she went on sabbatical this year, Peterson was still assigning her students those videos to watch at home so they could spend more time in class working on problems together.

“I do math with them, not at them,” she wrote.

After news of her award broke, Chalkbeat spoke with Peterson about why math gets a “bad rap,” how she checks in on her students’ mental health, and why knowing more about her students helps her be a more patient teacher.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I wanted to start by asking you about what it means to be honored as a high school math teacher. Math has been getting so much attention in the news right now as being something a lot of kids are struggling with. How might you add to the conversation, especially at a time when the country is paying close attention to how high schoolers are doing in math?

Math can get kind of a bad rap sometimes. For me, and every mathematician I know, mathematics is so beautiful. When we really get into the rhythm of it, we’re transported. But I think, oftentimes, there is so much content to teach, and our kids don’t get to feel that. That’s a conversation that I think we need to be having, about making sure that our teachers have the time and space to be able to showcase what math really is all about — which is creativity and collaboration and problem-solving.

The Gates Foundation, for example, did this study that showed a lot of folks think that math needs to be more relevant and tied to what students can see in the real world. [The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a supporter of Chalkbeat.] As a calculus teacher, do you feel like you need to make your math more relevant for your students?

The beautiful thing about calculus is it is so ubiquitous. We use it to figure out the average value of a Bitcoin over the last month, or model population growth, or if I’m drinking a cup of coffee right now, with my caffeine tolerance, when will my body allow me to fall asleep? I’m very lucky in that calc is already so applicable.

But I’m all for creating more pathways for our students to be able to see that application earlier on. We’ve had this track of Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, since I think 1892. It’s time to explore some more math pathways for our students so that they truly all feel like they are mathematicians. Because that is what I believe to my core — that every person is a math person.

You teach at a large urban high school, and many of your students come from low-income backgrounds. In your own math classrooms, how has the pandemic affected what you need to do for them and what they may be struggling with?

Kids have changed since the pandemic. There is this fascinating study out of Stanford. It suggests that perhaps we are now teaching an entire generation of students whose brains have been rewired a bit. And I think that we can’t ignore that.

For me, it’s really important that I connect to my students, that my students feel connected to me, and they feel connected to each other. That looks like teaching my students breathing techniques so they have that in their toolkit when they start to feel dysregulated. Doing gratitude journaling, helping them be the author of their own stories, and doing mental health check-ins — these small daily acts we do as teachers to open space for our students to be vulnerable allows them to know that we’re on their side and that we have been through a lot.

One of your teaching approaches is that you often ask students to share more about their backgrounds with you so that you can create that connection. Can you tell me more about why that’s been an effective tool for you in math?

With math, it can be a very intimidating subject for students. I have to push them pretty hard to do some really quite rigorous mathematics. If I am going to be able to do that, then they have to trust me. They have to know that I am on their side, that I’m not going to ask them to do something that they can’t eventually accomplish. That starts with being real and being vulnerable with them.

The first day of school, I share stories — both joys and sorrows — of my life. I think every single high schooler, at some point, has felt like an outsider. For me, it’s important to share those moments where I felt like an outsider, so that they understand that I know what that’s like, and I don’t want them to ever feel that in our space.

Then I just welcome them to come share their story. They’re invited to sign up for 15-minute time slots — before school, after school, during lunch — to tell me whatever they want. We talk about their family, their pets, their jobs, their clubs, their background with math and with school. Especially post-pandemic, those are heavy weeks. It’s a lot to sit with over 100 stories one-on-one. And it takes about 10 weeks to sit with every student, but once those 10 weeks are over, there is just this palpable change in the classroom.

Can you say more about that?

When I learn their story, I’m softened, and it empowers me to elevate their voice, and it empowers me to work even harder on their behalf because I know where they’re coming from. I think it makes me more patient. I come to the understanding that oftentimes a behavior that I’m not in love with in the moment is because there is a deeper story going on.

When you share things about yourself, what do students most connect with?

I think what really resonates is that I’m an immigrant, I’m the daughter of medical missionaries, so I moved a lot growing up. And not just to another state, we moved continent to continent. Moving that much, you feel like an outsider looking in. A lot of my students are immigrants, they are first-generation Americans, but even those that aren’t, they know what it’s like to be an outsider.

Every high schooler knows what it’s like to feel like they have to perform, they have to act, they have to earn their spot. That’s how I felt, oftentimes, growing up. And that’s exactly how I do not want them to feel in my classroom.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Expulsions are low in Denver, and that’s how it should be, district officials say

2023-04-14T23:24:10+00:00

Over the past decade, Denver Public Schools’ approach to discipline has swung decidedly toward keeping students in school rather than kicking them out.

Safety begins with positive relationships between staff and students and a positive school climate, the district’s discipline policy says. Bringing a gun to school is the only offense that automatically results in an expulsion hearing for a student. Even students facing serious criminal charges can stay in school as long as they are not behind bars.

Last month’s shooting of two East High School deans by a student who was being searched for weapons has placed renewed scrutiny on discipline in Colorado’s largest school district.

But so far, Denver Public Schools has held firm to its approach.

“We are a welcoming environment,” DPS Deputy Chief of Staff Deborah Staten said in an interview this week. “We really want students to be in their school environment.”

The debate now playing out in Denver — with some saying the pendulum has swung too far toward tolerance and others fearful of a return to policies that harm marginalized students — illustrates the difficulty of striking the right balance on discipline amidst rising gun violence.

“There’s just no discipline, there’s no accountability, there’s no structure,” said Heather Weldon, whose daughter is an eighth grader at McAuliffe International School, where the principal spoke out about DPS denying his request to expel a student charged with attempted murder.

“Right now, there’s no consequences, it feels like,” Weldon said.

She and other parents say there has to be a better way — some middle ground between anything-goes and zero-tolerance. The Denver principals union has called for changes too, including revisions to the district’s discipline guide and a new process for deciding on appropriate school placements for students who might harm others.

But advocates who have worked for years to keep young people out of the criminal justice system worry that the shooting at East — a high-profile school where the city’s power brokers send their children — will tip the scales back toward punitive punishment that disproportionately affects Black and Latino students.

A day after the shooting, the school board lifted its policy banning armed police on campus.

“It terrifies me,” said Elie Zwiebel, a Denver attorney who represents kids in school expulsion hearings and juvenile court — kids who he said in past decades might have been unfairly painted as violent and hardened criminals. “The ultimate problem is that everyone is buying into the myth again and forgetting that we’re talking about children.”

Denver approach to discipline keeps kids in school

On March 22, East High student Austin Lyle shot two deans who were searching him as part of a safety plan that was in place due to his past behavior. The deans survived. Lyle, who was 17, later died by suicide. He was on probation for a weapons charge, according to media reports, and had been expelled from the suburban Cherry Creek School District.

But expulsions aren’t forever. By the time Lyle transferred to East mid-year, his Cherry Creek expulsion had expired. He was living in the East boundary and that’s why he enrolled there, Staten said.

That a student with a weapons charge, who was being searched daily by school staff for guns, was able to enroll in and remain at a traditional public high school has put heightened focus on DPS’s discipline matrix. The matrix is a guide for school staff about when they should or should not call the police and when they can suspend or expel a student.

The matrix was last amended in the fall of 2021. At that time, DPS added bright red letters at the top. “You make a difference in breaking historical patterns of inequity,” it says. “Disrupt bias, fight disproportionality, and apply the discipline matrix in an anti-racist and trauma-informed manner.”

Under the matrix, the only offense that automatically results in an expulsion hearing is bringing a gun to school. Everything else, including sexual assault and selling drugs, is up to district administrators.

The number of expulsions in Denver has fallen over the past decade. In the 2011-12 school year, Denver expelled 63 students, according to state data. In 2021-22, it expelled just 21.

Compare that to Cherry Creek, a smaller district that suspended 142 students last school year.

The language and tone in the two districts’ policies could not read more differently.

Denver: “School safety and academic success are formed and strengthened when all school staff and personnel build positive relationships with students and are actively engaged in their lives and learning. … Effective discipline is built on consistent and effective classroom management, and is supported by a positive school climate.”

Cherry Creek: “The administration has the right to expect full cooperation of employees in the planning and execution of discipline and control procedures including support for removing students who persistently or flagrantly misbehave.”

Cherry Creek officials declined an interview request for this story.

Denver and Cherry Creek differ on expulsion

The districts’ differing philosophies were clear at a legislative hearing at the state Capitol on March 2, just three weeks before the East shooting. Both districts testified on a bill that would have given students more rights in expulsion hearings and made it harder to expel students for nonviolent offenses or for behavior that occurred off school property.

Denver was the only district to testify in favor. Denver Public Schools attorney Elise Logemann said during testimony that the district already does much of what the bill would have mandated, including requiring there be a “direct and substantial nexus between the student’s alleged conduct committed off school grounds and the risk of physical harm to other students or school personnel.”

Denver students and current and former staff members testified in favor too.

“Many people thought I was a bad kid and that I was a bully, but my anger was actually sadness,” said Lorenzo Gomez, a 16-year-old student at AUL Denver who told lawmakers he frequently got into fights before going to AUL, a small charter school for students who’ve struggled elsewhere.

“All kids deserve a second chance and a supportive place to go to school,” he said.

Cherry Creek joined the Harrison and Fountain-Fort Carson districts in Colorado Springs, along with the Colorado Association of School Executives, the Colorado Association of School Boards, and the Colorado Rural Schools Alliance, in opposing the bill.

Cherry Creek doesn’t require a connection to school to expel a student for off-campus behavior. Sonja McKenzie, an attorney for the district, said requiring one would prevent Cherry Creek from expelling potentially dangerous students.

She gave an example she said happened this year: A Cherry Creek student shot another teenager in a park. The victim attended a neighboring school district. Under the bill, she said, there would have been no grounds to expel the shooter because the victim didn’t go to Cherry Creek.

“But you tell me, would you want your child attending that school with that child who had a gun — and maybe had that gun on school grounds and we just didn’t know it?” McKenzie said.

More people testified in support of the bill than against it. But after the East shooting, state lawmakers killed the bill and introduced a scaled-back version instead.

Students have repeatedly flooded the Colorado State Capitol this year to call for stricter gun control in response to shootings. Some Denver parents, meanwhile, are calling for changes to district discipline policies.

Educators struggle to balance safety, learning

Attorney Lindsay Brown said she’s seen Denver’s approach to discipline change over time. Ten years ago, she said DPS was more punitive. She remembers representing a student athlete with a supportive family who was expelled for bringing brass knuckles to school.

While Brown said that would still happen in many suburban districts, she has for years now felt like Denver is more likely to give students a fair hearing.

“Denver has historically been a place where you can go in and speak to the hearts and minds of teachers and administrators,” Brown said. “I’ve always felt like they were really trying to do the right thing.”

She worries that the recent violence will change that.

“I am concerned that schools are going to start to wash their hands of quote-unquote problem kids using this umbrella of, ‘Well, these things happen, so we can’t be too safe,’” she said.

Elsa Bañuelos-Lindsay has the same fears. She’s executive director of Movimiento Poder, a Denver community organization formerly known as Padres & Jóvenes Unidos that for years led the fight to reduce suspensions and expulsions in DPS and statewide. She said putting police officers back into Denver schools is a sign that DPS is going in the wrong direction.

“It’s going to harm more of our students, especially students of color,” Bañuelos-Lindsay said.

Rob Gould, president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, is somewhere in the middle. Asked if the pendulum had swung too far toward keeping students in school, he said yes and no. If given the choice of smaller class sizes or more metal detectors because of limited funding, educators would choose the former, he said.

“We’re still trying to figure this out,” Gould said.

But attorney Igor Raykin, who also represents students in expulsion proceedings, said he thinks that after the racial justice protests of 2020, Denver and other urban districts “overcorrected and began to be tolerant of behaviors they shouldn’t be tolerant of.”

While he believes expulsion is disruptive to a student’s life and should be used sparingly, he said that needs to be balanced with keeping other students and teachers safe. Expelling a student just means they can’t go back to their current school. It doesn’t mean they can’t access an education, Raykin said, even if that’s through remote learning online.

Former DPS principal Kimberly Grayson said she moved students to remote or hybrid learning — over the objections of the district — if she felt their presence put other students at risk.

Last school year, after one of her students at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Early College was killed by gunfire on a weekend and police arrested another student on suspicion of the crime, Grayson said she and her staff figured out which of their classmates were involved in the rivalry.

Each was handed a computer and a message: “You’re going to finish this year out at home on your Chromebook. It’s dangerous for you to be here. For you and for everybody else here,” Grayson recently told activist and podcast host brother jeff Fard.

“The district told me I couldn’t do it,” Grayson said. “Oh yes, I am. We’re going to support them with their education. We’re going to give them a Chromebook.”

Grayson said she thinks DPS’s approach to discipline shifted too far over the years.

“They went from zero tolerance to complete tolerance,” she said in an interview. “I realize you want numbers [of suspensions and expulsions] to decrease for Black and brown kids. However, there still needs to be some consequences for some actions.”

Staten, the deputy chief of staff for DPS, said the district’s position is that a student can be in their regular public school — even if they’re facing criminal charges — as long as a judge has decided that the student can be out in the community and not behind bars.

“There are times where we may need to talk to probation to see what the terms and conditions are,” Staten said. “But if somebody in the judicial system has deemed that it’s OK for the student to be in the community, it’s OK for the student to be in a school setting.”

Superintendent Alex Marrero and Denver school board members address the media after deciding to return armed police officers to Denver high school campuses.

New plans and policies in the works

Ultimately, the responsibility for district discipline policy lies with the elected school board. But Denver board members are more hands-off now due to a new governance model that emphasizes letting the superintendent run the district’s day-to-day operations.

When school board members asked for a safety update at a recent meeting, Superintendent Alex Marrero gave little information.

“Yes, we will engage the community, and I appreciate the invitations to assist,” Marrero said. “But this is where I have to lean on the experts.”

Back in 2020, when the board voted to remove police from schools, it also directed the then-superintendent to “redefine school safety” in DPS, clarify the role law enforcement should play, and create a monthly school discipline report that would show the number of students ticketed and arrested, and the number of times police were called to schools.

But pandemic recovery and turnover in the superintendent role stymied some of that work. As of two weeks ago, a spokesman for the Denver Police Department said the department did not have an updated intergovernmental agreement with DPS, even as police return to schools. And Staten said the monthly school discipline reports were never created because of COVID.

The East shooting seems to have reignited the work. The board has directed the superintendent to develop a long-term safety plan by June 30. The district is also reviewing the discipline matrix — a review that was planned before the shooting at East, Staten said.

“Regardless of this behavioral incident at East, that was on the calendar to do this,” Staten said. “East has nothing to do with it. East has nothing to do with the overall district discipline.”

Though the board doesn’t vote on revisions to the discipline matrix, they do review it, she said. Several board members did not return messages for this story or declined to comment.

But Vice President Auon’tai Anderson, who worked as a restorative practices coordinator at a DPS high school before getting elected to the board in 2019, said he still believes that the district’s philosophy of erring toward keeping students in school is the right one.

“We’re a restorative practice district,” he said. “We’re not in the business of kicking kids out for a mistake. Because people have bad days. We can’t say you’re not worthy of an education here.”

Melanie Asmar is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado, covering Denver Public Schools. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Colorado bill would add protections for students facing expulsion

2023-04-13T23:38:32+00:00

Some Democratic lawmakers want more protections for Colorado students facing expulsion — including training for administrators and a guarantee that families will get at least two days to review the case against their child.

The bill is a scaled-back version of legislation that was killed earlier this month after widespread opposition from school district administrators who feared that limiting expulsions would make schools less safe. That bill would have made it harder to expel students for things they did outside of school and would have given students more due process rights.

The effort to limit expulsions comes amid debate about school safety and discipline. Educators have reported more student behavior problems in the wake of pandemic closures, while rising community violence has shown up repeatedly at the schoolhouse door. Advocates for youth, though, worry that removing students from school cuts them off from positive influences, derails their education, and makes it more likely they’ll end up in the criminal justice system.

Democratic state Rep. Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez of Denver and state Rep. Junie Joseph of Boulder are sponsoring the legislation. Gonzales-Gutierrez has spent her career in the child welfare and juvenile justice system in various capacities.

“I’ve seen firsthand what happens to kids who are not afforded due process in the school system and then put on a trajectory toward more system involvement,” she said.

House Bill 1291 would clarify that school districts have the burden of proving by a preponderance of evidence that a student violated state law and school district policy, that alternative remedies aren’t appropriate, and that keeping the student out of school is the only way to preserve the school’s learning environment.

Schools would have to show that it’s more likely than not that the student committed the offenses of which they are accused. It’s the same burden of proof that’s used in most civil lawsuits.

The bill also would require that school districts provide all the evidence they plan to use in an expulsion hearing to a student’s parent or guardian at least two business days before the hearing.

And it would require that hearing officers complete a training that covers topics such as child and adolescent brain development, trauma-informed practices, restorative justice, bias in disciplinary practices, and applicable state and federal law.

Over hours of testimony in support of the earlier bill, current and former students described being kicked out for behavior that stemmed from abuse and neglect. Others described being expelled for fights that happened over the summer or for being a member of a group chat in which someone else made a threat.

Barbara Garza, now a social worker at AUL charter school in Denver, described being expelled as a student. She later went on to earn her master’s degree at the University of Denver so she could help kids like herself.

“Adults always made me feel like school was not for me,” she said. “I always heard, ‘She just doesn’t try hard enough.’ During that time, I was trying hard.

“I had a lot of responsibilities. I was experiencing abuse. But adults had already made up their mind about who I was going to be and what box I fit into. I felt like people were using my behavior as a child to define what kind of adult I would be.”

State data from the 2021-22 school year shows that about a third of expulsions were for assault, weapons offenses, or felonies. The other two-thirds were for violations related to drugs and alcohol, defiance and disobedience, or destruction of school property. The single largest category — 214 out of 794 expulsions — was “detrimental behavior.”

Gonzales-Gutierrez had originally hoped to make it much harder to expel students for nonviolent offenses or for behavior that occurred off school property, such as a fight at the mall, unless administrators could show a “substantial nexus” with the school setting. She also wanted to allow students to cross-examine witnesses and have other rights they would have in a court setting.

That bill already faced a difficult path forward, with strong opposition led by the Colorado Association of School Executives, which represents superintendents, principals, and other administrators. They said expulsion is already a last resort, and they carry a heavy responsibility to keep an entire community safe. State law leaves school districts legally liable if they overlook known threats, and someone is harmed.

Then on March 22, a student who was on probation for a weapons charge and who had previously been removed from the Cherry Creek School District shot and wounded two administrators at Denver’s East High School. The student later died by suicide.

Two weeks later, Gonzales-Gutierrez withdrew her original bill, asking that the House Education Committee postpone it indefinitely, but pledged to bring back some protections for students facing disciplinary action.

She said her bill would not have changed anything about what happened at East High School. The bill still would have allowed expulsions for violent offenses and weapons-related offenses. And Denver Public Schools never sought to remove the student, who was on a safety plan that required daily searches.

She said the focus needs to be on providing more mental health services and other support.

“We are failing our students,” she said. “We failed that young man who took his own life and caused harm to others.”

She hopes this bill is a “fresh start” to the conversation.

CASE Executive Director Bret Miles said he appreciates the change in approach, though his group still has concerns about the most recent legislation. He’s not opposed to training or guaranteeing families time to review evidence, he said, but in general he thinks the current system is working.

Anything that would make it harder to expel students puts administrators in a difficult position, he said.

“What has become incredibly clear over the last few weeks is the impossible job principals have to work with all their families to balance the educational needs of all students,” he said. “Principals care about the most disenfranchised kid in their school. They want that kid to get what they need. And then they have other parents saying, ‘Why is my student put at risk or suffering or in harm’s way or afraid?’”

While administrators aren’t on board yet, the approach of Colorado’s Democratic legislature stands in contrast to other states where lawmakers are making it easier to kick disruptive students out of school. No such bills have been introduced in Colorado.

The expulsions bill is scheduled for a hearing before the House Education Committee April 20.

Bureau Chief Erica Meltzer covers education policy and politics and oversees Chalkbeat Colorado’s education coverage. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Colorado offers K-12 schools Zearn digital math learning platform at no cost

2023-04-12T12:30:00+00:00

Colorado is making the digital learning program Zearn Math available for free to schools statewide as part of a broader effort to address gaps in math learning that widened during the pandemic.

Gov. Jared Polis has set aside up to $6 million in pandemic relief money to pay for licenses for the digital program and to pay for printed materials for schools that adopt Zearn’s math curriculum Training also will be available to teachers in how to use the new platform.

Math scores on state and national standardized tests declined during the pandemic, with sharper drops in math than in reading and writing. Both educators and policymakers are focused on how to help students gain skills they missed out on during three disrupted years.

Last month, Polis and lawmakers unveiled a bipartisan $25 million proposal to offer widespread after-school tutoring in math, expand teacher training, and encourage districts to adopt high-quality curriculum. In addition, the initiative included plans for the state to pay for licenses for a digital math accelerator and make them available at no cost to schools statewide.

Polis announced this week that Colorado has selected Zearn Math as the state’s online math program. The state did not request proposals, instead choosing Zearn based on studies and reviews and purchasing it from a software reseller at a set price.

“We are taking an all-hands-on-deck approach to boost student math achievement and make sure Colorado kids have the support and practice they need to excel in math,” Polis said in a press release. “This new access saves school districts and families money and is part of our ongoing work to provide high-quality education for every Colorado student.”

Polis spokeswoman Melissa Dworkin said the governor’s team considered several programs and chose Zearn Math based on studies provided by the company that showed students who used Zearn regularly made substantially more progress than those who didn’t.

Educators who study math instruction and ways students learn through gaming and online platforms said Zearn has positive elements but cautioned that teachers need training and time to learn how to use it well. It shouldn’t be used as a substitute for in-person instruction by well-trained teachers, they said, and teachers need to make sure students are engaged and supported in their learning.

Started by New York teachers and backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the program is used widely in states like Tennessee and Texas. Many New York City schools also use Zearn Math. The program is intended to be used in conjunction with in-person, whole class instruction. (The Gates Foundation is a funder of Chalkbeat. See our funders here. Read our ethics policy here.)

Mary Pittman, president of the Colorado Council of Teachers of Mathematics, said she feels “hopeful excitement” about the plan.

“It is new for Colorado to have access to a program like this across the board,” she said.

She described the platform as offering flexible, high-quality materials built around Common Core State Standards, which are the basis for Colorado’s academic standards. She said Zearn was originally used most often for intervention with students who were far behind in math, but that it also offers a well-regarded comprehensive core curriculum, data that can inform teachers’ daily instruction, as well as lessons that can be used during tutoring or at home.

David Webb, an associate professor of math education at the University of Colorado Boulder who also heads a research consortium on math instruction, said Zearn seems to have good content and be based on solid ideas around math instruction. He worries, though, about relying too much on digital platforms, when it was the lack of interaction with teachers and peers that contributed to learning gaps during online and hybrid school.

“To see it resolved through digital platforms, it rubs me a little bit the wrong way,” he said. “I understand the desire to get back on track and come up with personalized interventions. But to say we’re going to have you spend more time on technology, I think we need a more holistic fix.”

A 2019 Johns Hopkins study found students in some subgroups using Zearn made statistically significant progress but overall results were less significant. Students in schools that used Zearn for more hours a week generally saw more improvement than those that used it for fewer hours. Teachers in the study generally liked the program and felt it supported student learning.

Even so, many teachers reported the format of Zearn — which requires students to work independently and to read, listen, and type responses — made it hard for some students to use.

Meanwhile, students who used Zearn in the study were less likely to express confidence in their math skills compared with students at schools that didn’t use Zearn. A potential explanation, the study authors wrote, was that students may have found the Zearn material “more challenging than previously experienced, which may have affected their feelings toward mathematics in general.”

Webb said these types of findings underscore the importance of coupling digital platforms with instruction from teachers and opportunities for students to work through math problems with their peers. It’s also critical for teachers to get training — something that has become much more challenging as teachers lose their planning periods to cover for colleagues or can’t go to conferences due to substitute shortages, Webb said.

Arturo Cortez, an assistant professor of learning sciences and human development and director of The Learning To Transform (LiTT) Video Gaming Lab at the University of Colorado, said the teachers he works with who already use Zearn love it because it helps them see quickly which students got the lesson and which need more help.

Zearn also has the potential to bridge divides between the home and the classroom and help parents better support their children’s learning, Cortez said.

He cautioned, though, that teachers need opportunities to learn how to use the program, play with it, and think through how it can help their students — not just a perfunctory session to get familiar with the interface. It’s also important to see how — and whether — students engage with the tool.

“With a lot of digital tools, we sit kids in front of them and don’t spend time with them while they are using them,” he said. “What makes them engaging? What makes kids have that commitment? And how do we create environments like that in the classroom?”

Colorado schools can sign up for Zearn Math for the 2023-24 school year.

Chalkbeat Senior Reporter Ann Schimke contributed reporting.

Bureau Chief Erica Meltzer covers education policy and politics and oversees Chalkbeat Colorado’s education coverage. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

‘Hard to get sober young’: Inside one of the country’s few recovery high schools

2023-04-06T16:18:00+00:00

This story first appeared on KHN (Kaiser Health News) and is republished with permission.

Every weekday at 5280 High School in Denver starts the same way.

Students in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction gather on the steps of the school’s indoor auditorium to discuss a topic chosen by staff members. One recent morning, they talked about mental health and sobriety. A teenage boy dressed in tan corduroys, a black hoodie, and sneakers went first.

“I didn’t want to have, like, any emotion,” he said. “So I thought, like, the best way to, like, put it down would be to do more and more and more drugs.”

A classmate said she started doing drugs for fun and then got hooked. Another student said his addiction negatively impacts his mental health. A third announced an upcoming milestone.

“In, like, two days, I’ll be six months sober,” she said, as her classmates cheered.

The students attend Colorado’s only recovery high school — one of 43 nationwide. These secondary schools are designed for students who are recovering from substance use disorder and might also be dealing with related mental health disorders. The Denver school opened in 2018 as a public charter school that today enrolls more than 100 students annually.

One of those cheering classmates was sophomore Alexis Castillo, 16, who listened supportively during that recent morning meeting. She is in recovery for alcohol and fentanyl addictions. Several of her friends attended the school when she enrolled during her freshman year and initially loved it. But after a while some of Castillo’s friends left and she grew disillusioned. She stopped going to class and wasn’t motivated to work her recovery steps.

“They give you a lot of accountability,” she said. “That was not something I wanted.”

Castillo relapsed and school staffers helped her get into rehab. Three months later she was back at the school, sober and ready to do the work.

The school’s mission is to help kids learn to live a substance-free life while receiving an education.

“They can go on to college or a career and really handle anything that life throws at them,” said 5280’s founder and executive director, Dr. Melissa Mouton.

In 2022, nearly a third of 12th graders and 1 in 5 10th graders reported using an illicit drug in the previous year, according to a national survey from the Monitoring the Future project conducted by the University of Michigan Survey Research Center. Those numbers have steadily decreased over the past 25 years. However, data from UCLA shows overdose deaths among teens doubled in the first year of the pandemic, mainly attributed to the increased prevalence of fentanyl-laced drugs.

The first recovery high school opened in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1979 and similar programs now operate in 21 states. Compared with their peers at regular schools who have gone through treatment, recovery high school students have better attendance and are more likely to stay sober, and their graduation rate is at least 21% higher, according to one study.

“For this particular group of young people who have these disorders, this can be a lifesaver,” said John Kelly, director of the Recovery Research Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital. “It can help them create a social norm of recovery.”

A mosaic in the computer lab at 5280 High School in Denver.

There are three components to effective drug and alcohol treatment, according to Dr. Sharon Levy, a pediatrician and addiction medicine specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital. The first part is medical, which includes seeing a doctor, drug testing, and using medications like buprenorphine to treat opioid addiction. The second is emotional support from counseling to address co-occurring mental health disorders. And there is a behavioral health component that, for kids, can include recovery schools.

“Recovery schools offer an opportunity really for peer support and mutual aid in a kind of a supervised and structured way,” Levy said.

Recovery high schools often weave components of treatment into the school day — activities like 5280’s daily recovery program meeting. In the afternoon, the school offers wellness electives such as basketball and journaling.

Recovery schools do face challenges. Most are publicly funded charter or alternative schools that carry a higher cost of educating students than traditional schools do. This is due to a smaller enrollment, the need for mental health and recovery personnel, higher faculty-to-student ratios, and other factors.

The Denver school enrolls about 100 students annually, making it one of the biggest recovery high schools in the nation. This year, the per-pupil cost is about $25,000 per student but the school receives only about $15,000 from federal, state, and local funding, according to Mouton. The remaining money comes from donors.

Given the complex needs of the students, “recovery schools will always be small,” she said.

Pooling such students together may also raise a concern that students will trigger one another to use drugs and alcohol and relapse, but, Levy said, that’s a risk with any social interaction.

“So, if you’re in an environment where the recovery is kind of front and center and people are watching and monitoring and supervising,” she said, “I think that’s helpful for a lot of kids.”

The school in Denver purposely keeps enrollment under capacity so additional teens can enroll anytime during the school year. A student won’t get kicked out if they relapse, but there are two requirements: They must want to be sober and attend an outside recovery program.

“The No. 1 step is just letting them know out of the gate, no matter what’s going on, that we love them,” said Brittany Kitchens, the school’s recovery coach. “We are here for them.”

Kitchens teaches students how to navigate recovery and regulate their emotions. She likens herself to a hall monitor, constantly checking in with students and looking for changes in behavior.

“I tend to be the first kind of line that the kids will come to when they’re experiencing something that is just a little bit too big for them to process,” she said.

Some of these difficulties stem from traumas students have experienced, including sex and drug trafficking, and abandonment. Students also deal with traumas they have caused, Kitchens said, actions that landed them in jail or on probation. Kitchens, who is in recovery herself, shares coping mechanisms with the students.

“A lot of times it just starts with, ‘Hey, take a breath, breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth,’” she said.

Alexis has been sober for nearly a year, she said. The morning meetings where she and her classmates talk about mental health, sobriety, and other topics are an opportunity to build a community of friends who support one another, something she said she didn’t have when she was using drugs.

“It’s really hard to get sober young,” she said.

This story is part of a partnership that includes KUNC, NPR and KHN.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

After a traumatic event, how can teachers best help students?

2023-04-04T11:00:00+00:00

Community violence, racial injustice, school shootings. Students across America are faced with these realities every day, leaving educators to respond by adapting lesson plans or offer emergency support.

Some schools have added social workers, counselors, and other mental health resources to grapple with the toll community trauma is taking on students’ mental health. And in some districts, teachers and school leaders have created new student-focused programs in the wake of increases in gun violence and other traumatic incidents.

But educators say they remain overwhelmed and need more resources to support their students, especially following disrupted learning at the height of the COVID pandemic. Students have shared their own hopes for how adults might approach these conversations. If you are an educator or parent looking for resources on how to talk to students, we hope you find the below articles as a good starting place.

Expert advice for talking to children after a traumatic event

How to speak with kids after a violent event

Chalkbeat spoke with social worker Katie Peinovich about how to talk to children about traumatic events, what signs of distress to look for in children, and how to help those who might be fearful of future violence.

Peinovich tells parents, caregivers, and teachers:

Pay attention to kids’ actions following traumatic events: Kids may startle more easily, seem more irritable, and be reluctant to be apart from parents or caregivers.
Reassure children that they are now safe: Acknowledge and validate their feelings that what happened was very, very scary. Ongoing news coverage can give preschoolers and early elementary kids the impression that this is an ongoing situation. Parents and schools should limit media coverage and to reassure children that the event is over and they are safe.
Maintain routines: Both caregivers and educators should strive to keep schedules similar, whether it’s what children eat for breakfast or when they go to recess. Changing up schedules suddenly can heighten anxiety.
Understand recovery timelines: In about four weeks, most kids will return to their previous level of functioning. If kids are still struggling after a month, they may need extra support.

A student’s personal essay sits on a table in a classroom at the Philadelphia.

Trauma can make it hard for kids to learn. Here’s how teachers can help.

A child psychologist at Lurie Children’s Hospital and an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s medical school, Colleen Cicchetti helps lead the hospital’s efforts to improve how local schools handle trauma. Chalkbeat interviewed Cicchetti about the cost of childhood trauma in communities and what teachers can do to promote healing.

Her tips for teachers include:

Establish a predictable and “safe” classroom: This helps students understand the expectations and what they need to do to be successful. Taking breaks helps them focus.
Ask for help, even if you have to look outside your school: A teacher may not feel like they can tell someone they’re struggling with a student or feel isolated. That can lead to burnout.

This principal had a student killed just days before the year began. Here’s how he and his school found a way forward.

After one of his 6-year-old students was killed two weeks before the school year began, a California principal wrote that the experience taught him a lot about what it means to authentically communicate with young children about death.

“I desperately hope that no one else will ever need to use the lessons I learned,” wrote Danny Etcheverry, principal of Rocketship Spark Academy. “But I know they will, so here are a few ideas that helped guide us — and that might ease the burden a little bit for educators who find themselves with such a task.”

Among his advice:

Communicate honestly: “My staff members, alongside our school’s mental health professionals, determined that our students would need explanations of the event from those they trust and the space to process those explanations.”
Provide different kinds of support: “I spent a lot of time in classrooms those first few days, and I was struck by how these moments are initially much more emotional for adults to process than they are for young children … With our youngest students, we spent a lot of time talking about the concept of death and tragedy.”
Treat compounded trauma: “Over the weeks following the shooting, it became clear that this tragedy layered on top of prior wounds for some students … Healing is a long journey, and we’re just getting started.”

Educators shouldn’t always feel the need to talk to students after witnessing or watching a violent event, but should provide space to listen, said one expert from the nonprofit group Facing History & Ourselves. File photo from 2022.

How anti-bigotry lessons help students comprehend violence, push for change

The nonprofit group Facing History & Ourselves provides educators with resources to help students understand the lessons of history to combat bigotry and hate. Following the death of Tyre Nichols — the 29-year-old skateboarder and photographer who died days after being brutalized by Memphis police officers during a traffic stop — a local leader spoke with Chalkbeat about helping Memphis students grapple with Nichols’ death.

Among her advice for educators:

Don’t always feel the need to talk to students after witnessing or watching a violent event: “We listen to them. We really let them sit with that, because the last thing we want to do is minimize their pain. Our teachers are really skilled at listening, and letting the students talk. We don’t want to say that it’ll be all right, because it may not be all right.”
Focus on lessons that humanize the students, so they can reflect and have conversations: “In August, when we had the situation with the shooter [19-year-old Ezekiel Kelly was charged with killing three people in a citywide shooting spree], I went to Central High School and listened to Mary McIntosh’s Facing History & Ourselves class, and sat there and listened to her unpack the fear those kids had around that shooting that happened in August. She slowed it down, and got them to free-write it in a journal, just dump it all out, and gave them agency to be able to talk to each other.”

Schools nationwide are struggling to address the mental health needs of students. Some Detroit high school students, part of a city youth organization called Local Circles, wanted to know two things about their peers: How they practice self-love, and how they find peace in a world in which they constantly feel judged. File photo from 2019 at Southeastern High School in Detroit.

Students share what they need after crisis and reflect on what must change

Teens say it takes self-love to navigate times of crisis

A group of about 20 Detroit teens set out to learn two things about their peers: How they practice self-love, and how they find peace in a world in which they constantly feel judged.

These are relevant questions as schools struggle to address student mental health needs. Those troubles existed before the pandemic, but the isolation, lingering effects of remote learning, and challenges coping in the midst of a global health crisis have deepened them. The Detroit teens detailed their findings and, in some cases, expressed their worries in pieces that seek solutions.

Not every upsetting event needs to become a lesson

Black trauma doesn’t have to be channeled into some inspiring lesson, wrote one high schooler in New York, who was haunted by the experience of a teacher making her watch the video of Tamir Rice’s killing.

He helped his school develop a class about mental health

One Newark high schooler went to 19 funerals during the first year of COVID. When he wasn’t saying goodbye to people he cared about, he wrote, he was in front of a screen that was his connection to school and friends for a year and a half.

“I was already in the process of starting a wellness council, a club where students could share their struggles and hear about what others are going through. If we could start this club, why not a class about mental health built into the school day? ... The result of all this planning is a real-life class called Health and Wellness.”

‘Peace warriors’ at Chicago schools spread messages of nonviolence

The Peace Warriors program, a central part of some schools’ efforts to confront gun violence by centering students’ needs, trains students to mediate conflicts, support grieving classmates, and bring peace and happiness to school by greeting peers at the front door and leaving celebratory birthday notes on lockers.

“Our biggest goal is to end violence — any and everywhere and to do that — we have to end violence inside of ourselves first because violence starts internally with the thought,” said DeMarcus Thompson, a then 17-year-old Peace Warrior at North Lawndale College Prep. “In order to get to our goal, we have to work together.”

Chicago wants schools to adopt a new $135 million curriculum. It is getting high marks and pushback.

2023-03-31T11:00:00+00:00

When Andrew Avila landed his first teaching job at Chicago’s Bronzeville Classical Elementary in 2021, he got to work creating lesson plans for his students, who would be returning to in-person learning amid the pandemic.

The newly minted science teacher had access to Skyline, a new online curriculum created by Chicago Public Schools. It offered a wealth of materials and ideas connecting science to his students’ experiences. A lesson on thermal energy, for example, explained how air conditioner units increase summertime temperatures in Chicago.

Chicago teacher Andrew Avila, who uses Skyline at Bronzeville Classical Elementary, has occasionally felt overwhelmed by the volume of resources on the platform.

But at times, Avila felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of lessons and other materials, housed on a digital platform that could be tough to navigate.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m drinking water from a firehose because there are so many resources I can turn to,” Avila said.

CPS is betting big that Skyline — the unprecedented $135 million trove of lessons in math, reading, science, social studies, and other subjects — will help students bounce back from COVID’s profound academic damage.

The curriculum remains voluntary for schools, but the district has started pressing campuses that have not yet adopted Skyline to prove they have other quality curriculums in place.

An analysis by Chalkbeat and WBEZ found that roughly half of the district’s campuses report using Skyline for at least two subjects, with the highest adoption rates at schools that serve predominantly low-income Black students. In other words, Skyline is shaping the learning of tens of thousands of students, including some of Chicago’s most vulnerable, amid a high-stakes pandemic recovery.

District leaders say that by ensuring students get lessons that reflect their grade levels, Skyline helps teachers speed up learning rather than constantly backtracking to material students should have learned earlier. Some educators praise Skyline for offering rich resources that help novice educators such as Avila hit the ground running and seasoned ones rejuvenate their teaching.

But others say the curriculum is not ready for prime time. A wonky digital platform can make it hard for teachers to navigate a slew of lessons and assignments that many say can be overwhelming. In some subjects, student materials include dense blocks of text with few visuals that can especially challenge struggling learners.

The district says it is continually strengthening the curriculum — created in-house with help from several curriculum companies — with input from educators and students, including recent improvements to the online platform. Still, some educators remain wary of a centralized curriculum in a district that has traditionally given teachers leeway to design their own lessons.

Getting the Skyline rollout right is enormously important, say curriculum experts such as David Steiner at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. He notes that many teachers are routinely pulling materials off the web, acting “like DJs for playlists of instructional materials” — a task that’s unfair to lay on overworked educators and one that leaves students’ education to chance.

“In this moment of fragility and uncertainty, we need to reduce the zone of ‘anything goes’ and chaos, and, ‘This is my unique curriculum and my unique classroom,’” he said.

How a uniquely Chicago curriculum originated

In Chicago, wealthier schools have often been able to buy quality learning resources while low-income campuses made do with cobbled-together or outdated materials and books.

Former Chicago schools chief Janice Jackson saw a solution: a curriculum bank filled with high-quality lessons in every subject. She said it could tackle massive disparities in academic achievement across the city’s 500-some district-run campuses. What’s more, by developing it in-house, experts could tie in Chicago’s history and present day, making it more engaging for students.

The district enlisted five companies to help develop and implement the lessons and built-in assessments, with input from some Chicago teachers. It came to draw heavily on federal COVID-19 relief dollars to foot the six-year, $135 million bill. Ultimately, Skyline — and the technology it relies on — became some of the priciest items the district bought from outside vendors with pandemic recovery dollars.

Chicago formally launched Skyline in the summer of 2021, a couple of weeks before Jackson stepped down.

Javee Hernandez teaches her sixth grade students social studies using the new Skyline curriculum at Bronzeville Classical Elementary School.

That summer, Javee Hernandez — a veteran social studies teacher at Bronzeville Classical whose classroom is across the hall from Avila’s — joined principal Nicole Spicer and other school leaders in deciding whether to adopt the new curriculum. Bronzeville Classical, a test-in school on the South Side where students learn a grade ahead of their age, had opened just a few years earlier, in 2018.

The administration felt the school’s math and reading coursework was strong, but social studies and science could benefit from a revamp. Enter Skyline.

“This was a free, high-quality, rigorous option,” said Spicer. “Skyline became a resource that really was a no-brainer for us.”

The district has offered schools like Bronzeville a slew of incentives to opt into Skyline: free books and math supplies, dollars to spend on science lab equipment, expanded access to technology. But even as Bronzeville has embraced Skyline, other schools have been more cautious.

Schools skipping Skyline must defend their choice

One elementary school principal who left the district last year said she was asked to make a case that her school’s English language arts curriculum passed muster.

She and her teachers largely agreed the school would benefit from adopting Skyline in the later grades; after two years of pandemic schooling, educators felt drained and ready for a break from the labor-intensive process of designing lessons from scratch. But in the earlier grades, the principal compiled test scores and other data to argue that her teachers should be allowed to continue using their own lessons. The district agreed.

“They don’t come out and say, ‘You have to do it,’” the principal said. “But if you can’t prove your school is using a high-quality curriculum, then the pressure is on to adopt Skyline.”

Chalkbeat and WBEZ are not naming several school leaders who did not have district permission to speak with the media; the former principal asked to remain anonymous to avoid burning bridges with the district.

A high school principal said she asked most of her teachers to take last school year to “tinker” with Skyline and do the extensive professional development the district offers. But she has mandated it for a few teachers who did not have robust lesson plans and struggled in the classroom.

This year, the district asked schools to evaluate their curriculums across the board against a district rubric that defined what made for a quality curriculum and recently shared results with principals: Roughly 20% of campuses do not have quality curriculums in reading, math, or social studies, and about 10% do not have one in science.

Mary Beck, the district’s head of teaching and learning, said the district is now working with those campuses to make a plan.

“If you don’t have a high-quality curriculum, what’s your plan to get to a high-quality curriculum?” she said. “Skyline is obviously the example, but not the only example.”

The number of schools adopting Skyline is growing each year. As of January, as many as 432 schools were using the curriculum for at least one subject, roughly 83% of all district schools.

In elementary schools, the English curriculum is the most popular and math is the least (not including world languages, which are not offered by all campuses).

Majority Black schools have adopted the curriculum at the highest rates. Campuses that serve mostly white students — only about two dozen districtwide — have been slowest to embrace Skyline, Chalkbeat and WBEZ found.

In Chicago, 432 schools have adopted Skyline for at least one subject, with majority Black schools using the curriculum at the highest rates.

Skyline adoption has also been slower at high schools, though some high-needs South and West side campuses were early adopters across all subjects.

A couple of principals told Chalkbeat and WBEZ they opted in mostly just to get the free resources from the district.

The high school principal said her school adopted Skyline in all subjects, but buy-in varies.

On one end of the spectrum, science teachers at her school really like the curriculum, which draws heavily on the well-respected curriculum called Amplify Science, and have rolled it out faithfully.

On the other end, English teachers dabbled but ultimately returned mostly to lessons they had developed previously. Social science teachers found the materials too challenging for struggling readers; some are picking and choosing parts to incorporate.

Some teachers struggle to navigate Skyline

Caprice Phillips-Mitchell, the chair of the Chicago Teachers Union elementary steering committee and a kindergarten teacher at Fort Dearborn Elementary School on the South Side, said she hears from a number of teachers who are unhappy with Skyline. And this school year, she experienced some of the problems herself.

Phillips-Mitchell said parts of the Skyline curriculum are too challenging for students or require prior knowledge teachers need to fill in. Because online lessons and assignments are not “user friendly,” teachers say they are printing out the lessons and making copies. Sometimes when teachers try to go back to a lesson, it is gone and replaced with something new.

She said her school was told it must adopt Skyline. That meant she had to stop using an English language arts curriculum she and other teachers liked. Phillips-Mitchell says she believes schools serving low-income students of color are facing more pressure to adopt Skyline.

“Why give anyone a curriculum that’s not really ready to be rolled out?” she said. “Do you do it in some of these Black and brown communities that may not have such a voice?”

The Chicago Teachers Union applauds the district’s effort to create a curriculum bank. But chief of staff Jen Johnson said it is problematic that some teachers are being told that it’s mandatory, while district leaders insist it is not.

“The unevenness of implementation means that teachers are experiencing dramatically different messages,” she said. “We do not support this being some kind of citywide mandated curriculum that takes away important teacher autonomy.”

Johnson said staff need more planning time to consider and digest a new curriculum in order to buy into it and implement it well. She often hears about problems with the online interface or mistakes in the materials. For example, one social studies lesson somehow omitted an entire state.

Teachers and educators across the district interviewed by Chalkbeat and WBEZ echoed the concerns about the platform and what many said is an overwhelming amount of resources. The platform is designed by a company named SAFARI Montage.

The former elementary school principal said she understands the good intention of offering teachers a wealth of resources to choose from, but “Skyline is overly packed with lessons. It’s really too much information for teachers.”

A couple of educators told Chalkbeat and WBEZ that because the Skyline platform was frustrating to use, they instead accessed math materials directly on the website for Illustrative Math, the curriculum that the district adapted for Skyline — essentially defeating the purpose of having a district math curriculum.

A current West Side elementary principal said his teachers largely moved away from using the Skyline reading curriculum in the early grades — with his blessing — because of some of these frustrations. His school sprang for a different early literacy curriculum this year.

Other educators say some of the materials for students have dense text and few engaging visuals. Much of the curriculum is translated into Spanish, but there are questions about how well-suited the lessons are for English language learners. And some teachers say it can be too challenging to make the lessons accessible for students reading below grade level, especially at the high school level.

Bronzeville Classical Principal Nicole Spicer believes that Skyline has made her teachers’ jobs easier and made lessons more engaging for students.

At Bronzeville Classical, teachers and Spicer, the principal, say they can relate to some of these concerns. But they also feel strongly the district has been listening and making helpful changes — and overall, Skyline has enriched their teaching and made their work easier.

Earlier this winter, sixth graders in Hernandez’s classroom learned about how rugged mountain geography influenced the early engineering of the ancient Inca people. She took the Skyline lesson on the topic and made it her own, creating engaging slides with stunning images of the Andes mountains.

Skyline, Hernandez says, has helped her cut down significantly on the time she used to spend on nights and weekends looking for lesson materials online.

Later, students explored design and engineering by the Spartans and ancient Greeks — culminating in a discussion of how these long-gone cultures influence design in present-day Chicago, such as its Soldier Field.

“They’re able to make that connection with the past and the present, which is really neat,” Hernandez said.

Javee Hernandez’s adoption of Skyline has saved her time on curriculum development over nights and weekends.

Beck, the teaching and learning head, says the digital curriculum was designed to be revised and improved quickly in response to teacher and student feedback. District leaders meet regularly with a steering committee of 120 teachers to get ongoing feedback. Beck said the district worked with SAFARI Montage to improve the platform and revamped some courses and units. It’s now focusing on upgrading materials meant for students.

Isabella Kelly, a member of a districtwide student advisory group, said fellow students had both positive feedback and suggestions for improving Skyline during a focus group on the science and French curriculums she hosted last spring.

Kelly, an Ogden High senior and student leader with the group Mikva Challenge, said students found the lessons engaging and loved the opportunities to collaborate on projects and work in small groups. But they also sometimes struggled navigating the online platform.

“The biggest challenge they faced was learning along with their teachers,” she said. “They wanted a little more assistance.”

Skyline is a key tool for academic recovery, district leaders say

In a recent webinar, district leaders reminded principals that rolling out a new curriculum is a heavy, time-consuming lift, and urged them not to get discouraged by the “growing pains,” as Chief Education Officer Bogdana Chkoumbova put it.

By keeping lessons and assignments squarely on grade levels, the curriculum can play a key part in COVID academic recovery, officials have said. It’s encouraging teachers to avoid constantly reteaching material from earlier grades — an approach shown to hamper academic catchup. That’s challenging work, Beck acknowledged, but the schools can layer other support, such as a specialized program for struggling readers called Wilson.

Beck said Chicago has worked with a group of curriculum experts to continually evaluate Skyline and better understand its impact on student outcomes, but that’s still a work in progress. The University of Chicago is studying whether the curriculum is paying off in early literacy improvements.

Steiner, at Johns Hopkins, says he is generally skeptical of the enormous energy and expense that go into creating an in-house curriculum in all subjects given the quality of off-the-shelf curriculums — especially if the district makes it voluntary. But he said rallying around a strong curriculum, particularly the collaborative work of teachers adopting it as grade level or subject matter teams, can be powerful for urban districts such as Chicago.

Some educators say that in a district where top leadership has been in flux for years and initiatives come and go, they are reluctant to buy into Skyline in a big way.

But Chkoumbova said the district knows adoption is a “long and hard process for schools,” and Skyline is here to stay.

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.

Sarah Karp covers education for WBEZ. Follow her on Twitter @WBEZeducation and @sskedreporter.

NYC parent coordinators are essential school workers. Many feel undervalued and underpaid.

2023-03-27T10:00:00+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Sign up for our free New York newsletter to keep up with NYC’s public schools.

“Family engagement” and “parent empowerment” are not mere buzzwords to Ana Maria Aguilar.

They are her touchstones as parent coordinator at a Brooklyn elementary school, where she sees the faces of her own parents — immigrants from Mexico — reflected in many of the families at drop-off and pickup.

“They come in with such fear. I try to make them feel welcome,” Aguilar said. “As a brown woman, who is also an immigrant, I can relate to their stories.”

That kind of connection drew Aguilar to become parent coordinator at Sunset Park’s P.S. 24 in the fall of 2020, a decision rooted in her desire to give back to her community after losing loved ones to the pandemic. But she found a job remade in many ways by COVID, which caused some parents and students to fear being back in school and ushered in a host of new challenges for staff.

New York City schools created the parent coordinator position 20 years ago as a way to connect families to their children’s schools after then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg assumed control of the nation’s largest school system, abolishing the local school boards that had given parents some direct decision-making power.

The role, which typically varies from school to school, has become more critical — and stressful —during the pandemic. Nearly a dozen parent coordinators described how they became their school’s tech support, public health workers, and family therapists. They doled out devices and got families logged onto school accounts. They communicated with families about COVID-related protocols and quarantines, and were often the ones standing outside of schools each morning taking students’ temperatures and collecting health screeners. They fielded calls from families with concerns about returning to buildings and were the ones reaching out to parents when kids went missing from classrooms for prolonged periods of time.

And many are now charged with helping the thousands of migrant families that have entered the public school system.

Parent coordinator salaries, however, have not kept pace with the job’s demands, staffers say, or with inflation. Starting salaries for parent coordinators two decades ago were between $30,000 and $39,000 a year. That would be about $49,400 to $64,200 in today’s dollars.

New hires for parent coordinators start at $38,235, according to current job postings.

It’s not uncommon for parent coordinators to turn to public assistance or take on additional jobs, several school staffers told Chalkbeat. And unlike teachers, parent coordinators are required to work some weekends and nights, getting comp time rather than extra pay. They also must work summers and during school breaks, where they have to report in person to borough offices.

Ana Maria Aguilar (center), the parent coordinator at P.S. 24 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, helps organize events celebrating families’ culture.

“We’re helping struggling parents, but we’re also struggling parents,” said Aguilar, herself a graduate of Brooklyn public schools and a former parent/teacher association head of her childrens’ school. For the upcoming spring break, she will likely have to take personal days since she doesn’t have child care for her first and fourth graders.

The city recently reached a tentative deal with District Council 37, the union representing parent coordinators, along with other city workers, including school aides, cafeteria workers, and other staffers critical to the day-to-day functioning of schools.

Under the deal, union members will get a one-time $3,000 signing bonus and four years of 3% annual raises, with a 3.25% bump in the fifth year. The deal, which runs retroactive to May 2021, remains below the pace of inflation, which hit 6% last year. But it was higher than Mayor Eric Adams’ proposed 1.25% increase in his preliminary budget.

Members have until the end of the month to vote on the deal, which is largely expected to be ratified. Many parent coordinators, however, remain upset that the contract doesn’t address certain issues like their in-person work requirements during school holidays.

Parent coordinators are helping families process trauma

Though COVID protocols are no longer as time-consuming, parent coordinators are still helping families whose lives have been profoundly impacted by the pandemic over the past few years. They are also on the frontline working with the families of the 14,000 asylum-seeking students who have enrolled this school year, many of whom arrived with few belongings, a lot of trauma, and little English.

Parent coordinators are often part of a school’s team focused on tackling chronic absenteeism, which has become a major problem, with about 40% of children last year missing at least a month of school. And they continue to have other duties, including marketing their schools — which has become more important as enrollment has dropped. They organize school tours and help families with admissions questions, both those interested in coming to their schools as well as those who are graduating.

At the start of this year, before the city lifted vaccination requirements for parents to enter the building, de-escalating tense situations often fell to parent coordinators, said Jonathan Figueroa, who started in the role at P.S. 59 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, two days before the pandemic closed down campuses.

“I do feel like the job has taken on more. I see the burnout is real,” said Figueroa, who hopes to finish his bachelor’s degree and become a social worker. “But for me, it’s about being involved and advocating for my community.”

Aguilar began building routines during the pandemic that have continued to serve her school community this year, as it welcomed an influx of migrant students.

Her Mondays focus on community resources, providing information about food pantries or rent relief. Tuesdays touch on self-care: A recent workshop with New York University’s ParentCorps discussed the importance of helping kids hold onto their roots after coming to a new country. On Fridays, she leads “community walks” to sites such as the large manufacturing and shopping complex at Industry City or the office of their local City Council member. Weekends are for coat and food drives as well as “family fun” activities.

Like Aguilar and Figueroa, Erica Ramos became a parent coordinator during the pandemic, where her ability to listen and her bilingual skills were a great asset. She let parents “release their stress,” and tried to help them manage their fears and frustrations as the various guidance from the education department shifted. With several families still too scared to send their children back, Ramos geared up with masks and face shields to do home visits with counselors.

“I spent hours and hours on the phone listening to parents just terrified,” said Ramos, parent coordinator at Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts, a middle and high school in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights. “What was it going to look like? How were we going to keep students socially distanced? And there were all these Catch 22s. We had the windows open, but it was freezing. So parents were calling to complain that their kids were too cold.”

She continues to help families in whatever way they need. Amid growing concerns about an uptick in marijuana use across city schools, she recently held a family workshop on drug use organized with her school’s substance abuse prevention counselor. She’s become the point person for a school-based pantry, ordering the food and reaching out to families to let them know about it.

Erica Ramos, the parent coordinator at Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

Her full-time job as parent coordinator isn’t enough for Ramos, a single mom who lives in Bushwick, to pay her bills. Her paycheck every two weeks of $1,500 covers her $1,900 a month rent in Brooklyn, but leaves little left for food and other necessities. Ramos recently reapplied for food stamps, but missed an enrollment call from the program. The process of starting over feels too daunting, she said. She also works at a restaurant on Thursdays nights and for Sunday brunch. On Friday evenings or Saturday mornings, she cleans houses.

She’s been eyeing other positions in the education department because her current one, she said, is “illogical” in terms of how much they get paid for the work and time they put in compared to other school staffers.

“Why am I working full time for the city of New York, and I can’t afford to live in the city of New York?” Ramos asked.

A wave of parent coordinator job openings on horizon

For some parent coordinators, the role is a stepping stone, while they finish degrees or get other higher-paying school secretarial jobs. For some, it’s a second career, which gives them a cushion of savings. But many have been doing the job for the long haul, and as the position reaches its second decade, schools are bracing for a wave of retirements.

As part of last June’s agreement in Albany to extend mayoral control over the city’s school system for another two years, the state tweaked the hiring process for parent coordinators, requiring that each district’s parent advisory boards, known as Community Education Councils, approve each new parent coordinator.

Rosa Diaz, president of District 4’s Community Education Council in East Harlem, said the change has been fruitful in building relationships with the new parent coordinators.

“I see it as another opportunity to work together,” Diaz said, explaining that they tell the new hires, “If you need any support, reach out to us.”

Sara Sloves was a teacher at a Harlem charter school before becoming the parent coordinator at the Upper West Side’s Computer School in 2007. The job took on a different “energy” during the pandemic, she said, as families eagerly awaited her weekly newsletters with updates on the city’s evolving COVID guidelines. She started hosting meetups at local parks to help them feel connected to the school. She still sets up time on Fridays to meet families at local coffee shops, but more recently has begun to host breakfasts again at school.

“You need to have a kind and understanding soul at the end of the day,” Sloves said. “You have to be able to connect with people and want to do that.”

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Denver schools are bringing back police. Other places in the U.S. already have.

2023-03-23T23:29:35+00:00

When a Denver teen shot and injured two school administrators on Wednesday, it marked the third time this year that gun violence had rocked East High, the city’s largest high school.

For the schools superintendent, it signaled the need for a dramatic shift in district policy: the return of police at comprehensive high schools for the remainder of the school year.

“I can no longer stand on the sidelines,” Alex Marrero wrote in a letter to the school board, which voted in 2020 to remove police from schools. The city’s mayor quickly backed the decision, and even a local group long opposed to police in schools acknowledged that acts of violence “force hard conversations.” On Thursday, the school board agreed to temporarily lift its ban on school police.

The turnabout in Denver echoes recent decisions to bring back school police by a few other districts across the U.S. In some cases, as in Denver, these debates are coming to a head after a shooting or other act of violence on campus erodes support.

Many other districts have stayed the course. But with more communities nationwide facing upticks in gun violence, and in a moment with far less political attention being paid to racism and policing, it remains unclear if changes elsewhere will be walked back.

“It makes sense that communities are really struggling following incidents like this — they are traumatic and scary,” said Katherine Dunn of The Advancement Project, a nonprofit that has advocated for the removal of police from schools. Bringing back police can be a quick, visible way for school leaders to demonstrate they are being reactive in a moment of crisis. “Every time this happens,” she said, policing is “the one thing that we know to go back to and try again.”

School leaders, families, students, and community groups have long wrestled with what role police should play in schools.

School shootings have prompted schools to add guards and police in an effort to stop future violence, though their track record is mixed. By 2019, just over half of U.S. schools had at least one armed officer present, according to a federal survey. But having police in school has also been shown to increase arrests and suspensions, with Black students most likely to be arrested at school and less likely to feel safer when police were around.

According to a tracker compiled by Education Week, at least 50 school districts eliminated school police or significantly reduced their school policing budgets from May 2020 through June 2022, following the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing racial justice protests of 2020.

Denver was one of several school districts that removed or scaled back the presence of school police during that period. The district canceled its contract with the city’s police department and officers were removed from schools by June 2021.

Eight districts ended up bringing back school police, EdWeek found, at least three of which reversed course in response to shootings or the presence of weapons at or near schools.

These debates are often complicated and play out differently depending on the community.

Some in Denver were questioning whether the school district should revisit its relationship with the police even before this week’s tragedy.

In Portland, Oregon, where the school district removed police from schools in 2020, the mayor said in December that talks were in the works to possibly bring officers back after students were shot outside two different high schools.

Montgomery County schools in Maryland brought back police following a shooting at a high school in January 2022 that injured a student.

And Alexandria City schools in Virginia temporarily reinstated police following several student fights and an incident in which a student had a handgun outside the city’s high school. The debate continued after a student was stabbed to death outside the same school. In January, an advisory group ultimately recommended that the district keep police in schools, in part to show families the district was taking those violent incidents seriously.

In those cases, police returned with some new requirements in place. Montgomery County, for example, limited which incidents police could get involved in, while Alexandria is poised to require that school police receive de-escalation training.

Elsewhere, changes have stuck. In Los Angeles, the district cut its policing budget by more than a third and reinvested that money into an initiative to boost Black student achievement. That includes hiring hundreds of new social workers, counselors, and other staff for schools that enroll large percentages of Black students. Some students have reported feeling more relaxed seeing those mental health staffers on campus instead of police.

“I feel like a big part of their purpose is to help you feel comfortable in your skin,” one 16-year-old student told Capital B.

Still, conversations about the future of school police are ongoing in lots of places. In Washington D.C., where the city has been shrinking its school police force, the mayor tried and failed to reverse the measure last year and is set to try again. In Chicago, decisions are being made at the school level, and 40 schools will decide whether to continue having police on campus in the next few months.

In Denver, the board suspended its policy prohibiting police in schools through the end of June. It also directed the superintendent to engage with students, families, and teachers, and to seek funding for additional mental health staff.

Dunn says while many schools have experimented with removing police, they have a longer way to go to figure out how to staff and fund alternatives to police.

“The systems transformation that is required to actually have schools be safe places — I don’t really see that happening,” she said.

Sarah Darville contributed reporting.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago school leaders foresee declining revenue but promise more investments

2023-03-22T23:40:07+00:00

Chicago Public Schools leaders warned of looming budget deficits Wednesday, but still promised to increase funds for pandemic recovery, migrant students, and other needs in the coming school year’s budget.

Over the past year, district officials have repeatedly cautioned about leaner budgets ahead. By 2024, the district will spend down its $2.8 billion in federal COVID relief, which has given it a financial cushion. It could lose some revenue with sharp declines in enrollment. At the same time, it faces a squeeze from rising inflation, a possible recession, and increasing pension and debt service costs.

“These issues have been papered over by federal support, but we need to confront them head on,” district CEO Pedro Martinez said.

A district report last fall noted the city has shifted costs onto the district and could offload more expenses amid a transition from mayoral control to an elected school board. The report described the district’s financial outlook as “fragile” and warned of a potential $628 million deficit by 2026, which represents about 6% of this year’s $9.5 billion budget.

The district won’t produce draft school budgets until next month and a districtwide budget until this summer. But despite the financial pressures it faces, officials said the district will continue to invest in summer and after-school programs, school counselors, academic interventionists, and other positions that it said are paying off.

Martinez promised to put more dollars toward students with disabilities, newly arrived migrant students, and student mental health services.

Some board members have previously criticized the city’s move to shift costs to the district. But on Wednesday, the district’s leaders laid the blame squarely on underfunding by the state. Martinez said he would convene community leaders and other supporters to lobby for more dollars.

The state’s school funding formula shows Chicago Public Schools receives about $1 billion less than what Illinois considers adequate funding. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of state money each year service the district’s massive debt rather than provide for classroom needs.

Chicago also is the only district in the state that covers its own teacher pension costs.

Martinez told board members Wednesday the district will continue to ensure each school has arts programming, every high school has an athletic director, and every student has a laptop or tablet. The district also will increase “equity grants” to prop up elementary and high schools with shrinking enrollment.

It will spend $60 million more next year on services for students with disabilities.

In recent years, the district has paid for police officers stationed in schools, crossing guards, and contributions toward a city-run pension fund — costs previously covered by the city. Those expenses this year totaled about $200 million.

The district also could face increased costs for water, sewer, rent, summer programs, and more, which the city may pass on even though it covers some of them for community colleges and other entities.

On Wednesday, district administrators stressed that pandemic relief dollars have allowed it to ward off cuts. Officials said the district has spent $1.7 billion of its federal COVID allocation, with plans to spend $696 million more next school year.

“There has been a temptation to spend the money as quickly as possible but we opted to be more methodical and more strategic,” Martinez said.

“We want to continue to emphasize that the district receives only 75% of what the state says we need to be adequately funded,” said Michael Sitkowski, deputy chief in the district’s budget and management office.

Officials also noted that the district would have more than half a billion dollars each year to spend on instruction if the state covered teacher pensions in the same way it does for other districts — and another half a billion if it did not have to service its debt related to building upkeep. Martinez stressed that both of these costs are slated to rise in coming years.

“Teacher pensions will take any new revenues we have — state or local,” he said. “They will take it all.”

School board member Michael Scott Jr. noted that the district has not succeeded in pleading with the state for more money in the past. He asked if the district has a plan B if it strikes out. But Martinez insisted only that Chicago must focus on getting more funds from Springfield.

“‘They have so few children and so many adults,’” he said he has heard critics contend. “Frankly that’s what we should have had all along.”

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.

Tutoring isn’t reaching most students. Here’s how to vastly expand it.

2023-03-22T10:00:00+00:00

Tutoring was supposed to be schools’ secret weapon — a way to reverse pandemic learning loss before students fell even further behind.

But three years after COVID closed schools, and with the deadline to spend pandemic recovery funds fast approaching, many students still aren’t getting the help they need. By some estimates, just 1 in 10 students — or fewer — are receiving intensive tutoring.

The good news? Experts say it’s still possible to drastically expand tutoring. Millions more students can get the help they need, the experts said, if leaders are willing to do what it takes.

“There is an enormous need right now,” said Naeha Dean, chief strategy officer of Accelerate, a nonprofit that funds research on effective tutoring. “We really can’t wait.”

Chalkbeat asked a dozen experts how to ramp up effective tutoring. Here’s what they said:

Schedule tutoring during the school day

Most schools say they offer tutoring, yet few students actually receive it. Why?

One big reason is that tutoring is often held after school, which all but ensures low participation. Families must consent to after-hours tutoring and figure out transportation, and students must show up. Each step shrinks the pool of participants.

During-school tutoring side steps those challenges, allowing most students to attend. Students also tend to take tutoring more seriously during school than after, when programs often feature snacks and playtime alongside academics.

Most importantly, tutoring during school is more effective. A 2020 research review found that the academic impact of tutoring during school is roughly twice as large as tutoring after school.

“The science tells us that students are much more tuned in, plugged in, not fatigued, ready to engage, during the school day,” said Jen Mendelsohn, co-founder of Braintrust, which runs school tutoring programs.

It can be tough to squeeze tutoring into the school day, but experts say it’s possible by repurposing existing class periods or creating new ones. For example, the charter school organization Uncommon Schools shaved a few minutes off each period, freeing up 30-40 minutes each day for teachers to tutor small groups.

After-school tutoring just isn’t feasible for some families, said Juliana Worrell, Uncommon’s K-8 chief of schools. “So what we have concentrated on is incorporating tutoring into our actual school day.”

Turn school staffers into tutors

Many school leaders say they can’t find or afford enough tutors. Luckily, one solution is already in the building.

Nationwide, schools employ more than 880,000 paraprofessionals, or classroom aides, who assist teachers and support students with disabilities. That’s more than the number of principals, guidance counselors, and school librarians combined.

Often overlooked and underutilized, paraprofessionals can make great tutors, experts say. First, they are more racially diverse than teachers, which can benefit students. Second, they are already district employees, saving schools the time and cost of hiring outside tutors. Most importantly, they’re effective.

Tutoring studies have consistently found that paraprofessionals are second only to teachers in their ability to boost student learning. (The studies also count aspiring teachers as paraprofessionals.)

With “proper supports, such as good materials and coaching, they can be excellent tutors,” said Stanford professor Susanna Loeb, who founded the National Student Support Accelerator to expand access to high-quality tutoring.

If principals are eager to use classroom aides as tutors but not sure how, they can turn to companies like Once. The firm, which works with schools in about 10 states, provides training and a curriculum to help school support staff teach reading to kindergartners. The daily tutoring sessions are then recorded so Once coaches can review the footage with tutors and offer feedback.

The service is much less costly than hiring additional tutors, said Once CEO Matt Pasternack. And it has the added benefit of putting some paraprofessionals on the path to becoming teachers.

“By the end of one year with us, they’ve gotten 20 hours of coaching in the science of reading,” he said. “There’s a lot more to learn before becoming a classroom teacher, but it’s a great foundation.”

Tap other talent pools for tutors

Schools can also find an ample supply of would-be tutors outside their walls.

One natural talent pool is the country’s estimated 600,000 aspiring teachers. Before they begin student teaching, educators-in-training often spend extensive time observing K-12 classrooms. But some teacher training programs have started using that time for tutoring, which lets aspiring teachers gain experience while assisting students.

“Research is clear that practice matters for aspiring teachers,” said Patrick Steck, senior policy director at Deans for Impact, a nonprofit working to deploy more student teachers as tutors.

Local officials are finding solutions to the inevitable logistical challenges, Steck added. For example, some teaching programs have rescheduled classes to not conflict with tutoring, while some cities and school districts cover tutors’ transportation costs.

Other college students can also make great tutors, though making that happen can be a burden for schools. Several states have stepped in to help, launching programs that recruit, train, and pay college students to work as tutors. For example, California’s new College Corps fellowship is paying college students $10,000 to tutor K-12 students this school year. Interest was high, with about three undergraduates applying for every fellowship slot, according to the state.

Parents and caregivers are another source of tutoring talent. The parent-led nonprofit Oakland REACH shows how that can work. The group recruited parents during school dropoff and pickup, then paid them a stipend to attend a six-week training on how to teach reading. The parents, whom the group calls Literacy Liberators, are now district employees earning pay and benefits to tutor students during school.

“It starts with changing your mindset about how you see our communities,” said Oakland REACH CEO Lakisha Young. “We see our parents are very powerful — we see them as the change agents.”

Use virtual tutoring wisely

Virtual tutoring can be a godsend for schools. It lets harried administrators outsource the heavy lifting and, in theory at least, allows students to get help even from home.

But there’s a big problem with virtual tutoring: Many students never use it.

One of the most popular services, Paper, lets students chat with tutors by text message 24/7. But in several school districts, only a tiny fraction of the students who have access to the service use it. And struggling students who most need help are often the least likely to log on.

Programs where students and tutors meet by video after school have also struggled with attendance. For example, in Indianapolis, only about 1 in 3 students who signed up for after-school virtual tutoring attended more than one session, officials said.

But the good news is that virtual tutoring — when done right — can be highly effective, said Loeb, the education professor who has studied online tutoring.

“Some virtual programs show dramatic effects for students,” she said in an email.

The programs work best during the school day, with adults in the classroom supervising as students work with their virtual tutors, Loeb said. Students should attend several tutoring sessions each week, and tutors should receive coaching and high-quality materials.

“What makes a good virtual tutoring program,” Loeb said, “is very much the same as what makes a good in-person tutoring program.”

States and feds must step up

Creating large-scale tutoring programs is costly and complicated — and probably not the best use of superintendents’ time.

“You can’t just leave it up to 13,000 school districts to figure out,” said Morgan Polikoff, a University of Southern California education professor. “State and federal governments have to get more involved.”

There are several ways to do that, experts say.

States can vet tutoring providers, develop clear guidelines, and help with tutor recruitment. Sixteen states have gone even further and established their own tutoring programs, according to an analysis by the Council of Chief State School Officers.

The Biden administration launched a public-private partnership that promotes effective tutoring practices and provides technical assistance to districts. But experts say the federal government could do more to incentivize schools to offer tutoring and remove roadblocks. For example, federal work study rules could be expanded so more college students and aspiring teachers are paid for tutoring, according to a new Deans for Impact report.

Whatever officials do, they must move quickly, tutoring proponents say.

“Students are still in school and they are not receiving the betterment they’re entitled to,” said Mendelsohn, the tutoring provider. “This is their fundamental right.”

Kalyn Belsha contributed reporting.

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

Ski day helps Aspen Community School students cope with recent false shooting threats

2023-03-17T16:30:00+00:00

This story originally aired on Aspen Public Radio and is republished with permission.

After a string of school threats over the last month and a half, many students, teachers and families in the valley have been on edge.

The three false threats each happened on a Wednesday morning and schools were bracing themselves for the possibility of another one last week.

A threat didn’t materialize last week, but instead of waiting to find out whether they’d have to secure their buildings yet again, teachers and administrators at the Aspen Community School decided to do something different.

So on the morning of Wednesday, March 8, over a hundred K-8 students gathered for a day of cross-country skiing at the Snowmass Nordic Center.

After students and teachers took a few laps on the trails, ACS principal Casey White called a brief all-school meeting.

“So last Wednesday, you guys probably remember we had an all-school meeting and then shortly after you got the message that we were going to secure the building again,” she said to students and staff. “And you know what I noticed? The kindergarteners were already out cross-country skiing. And all of a sudden an idea hit, ‘Maybe we should all do that.’”

White ran the idea by her staff first, and then alerted families and local law enforcement that they would be doing a school ski day.

“So one week later here we are, we are all out cross-country skiing because you have been so powerful in being able to stay calm and to help us through times that we don’t really know what’s coming next,” she said. “So thank you for coming out here.”

Out on the trails, fourth-grade student Kai Waanders was skiing with a few of his classmates.

“It’s amazing that we get to be out here instead of being inside a school all locked up like the last few Wednesdays,” he said. “It was kind of surprising and a little scary to have such a surprise — it hasn’t happened once last year or the year before.”

While some schools in the area received direct threats and had to go into full lockdowns, the Aspen Community School went into “secure” mode as a safety precaution.

Under a “secure protocol,” all doors are locked and no one is allowed in or out of the main school building while classes continue.

Waanders said that even though he was worried thinking about all the “what ifs,” he also felt safe.

“I knew that we had a community and people that could help us if something were to ever happen, and I knew that we’ve been preparing for it since kindergarten,” he said.

School lockdown drills aren’t the only way that Waanders and his classmates have been preparing for situations like this.

For years, Aspen Community School has been offering what it calls “social emotional” learning.

“It was a group of us on a very grassroots level, sitting around in our old building,” said White. “The question was, ‘What do we want for our ACS graduates? What character traits do we want our students to embody?’”

They eventually landed on five traits that are now the core of the school’s social emotional program: kindness, compassion, empathy, tolerance, and patience.

White said teachers and staff shape their curriculum to help kids learn those skills.

“We feel like when you can embed the tools to be able to self-calm and to navigate social problems and to apologize when needed — when you can do that in a setting that’s not super stressful, like cross-country skiing or a normal day in the classroom, then when something tough comes up, you’ve got the muscle,” she said.

At an all-school meeting at the Snowmass Nordic Center, Aspen Community School Principal Casey White thanks her K-8 students for how well they handled having to remain inside the locked school building during the recent false threats.

ACS also works with Lily Larkin, a licensed clinical social worker and wellness teacher from the Aspen Hope Center.

Larkin is one of the center’s twelve school-based clinicians in the valley and she spends four days a week at ACS.

“One of the things we work on is knowing that when our brains go into a fight, flight or freeze response, we’re not necessarily going to learn effectively in that state of mind,” she said.

When the school went into “secure,” Larkin says teachers created a sense of safety by tailoring classroom activities to how the students were feeling and coming up with projects that weren’t necessarily part of the regular school day.

“So they were doing art projects in the classroom, they were knitting, they were doing a lot of really wonderful hands-on activities to support them in that moment,” she said.

Larkin is also a parent at ACS and she appreciated that teachers went around to each class and told students in an age-appropriate way what was happening, while it was happening.

“So when my first-grader came home after having the experience, she just looked at me and she said, ‘Mom, somebody was trying to scare our school today,’” Larkin said. “And that’s how she described it.”

Some of the social emotional skills the school teaches, such as the “breathing tool” and the “listening tool,” are also helpful for parents.

“When my daughter comes home and she is visibly upset about something, but she tells me that she’s fine, I can look at her and I can say, ‘Sweetheart, if I’m listening with my eyes, ears, and heart, I can tell that there is something wrong — and you don’t have to tell me right now, but I’m here for you and I wanna hear about it,’” she said. “And that’s the ‘listening tool.’”

As a parent, Larkin is especially grateful to teachers who’ve supported families and kids through everything from the pandemic to school threats.

“Teachers are absolutely heroes and they have become, in the last decade or so, first responders,” she said. “It really feels like that has amped up a lot.”

Back at the nordic center, a group of middle-school students who regularly meet with Larkin were taking a ski break.

“Once a week we go down to her classroom and we sit in a circle and she asks us questions and we answer them altogether,” said sixth-grade student Annalise Ingram. “Also if you need some more time, you can just go down and see her anytime.”

Fellow sixth-grader, Anderson Tippet, said he appreciated the questions that Larkin asked them after the recent threats.

“One of them was like, ‘How are you dealing with this?’ ‘What makes you feel better or helps you not be as nervous about it?’” he recalled.

Tippet said he’s realized that having friends close by helps.

“Most of us have been together since kindergarten, so we’re all really good friends,” he said.

For her part, Larkin said she’s impressed by her students.

“They have moved through all of the feelings related to the last few Wednesdays and it’s so fun to see everybody together smiling, falling over, laughing, picking each other up,” she said.

The group of students agreed that they’re also proud of each other and grateful for their teachers and the whole community.

“Even when we were stuck inside, we still got through it really nicely by working together,” said fourth-grade student Cora Chimerakis. “The teachers just made it all happen and I’m really thankful for them — and thank you for the community always being there for us.”

Eleanor Bennett is an award-winning journalist and Morning Edition anchor. Eleanor has reported on a wide range of topics in her community, including the impacts of federal immigration policies on local DACA recipients, the Valley’s COVID-19 eviction and housing crisis, and hungry goats fighting climate change across the West through targeted grazing.

As mental health toll on NYC educators mounts, schools scramble to offer support

2023-03-13T10:00:00+00:00

The dire mental health conditions for staff and a wave of teacher resignations at one Brooklyn charter school prompted administrators to create a new position this year: a social worker responsible for supporting educators.

The staffer tapped for the role, Marcelle Davies-Lashley, a former city education department social worker, was skeptical at first. But she quickly discovered that many of her coworkers needed someone to talk to.

“We get to shoot the breeze and talk about whatever their stress of the day is,” Davies-Lashley said. “Sometimes it has to do with their own personal life, or with getting back to school, or scholars who are disrupting their class on a regular basis, or they’ve had a family loss. It could be anything.”

The experiment at Brooklyn Lab is part of a growing acknowledgment that many teachers are still struggling with mental health challenges three years into the pandemic and need more support. Many are dealing with unresolved trauma and grief in their personal lives while trying to regain their rhythm teaching in person and manage the mounting emotional and behavioral challenges of their students.

“Teaching has always been hard, that’s part of why I like it. But the past couple of years, it has really felt nearly impossible to do my job well,” said Brittany Kaiser, an elementary school art teacher in Manhattan. “I think the cumulative effect is what’s most hard … We can handle really big challenges, but the fact that it is one crisis after another, and repeatedly no support is available, you just hit a breaking point.”

The extent of educators’ trauma, and how it’s manifesting three years into the pandemic, is still coming into focus. A recent study found that during the height of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, teachers reported higher levels of anxiety than any other profession, including healthcare workers.

A member assistance program through the city teachers union that offers short-term counseling to educators more than quadrupled in size, from serving roughly 4,500 educators in the 2018-19 school year to around 20,000 last school year, a rise first reported by The 74.

And now the union program is going even further: partnering with the healthcare company HelloHero to match 2,500 educators with long-term therapists covered by their insurance.

Tina Puccio, the director of the United Federation of Teachers’ member assistance program, said she’s not surprised that mental health concerns have persisted, or even escalated, for some educators three years after the arrival of COVID-19.

“I remember thinking back when COVID was at its height, like God, this is going to linger. The mental anguish this is going to put on people is going to be here for a long time,” Puccio said. “And that’s still showing up.”

Educator mental health concerns have been building

When COVID hit New York City in March 2020, and schools shut down, Puccio’s program didn’t have the capacity to handle the wave of acute mental health challenges that hit educators, forcing her to put out a call for volunteers.

“I went from a staff of eight to a staff of about 300 overnight,” Puccio said. “They ran groups for me day and night, Monday through Sunday. They were talking to people at nine o’clock at night. They were calling me crying because they needed help with debriefing.”

As the acute challenges of the early pandemic faded and schools returned to in-person learning, a new set of mental health issues emerged.

Some educators confronted crippling anxiety at the thought of returning to school. Puccio recalled one member who lost her mother to COVID early in the pandemic and broke down in tears when she arrived back at school to see the empty seat of a student who had also died from COVID.

Other educators struggled to absorb a spike in behavior issues among their students after in-person school resumed while still dealing with their own lingering challenges.

“The behavior was so extreme,” said Peter, a middle school art teacher in Manhattan, who asked to use only his first name so as not to identify his school. “They [students] were traumatized, and they were acting as students with extreme levels of trauma do, and we were not prepared by any means.”

In some cases, the challenges have pushed some educators to leave the profession altogether.

At Brooklyn Lab, CEO Garland Thomas-McDavid, who started her position in July, quickly realized “people are not okay. We’re experiencing people resigning like crazy. We’ve had to do a lot to think about how do we create a workspace and structure the team to support adults so that we don’t lose all of our teachers. We need them.”

Peter left the city education department in January after his mental and physical health deteriorated.

“I struggled with depression … and all the things that come with that,” he said. “I became much less physically active. My weight, my self-esteem, my self-image declined, my relationships with friends suffered.”

Even excluding teachers who left because of the vaccine mandate, teacher turnover between fall 2022 and fall 2023 increased slightly compared to the years before the pandemic, from around 6% to 7% before the pandemic to 8% this year, an education department spokesperson said.

That echoes new data from eight states suggesting that an unusual number of teachers left the classroom after last school year.

Education department spokesperson Nathaniel Styer pointed to the agency’s Employee Assistance program and said the department has “leaned into creating emotionally supportive school environments for both students and staff, which is part of the reason we have not seen a significant drop in the retention of staff.”

Schools scramble to shore up supports

Brooklyn Lab’s experiment in providing mental health services to its staff in-house has not been without its bumps.

It took some time for word to spread and colleagues to feel comfortable opening up, Davies-Lashley conceded. But she pointed to advantages to the model as well, including having a mental health provider who’s intimately familiar with the conditions teachers are facing, and maybe even specific students.

All in all, “I think you would get a better quality educator if they knew they had this resource in the building,” she said.

Puccio, the UFT member assistance program administrator, echoed the importance — and difficulty — of building trust with educators.

“Taking care of people is their first go-to,” she said. “They’re not the first and foremost to really take care of themselves.” Puccio added many educators working in the city education department are wary of confiding in administrators, worried their disclosures could be used against them.

But after several years of steady growth, Puccio had to look outside the union to meet the burgeoning demand for mental health support, initiating the partnership with HelloHero.

Still, for some educators, help hasn’t yet arrived. Kaiser is still waiting to be matched with a mental health provider through HelloHero, and has had no luck finding a private therapist covered by her insurance.

In the meantime, she feels largely alone to confront both her own mental health challenges and those of the kids she sees each day at work.

“It creates an impossible situation,” she said. “We’re having to deal with our own issues and their issues in a society where there’s no way to address those things adequately.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

More children are grieving after the loss of a parent. Cherry Creek schools are piloting a program just for them.

2023-03-09T19:43:53+00:00

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For years after Oliver Dean lost his dad to cancer at age 5, triggers could send him into a depressive spiral.

But young Oliver had some advantages: He had a mother who worked at his school, an accessible school counselor and a psychologist specializing in child grief. Together, they helped him cope with overwhelming memories and disabling pain.

Since the pandemic began, more children have experienced the loss of a parent or caregiver, but too few of them have access to such support.

Last year, the Cherry Creek School District began a pilot program with grief-care nonprofit Judi’s House in Aurora to host group therapy for elementary age students. The Cherry Creek Schools Foundation is funding the program.

This year the program serves 20 students at two schools.

“I think there is a lot more need, absolutely,” said Steve Nederveld, director of mental health for the Cherry Creek School District. “We had schools specifically ask us for this kind of program.”

Dean knows about that need.

One day in third grade, a book about a girl who had alopecia, a condition causing hair loss, flooded Dean’s mind with painful memories about his dad balding and how he didn’t remember him with hair.

Often, teachers knew to warn Dean when a subject in class might remind him of his loss. On this day, Dean wasn’t expecting to have a wave of grief wash over him. But because he had been learning skills to deal with his emotions, he recognized what he was feeling and decided to step out of his classroom.

Now 19, Dean says he was lucky to have the support, part of it arranged beforehand by his dad, who was a social worker. He knows most children aren’t as fortunate.

“There are far more people than you would expect who lose someone significant before they turn 18,” Dean said. “You don’t know everyone’s circumstance. There are a lot more people who can relate than you think.”

Need for grief care is growing

If Cherry Creek’s trial proves it helps children, leaders say they hope it could become a regular part of Judi’s House offerings to schools. That would require more data to show the program works, as well as a way to pay for it, since the group does not charge schools. For years, the nonprofit has focused on middle schools, where they’ve felt their limited funding can make the most impact.

But Nederveld heard from elementary school leaders who want similar services in their schools.

Firm numbers are hard to come by, but people who work in schools say more students are dealing with losses. Nederveld said some of that is COVID-related, but students also are enduring the fallout of deaths by suicide, drug overdoses, and gun violence.

A model Judi’s House developed estimates the number of children who will experience the death of a parent or sibling by age 18. In 2018, that estimate was 1 in 18 children in Colorado. In 2022, the estimate went up to 1 in 14 children.

That would be about 7% of the child population.

“We weren’t really surprised by the data but we were also shocked, if that’s possible,” said Dr. Micki Burns, chief clinical officer at Judi’s House. In 2020, an estimated 4% of children who had lost a caregiver lost that parent to a gun-related homicide. “It’s a number that is growing and increasing.”

Burns said Judi’s House does serve everyone who comes to them but sometimes people have to wait for a spot in a group. The organization also offers quarterly family services. Sometimes people come to them but need other mental health services first, so they may get referred elsewhere.

”There is such a gap in mental health services in general,” Burns said. “As a society, we do need to do so much more.”

Schools see a benefit to helping students cope with grief

Last year, after the pilot started at Sagebrush elementary, Judi’s House found positive effects on students. Teachers reported students had improved attention and behavior, said Emily Napier, a licensed clinical social worker and community-based care manager for Judi’s House, who is running the pilot program.

Judi’s House is running its grief therapy groups this year at Cherry Creek’s Village East Community Elementary, where almost 70% of students qualify for subsidized meals, a measure of poverty, and Rolling Hills Elementary where about 15% of students do.

“I don’t think these two schools were outliers,” Nederveld said. “They were the first to reach out.”

Kids are placed into either kindergarten through second grade or third through fifth grade groups.

Rolling Hills has about 10 students in a weekly group, for third through fifth graders.

In the fall, staff reached out to families of students they knew had lost a close relative. If the family agreed, a Judi’s House clinician interviewed the student to see how grief was impacting them and to ensure the group setting could benefit them. Classroom teachers also filled out questionnaires about their student’s behavior in class.

This spring, the 10 students began meeting once a week, for an hour, in a group run by staff from Judi’s House.

District and school leaders say that the fact the group is run at school, during the school day, and for no charge helps families who may face barriers trying to access those services outside of schools.

Karen Arrowsmith, the school’s psychologist, said that halfway through the 10-week program, teachers are reporting that students are excited.

“They’re looking forward to the group, they’re opening up, and they’re checking in to make sure the group is still happening that week,” Arrowsmith said.

The goal is to slowly help students better understand their feelings, and to process their emotions. Then students learn about various coping strategies.

“When someone close to a child dies it kind of just rocks their world,” Arrowsmith said. “I would say we see a variety of emotions: confusion, sadness, anger, worry. Kids will tell me sleeping is hard. Concentrating on school work can be hard.”

For the younger group, a six-week course helps students label and understand their feelings and learn strategies to cope with them.

“A child’s understanding of the world can get shattered or disrupted,” Napier said. “It’s very painful. That can come out as behavioral changes. It helps schools to be able to say we don’t want to punish these kids for this behavior, but also we need them to be able to function and learn.”

Connecting with others helps children heal

Oliver Dean’s mom, Lisa Dean, remembers the first group session she and her son, then 7, joined at Judi’s House.

“We came home and Oliver said to me, ‘I want to go to school at Judi’s House,’” she said. “I was really confused. He loved school, but he said, ‘everyone there was like me. They all had someone in their life who died.’”

She and her son describe the “magic” of Judi’s House as their ability to create a safe space for families to talk about loss, despite being in a society that doesn’t like to talk about it.

Lisa says when Oliver was growing up she saw his grief show up in different ways. Changes, like the end of a school year, were difficult. Teachers noticed him struggling around the time of his bar mitzvah, because she realized he was missing his dad.

“Grief isn’t an event, it’s a journey that changes over time depending on the child’s maturity,” Lisa said. “As he matured he was able to see there’s lots of levels of loss and grief, and they’re not all as intense.”

Lisa now volunteers at Judi’s House, where she’s a “buddy” for children who need help completing activities during the group, or who need to be pulled away for a break during a difficult moment.

Napier said groups are a “powerful opportunity for kids to feel seen.”

“Sometimes, especially with little kids, as a society, we might underestimate how much grief they’re in, but little kids grieve just as much as we do,” Napier said.

Oliver, who is now in college, wishes more schools were prepared to help students who experience the death of a close family member.

“We live in a society that doesn’t want to talk about death. But for people who are grieving, it makes it harder to not see someone walking down the hall who gets it,” he said. “Leaving students in a lurch with an expectation they perform at the highest level, even when they’ve kind of been through it, it’s not fair. Sometimes there are things in life that are more important.”

Clarification: This story has been updated to more accurately describe the numbers of grieving children estimated in the model used by Judi’s House.

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Math scores dropped during the pandemic. Colorado plans to invest in tutoring, teacher training.

2023-03-07T18:15:00+00:00

Gov. Jared Polis and lawmakers hope to reach 50,000 Colorado students struggling with math skills through after-school tutoring while also offering more training to teachers and even parents.

Math scores have dropped in Colorado and the nation after three severely disrupted school years. Leaders hope the math initiative can turn around that trend and give students strong foundations as they enter high school and encounter more challenging material.

“We’ve seen a lot of kids who lost a couple of years during COVID,” said House Education Chair Barbara McLachlan, a Durango Democrat and bill sponsor. “And so we want to get them caught up for what they missed and get them to where they should be now, so at the end of the school year, they’re ready to go into the next year.”

Leaders unveiled the bipartisan math initiative Tuesday, though Polis had hinted at the outlines of the program in a January budget request. In contrast to Colorado’s yearslong efforts to improve reading proficiency, the program is voluntary and designed as a short-term intervention.

School districts, charter schools, and after-school programs run by community groups could apply for three-year grants to run math tutoring programs. Polis said the proposal is based on evidence that additional learning time can result in higher achievement. It should also save parents money on after-school care, he said, predicting that demand will be high.

Programs that work with high-needs students and with students in the transition years from elementary to middle school and from middle to high school would get priority, as would those using evidence-based math instruction.

The bill proposes setting aside $25 million for tutoring to be distributed over the next two years, plus another $3 million for other programs.

In addition to the after-school tutoring initiative, the bill would:

Encourage — but not require — school districts to identify students performing below grade level in math, tell their parents that they’re struggling, and offer interventions.
Make training programs available to both teachers and parents on a voluntary basis.
Require the Colorado Department of Education to maintain a list of evidence-based math programs. However, school districts would not be required to use evidence-based math curriculum or make any changes to instruction.
Require teacher preparation programs to train new teachers in evidence-based math instruction practices, including how to help students who are below grade level and those who have learning disabilities.
Require preschool teachers to learn how to help young children understand and work with numbers.

The bill does not define “evidence-based,” instead deferring to the state education department to highlight curriculum and instructional programs that experts believe will best serve students.

Math initiative aims to reverse pandemic-era declines

Since 2020, math scores have declined more than reading scores have, and middle school students showed greater declines on last year’s Colorado standardized tests than younger students did. Colorado ninth graders posted the biggest drops when compared with their peers in 2019. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, often known as the nation’s report card, just 28% of Colorado eighth graders tested proficient, the lowest rate in a decade.

“While many districts are doing great work to reverse that trend, additional support from the state, specifically around math achievement, will really help move the bar,” Polis said.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis calculates the benefit of a new bipartisan proposal to improve math instruction.

Because each stage of math learning builds on the previous one, disrupted learning in one grade can cause trouble for years down the road.

State Sen. Janice Marchman, a Loveland Democrat and bill sponsor, works as a middle school math interventionist when she’s not at the Capitol. Her job is to ensure students are ready for high school and achieve the algebra competency they’ll need in a wide range of professions.

Her job has gotten harder during the pandemic as students missed out on consistent instruction. Often she’s going back to fractions and multiplication.

“A lot of what I do is starting back with the grade four and grade five curriculum,” she said.

McLachlan predicted teachers would be eager to take the training and improve their own skills, even if it’s not required. The state hopes to reach 36,000 teachers. The bill calls for a “train the trainer” approach in which teachers who participate could take ideas for improvement back to their home schools. Many elementary teachers, in particular, need more help, she said.

“We get a lot of people who teach elementary because they don’t need to do the math,” McLachlan said. “And so they focus on reading, maybe, because that’s more fun. But we need to get really good educators for math.”

The bill would also make training materials available to parents to support their children at home, something many parents find challenging, especially as schools have adopted new approaches that differ from how parents learned to do math when they were young.

Marchman is particularly excited the bill includes funding for a digital math accelerator, a computer program that will be aligned with state standards and can offer personalized instruction. The program could allow students to learn while freeing up teachers and tutors to support students in areas where they need more focused help, she said. Polis said the state, by paying for a master license, can save school districts money that can be put back into the classroom.

Senate Minority Leader Paul Lundeen, a Monument Republican and bill sponsor, said the bill combines rigorous instruction with local flexibility and provide public money to support parents and out-of-school learning, something he would like to see more of.

Math proposal differs from Colorado’s literacy strategy

Colorado is not alone in looking for ways to boost math achievement. Alabama recently passed a major numeracy law and several other states are considering such bills now.

“There is a lot of traction around math,” said Christy Hovanetz, senior policy fellow at the Florida-based nonprofit ExcelinEd, which recently released recommendations for state-level policy changes. With low test scores in nearly every state, “policymaking bodies have really seen a need to act this session.”

ExcelinEd wants states to adopt high-quality curriculum, train prospective and current K-8 teachers on math instruction, administer math screenings early in the school year, and notify parents if their children are struggling.

Relying on voluntary programs and grants can result in a patchwork of practices that shortchanges kids, Hovanetz said.

“I think it’s very reasonable for a state to say, here are the four, five, six curriculum series that align with our state standards, are proven to be effective, and are easy to use for teachers,” she said.

That’s how Colorado has approached efforts to improve reading proficiency since 2019, when lawmakers revamped the 2012 READ Act. Frustrated with limited progress under the original program, Colorado now requires the use of evidence-based reading curriculum and training on reading for all K-3 teachers.

It was a major undertaking interrupted by the pandemic and represented a sea change in a state accustomed to local control. Many schools only recently have rolled out new curriculum and completed training for all teachers.

While Colorado’s math scores declined from 2019 to 2022, even before the pandemic fewer than 40% of middle-school students showed proficiency on state math tests.

Polis didn’t explain why he’s not calling for a more comprehensive overhaul of math instruction.

“That’s a different discussion,” he said. “This is a grant program for after-school programs. It’s additional time on task for those who need it to be able to improve math performance.”

Nonetheless, the proposal calls for a far greater state role in math and incorporates math into many existing school improvement efforts.

For example, under the bill, schools placed on a state watchlist due to low test scores would have to present plans specifically related to improving math instruction. Schools receiving grants to help ninth graders get a solid start in high school would have to show how they’re incorporating math.

In addition, the state is rewarding 12 schools that improved students’ math scores from 2019 to 2022 with $50,000 grants from federal pandemic relief money and plans to share lessons from those schools’ success with other educators.

The schools are: Thornton Elementary School, Roosevelt Charter Academy and Chipeta Elementary School in Colorado Springs, Fowler Junior High School, Hi-Plains High School in Siebert, Chatfield Elementary School in Grand Junction, Moffat Senior High School, La Jara Elementary School, Minnequa Elementary School in Pueblo, Avondale Elementary School, Rocky Mountain Elementary School in Longmont, and Hudson Elementary School.

The schools all increased the number of students performing above grade level despite pandemic disruptions, and many serve large populations of low-income students and English learners.

Minnequa Principal Katie Harshman noted that five years ago, her school faced possible closure due to persistent low test scores. Now it’s being recognized by state leaders. The turnaround required an effort by the entire community, but two elements included in the statewide math initiative were key — teacher training and personalized learning.

Chalkbeat senior reporter Ann Schimke contributed reporting.

Bureau Chief Erica Meltzer covers education policy and politics and oversees Chalkbeat Colorado’s education coverage. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Student behavior remains concerning amid COVID’s impact, educators say

2023-03-07T11:00:00+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Sign up for our free newsletter to keep up with how public education is changing.

More than a year after the nation’s return to in-person learning saw a surge of disruptive behavior in schools, educators say students are still struggling to adjust to life back in the classroom.

Disruptions after the long stretches of virtual learning ranged from smaller infractions to verbal and physical fights. Educators say those issues are still present this school year, but note many students are struggling in quieter ways, such as finding it hard to interact with their peers or engage in class.

“Last year, I was talking a lot about kids just walking out — it was a constant,” said Alex Magaña, executive director of Beacon Network Schools in Denver, Colorado. “But now, you see a higher percentage of kids that just sit there, not engaging.”

Behavioral challenges are not new to schools, but with the pandemic introducing additional trauma and stressors, educators fear they’ve become more prevalent. Even as some schools have strengthened support systems, teachers say it hasn’t always been enough to meet student needs — and experts warn the long-lasting effects on students are not yet fully understood.

In Chicago, schools saw a roughly 48% drop in serious or criminal misconduct at schools this year, but at the same time, more minor disruptive behaviors were on the rise. And while similar numbers are not available nationwide, nearly 70% of educators surveyed last fall said behavioral disruptions had increased since the 2019-20 school year, according to a report by EAB, an education consulting firm. (The survey drew from more than 1,000 educators across 42 states, but was not a nationally representative sample.)

Since 2018, the share of educators reporting frequent opposition and emotional disconnection among students saw significant jumps, according to the EAB survey. Those findings follow a May 2022 National Center for Education Statistics survey that found more than 80% of public schools had noticed slower behavioral and socio-emotional development in students amid the pandemic — and as educators on the EAB survey reported smaller but still notable increases in observed bullying and violence.

“Schooling was really inconsistent for a lot of students across the pandemic,” said Olivia Rios, an associate director at EAB. “They just haven’t had the chance, or the time, or the opportunities, to develop those skills that you need to sit in a chair and productively learn throughout the day.”

Of course, educators struggled with behavioral challenges well before the pandemic, she added. Indicators of student mental health, too, had been declining for years.

Rios said educators have told her this year has been less chaotic than the last, with students also exhibiting less severe disruptive behavior. But concerns remain over the long-term impact of the pandemic on students’ self-regulation skills, she added.

“The temperature has come down a little bit,” she said. “But even if the outbursts aren’t quite as big as they were last year, they’re still there, and we’re still having trouble resetting kids and getting them back into the mindset of being ready to learn.”

It’s an issue that some educators and students have seen locally, though experiences vary widely even within a school.

For 14-year-old Kiara Rodriguez, a ninth grader at Grover Cleveland High School in Queens, New York, this school year hasn’t felt different from the last. Many students still aren’t listening in class, and with friction between teachers and students, it can be difficult to focus, she said.

“I kind of want to go back to online school,” Rodriguez said. “It’s too much.”

Omar Ramirez, also a ninth grader at Grover Cleveland, has had a different experience. He said some students have been distracted, but the year has gone smoothly — adding he hasn’t seen any especially disruptive behavior around school.

“The students have been in control,” he said. “Nothing really crazy has been going on.”

Dan Walsh, principal of Kepner Beacon Middle School in Denver, said what teachers at his school are reporting “is more of a shift in the ratio.”

“Not that the behaviors that are happening are more intense, it’s just that the number of kids that are experiencing those challenges has increased,” he said.

Jennifer Spencer, a lead interventionist at the Distinctive Schools network in Michigan, said she’s seen widespread frustration from students as they attempt to navigate their classes after losing academic ground during the pandemic.

“They’ve lost that control and understanding that when they come to the classroom, they have to be ready to learn,” she said. “They’re just all over the place.”

And the impact hasn’t just been felt inside of the classroom. Danyelle Kimp, a teacher at Alcorn Middle School in Columbia, South Carolina, said students at his school have struggled to socialize with one another, even more than a year after returning to an in-person learning environment.

“Online communication was the norm for a year and a half,” he said. “So it just seems like some of the kids are awkward and don’t know how to interact with each other, let alone teachers or other adults.”

Alex Driver, a teacher at Pace High School in New York City, said he’s noticed an uptick in how many students struggle with social anxiety.

“There’s always been kids who are reticent to speak in front of the class,” he said. “But it’s probably five times as many these days.”

Though his students haven’t struggled with outbursts, he noted they’ve been more distracted, with cell phone use being particularly disruptive in class.

“There’s never been a period that goes by that I don’t have to say, ‘Put away your phone,’ like 15 or 16 times,” he said.

The EAB survey also highlighted a disconnect between teachers and school administrators when it came to addressing behavior issues in the classroom. It indicated that school administrators overestimated how much training staff and teachers had received — with more than 70% of administrators stating their staff had been trained in various behavioral management techniques, while 53% or fewer teachers reported that was the case.

Ben Court, a senior director at EAB, said ensuring teachers and administrators are on the same page is “the most important first piece of this puzzle.”

“One of the things that we know is incredibly important for students is consistent response from teachers between classrooms,” he said. “The more variation we have, the more chaotic it can be, the harder for them it can be to know how to respond.”

To Driver, the behavioral shifts in recent years have heightened the importance of support systems in schools.

“More kids than ever need the counselors at our school,” he said. “A lot of kids have trauma … but I have tons of kids who will ask to go see the counselor, and not because they’re in crisis. The counselor will say, ‘She just wants to talk every day.’”

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering national issues. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

Student attendance and behavior in Chicago school show gains — and ongoing struggles

2023-03-03T12:00:00+00:00

With no major COVID surges, the end of “close contact” quarantines, and a much more stable transportation and staffing picture, Chicago Public Schools had high hopes for turning a corner this year on lower than usual attendance and disruptive student behavior.

Indeed, the district has made promising headway: Campuses have seen chronic absenteeism dip for most student groups, including students with disabilities and English learners. They have cut suspensions in half.

But here and across the country, both attendance and behavior remain central challenges.

In Chicago, overall attendance remains just as low as last year, district officials cautioned principals during a recent meeting though the district said in a statement the rate ticked up above last year’s February rate, to about 88%. Chronic absenteeism — defined as missing roughly a month of classes in a school year — remains well above pre-pandemic levels and increased slightly for Asian American and white students, according to an internal data analysis obtained by Chalkbeat.

Black students saw the most marked drop in absenteeism, but more than 40% are chronically absent this year — still well above the 27% rate pre-pandemic. And while suspensions are down markedly, overall student discipline is up slightly over last year.

Amid the district’s push for academic recovery, students need to be in the classrooms to learn. Because absenteeism and discipline affect vulnerable students disproportionately, they can compound the more significant learning setbacks these students experienced during the pandemic.

Chicago is not an outlier in continuing to grapple with these issues, said Hedy Chang of the national group Attendance Works.

“Kids lost so much time,” she said. “This is not going to be solved overnight.”

District officials say they are encouraged by the attendance and school climate gains. They credit an increase in the number of students participating in after-school activities and the ability to intervene faster when students start missing school or acting out in class, among other measures.

District data shows hopeful signs — and some causes for concern

The elementary school Renye Owens’ fourth grade son attends has been preaching the mantra of regular attendance this school year. An email from the school — Jane Addams Elementary on the city’s West Side — arrived in the early weeks of the year urging parents to get students to school and voicing concern about an uptick in students who were leaving early. More recently, the school’s newsletter talked up regular attendance and on-time arrival.

“With gratitude,” the newsletter said, “we thank our parents who have supported our attendance policy.”

In Owens’ case, that’s preaching to the choir: This year and last, the mom of two has been a stickler for making sure her kids are in class every day. Indeed, a couple of weeks ago, her son came home with exciting news. Because his attendance had been consistent, he had earned a Friday without the school’s mandatory uniform.

Instead of his usual khakis and a baby-blue button-down, the fourth grader got to wear jeans and a casual sweatshirt.

“He was happy about it and he felt proud,” she said.

It’s not surprising that attendance is top of mind at Addams and other Chicago schools.

Last school year, chronic absenteeism districtwide soared to 45%, compared with 24% on the eve of the COVID outbreak. An earlier analysis by Chalkbeat showed the city’s charter schools and district-run campuses with majority Black student populations were hit hardest by the drop in attendance. Increased absenteeism was an issue across Illinois.

This year, Chicago has seen absenteeism rates dip for Black and Latino students, English learners, and students with disabilities. So far, 47% of students with disabilities have been flagged as chronically absent — down from 52% last year, but still significantly up from fewer than a third pre-pandemic.

Among Asian American and white students, absenteeism actually increased slightly this year, to 20% and 26% respectively.

Overall attendance has tracked fairly closely to last year’s, though the district avoided the massive drop during the omicron surge in January 2022. The average rate has remained well below the 95% goal the district had long set for its campuses before COVID struck.

Suspensions — in school and especially out of school — are down significantly, but discipline overall has increased. The district said that data reflect a roughly 48% drop in serious or criminal misconduct on campus, but an increase in more minor disruptive behaviors.

What Chicago is seeing is in line with national trends, Chang said. Last year, the delta variant surge disrupted the all-important first month of school, when students get into the campus routines and forge ties with peers and teachers; the chance to reset at the start of the second semester was upended by omicron.

But the absence of such massive across-the-board disruptions this year hasn’t meant that attendance has bounced back to normal — a sign of the long-lasting effects of the outbreak, Chang said. Schools continue to struggle with reengaging families and students, some of whom took on jobs and other responsibilities during virtual learning they’ve been reluctant to give up.

Chang said she is also not surprised to see absenteeism tick up for Chicago’s white and Asian American students. She points to recent Connecticut data showing that even as that state has seen those rates dip for high-needs student groups, rates for peers with lower needs have inched up.

Districts have focused their efforts to intervene on the students hit hardest by the pandemic. But some of the fallout — including the anxiety students can feel as they struggle to catch up academically, often with physical symptoms that can keep them at home — cuts across race and class.

Still, said Chang, “We are seeing some recovery in some places, and that’s usually because people have done some intentional work to get kids back to school.”

Chicago bets big on after-school programs and early intervention

In Chicago, the district says schools have stepped up outreach to families and tracked students’ attendance, behavior, and academic performance closely so school counselors and other staff can check in and intervene more promptly.

The district also said it made major new investments in mental health services, restorative justice coordinators, coaches, and training, and climate coordinators. It put more money into its lauded Choose to Change program, which offers mentoring to students affected by violence and involvement with the criminal justice system. And it’s looking at expanding home visits and other ways to intervene with chronically absent students.

“We are optimistic these investments will lead to improved attendance rates,” the district said in its statement.

Officials say expanded after-school programs, including more opportunities for students with disabilities, are key. The number of students districtwide participating in such programs jumped from 64,000 last year to 77,000 this year — almost 30% of Chicago’s enrollment. After-school participation has grown across all student groups, and the attendance rate is up to about 73%.

At Brunson Elementary, on the city’s West Side, school leaders say relationships on campus play a crucial role in boosting attendance.

The school enlisted “attendance heroes” this year — teachers, administrators, and cafeteria staff, each employee responsible for a specific group of students. They offer encouragement when children come to school consistently, check in with families when students are no-shows, and pause in school hallways to say, “We missed you,” when they return.

Meanwhile, more opportunities to engage in arts, sports, and other enrichment activities along with household item giveaways and other resources for families are helping increase engagement. Attendance is at 87%, a 2% increase over the first part of last school year.

“Our attendance is growing, but no one is at 95% in our network,” said assistant principal LaToya Woods.

Darlene O’Banner, the great-grandmother of two students at Earle STEM Academy on the South Side, said her campus has done a lot this year to rekindle the joy of school and, with that, student and parent engagement. It recently hosted a Black History Month celebration complete with a bouncy house and music, and is getting ready to temporarily turn the gym into a skating rink, she said.

O’Banner, an Englewood community leader who like Owens at Addams serves on a parent advisory board for the nonprofit Kids First Chicago, said she feels a strict COVID-era message that children should stay home over even the mildest symptoms is still dampening attendance. It’s time for schools to move on, she said.

She tests her great-grandchildren for COVID at the first sign of illness, but she said being in the classroom is just too important to keep a COVID-free student with a runny nose home.

“COVID is still here,” she said, “but it’s not killing us.”

Chang says redoubling efforts to strengthen relationships as well as expanding summer and after-school opportunities — ideally in tandem with nonprofits and other community organizations — are key. She pointed to an initiative Attendance Work helped with in Connecticut to expand the state’s successful teacher home visit program to include more frequent visits, not just by educators but also by district staff and community partners.

“We really need a whole community year-round approach,” she said. “It’s not possible to just do this with what’s in the regular school day.”

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools.

Mental health safety net for youth: Adams outlines vision to catch kids in crisis

2023-03-02T22:07:21+00:00

If you or someone you know is considering self-harm, please dial 988 for the national Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

As New York City continues to grapple with youth mental health challenges, Mayor Eric Adams laid out a sweeping vision on Thursday to help schools better recognize student mental health needs and create a safety net for kids in crisis.

The needs are high: About a fifth of children ages 3 to 13 had one or more mental, emotional, developmental or behavioral problems in 2021, according to health department data provided in the mayor’s new plan, called Care, Community, Action: A Mental Health Plan for New York City.

Rates of suicidal ideation jumped to nearly 16% from about 12% over the past decade, with more than 9% of the city’s high school students reporting they attempted suicide over the course of 2021.

“We’ve all seen the isolation and trauma that children have experienced over the past several years, along with the results: disappearing into screens, behavioral issues, and even suicide,” Adams said while revealing the plan.

Addressing the mental health needs of young people and their families was one of the three major focal points of Adams’ blueprint. The plan calls for several things, including opening more school-based mental health clinics, creating suicide prevention trainings for educators, and assessing the impacts of social media as possible “toxic exposure.”

Though most of the ideas lacked details in terms of timeline and cost, the mayor did add a price tag of $12 million for a previously announced telehealth hotline for high school students, which the city says will be the largest of its kind in the nation.

City officials said they will track certain data points to determine whether the plan is working, including the number of contacts made by or on behalf of youth through NYC Well (the city’s free, confidential support, crisis intervention, and information and referral service), and the percent of young people reporting feelings of sadness and hopelessness.

Here are four highlights from the plan that relates to youth and schools:

City taps telehealth to fill treatment gaps

The mayor initially announced in January that the city would launch a telehealth program for high schoolers, though has not said when the program will launch and how students can access it.

Officials said Thursday they are still working out details.

“Telehealth can improve access to care for young people and their families who cannot easily get around or meet the strict time or expenses of traveling to in-person appointments, especially when mental health provider locations might be far away from the child’s home,” the mayor’s plan stated. “In addition, many youth feel more comfortable using technology to connect, and technology offers new ways to stay connected outside of traditional therapy sessions.”

Other cities are leaning on telehealth for young people, as well, including Los Angeles.

Experts previously shared cautious optimism with Chalkbeat about the plan when Adams first announced it, while also raising questions about how it would work, including whether school staff will be monitoring sessions and get involved if a student’s needs are more serious.

School-based mental health clinics to expand

As of the 2020-21 school year, 162 schools had on-site mental health clinics, while another 238 had health clinics that offered some mental health services, according to a 2022 report from New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

The mayor’s plan calls on expanding mental health clinics that exist inside of school buildings through a partnership with the city’s education department, health department, the state’s Office of Mental Health and community providers.

Asked how many more clinics the city wants to open and an estimated cost, a health department spokesperson said these “are active and ongoing discussions.”

Creating school-based mental health clinics, however, can be complicated, said Kevin Dahill-Fuchel, executive director of Counseling in Schools, which partners with schools to offer counseling services. It involves getting approvals from the state, finding space inside of schools that would be eligible for such clinics, and setting up a financial structure to get reimbursed by Medicaid for the services, he said.

An easier lift, he suggested, might be to get more community organizations like his to offer services in schools. Those groups often operate with grants, thus cutting out complicated funding issues.

A push to train school staffers on suicide prevention

Adams wants schools staff to be trained on suicide prevention so that they can “respond appropriately to the needs of students,” the plan said.

Dahill-Fuchel praised such training, noting they could potentially help more students realize they need help.

“I think one of the things that is really gonna be useful is this idea of a public health approach to suicide prevention, which at its core really means demystifying it,” Dahill-Fuchel said. “It tends to be a word that, around children, people don’t like to use and that becomes part of the problem.”

City officials also plan to launch a program, called “Caring Transitions,” that would focus on preventing youth ages 5-17 in the Queens and Bronx who have been to the hospital for a suicide attempt from re-entering. Teams would be responsible for connecting these young people to follow-up services in their neighborhoods as well as “additional supports” for up to three months after they leave the hospital.

The plan also says it will launch a suicide prevention pilot program for young people of color ages 5 to 24. The goal is to bolster interventions that more effectively meet the needs of Black, Asian American, and Latino youth who face suicide-related risk “that includes or is intensified by racial inequities,” the plan said. The plan did not specify what those interventions might look like.

An attempt to address cyberbullying

Concerned with social media’s impact on youth mental health, the Adams administration plans to create a task force to study the issue and develop a public health approach to reduce exposure to harmful online content.

The plan noted that “there are few rules or regulations” on how social media companies interact with young people.

“We’re also going to examine the potential risks of social media to our children’s mental health and work to make sure tech companies are required to keep online spaces safe for our kids,” Adams said during his speech.

The group would include youth and families, according to the plan. It didn’t specify when the group would launch.

Federal officials have called for more rigorous research on how social media impacts youth mental health. In a 2021 advisory released by the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, officials note that while several studies have linked worsening mental health to online platforms, other researchers have argued that there is no clear relation between the two.

Seattle Public Schools recently filed a lawsuit against leading social media companies, alleging that students and schools were harmed by worsened mental health that stemmed from social media.

The surgeon general’s advisory also called for technology companies to make sure they were fostering “safe digital environments” for their youngest users.

Some of the pressure seems to be working: Tik Tok announced earlier this week it will set the default screen time limit to 60 minutes for users under 18, though kids can continue using the app with a passcode.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

To help address NYC’s youth mental health crisis, school psychologists want to practice outside school

2023-02-23T21:23:46+00:00

With a pressing need for more youth mental health services, New York’s state legislature is eyeing one way to plug the gap: allowing school psychologists to provide services in private practice without having to go through a lengthy licensing process.

Under current rules, school psychologists must obtain a doctorate in order to practice outside of school. But some school psychologists and legislators say that process is overly cumbersome and limits school psychologists’ ability to chip in to address a crisis in youth mental health.

“We need all hands on deck,” said Manhattan Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, the bill’s lead sponsor. “We’re wasting talent during such a need for mental health services.”

The idea makes sense to Brooklyn school psychologist Carleta Joseph. She often ends her work days feeling like she’s barely scratched the surface of the deep mental health needs in her teenage caseload.

Counseling sessions during school hours feel too short, the volume of students is too great, and administrative responsibilities cut into her time working directly with kids. Referring students with the greatest needs to outside providers rarely feels satisfying either.

A 2021 report from the American Psychological Association estimated that half of youth nationwide with mental health issues don’t get the treatment they need. Even in New York City, which has a high concentration of mental health professionals, many providers don’t see kids, school psychologists said.

“What we’re finding is when we’re referring families out to these community organizations and clinics, they’re waiting months and months for appointments,” said Joseph, who works at a large Brooklyn public high school. “So then we get stuck in this hole of how do we provide support to students?”

Joseph wants to do more to address what she sees as crisis levels of mental health needs among teens in during the pandemic.

“It can be frustrating because you have a skillset that’s not being utilized,” she said.

New York’s Association of School Psychologists, the member organization for 4,000 school psychologists across the state, has been pushing for licensure for years, said the organization’s legislative chair John Kelly, a veteran school psychologist on Long Island.

“The school defines our area of expertise and specialty but not necessarily our setting,” Kelly said.

School psychologists in New York are already required to have a master’s degree and two years of experience in schools to get a permanent certificate from the state education department.

The bill currently awaiting a hearing in the state assembly would grant school psychologists licenses to offer a limited range of education-related services outside of school, including psychoeducational evaluations and education-related counseling. That could mean working with students on strategies to manage anxiety that interferes with their ability to focus in class, Kelly said.

School psychologists would still be barred from offering mental health treatment outside of those categories or prescribing medication. Kelly noted that school psychologists who set up private practices would not be able to treat students from the schools where they work to avoid conflicts of interest.

Proponents say the benefit of licensing school psychologists comes not just from adding the new bodies, but also from leveraging the unique skills they possess. School psychologists are often more familiar with the nuances and politics of schools and districts than other mental health professionals, Kelly said. And when they do make recommendations about services or educational programs that could help students during the school day, they do it with a realistic understanding of how those recommendations would play out on the ground, he added.

“Where I see my colleagues in the community sometimes struggling is not understanding that culture [of schools] and how to manage and negotiate the system,” said Kelly. “I think that that’s a really unique aspect, school psychologists understand that culture of a district.”

Licensure could also be a boon for school psychologists, who would stand to earn more from private practice, and could add variety to the sometimes monotonous and paperwork-heavy rhythm of their day jobs, proponents said.

“The field in general is prone to burnout. You sort of get into this rut sometimes,” Joseph said. Having the option to practice outside of school “could break up your day and provide you the satisfaction you need to stay in the field you love.”

That’s not to say it would be easy. School psychologists work full-time jobs, and would have to set up private practices largely during evening hours, something not everyone would want to take on.

“It certainly is a lot,” said Kelly, the Long Island school psychologist, who operated his own practice for years after getting his doctorate degree.

Kelly argued that the current path for school psychologists to get licensure can disproportionately shut out people of color.

Joseph, the Brooklyn school psychologist, said she’s thought about going for her doctorate in order to get a license, but is unsure she can devote the time and sacrifice the income she’d otherwise make by working.

“It takes a significant amount of time and finances,” she said. “That’s a huge commitment.”

School social workers, by contrast, often have an easier time setting up private practices outside of school because their licenses allow it.

Rosenthal acknowledged that licensure can be a “thorny issue” and that there’s always a “push and pull” between expanding access and keeping standards high. The shift could also require additional staffing at the state education department, she noted.

A state education department spokesperson declined to comment on the pending legislation, but said the agency worked “closely with the legislature” on 2022 amendments to state law in an effort to “help increase qualified mental health professionals into the field.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago spent big on summer school in 2022. But tracking participation proved difficult.

2023-02-17T16:27:29+00:00

Last spring, as Chicago schools were grappling with how to recover from the pandemic, district CEO Pedro Martinez urged campuses to go big and bold on summer school without worrying about the price tag.

Tiffany Tillman, the principal at Melody Elementary on Chicago’s West Side, grabbed a notepad and started dreaming up a “summer university” for her predominantly low-income Black students. There would be “campuses” focused on academic recovery, sports, arts, and more.

She paid her entire staff of roughly 40 to work that summer, complete with counselors, psychologist, and social worker. She wanted a safe place for her students that blended learning and fun — breakfast and taco bars, field trips, a book club, a DJ on the last day.

In Chicago, as in other districts, the pandemic and an influx in federal relief dollars made summer school a much bigger deal — a key strategy for helping students bounce back from COVID’s toll. In 2022, the district went all in, spending 50% more than the previous summer: an unprecedented almost $40 million.

Data Chalkbeat obtained this month shows 73,000 students, or a fifth of the district’s overall enrollment, signed up, many for multiple programs.

A record 42,500 students enrolled in enrichment, or Out of School Time, programs designed by school leaders, sometimes in partnership with local nonprofits. But almost all other programs — including ones that help students catch up academically or make the transition to kindergarten and high school — were significantly underenrolled.

And even as the cost and the stakes for students have risen, the district has struggled to track student signups and attendance. That makes it harder to determine if the summer school push paid off — a key question as the district rushes to direct resources to vulnerable students and tighter budgets loom.

Chicago Public Schools took more than six months to fulfill a Chalkbeat records request for school-level enrollment data. For some campus-based programs, the numbers showed repeat signups or unusually high enrollments, raising questions about accuracy. No attendance numbers are available.

The district, which is gearing up to release information on summer school offerings for 2023, said it launched a new effort last year to better track summer participation; that effort will continue this year.

“We continue to strengthen our data collection and reporting methods to best serve our K-12 students in summer 2023 and beyond,” the district said in a statement.

Meanwhile, principals such as Tillman at Melody say the influx of summer resources made a difference for students.

Tillman said one student from a nearby school who was required to attend an academic recovery program at Melody told her: “I wish I could have been here the whole school year. Then I wouldn’t have been in summer school.”

Tracking summer participation remains a challenge

In a decentralized system where some programs are district-run, some draw students from multiple campuses, and some are school-run, tracking summer numbers has long been a challenge — and until recently, a low priority. In fact, not that long ago, schools kept their own records and didn’t report them to the district.

With three systems for entering enrollment data currently, it takes work to distinguish between the number of enrollments and that of unique students, who can enroll in more than one program in the course of a summer. Some principals told Chalkbeat they were required to report attendance data for some programs in the district’s Aspen system this past summer, but district officials said sharing reliable numbers would require entering the dates when programs at all district schools were in session — a labor-intensive undertaking.

But COVID made summer school a higher priority, upping the stakes for capturing data.

Last spring, district CEO Martinez had told the school board he felt an “obligation” to offer students engaging programming both after school and during the summer. He wanted campuses to go all-out in designing summer enrichment programs tailored to their own school communities.

“We have shared with schools that funding is not a limit when it comes to summer programs,” he said at the time.

District officials circled back with the school board in July to tout a summer of blockbuster enrollment. They announced preliminary numbers showing almost 91,000 students had enrolled, clearing a 90,000 target the district had set and far outpacing the district’s enrollment numbers for the previous summer. The 2022 total touted in July included about 33,000 recent Chicago Public Schools graduates contacted through an “alumni supports” program – text, email, and phone nudges to follow through on enrolling in college – but who did not attend district summer programs.

In the summer of 2021, the district now says, 55,000 students signed up for summer programs, a number that does not appear to include “alumni supports,” based on data the district provided that year. It is not clear whether that number included “alumni supports.”

Enrichment programs schools created in-house — some focused on STEM, arts, and sports, and some offered in tandem with local nonprofits — were a particular success, district officials said. Enrollment for the district’s extended school year program for students with disabilities, programs that prepare children for preschool and kindergarten, and a string of new career and technical education camps came in well below targets.

Students mix cupcake batter while attending a culinary camp at Benito Juarez Community Academy High School in Chicago during summer 2022.

Chalkbeat wanted to see what these numbers looked like at the school level and submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for the data last July. After a series of delays, the district provided data in December only for Summer Bridge, a program for students in grades 3, 6, and 8 who do not meet the criteria to pass on to the next grade, and Summer Acceleration, for struggling eighth graders. That data accounted for only about 6,500 students out of 91,000 the district had said signed up for summer school.

When Chalkbeat requested attendance data tracked in the district’s Aspen system, officials responded that the district does not collect that information “centrally or comprehensively.” Schools have traditionally seen a gap between signups for summer programs and actual turnout, and the pandemic dampened attendance year-round.

The district also said it does not centrally maintain numbers for students who complete summer programs, which can mean different things for different programs and campuses. The district did share completion numbers with Chalkbeat in the fall of 2020, showing that 14,200 out of 21,600 students who enrolled in largely virtual programs that summer stuck around until the programs’ end.

Officials said the district is working to improve how it centrally tracks summer data to ensure that its greater investment is resulting in equitable access across the city. But the challenge is doing that in a way that doesn’t overburden schools with data entry, allowing them to focus on providing strong programs, they said.

The enrollment data provided to Chalkbeat this month, which doesn’t include the alumni outreach program, shows that many of the 73,000 students who signed up for summer school did so for more than one program. The data shows 115,000 enrollments. Many students signed up for the same program at the same school more than once. That could be because some programs held multiple sessions, but some students enrolled repeatedly in programs they seem unlikely to take twice, such as an orientation program for incoming freshmen, raising questions about the data.

More traditional programs remained underenrolled throughout the summer, but numbers for school-designed enrichment programs, known as Out of School Time programs, grew significantly between that July presentation and the end of the summer. Data shows the average program drawing roughly a quarter of a school’s enrollment. On some campuses, enrollment for these programs appeared unusually high, with the number of students signed up in line with or even exceeding a schools’ overall enrollments.

“Schools were encouraged to use Out of School Time to support return to school for Fall,” the district said in a statement. “We were intentional in wanting to keep the momentum going from the first full year back from the pandemic.”

District officials said feedback from schools was positive

At Melody Elementary, which serves about 300 students, 190 showed up for summer programs, including some from other area schools attending Summer Bridge. Attendance data is not available from the district, but Tillman says she observed strong turnout throughout the summer.

The district has not compared outcomes for students who attended summer schools and peers who did not. But Tillman credits the summer push with a start-of-the-school-year engagement boost and with what she described as higher-than-expected mid-year academic progress.

Ariadne Huitron, 5, draws a flower on a whiteboard during her e-learning class at Carole Robertson Center for Learning in Chicago on May 14, 2021.

At the July school board meeting, school board member Elizabeth Todd-Breland said she had also heard high praise from principals. Some were “raving” about the influx of funds at back-to-school bashes last summer.

Martinez said one school leader on the district’s principal advisory council told him, “I was in tears because I saw the resources and I could set up the programming that I wanted to set up.”

Some principals told Chalkbeat drawing students to summer programs remained a challenge, and staffing issues lingered after a trying school year that made teachers more reluctant to take on summer work. One elementary principal said summer programs there drew an “astonishingly small number of students,” though the enrichment program the school offered did better than centrally managed programs such as Summer Bridge.

“CPS told schools that all families could opt in pretty late,” he said. “As a result, a lot of spots sat empty.”

A couple of principals told Chalkbeat that their schools ultimately opted not to host their own programs. “We were just so tired, and it was going to be a short summer,” one said.

Patrick Brosnan of the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council said in the summer of 2022 the nonprofit served almost 1,000 students in programs in partnership with five elementary and two high schools in the neighborhood, including enrichment, arts, sports and field trips and the transition program for high school freshmen.

Interest was up from the previous summer when the nonprofit offered some hybrid programming, Brosnan said, but participation still remained below pre-pandemic levels — perhaps in part a reflection of pandemic-era enrollment losses in some schools.

Susan Stanton of the nonprofit ACT Now!, a coalition of community-based organizations that provide summer and after-school programs, said many of its members partner with Chicago Public Schools to offer programs it fully or partially funds. These programs picked up somewhat over 2021, when COVID still cast a long shadow, she said.

But, she said, the first two summers of the pandemic took a lasting toll on programs, which rely on word-of-mouth and younger siblings of former participants to draw signups. She felt principals did not get enough guidance on how to set up their own programs and the district should have leaned on community-based organizations more and earlier.

“Principals were essentially handed money last minute,” she said, “and building these partnerships doesn’t just happen with the snap of your fingers.”

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.

9,000 children don’t show up in Colorado school data. Are they missing or in private school?

2023-02-11T00:25:12+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Subscribe to our free Colorado newsletter to keep up with education news from around the state: ckbe.at/subscribe-colorado

Kindergarten enrollment is down. Dropout rates are up. Public school enrollment still hasn’t rebounded to where it was in 2019, before COVID turned education upside down.

Where have the kids gone? A new analysis by The Associated Press and Stanford University’s Big Local News project found an estimated 230,000 students in 21 states absent from publicly available data on public and private school enrollment and home schooling. That tally includes as many as 9,000 uncounted in Colorado, or about 1% of the state’s school-age children.

The uncounted likely include students learning in private school and at their kitchen tables who simply haven’t been reported, along with children who aren’t in school at all.

The findings further illustrate the pandemic’s profound impact on education, with some families rethinking their options and other students struggling to stay connected. They also demonstrate the difficulty of getting a full picture of where students have landed as a result of the upheaval.

States like Colorado where kindergarten is voluntary have many more unaccounted-for children than states where kindergarten is required, the analysis found. Birth rates have declined, meaning there are fewer 5-year-olds than even a few years ago, and thousands of families have moved out of state. But those changes don’t fully account for the decline in kindergarten enrollment.

More families could be keeping their 5-year-olds home even as Colorado prepares to launch a major expansion of public preschool.

“That’s important because kindergarten is the first experience kids have with a formal learning environment, and readiness to learn is really important as they move onto older grades,” said Thomas Dee, a Stanford University education professor who worked on the analysis.

At the other end of their school careers, more Colorado students are dropping out, state data shows, with 10,500 middle and high school students leaving the system in 2021-22, a 23% increase from 2019-20 and the highest dropout rate in four years.

Chronic absenteeism is up too, said Johann Liljengren, the state education department’s director of dropout prevention and student re-engagement.

“We definitely are seeing higher levels of disengagement across various measures, from attendance to dropouts,” Liljengren said. “What we’re trying to do is dig in and find out why and can we see some of those kids come back?”

The analysis used enrollment and U.S. Census data to look at changes from 2019-20 to 2021-22 and doesn’t include the current school year.

State data shows home school declining from its peak in 2020, and private school enrollment is nearly flat, raising questions about where other students who left the public system may have gone. But state education officials acknowledge their data on both student populations is “loose.”

Private schools don’t have to report enrollment, and more than 30% of 700 non-public schools in a state database report no information, potentially accounting for thousands of students. Home-school families are supposed to notify a school district every year of their intentions, but not all do.

Van Schoales, senior policy director at the Keystone Policy Center, said the gap is a symptom of Colorado’s lax approach to data collection. Without better information, it’s hard to know what’s happening or what to do about it, he said.

“We don’t know what the problem is,” Schoales said. “Is the problem that younger parents entering the school system during COVID had bad experiences and don’t trust the system? Or is the problem that high schools abandoned kids who were on the brink? Or maybe parents are making different choices.”

Kindergarten slide raises concerns

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis made improving early childhood education a centerpiece of his administration. He made full-day kindergarten free to parents in 2019 and enrollment surged, only to plummet the following year when many school districts started the year remotely.

Kindergarten enrollment rebounded somewhat in 2021-22 school year that was included in the Associated Press/Big Local News analysis — only to drop again this school year. But even in 2021-22, the share of 5-year-olds who weren’t in kindergarten was higher than before the pandemic. (Demographers caution that population estimates are imprecise.)

In 2019-20, fewer than 2% of Colorado 5-year-olds weren’t in public or private kindergarten. In 2021-22, roughly 4% were not enrolled.

The decline in participation is a concern, said Leslie Colwell of the Colorado Children’s Campaign. But without more information, it’s hard to know if vulnerable children are missing out on key early learning opportunities or if families with more resources are “red-shirting” or holding back their kindergarten-eligible children or enrolling them in private options, she said.

Complicating the kindergarten trends, enrollment in both preschool and first grade are up this year. The launch of universal preschool in August could bring thousands more children into the public school system with part-time free care.

Who’s not in school?

State data gives some insight into how public school enrollment is changing. The largest decrease is among white students. There are 30,000 fewer of them in Colorado public schools this year than in 2019-20. The largest percentage decrease is in Native American students.

Dropout rates increased among all student groups but increased most among Hispanic and Native American students. Hispanic students accounted for more than half of all Colorado students who left school last year without graduating. Some school districts have stepped up efforts to find and bring back students who left school to work or who just didn’t see the point.

Attendance advocates in the Greeley-Evans district go door to door in search of students who are missing school.

Liljengren said state education officials are also revamping how they do their work — bringing together sections that once worked in isolation to better use data to identify students in trouble and to support high schools in revamping their programming to keep students engaged, including with more pathways tied to career options.

But enrollment isn’t down everywhere. Alan Smiley, who heads the Association of Colorado Independent Schools, said the 39 schools his association accredits have seen enrollment grow between 1% and 3% a year since 2019, including families who have moved to Colorado as well as those switching from public school.

Families are attracted to small class sizes, specialized programming, and school environments that reflect their values, he said. Many start in preschool with the intention of remaining in one school for years. His members watch demographic trends just as other school officials do but haven’t seen the declines public schools report.

Regardless of the choices families make, public school enrollment is not expected to rebound anytime soon. There are 79,000 18-year-olds in Colorado, but just 67,000 5-year-olds, according to U.S. Census data provided by state demographer Elizabeth Garner.

Colorado home-school trends are hard to track

Joanna Rosa-Saenz was among more than 15,000 Colorado families who reported home schooling in the 2020-21 school year. She started out running a learning pod from her Denver home and continued after schools opened. She worried about vaccine mandates and wanted to be more hands-on with her children’s education, especially after her middle son fell behind when his school didn’t address his special education needs.

Her children are back in Denver Public Schools this school year. As a single parent, she couldn’t educate her children and support them financially and get more than a few hours sleep a night, she said. And she couldn’t afford tuition at the private Christian schools that most appealed to her.

The state’s official count of home-school students has gone down each of the past two years — perhaps reflecting parents like Rosa-Saenz who could not sustain it — but Stephen Craig, executive director of Christian Home Educators of Colorado, said his membership is holding steady after a notable increase in 2020.

Rosa-Saenz said she knows many home-schooling families that are still going strong. Some didn’t like what their kids were being taught or the political direction of their district. Others were frustrated by high teacher turnover and frequent leadership changes. Still others felt a public school education just wasn’t very good.

“Parents have a lack of trust and so they are pulling their kids out and seeing what they can do to really support them,” she said.

Public school approaches on everything from math instruction to gender have alienated conservative parents, Craig said. Families want an education tailored to their child and their faith.

“For too long we’ve put education in its own box and said 2 plus 2 is 4 and that’s not religious,” he said. “And that’s just not true. Our world view is in everything.”

Tracking these students is tricky. Some families may not report. The Christian home educators group advises families they are not legally required to report if their children are being taught by a parent who is a licensed teacher — an interpretation of the state’s compulsory attendance law supported by the Homeschool Legal Defense Association. State education officials told Chalkbeat they interpret the home-school statute to mean such families should still notify a school district.

Colorado’s public school enrollment data also includes thousands of home-school students who take a class or receive a service from a local public school. That means the real number of home-school students is higher and the real number of public school students lower than publicly available data suggests.

Fall 2020 saw hundreds of thousands of Colorado students learning at home. Some of them stayed there.

Enrollment declines are cause for concern

Regardless of the exact number, missing students and disengaged families demand attention, observers said. Schools connect students not just with education but also with meals, medical care, and community. Schools with fewer students also get less money. Many Denver metro area districts have closed schools or plan to.

Polling data that the conservative education group Ready Colorado expects to release this month shows a big increase in parents concerned that schools are on the wrong track. That aligns with a Magellan Strategies poll from last spring — though the reasons for dissatisfaction were diverse.

Ready Colorado President Brenda Dickhoner said she knows more families who thought private school was out of reach but re-examined their options as they grew less satisfied with their local public school.

“I’m less concerned with whether Joey is in private or public school, but I’m really interested in understanding the parent motivations,” she said.

Colwell of the Children’s Campaign said she worries that more families may be opting out — even though the vast majority of Colorado families continue to enroll in public school.

“We want kids to be connected to high-quality learning opportunities,” she said. “For families to make the choice that they’ll disengage entirely, to see an increasing number of families making that choice in the wake of the pandemic and the political environment, is concerning.”

Bureau Chief Erica Meltzer covers education policy and politics and oversees Chalkbeat Colorado’s education coverage. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

COVID exodus: Where did 1 million public school students go? New data sheds some light.

2023-02-09T05:01:00+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Subscribe to our free newsletter to keep up with how public education is changing: ckbe.at/national

Until now, it was one of the pandemic’s great mysteries: Where did the missing students go?

When classes resumed in fall 2020, several months after COVID struck, enrollment in the nation’s public schools had plummeted by more than a million students. It was the largest single-year decline since World War II. And defying hopes of a rapid rebound, enrollment barely budged the following year.

There have been clues about where students went, such as the steep rise in homeschooling, but a full explanation of the public school exodus has been elusive. Now, a new analysis offers a more comprehensive accounting — though one of its most striking findings is that tens of thousands of students remain absent from the available data.

“It’s really been enigmatic,” said Thomas Dee, a Stanford professor who conducted the analysis in collaboration with the Associated Press and data journalists at Stanford’s Big Local News project. “Where have these children gone?”

The data the team compiled point to two main drivers of the public school enrollment plunge: family choices and population changes. After public schools went remote, a portion of families switched their children to private schools or homeschool. At the same time, immigration slowed and many families fled big cities, causing the school-age population in some places to shrink.

The schooling changes and population shifts explain most of the enrollment drop — but not all of it, according to the analysis. Dee offers some possible causes of the unexplained decline: unregistered homeschooling, families opting out of kindergarten, and students who simply stopped attending school.

For students’ whose formal education ceased or failed to start during the pandemic, the learning loss continues.

“These data are telling us that there are learning disruptions that go beyond who is simply sitting in public schools,” Dee said.

Yet the number of unaccounted-for students and their current status is unclear. Most states don’t track all the students who leave public schools, and oversight of non-public education is minimal.

The new analysis “is beginning to shed light on a very important topic,” said Richard Welsh, a public policy and education professor at Vanderbilt University who was not involved in the study. Still, “we don’t have the data to get the complete picture.”

Here’s the latest on what we know — and still don’t know — about where students went during the pandemic.

Public schools lost a lot of students.

Public school enrollment fell by 3% during the first year of the pandemic, according to federal data. The largest decline since 1943, it wiped out a decade of enrollment growth.

The decrease left public schools with 49.4 million students in fall 2020 — about 1.4 million fewer than the previous fall.

The steepest declines were among the youngest students. From 2019 to 2020, prekindergarten enrollment plummeted by more than 20% and kindergarten enrollment fell by 9%, according to a federal analysis of preliminary data, which found much smaller declines in the later grades.

The decision to keep school buildings closed drove some families away, according to a separate study by Dee. School districts that remained fully virtual in fall 2020 faced bigger enrollment losses, he found.

In fall 2021, public school enrollment was flat. Students had stopped fleeing — but they weren’t returning.

“There was no bounce back,” Dee said.

It’s too early to know whether the tide is turning. Federal data for this school year is not yet available, and the most populous states — including California and Texas — have not reported their most recent enrollment counts.

However, about two dozen states have, according to the data tracking firm Burbio. Thirteen of those states saw enrollment increases in fall 2022, while 11 saw declines.

Homeschooling surged, and private schools grew modestly.

During the pandemic, public schools’ loss was other schools’ gain.

The share of families choosing to homeschool their children doubled in 2020, according to a Census survey. By that fall, about 11% of households with school-age children were homeschooling, up from 5.4% that spring and about 3% in prior years. The shift was especially dramatic among Black families, whose share of homeschooling families grew fivefold in 2020.

In the 21 states and the District of Columbia that track homeschooling, enrollment soared by 30% from fall 2019 to fall 2021, according to the Stanford and AP analysis.

“It was a destination of choice,” said Welsh, the Vanderbilt professor, adding that the expansion of remote work enabled some parents to try homeschooling.

Private schools saw a smaller bump. Their enrollment climbed just over 4% during that period, according to the analysis, which included data from 33 states and D.C. (Non-public school data can be spotty even in states that track it. For example, Colorado, which is included in the analysis, does not require private schools to provide student counts, and nearly 30% of the 700 private schools in a state directory didn’t report any enrollment data.)

Notably, private schools’ first grade classes ballooned in fall 2021, the analysis found, suggesting that some families who opted out of public kindergarten in 2020 decided to keep their children in private schools.

How the local public schools responded to the pandemic appeared to influence families’ school decisions. In a study of Michigan’s enrollment patterns, researchers found that more families opted to homeschool in districts that resumed in-person learning in fall 2020; in districts that stayed remote, more families moved to private schools.

“No matter what choice the public system made,” said Andrew Bacher-Hicks, a Boston University professor who co-authored the study, “they were going to lose some set of families.”

In Michigan, about half the students who exited the public schools in fall 2020 returned the following year, Bacher-Hicks said.

Nationwide, whether families will stick with their pandemic school choices remains to be seen. The most recent national data on non-public school enrollment is from 2019, and the Stanford-AP analysis ends in fall 2021.

In a recent survey of about 300 private schools, 55% reported enrollment gains this school year and 20% reported losses. A few states that released fall 2022 homeschool data saw enrollment increases, while others saw declines.

Welsh said it’s likely that some families who decided to homeschool at the height of the pandemic will reconsider.

“I do think there could be some buyer’s remorse,” he said.

The school-age population shrank, and families moved.

While families ditching public schools drew headlines, a less visible change also drove the enrollment drop: In many places, there were simply fewer children around to enroll.

The school-age population shifted in two big ways during the pandemic. First, it shrank nationwide by some 250,000 children, according to the Stanford-AP analysis, which relied on Census estimates in April 2020 and July 2021. Birth rates that have fallen for over a decade and a sharp drop in international immigration during the pandemic drove the decline.

Second, many families with children relocated during COVID. They were most likely to leave cities, often due to housing costs or health concerns. They also moved between states: California and New York lost the most children, while Texas and Florida gained the most.

The school district in Brockton, Massachusetts, a midsize city south of Boston, was hit by both trends: a falling birth rate and out-migration.

“Many families lost their jobs and struggled to pay rent and now are facing eviction,” said district spokesperson Jess Silva-Hodges, adding that many moved in search of cheaper housing. “The affordability of everything has been a challenge for our families.”

Across the 21 states with full datasets in the Stanford-AP analysis, population shifts explain 26%-36% of public schools’ pandemic enrollment decline. (The size of the effect depends on the length of the population estimate.) The effect was bigger in states such as New York, which lost some 60,000 school-age children. Population loss drove at least 40% of that state’s enrollment decline.

“On some level, the reduction in public school enrollment wasn’t just a flight from public schools,” Dee said, “it was a flight from communities.”

Researchers expect the population downturn to continue, leading the National Center for Education Statistics to project a 4% decline in school enrollment by 2030. Such projections have “sobering implications” for school finances and operations, Dee noted, including possible staff layoffs and school closures.

Federal COVID relief money has buffered most districts from the financial fallout of the recent enrollment declines — but those funds expire next year.

“There’s going to be lean years ahead,” said Silva-Hodges, adding that all districts must soon start “taking a hard look at their budgets.”

Many students are still missing.

In the new analysis, one of the most startling findings is that the numbers don’t add up.

In the 21 states and D.C. that had data on each trend, up to a third of the public school exodus — some 230,000 students — can’t be explained by population changes or increased private school or homeschool enrollment. At least on paper, those students are still missing.

The report suggests a few possible explanations. Some of the unaccounted-for students could be in unreported homeschool. More troublingly, some students might have left school during the pandemic due to family hardships or dissatisfaction with remote learning and never returned. But the report makes clear that data on the number of such students “are not widely available.”

However, the report does provide indirect evidence of a third possibility: that some families kept their children out of kindergarten during the first two years of the pandemic. Among the 21 states in the analysis and D.C., the share of unaccounted for students was significantly higher in places where kindergarten is not mandatory.

In other words, many of the missing students might have skipped kindergarten. While national data for this school year is not yet available, some states that have reported their fall enrollment figures saw increases in first grade, according to Burbio — a possible sign that students who sat out kindergarten have returned.

A final possibility is that some of the unexplained enrollment decline reflects incomplete data or measurement errors.

While the analysis is limited to states that track non-public school enrollment, it’s possible that some of the homeschool and private school figures are undercounts. And a few demographers Chalkbeat contacted raised concerns about aspects of the analysis, including its comparison of Census estimates to actual enrollment figures.

Dee called the concerns reasonable, but said the size of the missing student group — including nearly 152,000 unaccounted for students in California alone — suggests more is at play than measurement error. He also analyzed earlier data in New York and California and did not find such large unexplained enrollment changes before the pandemic.

While better data is needed to fully understand how many students have fallen through the cracks, Dee added, the fact that any students are unaccounted for is concerning.

“We’re so focused on how districts are engaging the kids in front of them,” he said. “But we’re missing the fact that some kids aren’t sitting there.”

Due to an update to one state’s enrollment figures, this story has been corrected to change the estimated number of students who aren’t accounted for in the data from 240,000 to 230,000.

Erica Meltzer and Amy Zimmer contributed reporting.

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

NYC schools want to boost enrollment. It might prove a major challenge.

2023-02-09T05:01:00+00:00

New York City schools Chancellor David Banks wants to win students back.

The nation’s largest school district has hemorrhaged students since the start of the pandemic, with enrollment down about 11% to 813,000 students in grades K-12 since then.

Earlier this week, Banks even tweeted: “Increasing enrollment and boosting opportunity for all of our students is our North Star.”

But such an effort might not be so simple, according to a new analysis by The Associated Press, Stanford University’s Big Local News project, and Stanford education professor Thomas Dee.

Across 21 states, about 230,000 of the students who left the public school rolls from 2019 to 2021 cannot be explained by rising private school or homeschool enrollment or population changes, according to the analysis. A quarter of those children — roughly 60,000 — were in New York.

These students could have fallen off school rosters for various reasons, Dee noted, such as being homeschooled without registering with the state or skipping kindergarten. Other students might have disengaged during remote learning or amid mental health struggles.

But there could be other factors that complicate the chancellor’s goals of rebuilding enrollment. Besides a declining birth rate, immigration to New York City has slowed, and families are leaving New York for places like New Jersey and Florida — often in search of cheaper housing. Together, demographic change could account for at least 40% of New York state’s public school enrollment decline, according to the analysis.

“There’s growing evidence for how much domestic migration happened during the pandemic,” Dee said. That likely reflects “underlying structural factors,” he said, “such as the enduring nature of work-from-home arrangements that have allowed people to relocate, as well as the push-pressure from things like rising housing costs.”

He added, “On some level, that reduction in public school enrollment wasn’t just a flight for public schools. It was a flight from these communities.”

Enrollment losses mount in NYC

New York City school enrollment has been declining every year since 2016, due in part to declining birth rates.

Between the 2018-19 and the 2019-20 school years, for example, the city saw enrollment fall by 5,000 students. But the decline has accelerated. Three years later, there are 99,000 fewer kids in the city’s district schools, even as additional classrooms for 3-year-olds have been added to the system, according to preliminary education department enrollment data from October.

Where did they go? The picture is not entirely clear. During this time, the number of homeschooled students in New York state has gone up, though it still represents comparatively few children. The number of private school students statewide, however, dropped.

At the same time, the school-age population statewide fell by more than 60,000 children, according to census estimates.

After accounting for the non-public school increase and the population loss, that leaves just over 59,000 students whose exit from the state’s public schools isn’t explained. At least in theory, those students are missing.

But the census estimates used for the analysis have shortcomings, especially when it comes to counting children. The New York state census estimates, in particular, have been known to be off-base compared to the official 10-year estimates. Dee’s analysis notes that the enrollment data and census data are collected over different time periods, which could understate the role of population change.

Demographic experts warned against using a specific number for the state’s students missing from school rosters.

“The population estimates may not be the best basis for comparison in this case,” said Steven Romalewski, director of the CUNY Mapping Service at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Center for Urban Research. “You may be able to generally determine the direction of the gap,” he added, but cautioned against “calculating seemingly precise population counts representing the ‘gap.’”

Because of these limitations, Dee ran a similar analysis for pre-pandemic years in New York, which found a much smaller number of unaccounted-for students, pointing to something “out of the ordinary” during the pandemic, he said.

“Over the pandemic, we’ve seen this historically unprecedented exodus from public schools,” Dee said.

City officials said they have accounted for students who left the system, sharing a breakdown earlier this school year detailing the numbers of children who went to different parts of the state, the country, or left the U.S., as well as those who dropped out or transferred to charter or private schools.

“Like districts and schools across the county, our enrollment has been impacted by fluctuations resulting from the pandemic as well as long-term trends in birth rates,” Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg previously said in a statement.

The enrollment drop has real world consequences for schools. As students leave the system, the city is bracing for a dramatically smaller budget once COVID relief dollars dry up since schools funds are based on enrollment.

Grappling with students who left, and who are frequently absent

Banks, in prepared remarks for Wednesday’s Albany budget hearing, acknowledged that families left New York City public schools for various reasons, and he showed optimism for winning some back.

“The answer to declining enrollment is clear: we have to give our students and families the opportunities and experiences they want in the classroom,” he said, “and we must do a better job of showing them how our schools are giving students the skills and knowledge that will drive success in their lives after school.”

He added: “My administration is focused on rebuilding trust with our families and bringing families back to our schools.”

To that end, the city continues to open new schools. Two that include remote learning opened this year, along with a school focused on robotics. A school focused on design and social justice is expected to open next year. But it also remains to be seen whether the city will soon propose a rash of school closures or mergers. There are a couple of proposed mergers on upcoming agendas for the city’s Panel for Educational Policy.

David Bloomfield, a professor of educational leadership, law and policy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, cautioned about using the big-picture “rough” data to make “finely tuned” policy decisions that affect individual students.

“It doesn’t get to the granular level of individual kids’ needs,” he said. “We know they’re not missing in a real sense. They’re just not on anyone’s radar. It’s the radar screens’ fault, not the kids’ fault.”

He compared the issue to the debate around learning loss, saying it’s “valid and important” to research the phenomenon, but that there are also so many variables and unknowns that are difficult to parse out.

“I think it’s much less important for the macro than the micro: For a given kid who’s not in school, it’s much more important,” he said.

Bloomfield remained more concerned about the larger number of New York City students who are chronically absent and might be enrolled but “alienated” from their schools. More than 30% of students this year are on track to have missed more than 18 days, or about a month, of school, city officials have said.

“The other piece is the in-school situation,” Bloomfield said, “The kids who can be found but are not being served.”

Correction: Due to an update to one state’s enrollment figures, this story has been corrected to change the estimated number of missing students in all states from 240,000 to 230,000.

This article is based on data collected by The Associated Press and Stanford University’s Big Local News project. Data was compiled by Sharon Lurye of the AP, Thomas Dee of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, and Justin Mayo of Big Local News.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

The other thing locked classroom doors keep out

2023-02-08T13:00:00+00:00

At the beginning of this school year, the Maryland school district where I teach imposed a new regulation: All classroom doors are to be locked when students are in the building. Of course, we’ve had exterior doors locked and a strict visitor check-in policy for most of the 20-plus years I’ve been teaching at this high school.

The new mandate grew out of the recommendations of the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission, which reported, “There has never been an event in which an active shooter breached a locked classroom door.” I’m all for protecting our students and staff and am well-versed in the debates over locking mechanisms and who should be deputized to open a locked door when someone knocks. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned about the policy’s effect on our school culture.

Jamey Melcher

We’re well into the school year now, and teachers areteaching, students are engaged, and classrooms are full of lively activity. But the hallways are now wonderful places for teenagers to disengage, stare at their phones, or roam around unnoticed. Exactly what we have been working so hard to combat in our post-pandemic school communities. Classroom activities and discussions that used to filter into the hallways and even draw passersby into them, now seem to exist within their own bubbles, and the overall feeling of community has decreased dramatically.

It’s easy to blame attendance policies or school administrators for not disciplining students when they skip class. But the blame game or heavier disciplinary consequences don’t really address the culture of isolation that we are now getting used to. As teachers, we see that students are more withdrawn when we deliver our lessons only on screens or otherwise overuse technology. Now, we’ve created a physical environment that also separates and isolates young people.

Until this year, students in my English classes would use the hallway as a practice and staging area when rehearsing their assigned scenes from “Macbeth” or “Antigone.” On performance day, they would grandly enter the classroom in their ridiculous paper crowns, fake beards, and other items from the prop box.

And I miss hearing students in the physics class across the hall propel race cars down the corridor or stretch giant springs and measure the force or torque or whatever it is they used to do out there. The French class students who would sit on the floor in small groups, spreading out into the hallway so they could work on conversational skills, are also gone now.

Open classroom doors fostered inclusion and unity within our diverse high school.

I miss hearing students in the physics class across the hall propel race cars down the corridor.

By locking our school’s interior doors, are we overreacting to the dangerous world around us? I think we probably are. I’m afraid that we’re also unwittingly contributing to the pervasive decline in interpersonal skills among our teenagers. We didn’t really understand the emotional and social damage caused by moving schools online for an extended period of time until we returned to in-person learning. In a similar way, I fear that our attempts to keep students safe by creating a lockdown atmosphere in schools every day is also damaging the social and emotional growth of many students.

Is the solution to be carefree and ignore the lessons of the tragic events that have occurred and continue to bring us to tears each time they happen? No. But we do need to react with a measured response. We haven’t stopped going to malls, restaurants, or concerts because fatal shootings have happened in those places. We continue to engage with each other because we need places that bring us together and create community; our students need that even more than we do.

Jamey Melcher is currently a Work Based Learning Coordinator and a former English teacher for Frederick County Public Schools in Maryland. She has been teaching and learning from her high school students for 26 years.

Consejería gratuita: las escuelas de Colorado ayudan a los estudiantes a obtener apoyo para la salud mental

2023-02-01T19:53:02+00:00

Read in English.

Roxana Alvarado Martínez, estudiante de décimo grado, solamente le había contado a algunas amistades cercanas que estaba yendo a citas de terapia para que la ayudaran con la ansiedad y el insomnio.

Pero eso cambió la semana pasada en el salón de la clase de educación cívica, donde trabaja como ayudante del maestro. El maestro sacó papelitos de la caja “Sol y Nubes”, donde los alumnos pueden compartir sus dificultades o emociones anónimamente.

Ese día, cuando se tocaron los temas de depresión, acoso escolar y suicidio, Roxana habló.

“No es motivo de vergüenza, ni absolutamente de pena, que ustedes o yo acudamos a terapia”, le dijo a la clase en la Escuela Secundaria Summit en Breckenridge. “Podría ayudarte a conectarte, si es lo que necesitas”

Roxana es parte de una generación que, en los últimos años, ha tenido que enfrentar problemas de salud mental sin precedentes en medio de una pandemia que amplió el estrés, el miedo y el aislamiento en personas jóvenes y mayores. También es una de los miles de jóvenes de Colorado que están aprovechando el aumento en programas cuyo propósito es hacer que el apoyo de salud mental sea más accesible y económico para la juventud.

Estos programas incluyen el programa estatal I Matter (Yo Importo), que ofrece seis sesiones gratuitas de consejería en persona o telesalud (virtuales) para estudiantes de primaria a secundaria. Hasta ahora, el programa ha atendido a más de 5,600 estudiantes en todo el estado.

Además, hay una variedad de programas locales. Roxana, de 16 años, recibió una beca para cubrir el costo de la terapia de Building Hope, un grupo sin fines de lucro en el Condado de Summit. El distrito escolar de Aurora, al este de Denver, empezó a ofrecerles seis sesiones gratuitas de consejería a los estudiantes hace un año, y el vecino distrito de Cherry Creek empezó a ofrecer en diciembre de ocho a 10 sesiones gratuitas para los estudiantes de escuela intermedia y secundaria. Ambos distritos contrataron a Hazel Health, una empresa de telesalud con sede en San Francisco.

Es difícil saber si la juventud de Colorado está recibiendo toda la ayuda que necesita. Durante los primeros nueve meses de 2022, las visitas a la sala de emergencias del sistema Children’s Hospital Colorado relacionadas con salud mental aumentaron un 74% en comparación con el mismo período en 2019, dijo una portavoz del hospital.

Esta es en parte la razón por la que los líderes locales y estatales siguen presionando para que los niños y adolescentes tengan acceso fácil a servicios de salud mental antes de que haya una crisis mayor.

Michelle Weinraub, directora de salud mental de Cherry Creek, dijo que el programa de consejería gratuita del distrito surgió de un grupo de trabajo sobre salud mental puesto en marcha a principios de 2022. Recordó que les preguntó a los estudiantes, en una reunión, si ellos usarían sesiones de consejería gratuitas que estuviesen disponibles en sus teléfonos después de la escuela o el trabajo.

Un par de ellos se emocionaron tanto, que casi saltaron de sus sillas, dijo ella.

“Dijeron: ‘Sí, eso es lo que queremos’”, afirmó ella. Entonces los estudiantes empezaron a hablar: “No podemos conseguir cita a menos que estemos en crisis... Mi amigo intentó llamar y está en lista de espera desde hace seis meses. Quería la cita con alguien que ya estaba atendiendo a un conocido, pero esa persona no acepta seguros médicos.”

Expertos declaran una emergencia de salud mental

En mayo de 2021, poco más de un año después del inicio de la pandemia, los líderes del Children’s Hospital Colorado dieron la voz de alarma sobre el gran aumento de problemas graves de salud mental entre niños y adolescentes, y declararon un “estado de emergencia” de salud mental en la juventud.”

Ellos pidieron más fondos y también más esfuerzos para reducir las trabas burocráticas en el sistema de salud mental para los niños y adolescentes. Seis meses después, el estado lanzó el programa I Matter.

Este programa no es la única “puerta” para encontrar consejería. Es una opción de acceso fácil para cualquier persona joven que necesite alguien con quien hablar, dijo Charlotte Whitney, de la Administración de Salud Conductual, la agencia estatal que maneja el programa I Matter. No se requiere tener ansiedad ni depresión extremas.

Whitney dijo que el modelo puede ayudar a los niños a mejorar su salud mental a largo plazo “porque sabrán dónde obtener los servicios y habrán aprendido las técnicas de manejo para superar esos momentos realmente difíciles”

Los estudiantes de 12 años en adelante pueden inscribirse en las sesiones de terapia llenando un formulario sencillo en línea. Los menores de 12 años pueden utilizar el servicio, pero necesitan que uno de sus padres lo haga. Whitney dijo que, en general, los estudiantes pueden obtener citas de telesalud en cuestión de días.

Ocasionalmente, dijo ella, los estudiantes esperarán más si están buscando algo específico, por ejemplo una cita en persona en una comunidad rural, o un terapeuta que se especialice en asuntos de transgénero.

En Aurora, desde que comenzó el año escolar más o menos 230 estudiantes han sido referidos a consejería a través del programa gratuito de Hazel Health. En Cherry Creek, que puso en marcha su programa el 5 de diciembre, unos 200 estudiantes han sido referidos para recibir ayuda. Los funcionarios del distrito dicen que no hay listas de espera para las citas.

Ya sea que los estudiantes empiecen con I Matter o con otro programa, si necesitan consejería continua, los terapeutas trabajarán con ellos para encontrar esa ayuda ya sea a través del seguro médico o de otra forma.

La pandemia de COVID19 provocó agotamiento mental en los estudiantes

Roxana siempre fue estudiante sobresaliente, incluso antes de mudarse de México a Estados Unidos a los 7 años. Sus padres esperaban buenas calificaciones, y ella las lograba.

Pero sus clases se hicieron más difíciles en la intermedia. Luego, en séptimo grado, llegó la pandemia. Roxana, que antes siempre estaba rodeada de amigos, se encontró pasando largos días sola en su cuarto.

Su papá le decía, “tienes que salir y por lo menos comer algo, beber agua”, dijo Roxana. “Empecé a llegar al punto en que me estaba ahogando en todo mi trabajo”

Se sentía claustrofóbica, agotada y preocupada por su madre, que trabajaba como enfermera en México. Al final, Roxana acudió a consejería, pero no le fue bien. Dice ella que el terapeuta le dijo: “Solo está en tu cabeza. Estás fingiendo”.

A mediados del noveno grado, sus problemas se agravaron. Por primera vez en su vida, estaba faltando a clases y a punto de fracasar en sus clases. Y terminó en el hospital.

Actualmente Roxana está mejor. Está acudiendo a una terapeuta con la que se siente identificada — es latina y su primer idioma es español, como ella — y ha dejado de lado su afán por tener perfectas calificaciones. También está intentando eliminar el estigma de buscar ayuda para la salud mental, algo que ha sentido como parte de la comunidad latina.

“Tenemos una cultura muy, muy arraigada de que lo que ocurre en nuestra familia, se queda en nuestra familia, y no hay por qué estar contando los asuntos familiares por ahí”, dice ella.

Pero Roxana sabe que hay otros estudiantes como ella en la escuela, luchando en silencio contra dolorosas realidades. Por eso decidió decir algo durante la reciente clase de educación cívica, tartamudeando un poco mientras compartía su historia.

“Si yo no hablo, otros tampoco lo harán”, afirmó.

Ann Schimke es reportera senior de Chalkbeat y cubre temas de niñez temprana y alfabetización temprana. Para comunicarte con Ann, escríbele a aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Tell us: How has your relationship to school changed since the pandemic started?

2023-01-25T21:45:59+00:00

To say it’s been a long three years feels like an understatement. Much has changed for many New Yorkers since the COVID pandemic started, particularly when it comes to their relationship to school and education.

Where does that leave parents, students, and educators? What kind of support do families and schools need?

It’s still a trying time for many New York City schools.

The nation’s largest school system continues to lose students, resulting in budget cuts. But in many cases, having fewer teachers meant they had to do more with less, often with class sizes ballooning. Compared to the year before, elementary and middle school classes increased this year, according to city data. And the privately run but publicly funded prekindergarten centers that are the backbone of the city’s free pre-K program for 3- and 4-year-olds has been rife with funding and other problems.

Meanwhile students are still healing from prolonged isolation, but are once again going on field trips and are back in their classrooms — except when they don’t show up, as chronic absenteeism rates remain high, and educators have seen an increasing number of students who feel like school is optional, in a way.

Some children are trying to self-medicate with marijuana, experts have said, and schools are reporting an uptick in student marijuana use, particularly in younger grades. On top of social emotional needs, many students still need academic help. The city has also been grappling with how to better serve a rising number of homeless students, particularly from migrant families sent here on buses from Texas.

Please fill out our brief survey to let us know how things have changed for you:

Colorado experts declared a youth mental health emergency. Here’s what happened next.

2023-01-19T22:50:33+00:00

Leer en español.

Roxana Alvarado Martinéz, a high school sophomore, had told only close friends she was seeing a therapist to help her with anxiety and insomnia.

But that changed last week in the civics classroom where she serves as a teacher’s assistant. The teacher plucked slips of paper from the “Sol y Nubes” — sun and clouds — box, where students can anonymously share struggles or excitement.

That day, as the discussion touched on depression, bullying, and suicide, Roxana spoke up.

“There is no shame, absolutely no shame in you having a therapist or me having a therapist,” she told the class at Summit High School in Breckenridge. “I could help you get connected if that’s what you need.”

Roxana is part of a generation that has grappled with unprecedented mental health struggles over the last few years amid a pandemic that stoked stress, fear, and isolation for people young and old. She’s also one of thousands of Colorado youth taking advantage of a growing number of programs that aim to make mental health support more accessible and affordable for young people.

These programs include the state’s “I Matter” program, which provides six free telehealth or in-person counseling sessions to students in elementary through high school. So far, the program has served more than 5,600 students statewide.

There are a variety of local programs, too. Roxana, 16, received a scholarship to cover the cost of therapy from Building Hope Summit County, a mental health nonprofit. The Aurora school district east of Denver began offering students six free counseling sessions a year ago and the neighboring Cherry Creek district began offering eight to 10 free sessions to middle and high schoolers in December. Both districts contract with Hazel Health, a telehealth company based in San Francisco.

It’s hard to know if Colorado youth are getting all the help they need. During the first nine months of 2022, mental health-related visits to emergency departments in the Children’s Hospital Colorado system were up 74% compared with the same period in 2019, according to a hospital spokeswoman.

That’s part of the reason why local and state leaders continue to push for easy-access mental health support for children and teens before a full-blown crisis hits.

Michelle Weinraub, Cherry Creek’s chief health officer, said the district’s free counseling program grew out of a mental health task force launched in early 2022. She recalled asking students at one meeting if they’d use free counseling sessions they could access on their phones after school or work.

A couple of them were so excited, they jumped out of their chairs, she said.

“They were like, ‘Yes, that’s what we want,’” she said. Then the students started talking: “We can’t get an appointment unless we’re in crisis … My friend tried to call and they’re on a waitlist for six months. My friend wanted to see this person that they knew somebody else was seeing, but it doesn’t accept insurance.”

Experts declare a mental health emergency

In May 2021, just over a year into the pandemic, leaders at Children’s Hospital Colorado sounded the alarm about the spike in serious mental health problems among children and teens, declaring a youth mental health “state of emergency.”

They pleaded for more funding as well as efforts to reduce bureaucratic constraints in the youth mental health system. Six months later the state launched I Matter.

The program isn’t meant to be the only “front door” to counseling, but rather to serve as one low-barrier option for any young person who needs someone to talk to, said Charlotte Whitney of the state’s Behavioral Health Administration, which runs I Matter. There’s no requirement to be extremely anxious or depressed.

Whitney said the model can help set kids up for improved mental health long term “because they know where to access services and they know the coping skills to get them through those really hard times.”

Students 12 and over can sign up for the therapy sessions by filling out a simple online form. Children under 12 can use the service, but need a parent to do so. Whitney said generally students can get telehealth appointments within days.

Occasionally, she said, students wait longer if they’re looking for something specific — for example an in-person appointment in a rural community or a therapist that specializes in transgender issues.

In Aurora, about 230 students have been referred for counseling through the free Hazel Health program since the start of the school year. In Cherry Creek, which launched its program Dec. 5, about 200 students have been referred for help, often by their parents. Officials in both districts say there are no waiting lists for appointments.

Puppy therapy helps students open up

Timothy Swanson, a social worker in Colorado Springs, is one of about 200 I Matter therapists statewide. He sees up to three students a week, mostly in person, through the program. Often, his clients open up first to his dog Smoke, a gentle pitbull mix who accompanies him to the office.

Tim Swanson’s dog Smoke is a comforting presence for clients.

“They just love him. They just grab him and start talking to him,” said Swanson. “It really helps these kids because a lot of times they come in, they’re withdrawn, a little nervous, not sure what therapy’s about.”

Swanson, 63, said many young clients, whether they’ve come through I Matter or other avenues, struggle with anxiety, anger, or depression. Sometimes, it’s because of pandemic-related disruptions at school, the trickle-down effect of parent stress, or cruel behavior from classmates.

Some of his clients have been told by fellow students, “Well, if you feel that way, why don’t you just kill yourself?”

“It’s really damaging,” Swanson said. “I encourage them to talk to counselors, to me, to their parents, to teachers or whoever, to help them develop a support system ... a healthy one where they can get good answers.”

As with other free therapy programs, I Matter aims to connect youth to continued counseling if they want or need it after the free sessions. Swanson said 30% to 40% of his I Matter clients continue seeing him after the first six sessions, paying through health insurance or other means.

Weinraub, of the Cherry Creek district, said if needed, Hazel Health therapists work with students and families to connect them to a local therapist after the free telehealth sessions end.

The COVID19 pandemic led to student burnout

Even before Roxana moved to the United State from Mexico at age 7, she was a top student. Her parents expected good grades and she delivered.

But her classes got harder in middle school. Then, in seventh grade, the pandemic hit. Roxana, once surrounded by friends, found herself spending long days alone in her bedroom.

Her father would say, “You have to come out and at least eat something, drink some water,” Roxana said. “I started getting to the point where I was drowning myself in all my work.”

She felt claustrophobic, exhausted, and worried about her mother, who worked as a nurse in Mexico. Eventually, Roxana tried counseling but it didn’t go well. She said the therapist told her, “It’s only in your head. You’re just pretending.”

By the middle of her freshman year in high school, her struggles spiraled. She was skipping classes and nearly failing courses for the first time in her life. She ended up in the hospital.

Today, Roxana is doing better. She’s seeing a therapist she relates to — one who is Latina and a native Spanish-speaker like herself — and she’s let go of her drive for perfect grades. She’s also trying to tackle the stigma around seeking mental health help, something she’s felt as part of the Latino community.

“We have this big, big culture of what happens in our family stays in our family and you’re not going to tell our family business around,” she said.

But Roxana knows there are other students like her at school, silently struggling with their painful realities. That’s why she decided to say something during the recent civics class, stuttering a bit as she shared her story.

“If I don’t speak out, other people won’t either,” she said.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat, covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

After COVID paused Regents exams, graduation rates for NYC’s English language learners surged

2023-01-19T19:31:54+00:00

Arnulfo Toribio was ready to drop out of high school.

It was 2020, and Toribio felt exhausted from learning years’ worth of material while balancing school with a full-time restaurant job. Before immigrating to New York City a few years earlier, he had spent much of his childhood working on a Mexican farm to support his family after his father died, missing at least six years of formal schooling.

A guidance counselor persuaded him to stay on track for a diploma, and Toribio got an additional boost just months before graduation: In response to the pandemic, the state canceled New York’s Regents exams, five of which students are required to pass in order to graduate. Students would still need to pass their courses. Toribio, who hadn’t passed his English or Algebra Regents after a couple attempts, graduated later that year.

“I benefited from that policy,” Toribio explained in Spanish through a translator. “It honestly helped me graduate.”

Bucking national trends, graduation rates rose across the state in the 2020-21 school year. Even more surprising, the rate catapulted for the city’s English language learners — rising by 14 percentage points to 60%, the largest increase on record for those students and a greater rise than other student groups.

The graduation rate spike seemed counterintuitive given that low-income immigrant communities had been severely affected by the pandemic, and many English learners found it more difficult to learn remotely. (Educators also found it difficult to teach remotely.)

Data obtained by Chalkbeat suggests that the temporary policy change — first canceling the English Regents and then not requiring a passing score on it to graduate in 2020-21 — removed a hurdle for English language learners trying to earn their diplomas. More English learners graduated during that time period, far fewer of whom passed the English Regents exam.

State officials acknowledged the spike could have been connected to the temporary cancellation of the Regents exams, and specifically the English exam, but they couldn’t say to what extent.

The effects of that policy could become clearer soon, as the state prepares to release graduation rates from the 2021-22 school year, when Regents exams resumed. The data could help inform a commission tasked with recommending changes to the state’s graduation requirements in 2024, including whether the Regents exams should still be required for students to graduate.

More English language learners take advantage of the Regents cancellation

Students typically take the English Regents exam at some point between freshman and senior year — with some taking it multiple times in hopes of eventually passing so they can get their diplomas. (Some students can appeal their scores and still graduate.)

In the 2018-19 school year, nearly 3,000 English language learners graduated from city public schools within four years, and roughly 67% of them had passed their English Regents at some point. In comparison, nearly all students who graduated and were not learning English as a new language had passed their English exams.

By 2020-21, when the English Regents was optional, the number of English language learners who earned diplomas rose to nearly 4,900, while just 8% passed their exams. (Pass rates also fell for other students who graduated, as more of them earned diplomas. Still, more than three-quarters of non-English learners had passed the test.)

The data doesn’t prove that English Regents exams are the source of low graduation rates among English learners because other factors could have influenced the recent rise, multiple policy experts who reviewed the data said.

Still, there’s “pretty good evidence” that canceling the exams was “one of the things that caused kids to be able to graduate,” said Julie Sugarman, senior policy analyst for K-12 education who focuses on English learners at the Migration Policy Institute’s National Center on Immigration Integration Policy.

Sugarman also noted that counselors could have encouraged more students to graduate, or looser grading policies could have helped students. (In Toribio’s case, he said his teachers were also flexible with his assignment deadlines as he searched for a new job during the start of the pandemic.)

Still, the data shows strong signs that “students who disproportionately struggle with high stakes standardized tests are disproportionately impacted” when those exams are no longer required to graduate, Sarah Part, a senior policy analyst with Advocates For Children, which has been advocating to remove Regents as a graduation requirement, said in an email.

English language learners typically don’t graduate on time

Graduation rates for English learners have been historically low — 46% graduated on time in 2020 in New York City, compared with 79% of all students citywide. Advocates and policy experts have cited many reasons, including that newer immigrant students might juggle work with school and lack of enough support in classrooms as they’re still learning the language.

Those rates have steadily grown since 2016 by an average of roughly 4 percentage points annually. But the 14-point jump in the 2020-21 school year was an anomaly. It was so high, that for the first time in eight years, English learners no longer had the lowest four-year graduation rate among the city’s major student groups, surpassing children with disabilities.

Research has found little evidence that requiring high-stakes graduation exams improves student achievement, and doing so may actually increase dropout rates for struggling students. The English exams can be particularly hard on English learners, advocates and researchers said. Sugarman said she often hears from educators about students who have passed all of their classes, but can’t pass the English Regents exam.

Just 3% of the city’s English learners who graduated last year did so without using any exemptions from Regents exams, compared to 28% of non-English learners, according to an analysis from The Education Trust-New York.

That organization described their findings as a “signal that students may be underprepared for postsecondary opportunities.”

At the same time, the data is likely fodder for advocates who have called for the state to stop requiring the Regents exams to graduate.

“What are more meaningful measures that can still capture the student’s learning and still give them different possibilities in different ways, so that their ability to graduate doesn’t depend on one test they take on one day for a few hours out of the four years plus of their high school career?” said Juliet Eisenstein, senior staff attorney with Advocates For Children who sits on the state’s commission that is reviewing graduation requirements.

Juanmy Moscoso, an English learner who graduated in 2021, took the English Regents exam five times before passing it, finally succeeding his junior year of high school, three years after he first moved to the United States from the Dominican Republic. He was part of the minority of English learners who passed the exam prior to graduating in 2021.

He felt that his teachers had done all they could to prepare him, but it was tough to pass the exam while also juggling a challenging course load, including several Advanced Placement classes.

“The problem is me not knowing the language as I wanted,” Moscoso said.

Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, an associate professor of international education at NYU, who has studied English language learners, has raised the larger question of why officials expect newcomer English learners to graduate on time to begin with — an argument other policy researchers have also made.

Those students are acclimating to a new country, as well as a new language, and could benefit from extra support and more time instead of “getting them out as quickly as possible,” he said. He said that many newer immigrants don’t pursue college and wondered if that would be different if they received more support in school.

There are signs that English learners who get more time to learn the language perform well academically. The graduation rates for students who are former English learners typically outpace their peers.

Toribio, the student who graduated in 2020, went on to attend community college. But he stopped attending because he was struggling to pay for school, according to an advocate who has helped him in the past. He hopes to go back soon.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Guns in schools are up, and Denver superintendent says violence is his top concern

2023-01-17T23:05:48+00:00

Denver Public Schools Superintendent Alex Marrero recalled standing in September by the bedside of an East High School student who’d been shot in the face. The bullet had pierced the teenager’s cheek and exited through his ear. He couldn’t speak, but he wrote something down.

“Why was I shot?” the student wrote, according to Marrero.

“I have no answer for that,” Marrero said.

The shooting happened about an hour after school let out, outside a recreation center next to East High on busy Colfax Avenue. Two 16-year-olds were arrested in connection with the crime. The police said the 16-year-olds had been fighting with a 20-year-old man, who was also injured in the shooting. The student had been a bystander to the fight.

For Marrero, the shooting was the latest in a string of gun incidents this past fall. The superintendent says preventing gun violence is his top concern in a district with plenty of challenges, from academic struggles to declining enrollment.

“This is, pardon the pun, a ticking time bomb,” Marrero said at a public school board meeting in November. “I can’t stay silent any longer.”

Marrero said that while he’s used to delivering tough messages as the superintendent, “the last thing we want to do is say, ‘We don’t have an answer for a loss of life or a tragedy.’”

District data backs up Marrero’s concerns. The number of weapons found at schools and confiscated from students has skyrocketed since before the pandemic.

In the 2018-19 school year, the district found 40 weapons at schools, according to data that Chalkbeat obtained through an open records request. Those included two guns and nine fake guns, the data shows.

Last school year, five times as many weapons — 200 total — were found at schools, including 13 guns and 28 fake guns, the data shows. This year is likely to be similar. As of late November, the district had recovered 79 weapons, including seven guns and 17 fake guns.

That doesn’t count weapons found near schools or shootings that happened just off campus, like the shooting near East High in September or a juvenile who was shot in the park next to Montbello High School on a Friday afternoon last month.

In most cases, students are carrying guns not to start violence but because they’re scared and feel the need to protect themselves, Marrero said. It’s illegal to carry guns on campus. Even if district staff can keep students safe in school, Marrero said he’s worried about the conflicts that happen just beyond their reach, when students are on their way to or from school.

“This is not a DPS issue,” Marrero told the school board. “This is a city of Denver issue. This is a county, a state issue — quite frankly, a national phenomenon in terms of access to guns.”

Jason McBride is worried about the conflicts too, but he disagrees with Marrero that it’s not a school district issue. McBride is a youth violence prevention specialist with the nonprofit Struggle of Love Foundation. He thinks the district’s tally of guns on campus is likely an undercount. There are more guns in backpacks that never get reported, he said.

McBride said there have been times when his organization tries to step in and help after a shooting but isn’t let into a school because the incident happened off campus. He recalled one recent incident in a park next to a school in which a student held a gun to another student’s head and pulled the trigger but the gun jammed.

“A lot of these shootings are happening in broad daylight by kids who are supposed to be in school,” McBride said.

He thinks schools should be mandated to work with community organizations like Struggle of Love that provide mentorship and counseling to students at risk. Instead, it’s up to each school principal whether they want to contract with an organization that does violence interruption work, which often means taking money from another budget item. Last year, Struggle of Love was in eight schools, McBride said. This year it’s just four, he said.

In an interview, Marrero stopped short of agreeing with that approach. While he acknowledged it would help, he said the solution needs to be broader. He also dismissed the idea of more police, which touches on another hot-button issue.

The school board voted in 2020 to remove police officers from Denver schools, about a year before Marrero was hired as superintendent. Marrero said he’s proud of the district’s response to that directive. While Denver Public Schools still has its own unarmed security guards inside schools, as well as a unit of mobile armed guards, far fewer students are being referred to law enforcement now than before police officers were removed.

State data shows that in the 2018-19 school year, Denver students were referred to law enforcement 657 times. That compares with 125 In 2021-22, a whopping 81% decrease.

“We are not interested in increasing the school-to-prison pipeline,” Marrero said. “We’re doing our best to ensure students continue to get second chances and to right their path and succeed.

“But certain cases are so extreme. We’re doing an incredible job with low-tier incidents and even high-tier incidents. But my concern is those high-tier ones are off the scale.”

Marrero said he wants to make sure youth gun violence is the top priority for city leaders. Denver voters will elect a new mayor in April from a crowded field that does not include current Mayor Michael Hancock, who is barred from running for reelection due to term limits. Marrero said he plans to ask mayoral candidates himself how they plan to address gun violence.

“I cannot guarantee that every scholar is going to thrive — as has been our tagline here — if something happens outside of our control,” Marrero said.

“I feel like there’s a tragedy that’s brewing, and I need other folks to step in.”

Melanie Asmar is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado, covering Denver Public Schools. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Meet the Helpers: How a bilingual school counselor in Adams 14 helps students and families

2023-01-11T22:39:18+00:00

Leer en español.

As more schools see a need to focus on student mental health, districts are hiring new mental health professionals to help.

But what do these various positions involve, how do they work together, and how can they help students?

Chalkbeat talked to a bilingual school counselor in Adams 14 to learn more about how school counselors work with students and how being bilingual contributes to the job.

Brenda Moreno Negrete is the only bilingual counselor in the only comprehensive high school in Adams 14, a district north of Denver, where about half of the more than 6,000 students are identified as English language learners and most come from Spanish-speaking homes. Here she talks about her job and how being bilingual helps her talk to more students and connect with families.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Do you have more questions about mental health positions at your schools you’d like to share with us? Send us an email at co.tips@chalkbeat.org.

Tell us about your job.

Brenda Moreno Negrete is a bilingual counselor in Adams 14.

It is my first year as a school counselor here at Adams City High School. School counselors, we have three main domains that we focus on: academics, career, and then social-emotional, which is where the mental health part comes in. They go hand-in-hand. A lot of times we have kiddos struggling at home or with mental health that affects their academics. Being able to look at kiddos in that holistic way is where we try to help.

A lot of college programs including mine we do internships and practicums where we do just mental health — that’s all we do we do, and then later we incorporate the academics part of it.

I grew up in the community I’m serving. We do have an intern that is bilingual, but I am currently the only bilingual licensed counselor at the school which has been of huge help. It’s just really nice to be able to connect with families in their language. I know my community and I know how important it is for parents to connect with people who speak their language and who can connect with them. I also know the needs here so I wanted to come here and I wanted to start my career here.

What kind of work do you do with students on a typical day?

It varies. If a kid is talking about suicide or self-harming, we get called in and we do screeners. If a kiddo is having a tough day they come to us and meet with us, whether it be about anything from anxiety, which we have seen a lot, to depression, to maybe even just relationship problems. We go ahead and talk to them. We do talk about academics but that is not all the focus.

If we see they’re having attendance issues then we go ahead and check in and see what’s going on. A lot of the time it has something to do with their life at home or they are struggling with mental health.

How are students assigned to one of the four counselors?

It depends on the school. Right now at our school we have them by alphabetical order, so it’s by last name.

When it comes to kiddos, their families might only speak Spanish, but a lot of kiddos are bilingual. We do have kiddos who maybe they just got here from Mexico or they’re fairly new. If they don’t speak English, then yes, that would be me. I go ahead and meet with them and talk to them just because right now our other counselors do not speak Spanish. We do have the intern who does and she does talk to some also.

What are the other mental health resources you work with at your school?

We have a social worker. She works with a lot of kiddos, she usually has a case load just like us. A lot of her kiddos have special education services or are on IEPs (Individual Education Program).

In this school we have Kids First, which is a clinic and they’re stationed here at the school, right in the same area as our nurse. Kids First also offers a therapist. If there are kiddos who need more time, for example my caseload right now is about 350 students, so that’s a lot of students. We do have kiddos who need maybe more individualized meetings with a therapist more often, like once a week or every other week. Then we do refer out.

We have Kids First and we have Griffith Center here at the school. Griffith Center is also a mental health place where they do all sorts of things, but they have someone who is actually here at the school. It’s really neat because when we refer students they meet with a therapist who is here at the school. The family does not have to go out. We try to eliminate that barrier. They usually try to pull them or meet with them during the school time, where they’re able to.

When do you connect with families?

It comes in a lot of different ways. Sometimes the parents do come in asking for help. They get phone calls saying that their kid is missing class and so some of them do come in. Or for example if we have a teacher who refers them and says, “Hey, I know this kid who maybe has cuts” or “I know this kid is feeling down,” then we go ahead and pull them and depending on what’s going on that’s when we make the connection at home.

Or we call as we’re checking in on students. We let them know what’s going on, especially for example with mental health, if we notice we need to check on what’s going on at home. If it comes to academics, we might call to let them know this is how they are looking for graduation.

Can students expect confidentiality, or when do you have to reach out to parents?

There is confidentiality with us and the student. There are only three exceptions where we need to break that. That is if they are being harmed, so if they’re talking about suicide, if they’re in danger. If they’re talking about hurting someone else or they want to hurt someone else or themselves, or if there’s an immediate danger to the building. It’s really only those exceptions, unless they give us permission.

When we meet with students we have signs and we do tell them. We do keep confidentiality. I am here for you, but there are exceptions to that. I always tell them and they do give me permission a lot of times to talk to the families. If the families are on board it makes all the difference, but sometimes it’s not safe.

For example if a kiddo is hurting themselves or having suicidal ideations, then having that conversation with parents in a way where the chid can feel safe and where it’s not so much stigmatized is one way we can help.

What do you want people to know about how you’re able to help students in this job?

Where we come in is we really try to see what’s going on, try to take the time to see what’s going on. If a kiddo is getting into fights, talking to them about anger and their coping skills. We really do not go into discipline because of the relationships we’re building with the students. We have to be the people they can go to.

Students have to be feeling good mentally and emotionally before they can even be students. In working with other professionals here at the school, we are able to be more intentional about mental health and what’s going on.

Bringing in other support like home and family. There are strengths in our community. Looping them in in a way where it can benefit the student if it’s possible that also helps. For example normalizing some of the things when we talk about mental health. Letting them know, a lot of kiddos are struggling with this. People struggle with it and it doesn’t have to be something that’s wrong with the kiddo. Normalizing that in a way where parents also feel support. Telling them we have these resources. If it’s here at the school, for example, it’s free. Talking to parents in a way they can understand it’s not this shameful thing.

The biggest misconception about school counselors is that we just look at grades or do scheduling. There’s this huge other resource that’s not being tapped into which is the mental health, the social-emotional part. We’re a great bridge to resources when it comes to how a student is feeling.

We have to meet with them about their grades, but it’s also about just letting them know we’re here because if the kiddo does open up, we can go ahead and get on that.

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

What education stories do you want to see more of in 2023?

2023-01-05T15:36:48+00:00

Efforts to recover from COVID’s lingering toll. New restrictions on teaching about race, gender and sexuality. Gun violence. New efforts to boost reading. Teacher turnover. Intensified focus on student mental health.

These were just some of the issues defining school communities across America last year. We turned to Chalkbeat readers dozens of times for help with our journalism — and your ideas and stories influenced hundreds of articles. Now, as a new school semester launches, we want to know: What’s the biggest education issue facing your school community in 2023?

Our journalists want to start the year from a place of listening, and your voice will help us determine what stories and questions matter most to you. Fill out our brief survey below, or go here.

Caroline Bauman connects Chalkbeat journalists with our readers as the community engagement manager and previously reported at Chalkbeat Tennessee. Connect with Caroline at cbauman@chalkbeat.org.

13 education data stories that explained U.S. schools in 2022

2022-12-29T15:00:00+00:00

A map, a graph, a timeline: When we think about data in news stories, our minds naturally jump to these kinds of visual elements. But the core of data journalism is less about specific charts, and more about scale—it gives us a way to understand big stories and lots of numbers, by analyzing and aggregating them until we can see the shape of the trends within.

2022 was my first full calendar year as the editor of Chalkbeat’s data team, and what a year for data it was. Here’s a baker’s dozen of the stories that we feel captured our best work, and help sum up a busy 12 months reporting on education data across America.

1. NYC parents, was your child exposed to COVID? Here’s what to do next

It’s easy to forget now, but at the start of 2022 there was still a lot of confusion around what the return to school meant for public health: Policies around masking, quarantine, and contact tracing were all changing rapidly. Our team worked with Chalkbeat editors and reporters in New York City to create an interactive flowchart to reduce some of that confusion, so that parents could walk step by step through the requirements if their child or a classmate tested positive.

2. What five graphics tell us about COVID vaccine disparity in Chicago schools

Once vaccines were approved for children, they became part of a layered public health strategy for school districts trying to get kids back into classrooms. But like so much about COVID, vaccine distribution also revealed persistent inequality. In Chicago, data analysis from the district’s vaccination dashboard showed an organization struggling to keep kids safe, especially in historically Black and Hispanic neighborhoods on the South Side of the city.

3. Technology, Skyline rollout dominate Chicago Public Schools’ federal relief vendor spending

With the pandemic came federal money, through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Funds, also known as ESSER I, II, and III. Flush with cash, school districts across the country channeled money into renovation, hiring, and equipment.

On this story, we looked at the data from Chicago Public Schools’ spending, to see who was making the most from ESSER purchases. Unsurprisingly, the tree map at the top shows how more than half of all spending went to only 10 mega-vendors out of almost 1,000 companies in the dataset.

4. How the COVID-19 pandemic is changing school data

Pandemics are natural data stories, but they are also big data events for governments and school administrations, and many states responded accordingly. Data reporters Kae Petrin and Kaitlyn Radde collaborated on this story to explore how COVID had exposed weaknesses in school data infrastructure, and the improvements they were making in response.

5. Nonbinary students aren’t reflected in federal civil rights data. That might change.

In a similar vein, this story from Kae Petrin looked into a proposed change from the federal Office of Civil Rights that would expand the gender categories used in state-reported data on harassment, absenteeism, and sexual assault. More than just a demographic marker, these kinds of changes — highlighted in a map from Cam Rodriguez — also show the seams of our patchwork educational system, and where they sometimes strain to keep up with social change.

6. In New Jersey, thousands of Black and Hispanic students are shut out of AP classes

One of the advantages of working on data at Chalkbeat is our local coverage, and the ability to work with bureaus that are deeply sourced in their communities. This story by Patrick Wall is a perfect example, as it digs into New Jersey’s AP class attendance gap, and its disproportionate effect on students of color, including maps and graphs from Cam Rodriguez that put the disparity into sharp contrast.

7. How the age-appropriate debate is altering curriculum in Tennessee and nationwide

This year saw the political debate around critical race theory — the academic framework that examines how policies and the law perpetuate systemic racism and that is not commonly taught in primary or secondary schools — turned into an ongoing controversy around reading material in libraries and classrooms. For this enterprise story, our team added context for objections that parents had raised against the curriculum used by Williamson County, which included accusations of racism against Ruby Bridges’ autobiography and an assertion that a book on seahorses normalizes male pregnancy. We also wrote up some of our notes on the development of the visualization.

8. Nation’s report card: Massive drop in math scores, slide in reading linked to COVID disruption

After a year of delay from its normal schedule, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released test results that showed just how severely students were affected by learning loss during the pandemic. Our team worked with all of Chalkbeat’s bureaus to analyze these scores around the country, including demographic breakdowns. On the national level we also added comparisons to the impact of remote learning by state.

9. Online enrollment grows in Colorado but some say more accountability is needed

Analysis of NAEP scores showed that students didn’t clearly lose or gain in online schools, but that those schools’ growth hasn’t always been transparent. This report by Colorado reporter Yesenia Robles and data team member Kae Petrin dove deep into concerns around graduation rates and academic achievement at virtual schools, as well as wide gaps in the state’s data on their effectiveness.

10. As pandemic aid runs out, America is set to return to a broken school funding system

Pandemic relief funds were a windfall for many districts, especially after years of tight budgets at high-poverty schools. But with ESSER money due to expire soon, questions remain about how to make those changes sustainable and address historical underfunding. Our team worked on several ways to visualize this problem, including a spike map that juxtaposes population against per-student funding.

11. Ahead of school closures, 5 takeaways about the number of schools and students in Denver

Nationwide, shrinking school enrollment has led districts to make hard choices about keeping schools open, especially as smaller schools are more expensive and offer fewer options for each student. In Colorado, Chalkbeat has covered the debate over school closures, including this analysis-based story on how Denver school growth (both district and charter) has tracked against the student population.

12. Interest in running for Indianapolis school board drops to new low

Two sets of local elected officials became the center of intense (often negative) scrutiny this year: election supervisors and school boards. In Indiana, Cam Rodriguez worked with Chalkbeat and WFYI reporters to put together this comparison of election cohorts over time, showing how candidate interest in school board openings has dropped, even as the cost of running has increased.

13. Michigan students who are homeless more likely to be disciplined

Based on a University of Michigan study, this story features a map that isn’t just an illustration of population density (a common mistake) but gives readers a way to explore the relationship between school discipline and student homelessness.

How MSCS is trying to get pre-K programs — and preschoolers — back on track after COVID

2022-12-22T12:09:39+00:00

When Jairia Cathey switched from teaching elementary school to pre-kindergarten more than a decade ago, it was a tough adjustment. Some students didn’t know how to hold a pencil or a fork, she recalled. Some didn’t know their parents’ names, or even their own. And some didn’t know how to color.

“I was like ‘what did I get myself into?’” Cathey said. “I thought every child knew how to color.”

But those challenges didn’t come close to what she would experience trying to educate and engage with 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds during the depths of COVID-19 pandemic — or what it would take to try to get them caught up in the aftermath.

When schools closed abruptly in 2020, derailing education for students across Memphis and the country, Cathey, a teacher at Evans Elementary, scrambled to provide virtual learning any way she could think of. She sent parents pictures of worksheets and activities from her classroom. She searched Pinterest for other learning materials. At a certain point, she set up times to visit each of her students at their home, with a face mask on.

(From left) Lisa Patterson and Jairia Cathey have dealt with the challenges of trying to keep their early learners engaged during the pandemic and its aftermath.

“I just had to lay eyes on them, and I know they had to lay eyes on me,” Cathey said. “Even if it was just giving them a pencil or a coloring book or just a hug, I had to do it.”

Plummeting enrollment in MSCS early childhood programs during the pandemic left just a handful of students in her class. When classrooms reopened in the spring, the families of Cathey’s four students decided to keep them learning remotely. And by the time students returned to her classroom after 18 months of distance learning, the few students who came arrived with a severely disrupted preschool experience or having attended no school at all, at risk of falling behind academically, socially, and emotionally.

Now Cathey and co-teacher Lisa Patterson are part of a mobilization across Memphis-Shelby County Schools to get early childhood learning in the district back on track. The effort is focused on the classroom, but it’s also counting on community groups, advertising, family engagement specialists, and multiple offices within district headquarters, with the goal of getting more students enrolled in early childhood programs and making sure they are kindergarten-ready.

The bigger objective: Containing the pandemic’s long-term impact on children and their education in Tennessee’s largest school district, where most students are Black and come from low-income families who were hit hardest by COVID-19.

The task is daunting. After bottoming out at 4,430 in 2020-21, enrollment in MSCS’ pre-K programs has ticked back up to 4,776 this year. But it’s still far below pre-pandemic levels of above 6,000.

Meanwhile, just 32% of students starting kindergarten last school year were considered ready overall, as measured by early reading and math assessments. That’s down from 40% in 2020-21, and 46% before the pandemic.

A 2020 study published by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that children who are not adequately prepared for kindergarten are more likely to struggle for the rest of their academic career — in later elementary school, high school, and beyond.

“I’ve seen the results of when we get it wrong,” said Divalyn Gordon, a former kindergarten and first grade teacher who has also worked at alternative high schools and now heads MSCS’ early childhood office.

“Those students later drop out of school … they’re making tally marks and counting on their fingers because they don’t know any multiplication facts. They can’t read to learn or comprehend. Those foundational skills are vital for student success as they matriculate through high school,” Gordon said. “That’s why I push so hard for pre-K. We’ve got to get this right.”

Gains from pre-K program follow students into higher grades

District officials have made early childhood education a centerpiece of their strategy to improve the district’s academic performance and recover from the pandemic. Test score data helps explain the emphasis.

The April data shows that even amid steep declines in kindergarten readiness across the district, students who attended MSCS pre-K scored significantly higher in reading, math, and overall readiness compared with those who did not attend.

The same was true for students who are considered economically disadvantaged. And their higher performance followed them into third grade. Students from low-income families who attended a district pre-K program were slightly more likely to be proficient in English and language arts in third grade than those who did not participate in the program, according to the report.

The third-grade performance is critical, because a new state law that takes effect this year requires schools to hold back third-graders who aren’t considered proficient in reading. The law has added pressure on districts to intervene early.

MSCS prioritizes students who come from economically disadvantaged households for pre-K enrollment. But interest in the program dropped off dramatically after COVID hit and instruction went online. And persistent concerns about COVID led many parents to decide it was safer to keep their child at home than to send them to an optional program.

Because of that, Cathey said she is getting her students later, and they’re far behind — academically and otherwise. She has had to adjust her instruction accordingly.

The use of small group instruction in early childhood classrooms has become even more important to catch students up.

Small group instruction has always been a critical piece of early childhood education, but given the delayed progress for some students, it’s more important than ever, Gordon said.

Gordon pointed to Cathey’s classroom as an example: Cathey’s 19 students were divided into four groups based on their skill levels, but named for different colors. On that December morning, Cathey and her co-teacher Patterson circulated through the room, giving individualized attention and instruction to students in each group, depending on what they were working on and what they needed.

At one point, Cathey sat cross-legged on the floor next to one girl, and they talked about a book she was paging through. In another corner of the room, Patterson helped two students completing a spelling puzzle.

“You have to make those real-life adjustments when students don’t get it or don’t have the necessary foundation,” Gordon said.

And if teachers don’t, she said, “those kids fall through the cracks.”

District enlists community partners to boost enrollment

With pre-K enrollment across MSCS recovering slowly, Gordon said, the district is laser-focused on attracting more students to the program.

The district continues to work with the Salvation Army Purdue Residential Facility, a Memphis homeless shelter for women, and the Shelby County Division of Corrections to identify and enroll pre-K-age students who could particularly benefit from early academic intervention, Gordon said.

MSCS has also beefed up its advertising efforts, from billboards to social media ads, Gordon said. “The journey begins with pre-K,” the ads on Facebook and elsewhere in the community usually say. “Get your future scholar started early on their academic journey.”

Meanwhile, it has expanded its family engagement team to a staff of over 100 specialists who are charged with encouraging families who begin the online application process to finish it.

Family engagement specialists also help parents find another location if the school they requested is no longer available. Sometimes that means connecting families with other early childhood education providers in the community, Gordon said.

To ensure quality — the bigger challenge in Memphis, which does not have an acute shortage of child care services — the district requires those providers to follow the same bid process it uses for other services, and beginning this year, administrators visit the campus in person to confirm that best practices are being used in classrooms.

It’s part of a broader district effort, outlined in February by then-Superintendent Joris Ray, to increase community-wide collaboration in early childhood education.

The district has two representatives — Gordon and Angela Whitelaw, the district’s deputy superintendent of schools and academic support — in a community consortium dedicated to improving early literacy. The consortium includes prominent early childhood organizations and child care providers from across Memphis, including the Urban Child Institute, Porter-Leath, Literacy Mid-South, First 8, Next Memphis, and the Hyde Family Foundation, among others.

Since early childhood became a top priority for the entire district, collaboration with other departments across the massive district has also improved, said Detris Crane, director of MSCS Head Start programming.

“The district has realized that these pre-K families are the same ones who come in for K-12, and that the earlier we intervene, the more we can improve outcomes for both children and their families,” Crane said. “I collaborate with everybody in the district now, in every department.

“I used to be on a little island,” Crane said. “Now we’re on the mainland.”

Teachers in Memphis are also dealing with the trauma children have faced due to the pandemic and poverty.

COVID left emotional scars

Beyond the academic fallout, trauma related to COVID and poverty continues to loom large among MSCS students and families, several MSCS teachers said.

Ida Walker, a pre-K teacher at Douglass Head Start in northeast Memphis, said the social and emotional tolls of the pandemic have been the most noticeable among her students.

Many of them “have something going on at home,” said Walker, who’s been a Head Start teacher since 2018. Some lost family members or caregivers in the pandemic. Others’ families have yet to recover from the deep economic consequences of COVID.

Pre-literacy skills remain a large focus in Walker’s classroom. As she read aloud to one small group of students, her co-teacher Tequila Lockett helped two other groups of students draw koala bears as part of the class’ two focuses that week, the letter K and “awesome animals.”

But so are students’ social and emotional needs. Walker has rearranged her classroom to create a “cozy corner” where her students can take time away from whatever they’re doing to regulate their emotions and seek support from Walker or her co-teacher throughout the day.

Walker hopes her students learn how to express and process their feelings. If their social and emotional needs are met now, the rest will come later, Walker said.

“They pick it up fast,” she said with a smile.

For pre-K teachers like Ida Walker, pictured in her Douglass Head Start classroom on Dec. 1, social and emotional engagement is a large focus in the classroom.

Cathey takes a similar approach in her classroom — what she hopes is a “safe haven” from whatever children are dealing with at home. Beyond teaching them early literacy and math skills, she strives to build relationships with students and their families and ensure their social and emotional needs are met.

Cathey and Patterson also try to model caring for one another to their students, so that even if one of them isn’t nearby when a child is struggling, their classmates know to step in. Now, if a student falls or looks sad, Cathey said, their peers are quick to ask, “Are you OK? Can I help you?”

“It is a joy seeing students come in at the beginning of the year, complete blank slates. We introduce literacy. We promote language, math skills, teach them how to take care of themselves, and take care of others,” Cathey said. “When they leave, they’re writing sentences, they’re making words, they’re adding and subtracting, They learn how to work out their feelings, and it’s just so amazing to see them so independent.”

“It’s just so rewarding,” Cathey added. “We’re getting them ready for the rest of their lives.”

This story is the third and final installment of a Chalkbeat Tennessee deep dive into the role early childhood education can play in improving literacy in Memphis and across the Volunteer State. This effort is supported by the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program. Check out the first and second stories of the series.

Samantha West is a reporter for Chalkbeat Tennessee, where she covers K-12 education in Memphis. Connect with Samantha at swest@chalkbeat.org.

As school gets back to normal, things are better — and worse

2022-12-20T12:00:00+00:00

“Things are better this year, right?” I am asked again and again. The short answer, from this high school administrator, is yes and no, depending on which aspect we choose to focus on.

On the surface, things are mostly back to normal. We’re not in masks or tracking COVID cases or on a hybrid learning schedule. We’re having assemblies, sporting events, band concerts, and school dances. Hallway shenanigans are back. We had a senior prank last year. A couple of boys rounded up some local ducks and let them loose in the main hall.

I wasn’t even annoyed. It was nice to have the pranks back.

Brandon McCoy

This school year, I haven’t taken a single angry phone call from a parent about COVID restrictions (too loose or too rigid) and haven’t sat on a committee to determine the safest way to keep schools open. I haven’t heard the phrase, “We’re building the airplane in the air,” in many months. These are all victories in my mind and indications that the worst is behind us.

There are, however, some unfortunate realities that are far more prevalent now in a post-COVID high school world. The two primary culprits I see regularly are student apathy and a lack of perseverance. When students learned in a virtual setting, either fully or partially, the “school muscles” that they had been developing since kindergarten, didn’t get much exercise. The routine — one that so many students relied on to thrive — was broken.

I found that the kids who learned online only during the 2020-21 school year struggled the most with readjustment to campus life. Learning largely in isolation, some overwhelmed students fell behind; some gave up on their studies altogether. We are now trying desperately to catch them up academically, but we are starting to have difficult conversations with families about graduation being a semester or year later than expected for some learners.

We are also reminding our students how to exercise those “school muscles.” But apathy, which shows up mostly in the form of school days missed and assignments not completed, can be difficult to counteract. The overriding sentiment seems to be, “Why does any of this matter?” It’s especially prevalent among underclassmen, who were in middle school during the height of COVID learning. As such, they missed some vital developmental skills — grit, time management, self-advocacy, social communication, and even just how to handle their bodies — that the middle school experience provides.

The overriding sentiment seems to be, ‘Why does any of this matter?’

Juniors and seniors seem to have adjusted better. Juniors, after all, had made it through most of eighth grade, and seniors were already high school freshmen by the time schools shut down in March 2020. They are missing fewer pieces in the “this is how we do school” toolbox. The older kids also seem wiser than in years past. They’ve been through a lot.

We are, of course, experiencing our share of low lows this semester. We’ve seen students facing severe mental health crises, including those too anxious to come to school and those who have run away from home. We are hearing from parents struggling with how to help their children. Through a partnership with a local organization, we are offering free, on-campus therapy for students. And our days as administrators are booked solid with students who are still relearning how to “do” school.

Through it all, though, our teachers continue to show up with compassion and tenacity. But unlike in the spring of 2020, when parents — trying in vain to guide their students through virtual learning — heaped praise upon them, educators today are working under a dark cloud. Recent years have brought loud outside voices weighing in on everything from how we teach about race and gender to which books are in the school library.

There is more trepidation in teaching today than I have seen in my 15 years as an educator. But there is resolve, too. We went through COVID. We can do this.

As for the ubiquitous questions about whether things are better this year: On a day-to-day basis, they really do feel better. COVID took away social interactions and ate away at our school culture. We’ve reclaimed that culture; we’re in the process of catching students up on the academics they missed, all the while sharpening the school skills they need to be successful. There are victories each day.

Dr. Brandon McCoy is a high school administrator in Kansas City, Missouri, where he lives with his wife and three children. He writes about life, and public education at The Worst Kids Always Become Principals.

How one Chicago school social worker is grappling with COVID’s toll on students

2022-12-09T12:00:00+00:00

Inside a staff bathroom at Piccolo Elementary School on Chicago’s West Side, Mary Difino wiped away tears and tried to catch her breath. It had been a long day in another stressful week.

A spate of fights and a string of cyberbullying incidents among students two months into the school year had taken a toll on Difino — the school’s only social worker.

In the last six years, she has juggled caseloads across two separate schools, participated in an 11-day teachers strike, and navigated a pandemic that upended schools for 18 months.

Still, Difino had harbored hopes that COVID-related disruptions had passed, and things might be getting back to normal. After all, this was supposed to be the year Chicago Public Schools — and its 322,000 students and 39,300 staff — recovered from the upheaval of the pandemic. This would be “one of the strongest years ever” in the district’s history, CEO Pedro Martinez said on the first day of school this fall.

At first, Difino felt that might be the case. Even her students described school as “more chill” with “less drama.”

But she soon realized her students’ trauma was deep-rooted.

Students were behind academically. Behavior problems were going up. Staff shortages at the school that serves Latino and Black students continued to stretch an already depleted workforce.

It felt, Difino said, “just as hard as last year.”

She was maneuvering between crises and helping the behavior team come up with school-wide plans to address some of the fighting and bullying. Plus, she still had to keep up with her regular caseload and small group counseling sessions.

Difino’s job as a school social worker is like “four jobs combined into one,” she says. She’s also responsible for supporting students with disabilities — and managing the paperwork that goes with their Individualized Education Programs or 504 plans — which includes doing diagnostic assessments and meeting with parents and other school staff.

In the bathroom, Difino took another deep breath, then headed back to her office. There she tidied up and fixed her desk. She grabbed her soccer bag from that morning’s Piccolo girls soccer team practice and a binder full of drills and activities. Her role as coach for second, third, and fourth grade students is a reprieve from her frenetic duties during school hours.

She thought about what was needed to calm the fights and help her students: a restorative justice coordinator, smaller class sizes, perhaps another social worker.

But as Difino left for home that night, that wish list seemed far away — and she just felt exhausted.

Chicago doubles number of school social workers

The week before students returned to Piccolo in August, Difino recruited her boyfriend to help set up her office.

They adjusted furniture, arranged plants, and decorated the walls with posters plastered with encouraging phrases such as “We rise by lifting others” and “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

It would be Difino’s second year full-time at Piccolo, rather than bouncing between two separate schools. It is something she and other social workers in the district have long wanted: to be able to settle in and focus on one group of students in one community.

Mary Difino has advocated for smaller classes sizes, more staff, more programming, and affordable housing for student in Chicago Public Schools.

Difino often felt misunderstood as a young person, and gravitated to social work after years of working with at-risk students. She wanted to help kids who might not have the words to say what they’re feeling or what they need. Kids having a rough time at home. Kids needing a little extra support.

“I just thought it was purely wonderful there is a job that existed purely for those students,” she said.

When Difinio started her career in 2018, Chicago Public Schools had 337 social workers. Now, there are 618.

Until 2019-20, Difino juggled a caseload of about 100 students across two West Side elementary schools — Piccolo and Chalmers. It was, she says, a nearly impossible task.

That, in part, motivated Difinio to become more involved with the Chicago Teachers Union.

In her second year with the district, teachers went on strike for 11 days — and ended up winning provisions to increase the number of social workers and other key school staff. Under the contract between the district and the teachers union, every school must have a social worker by 2024.

Difino remembers the 2019 strike as a huge win, but it came at the cost of being villainized by some media and members of the public.

Federal COVID relief funds have since helped the district bolster its social and emotional staffing. Nationally, some school districts have struggled to hire these positions. In Chicago, 28 social worker positions remained unfilled district wide as of last month, according to the district staffing data.

The doubling of social workers in the district means there’s now one for roughly every 520 students — a huge improvement, but still short of what’s recommended by the National Association of Social Workers.

That organization says schools should staff one social worker for every 250 students. At schools where students are experiencing high levels of trauma, the recommended ratio falls to one social worker for every 50 students.

Even though Difino’s caseload has gone down, she still feels stretched — many days having to quickly pivot from one-on-one meetings with a student or small group sessions to deal with the fallout of a fight or another crisis. It often disrupts a consistent schedule for students in her caseload, she said.

Amid the pandemic that exacerbated pre-existing traumas and disparities, she questioned the district’s way of allocating funds for school social worker staffing positions, especially on the South and West sides — communities that were hard hit by COVID and experience higher levels of gun violence and disinvestment.

Social workers are assigned to schools based on the number of students with special education needs, population, and size. The district said it prioritized schools with the greatest needs.

Currently, every school has a social worker assigned to it. But they’re not all full-time. Only 392 schools have at least one full-time social worker, according to the district.

Federal funds also helped hire additional support, including counselors. According to Chicago Public Schools, 117 schools now have two counselors.

The district said in an emailed statement that it also aims to meet the social-emotional learning needs of students through additional crisis support, programs with wraparound services such as Choose to Change and Back to Our Future, and partnerships for supplemental mental health support with community groups and hospitals such as Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital.

But Difino wasn’t thinking about abstracts and funding philosophies when she set up her classroom.

School social worker Mary Difino spent the week leading up to the new academic year decorating her room to create a calm, welcoming space for students.

She recalled students disoriented by unpredictable quarantines, countless fights, and behavioral problems. And she remembered accompanying a few students to the hospital and frequently staying long after dismissal to manage family crises.

“The lack of consistency was really hard” for students, their families and school staff, Difino said. “Last year, we had to learn all over how to be in school, with new routines, and precautions.”

The previous 18 months of remote and hybrid instruction presented other challenges for social workers trying to address very specific goals for students with Individualized Education Programs.

Instead of focusing on school work or academic and social goals, students often preferred to talk about the impacts of quarantines and remote learning. They just wanted someone to listen, she remembered.

On the first school day in late August, Difino arrived 40 minutes before the bell to put the final touches to her room. She greeted students in the halls and walked some kids to class while others stopped by her room to check whether they would be meeting this year.

She left campus that day feeling that this would be a more manageable year than the two years that preceded it.

That sense of optimism would not last long.

Student mental health needs multiply

The return to school has been shaping up as another challenging year across the nation, said Christy McCoy, the president of the School Social Work Association of America.

“The residual impact of the last couple of years with the pandemic, all the disruptions in schools, the increase of racialized violence — and community violence,” left lingering trauma that has sparked behavioral issues among students, McCoy said.

Some students are exhibiting more aggressive external behavior including bullying and fighting in middle schools and high schools, and internal behaviors with some children struggling to focus and pay attention in class, she added.

“We have youth that are really struggling with engaging and knowing how to do school again,” McCoy said. “When you think of all the gaps of learning that have happened in the last couple of years, youth are really struggling.”

In a statement, Chicago Public Schools said it had prioritized mental health, social-emotional learning, and support services amid the pandemic that “had a disproportionate impact on our communities of color.”

“We recognize that our students continue to struggle with the impact of the pandemic as well as ongoing trauma in their lives,” the district said in an email.

Jackie King-Papadopoulos, another social worker with the district, put it more simply: At this moment, every school has high needs.

“I think that every student that is in Chicago Public Schools, every teacher, every adult that is in Chicago Public Schools is adjusting to life in this pseudo-post-pandemic world,” said King-Papadopoulos, who works at Morton School of Excellence in East Garfield Park.

Last year, King-Papadopoulos started the year at an elementary school in Austin before she was transferred to another school in Uptown. Amid higher expectations, teachers were trying to help students catch up academically while also dealing with challenging behavioral concerns, she recalled.

“Whenever you have that much of a struggle with academics, the social and emotional part is going to really be impacted as well,” King-Papadopoulos noted.

The pandemic has had a varied impact on students. The youngest children are learning to be around other kids, while middle school children are relearning how to be in a classroom, she said. Others are just not coming to school at all, adding to the social worker’s concerns about chronic absenteeism.

At Morton, King-Papadopoulos noted there is still some carryover of fighting among middle school students, but she has heard from teachers and staff that the students who struggled the most with disruptive behavior last year are doing much better this year.

“I think that everybody has made some positive strides in terms of how they’re coping with things,” King-Papadopoulos said. “I do think that everybody’s kind of breathing a sigh of relief that’s so far this year, feels about as normal as they think that it possibly can.”

King-Papadopoulos has been able to meet her caseload, handle new referrals, hold small group interventions, visit classrooms, support teachers, and is part of the behavioral health team.

But it is sometimes a juggling act, she acknowledged. “I also feel like everybody feels like the situation is very tenuous.”

Social workers confront fights, bullying, paperwork

At Piccolo Elementary, the honeymoon phase of the new school year quickly ended.

Difino scrambled to respond to big fights and bullying. She zagged between mediating conflict resolution and connecting parents with resources. She accompanied a student experiencing a mental health crisis to the emergency room.

And the physical fights didn’t let up — some even involved family members during school dismissal. In mid-September, there were four brawls in one day, involving about 16 students, she recalled.

It took an “all-hands-on-deck” approach — by Difino, the principal, school counselor, and other Piccolo staff — to untangle which students were involved, come up with potential restorative approaches and consequences, work out a safety plan, and fill out paperwork to document the fights.

“I don’t think any of us will really understand the effect that quarantine and COVID had on us,” she said later, “but I think that behaviors become habits really quick.”

On days like that, Difino said, school social workers are forced to make tough decisions of whether to scrap some responsibilities to handle a crisis or not respond to a crisis within 24 hours as required.

Piccolo Elementary school leaders, students, and community leaders gathered in mid-October to cut the ribbon on a new playground for students at the Humboldt Park campus.

In Difino’s five years at Piccolo, she has seen the school add more programming for students before, during, and after school. She credited the principal with bringing in six community partners to do art therapy, sports programs, and providing supplemental counseling, as well as implementing initiatives that center the voice of students.

On paper, Difino’s school is considered adequately staffed by district standards. According to district staffing data, Piccolo has a dean of students, a school counselor, at-risk student coordinator, and a few security staff. It also partners with Becoming a Man, or BAM, to offer counseling and social emotional services to Latino and Black boys.

Still, Difino said it still doesn’t feel like enough to address the persistent behavioral concerns.

“There’s just not enough manpower in the building to do all of that when there is such a high frequency of fights and police-involved incidents — on top of your regular responsibilities,” she said. She advocates for smaller class sizes, more staff to help mediate conflicts, and more affordable housing for students and their families.

“It’s like every school is seen as a spreadsheet,” she said, “not as humans with unique needs, or communities with unique needs.”

On one early December day, as the school year trundled to winter break, Difino pivoted from helping a student in crisis for a few hours to meeting with a mother and her child for an annual IEP assessment. For about an hour, they discussed the previous year’s goals and made new objectives for the rest of the year.

Difino spent the next few hours in her office, filling out forms and writing up paperwork.

Piccolo students are grappling with so much outside of the school walls — too many guns, not enough food, no stable places to call home, said Difino. Those pressures often translate into classroom disruptions or academic struggles.

“When kids have big behaviors, it’s really easy to not see them as a kid anymore,” Difino said. “Usually when they have difficult behaviors, they don’t have the words to say what they’re feeling or going through.”

After the holidays, she hopes to get back to a consistent schedule for her small groups and build on the progress she is seeing in her students.

She envisions tailoring activities around their specific needs and interests. Maybe talking about basketball. Or incorporating play-based learning with Legos.

She still believes in what she does and, she says, no matter the obstacles — the lack of support from the district, the cascading responsibilities — she will find a way to do her job.

Purely for the students.

Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org.

COVID has left students less prepared for higher education. Here’s how colleges are trying to help.

2022-12-08T23:44:18+00:00

Arizbeth Cortez felt confident college would be just like high school and she’d ace all her classes. After all, she’d never received anything less than an A grade at Denver’s Bruce Randolph School.

On her first exam at the University of Northern Colorado, however, she got a B. It brought a flood of tears and worries that she didn’t have the skills to meet her expectations.

“I ended up with anxiety about exams because I didn’t know how to study very well,” said Cortez, 18, a freshman.

The challenge of college can be an eye opening experience for even the brightest student. But Cortez realized she didn’t know how to manage her time or know how to prepare for a test.

They’re skills she missed while attending high school during the pandemic, when she took her classes virtually for more than a year, rarely had homework, and most of the tests she took were open book. Most of her junior year was spent learning from home and she saw her mom and sister more than peers and teachers.

Cortez isn’t alone in her first semester struggles, which at times left her rattled. College leaders have encountered many more freshmen like her this year — students who don’t have the base of skills that will make them successful in college. And they all agree about the cause: nearly five high school semesters upended by the pandemic, and less accountability placed on students because of it.

Educators say students entering college this fall have fewer study and test-taking skills, such as simple tactics like preparing note cards or the value of study groups. They’re less communicative with professors when they need extra time to complete assignments, have difficulty staying on task, and have fewer coping mechanisms when adversity strikes.

University of Northern Colorado administrators say they have had to double down on efforts to help freshmen succeed, teaching basic skills to help them adjust and navigate the new environment.

The gap between how prepared freshmen typically are for college and how this year’s class is performing surprised Stephanie Torrez, the university’s student academic success assistant vice president, who has spent more than 26 years in higher education.

“This is who students are now. It’s not what I’ve expected, even from my own children,” she said. “I have a freshman in college here and he’s not the person he was two years ago.”

The college has a few strategies to help, such as an increased emphasis for peer mentors, tutors, and counselors to connect one-on-one with freshmen so they can figure out if they need on-campus resources.

University leaders say they are optimistic a focus on individual needs will pay off. The retention rate for the Class of 2021 was the highest it’s been in the last decade, offering hope that the school is on the right track. But they realize that as more students come unprepared, the school might need to increase the number of mental health counselors and train more staff on how to help when students are struggling with classes or with their mental health.

Caleb Quiroz, 18, right, presents his group project during University 101 class at the University of Northern Colorado.

Pandemic disruptions leave gaps in classroom, social skills

In 2021, Cortez returned to in-person classes for her senior year. While returning to the classroom was manageable, she felt less willing to interact with classmates. Even now, social situations are tough. It sometimes feels easier to close herself off.

“I have to tell myself it’s not so bad being social,” Cortez said. “But it can be scary. I’m used to always having my mom or my sister around.”

Those anxieties are showing up in lots of classes at the University of Northern Colorado this fall, faculty said. Students are disengaged and less motivated to attend events, even fun ones like football games.

College leaders know that ultimately, they have to meet students wherever they’re at to address those gaps, said Hollie Chessman, research director at the American Council on Education who studies student mental health and well-being. And students are heading to college after unique circumstances, she said.

Some schools have responded to the challenge by using federal relief money to increase mental health resources on campus. Others are using summer bridge programs to help students adjust to college life, Chessman said.

About 40% of University of Northern Colorado students are the first in their family to go to college. That’s a population that historically has needed more support to adjust to campus life because their parents can’t give them as much guidance. But even students from college-going families can struggle in a new environment.

One strategy: University 101, an elective offered to all freshmen. This fall, about a quarter of the freshmen took the class, similar to previous years.

But instructors have struggled more this fall within that class, which covers study skills, work-life balance, and stress management. Attending therapy counts as extra credit.

In a class that’s supposed to be low-stakes and teach students about accountability in college, this year, more students than usual have turned in assignments late, and they sometimes argue whether they should show up in person, said Jordan Martell, who has taught the class for four years.

Vianney Ocampo, 18, seated center left, asks a question to class leader Jordyn Faelber, 20, left, during University 101 class at the University of Northern Colorado.

Students are also more disruptive during class — talking during lectures or arriving late, Martell said. Students have also argued against a zero grade rather than do the work.

“Students kind of are struggling to have that awareness of accountability,” Martell said.

Still, now that the semester is wrapping up, some students are feeling more comfortable. Cortez chatted quietly with some peers on the last day of University 101, and says they have helped her break out of her shell.

The university’s Center for Human Enrichment, a program that supports students who are the first in their families to go to college, has provided crucial academic and other support.

Through one-on-one help, Cortez has learned how to study through repetition, and the value of note cards and color coding her notes. Staff encouraged her to get more involved with campus and provided a safe space for her to talk about what’s going on in her life.

“The program makes me feel like I am at home,” Cortez said.

Jason Gonzales is a reporter covering higher education and the Colorado legislature. Chalkbeat Colorado partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage. Contact Jason at jgonzales@chalkbeat.org.

After-school conflicts spur student discussions with NYPD on Downtown Brooklyn safety

2022-12-06T22:13:54+00:00

Jahya Williams often walks out of her Downtown Brooklyn high school at the end of the day to find a cluster of police officers monitoring dismissal. The 16-year-old feels uneasy at the sight.

“It makes me feel very intimidated,” said Jahya, a junior at Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women. “Having them in the school and right outside of the school is making me feel like a criminal.”

Jahya had seen conflicts between students bubbling up in the neighborhood after school, with some turning violent. Earlier this year, a 15-year-old student at a nearby charter school was shot and killed around 1:30 p.m. in a park just blocks away, a tragedy that reverberated across a neighborhood packed with middle and high schools.

But Jahya had never gotten a chance to ask anyone at the NYPD directly about the police presence outside her school or share how it made her feel — until recently.

Jahya is one member of a new working group, launched by City Council Member Lincoln Restler, that brings together student and staff representatives from nine schools in the area, along with police, school safety agents, and civic leaders to talk about how to make Downtown Brooklyn safer.

For Jahya, the first meeting of the task force last month was eye opening.

“Stuff like that is extremely helpful because the cops said certain things I’ve never heard and we said things they’ve never heard,” she said.

“Just seeing their [NYPD’s] perspective on how they see us … all they’re seeing is the little rivalries, everything that happens outside of school, and then we clash,” she said. “What we see is you all … getting in the way.”

Participants acknowledged that no easy answers emerged from the first meeting and said it will take sustained work to begin to break down deep-seated mistrust between students and police.

But school staffers said it was a positive step to put all the campuses in the area in direct communication, since many of the conflicts that break out involve students from multiple schools.

“We have so many campuses in such a small radius, all the kids filter into a relatively small area and mix at one time,” said Annie Annunziato, an assistant principal at Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women. “The idea was: Let’s bring everyone together and open the lines of communication.”

A tragic death is a call to action

Conflicts have bubbled up after school for years in Downtown Brooklyn, a bustling commercial hub with a high density of schools.

But students, staff, and lawmakers said safety concerns have escalated in the wake of the pandemic.

“It really has changed,” said Anayasia Bass-Williams, a 16-year-old junior at Institute of Math and Science, who’s been going to school in the neighborhood since sixth grade. “Before the pandemic it wasn’t as heavy. Now it’s extremely heavy.”

Students leaving the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women at the end of the school day.

Students described a rise in frightening interactions with mentally ill people on the streets, more open selling and using of drugs, and an uptick in conflicts between students from neighboring schools converging in popular spots like a local Burger King and the subway station.

“Once everybody’s outside, it’s a whole lot of energies mixed, personalities, groups,” said one student at the Institute of Math and Science, whose name Chalkbeat is not disclosing to protect her privacy. “It’s chaotic.”

Restler, the council member for Downtown Brooklyn, said he was shaken by the death of 15-year-old Unique Smith, a student at Brooklyn Lab Charter school who was killed in Mclaughlin Park just after getting out of his first day of school.

“Never had we had anything like the horrible tragedy where Unique Smith was lost to gun violence at just 15,” Restler said.

Restler convened a meeting of administrators from the nine schools in the area to coordinate. It was during that first brainstorming session that Annunziato suggested bringing students into the conversation.

That was “so right and smart,” Restler said. “Ask the people closest to the problem … how we can fix it.”

Students debate the role of police

At the center of the conversation about making Downtown Brooklyn safer is the question of what role the police should play.

Five students who participated in the first meeting of the working group told Chalkbeat that they find the NYPD’s presence in the area often ineffective and sometimes harmful.

“Every single fight I’ve been in Downtown, they’ve never intervened, not once,” said one Institute of Math and Science student. “They do nothing. It’s the bystanders or pedestrians breaking up the fights.”

The teens said that when police do get involved in conflicts between students, it often feels overly harsh.

“They pour oil on the fire,” said Fredlove Deshommes, a 16-year-old sophomore at Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice, which shares a building with the Institute of Math and Science.

Some students said when police come, they often end up unjustly or arbitrarily arresting students.

NYPD officers and school safety agents stand next to Council Member Lincoln Restler during the first meeting of the working group on Downtown Brooklyn safety.

Annunziato said police officers at the first meeting of the task force explained that it can be difficult in the heat of the moment to tell which students are involved in the altercation and which are spectators, particularly when students are tightly packed in to record the fight on their phones.

“When there’s a chaotic situation like a fight, it’s hard to understand who’s involved or not,” Annunziato said. “One wrong bump can lead to an arrest, and I’ve seen that.”

An NYPD spokesperson said the police department and school safety division “have ongoing open dialogue with child advocacy groups, students and other stakeholders in order to respond to concerns, while maintaining a balance between the safety of the entire school community and the importance of not criminalizing our youth.”

The spokesperson pointed to 2019 changes to the memorandum of understanding between the NYPD and education department meant to reduce in-school arrests and empower school staff to handle “minor student transgressions, without involving formal criminal proceedings.”

One school safety agent at a Downtown Brooklyn high school, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the “large population” of students “thank us” when they see NYPD youth officers posted outside of school during dismissal.

“They knew it wasn’t being done to hurt them or stop them from being a kid,” the safety agent said. “But the kids doing their nonsense think they’re being targeted. That’s absolutely not the case.”

Race underlies the discussion about police and student safety. The vast majority of students at the public and charter schools in the neighborhood are Black and Latino – and students suspect that plays an important role in how they’re treated.

“I bet you if there were two white kids fighting, they would be like ‘stop it,’” said Anayasia.

“For us, it’s handcuff, handcuff,” said Jahya.

Searching for solutions outside of police

Restler said one of the ongoing priorities for the task force in the coming meetings will be brainstorming solutions that don’t involve the police.

“I would like to see us pool resources across the schools to bring in nonprofit organizations that could provide a supervisory presence in some of the key locations,” Restler said.

Students consistently pointed to the need for larger-scale citywide plans to provide support and services for severely mentally ill people they encounter on their commutes or outside of school.

It’s those encounters that have led many teens to start carrying pepper spray, tasers and other self-protection tools on their way to and from school, students said – devices that can be confiscated by school safety agents and categorized as “weapons” or “dangerous items” by the NYPD.

Students (from left) Fredlove Deshommes, Jahya Williams, Anayasia Bass-Williams, Nikayah Cochran, and Daysha Williams participated in the first meeting of the Downtown Brooklyn safety working group.

Last year saw an explosion in the number of such items turning up at schools, and the trend has continued this year, with the number more than doubling from 790 from July through October of last year to 1,510 during the same period this year, according to NYPD data.

The biggest jump came in a category listed as “other weapons/dangerous items.” Police didn’t specify which items fit in that category, but it presumably includes pepper spray, which is confiscated by school safety agents, and not listed as a separate category.

The Downtown Brooklyn school safety agent who spoke on the condition of anonymity said she sympathizes with students who want to protect themselves on their commutes.

“It’s a lot for these kids to deal with … I get it we’re living in times with a lot of people that have mental health issues,” the safety agent said. “But walking around with a weapon is not the right thing to do.” The safety agent advises students to travel in groups, hide their electronics, and keep their headphones off during commutes.

Daysha Williams, a 16-year-old junior at the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice, said it’s frustrating that so much of the onus for keeping students safe gets pushed onto the students themselves.

“I just feel like I shouldn’t have to walk with five million people or go down this street because I feel unsafe,” she said. “I feel like that’s placing the problem on the victim instead of addressing the root of the issue.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

We don’t have to choose between academic recovery and social-emotional learning

2022-12-02T13:00:00+00:00

National test scores showing dramatic declines in student achievement have prompted some politicians and school board candidates to call for education to go “back to basics.” Now is the time to focus on core academic subjects, they say, not things like social-emotional learning.

As a former teacher and school principal, and as the mother of a third grader and sixth grader, I believe academic recovery is paramount. But any claim that suggests schools exclude a focus on social and emotional learning, or SEL, misses the real “basics” of student learning.

Dr. Aaliyah A. Samuel

I lead an organization that promotes social and emotional learning, and I often hear from people who see academics and SEL as a zero-sum game. Some of them believe it’s a choice between core academic subjects and attention to social-emotional skill-building, such as learning to manage emotions, make responsible and caring decisions, and show empathy for others.

From where I sit, I know the opposite is true. Independent studies have shown social and emotional learning to be a powerful tool for boosting academic achievement. But you don’t need researchers to tell you why this is the case. Any parent or teacher knows the basics of learning involve supportive relationships, joy, and skills like perseverance and effective communication.

With my younger son, I’ve seen firsthand that productive academic learning doesn’t happen unless students feel valued and heard in the classroom. Last year, he struggled socially and was teased by other children about his braids. Because he didn’t have a strong relationship with his teacher, he didn’t tell her. Had his classroom prioritized SEL alongside academics, I believe he would have felt empowered to ask for help. Instead, he said, he was just trying “not to be seen.”

Any parent or teacher can tell you the basics of learning involve supportive relationships, joy, and skills like perseverance and effective communication.

Now, as a third grader, my son is engaged and excited to learn. His teacher’s focus on social and emotional learning has helped him develop connections with educators and classmates. Not only does she teach them strategies for asking for help and building relationships, she makes connections to students’ interests, models kindness and empathy, and carves out time to support every child.

The pandemic has impacted education in ways we won’t fully understand for years. What is clear is that real recovery will require schools to help students engage, connect with content, set and achieve goals, and focus on learning. A recent survey from Pew Research found that 93% of parents said it’s important that schools teach their students skills such as respect, cooperation, perseverance, and empathy. That doesn’t mean they want SEL to replace math, English, and science. Rather they see SEL as I do: a prerequisite for academic success.

Similarly, district administrators also ranked mental health as a top priority in a recent poll. And research shows that academic activities that spark emotion or give students opportunities to interact socially with each other lead to deeper, longer-term learning.

Schools and families need a multi-pronged approach to address the pandemic-related losses kids have experienced. That includes a deep focus on academic learning as well as bringing joy back to schools and cultivating relationships between students and teachers. We have to get back to what makes school the fun and supportive learning environment that we know it can be. As a teacher myself, I know that students could care less about what you are presenting to them unless they trust the adult teaching it.

The question of whether or not academics are critical is not up for debate. The real question is how educators actually go about teaching academic content in a way that allows students to engage with it.

I’ve seen the benefits of social and emotional learning in real time. Recently, when my younger son had an opportunity to miss school for a day, he insisted on attending, saying: “Mom, Mrs. H says I’m the light of her day, so I have to go to school.”

Dr. Aaliyah A. Samuel is the CEO of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL, a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child, and a former NWEA official.

Struggling during COVID, I helped my school develop a class about mental health

2022-12-01T13:00:00+00:00

I went to 19 funerals during the first year of COVID. When I wasn’t saying goodbye to people I cared about, I was in front of a screen that was my connection to school and friends for a year and a half.

I was used to greeting my friends and teachers with an enthusiastic “Hiiiii” and taking part in lively class discussions — experiences I couldn’t replicate on a computer. During online school, I struggled with grief and depression, and a general sense of being overwhelmed. I was trying to learn while dealing with spotty internet and helping my three younger god-siblings with their studies. During this time, I turned to a longtime hobby: journaling. It helped me get in touch with myself and work through what was being thrown at me.

As I was jotting down some ideas in my notebook one morning, a question came to mind: When will we ever talk about mental health here? At the height of COVID, with so many of us suffering in isolation, it was definitely needed.

I was already in the process of starting a wellness council, a club where students could share their struggles and hear about what others are going through. If we could start this club, why not a class about mental health built into the school day?

My research began online. I read studies about the benefits of social and emotional learning and thought about its real-world application. I watched lectures on YouTube about the importance of lessons on mental health. I even spoke with curriculum developers. Personal struggles, together with this research, underscored the need for a mental health class at my Newark high school.

Dr. Shaniqua Fitzgerald teaches Health and Wellness.

So I scheduled a meeting with my principal, Mr. Michael Mann, and began to work on a presentation that included testimonials from current and former students and staff. I had sent out surveys to students — freshmen through seniors — asking them about their mental health needs. They said a class that focused on student mental health would not only reduce the stigma surrounding mental health, but would also help foster social and leadership skills, self-awareness, and caring connections with those around them.

My principal seemed surprised at how passionately I advocated for this class, and he offered his wholehearted support. Next, I reached out to Ms. Julie Jackson, one of the co-CEOs of Uncommon Schools. (My school, North Star Academy Washington Park High School in Newark, is part of the Uncommon Schools charter network.) Soon, I was sitting down with one of the most powerful people in my school’s network. Ms. Jackson started the meeting by praising my efforts, and she assured me that it would be a casual conversation. Turns out, she was onboard, too.

Next, I created a working group made up of educators and North Star students. Our goal: To start a class where students could learn about the causes and symptoms of mental health challenges, and how to advocate for themselves and their peers.

Students tell me how this outlet helps them find their inner voice and relieve stress, making them less likely to experience burnout.

The summer between my freshman and sophomore years, I worked on lesson plans and brainstormed ideas for final projects. A lesson I’m especially proud of is about consent. Here’s one of the assignments: “Over the next week, please log two situations in which you were asked to give permission to someone else for something and at least three situations in which you asked someone else for permission to do something.” This lesson centers on the three R’s of consent: Rights, Respect, and Responsibility. Another lesson asks students about the evolution of their ideas about mental health, and a third helps students understand the difference between sex and gender.

The result of all this planning is a real-life class called Health and Wellness.

Health and Wellness students left notes of praise for Dr. Shaniqua Fitzgerald.

Because the class was piloted during COVID’s peak, it started off virtual so attendance and class participation initially lagged. However, since last school year, the class has been in person. Dr. Shaniqua Fitzgerald, who now teaches Health and Wellness, welcomes students into her cozy corner classroom with a wide smile. The smell of cocoa butter fills the entire room. It’s warm and serene inside. Just walking by on my way to class, I often hear students excitedly screaming out different answers whenever Dr. Fitzgerald poses a question.

Students tell me how this outlet helps them find their inner voice and relieve stress, making them less likely to experience burnout. They say they have a better sense of autonomy and agency thanks to lessons on sexual health. (Now, Dr. Fitzgerald and I are talking about bringing this class to other schools in the charter network.)

During remote learning, struggling with grief and depression, I wanted to develop something that would help me feel better and empower others. I’m proud of what Health and Wellness has become, a class that destigmatizes difficult conversations, and fosters knowledge, openness, empathy, and care.

Dashawn Sheffield is a senior at North Star Academy Washington Park High School. He aims to educate students and faculty on the symptoms of mental health issues, and promote school-based mental health support.

New Jersey school counselors say student mental health needs have ‘increased tremendously’

2022-11-22T21:00:33+00:00

An expectation to “return to normal” this school year has exacerbated student anxiety, depression, and other mental health needs that were already on the rise after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, school counselors said during a virtual panel organized by the Latino Mental Health Association of New Jersey.

Counselors and other mental health professionals who are part of the state’s school-based youth services program — which contracts nonprofits to provide those services in host schools — gathered virtually on Thursday to discuss their efforts and struggles to re-engage students two years after the pandemic began.

Though anxiety and depression have spiked among their students, counselors are finding hope in being in-person with their students, less stigma in school around seeking help, and sharing resources and tips with their colleagues.

Many students, they say, are finding it challenging this school year to follow basic rules and expectations, such as wearing a uniform all day, showing up to class on time, and completing assignments. Behind those behaviors are students grappling with anxiety, chronic stress, and depression.

In 2020 and 2021, students experienced “fight or flight mode” as schools switched to remote learning for 18 months, said Giselle Fontalvo, a school counselor in Passaic Public Schools who led the virtual meeting. Then, the 2021-22 school year became “all about survival” as in-person learning returned with masks and COVID testing in the face of an ongoing pandemic, she added.

But this school year, with limited accommodations and no remote learning option, students are experiencing a shock as they face yet another transition – a “return to normal” – and it’s affecting their mental well-being, Fontalvo said.

“You need to be in school on time every day and you can’t get up five minutes before school starts to log on to a computer,” Fontalvo said. “There’s this sense of shock when students face consequences for consistently showing up late, like, ‘What do you mean I have detention? I didn’t get detention last year.’”

Student mental health needs ‘rapidly increasing’

The pressure for students to perform well academically and socially in school this year has intensified their mental health needs more than at any point during the pandemic, said Nivioska Bruce, the associate vice president of clinical interventions in schools for Care Plus NJ, during the virtual meeting.

Her clinical intervention teams lead “school clearance assessments” on students to evaluate their level of risk to themselves or others before they’re sent to emergency psychiatric services at a hospital, she said.

In the first three months of school, her team has already “seen so many students” go to emergency rooms for having high-risk levels, Bruce said.

“We’re just realizing the level of intensity that they’re presenting with has been something that we haven’t seen,” she said. “Their mental health needs have increased tremendously. All of the stress from the last two years turned into chronic stress, creating this inability to regulate and utilize healthy coping skills. And now, these levels of anxiety and depression are just rapidly increasing.”

Jennesis Quintana, a school-based youth services counselor with the Mental Health Clinic of Passaic, has seen her students struggling with keeping on their uniforms and lanyards that hold student identification cards and completing assignments.

“A lot of them say it’s hard for them to go to sleep at night, and when they wake up they’re drained and can’t get out of bed or make it in on time,” Quintana said at the virtual meeting.

She said she can recognize when her students are going through depression as it often shows up in their appearance, something she would have missed in a virtual setting. They’ll come to school with poor hygiene and a lack of appetite, on top of the sleep deprivation, she said.

“Those factors then impact how they overall perform, how they function throughout the day, and how they interact with one another,” Quintana said.

But, the counselors said, there’s room for hope.

“The students are opening up more and more,” Quintana said. “You can see what they’re not saying through their body language and interactions and you have direct access when they’re having a breakdown.”

In a phone call on Monday, Fontalvo told Chalkbeat that she feels lucky to work in a district that’s predominantly Latinx and Hispanic, where students can see themselves reflected in her.

“When my English language learners come to see me, they say, ‘Oh, thank God, you speak Spanish,’” she said. “The rest of the day, they’re working on acclimating to the school environment and speaking in English, but with that one conversation in Spanish, they get to have a little relief and feel comfortable.”

There’s also “power in being in the moment” with a student when they’re having trouble regulating intense emotions, Fontalvo said.

“You can help them navigate those feelings of anxiety by simply validating their experience and guiding them with helpful steps to take,” she said. “We can say, ‘OK, you’re right, it is a lot. But we still have to work on this and the goal is still to be a great student. How about we take these two minutes to freak out, and then we’ll work on our to-do list together.’”

In the last two years, an open dialogue about mental health in schools has reduced the stigma of visiting a school counselor or psychologist for help, the counselors said.

“The access to immediate, consistent support and care is the best part of being in schools,” Bruce said at the virtual meeting. “We know that school-based mental health for many of the students and families that come through, this may be the first time they have access to this type of service, but it’s in a place that’s familiar and safe and free of stigma.”

When talking with her students about their needs and what would help them address the pressure they feel, Quintana said she learned that they would like to start their day with a “mental health break.”

“When they haven’t had a good night’s rest, or they just had a fight with a parent, to come in and have a test or project or presentation waiting for them can be overwhelming,” Quintana said to her fellow school-based counselors at the virtual meeting.“Maybe we can incorporate the first 15-20 minutes of the day as a break for them to catch their breath and then start the day.”

Azara Santiago Rivera, president of the Latino Mental Health Association of New Jersey, said in a phone call with Chalkbeat on Friday that she aims to continue holding these meetings for school counselors to share their experiences and resources, especially those that work in predominantly Latinx communities and communities of color.

“At a time when we’re seeing a rise in serious mental health needs for students, we’re also seeing a shortage of mental health professionals,” Santiago Rivera said. “This is the time to share ideas, resources, and strategies with each other and create a safe space for our professionals.”

Catherine Carrera is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Newark, covering the city’s K-12 schools with a focus on English language learners. Contact Catherine at ccarrera@chalkbeat.org.

School psychologist, counselor hiring lags nationwide even as student mental health needs soar

2022-11-18T12:00:00+00:00

This story is a partnership with The Associated Press.

Mira Ugwuadu felt anxious and depressed when she returned to her high school in Cobb County, Georgia, last fall after months of remote learning, so she sought help. But her school counselor kept rescheduling their meetings because she had so many students to see.

“I felt helpless and alone,” the 12th grader later said.

Despite an influx of COVID-19 relief money, school districts across the country have struggled to staff up to address students’ mental health needs that have only grown since the pandemic hit.

Among 18 of the country’s largest school districts, 12 started this school year with fewer counselors or psychologists than they had in fall 2019, according to an analysis by Chalkbeat. As a result, many school mental health professionals have caseloads that far exceed recommended limits, according to experts and advocates, and students must wait for urgently needed help.

Some of the extra need for support has been absorbed by social workers — their ranks have grown by nearly 50% since before the pandemic, federal data shows — but they have different training from other mental health professionals and many other duties, including helping families. Districts included in the analysis, which serve a combined 3 million students, started the year with nearly 1,000 unfilled mental health positions.

Hiring challenges are largely to blame, but some school systems have invested relief money in other priorities. The Cobb County district, for one, has not added any new counselors.

“They have so many students that they’re dealing with,” said Mira, 17. “I personally don’t want to blame them. But I also deserve care and support, too.”

A spokesperson for Cobb County Public Schools said school counselor positions are based on a state funding formula, and the district strongly supports more funding.

The Chalkbeat analysis is based on school staffing and vacancy data obtained through open records requests. The 31 largest districts in the U.S. were surveyed, but some did not track or provide data.

Some school systems used federal relief money to add mental health staff, but others did not because they worried about affording them once the aid runs out. Districts have limited time to spend the nearly $190 billion allocated for recovery.

“Here’s this conundrum that we’re in,” said Christy McCoy, the president of the School Social Work Association of America. “It’s like we are trying to put a Band-Aid on something that needs a more comprehensive and integrated approach.”

Hiring challenges for psychologists, counselors

Many of the schools that have wanted to hire more mental health workers simply can’t find them. School psychologist positions have been particularly hard to fill.

Chicago, for example, added 32 school psychologist positions since fall 2019 but ended up with just one additional psychologist on staff this fall. Dozens of positions couldn’t be filled.

Schools in Hillsborough County, Florida eliminated dozens of unfilled psychologist positions, leaving schools with 33 fewer psychologists this fall than pre-pandemic. Houston schools also cut more than a dozen psychologist roles it couldn’t fill before the pandemic. Instead, the district used the money to pay outside providers and hire psychologist interns.

With their extended training, school psychologists are relied upon to provide intensive one-on-one counseling and help determine whether students are at risk for suicide.

In Maryland, a shortage of psychologists at Montgomery County Public Schools has kept the short-staffed department focused on crisis intervention and providing legally mandated services like special education assessments, said Christina Connolly-Chester, director of psychological services. That has meant they cannot keep up with other, less urgent counseling services.

“If that psychologist has more schools because there are vacancies and they’re not able to spend as much time in their assigned schools, then things like counseling go away,” she said.

The district sought to hire staff to address increased student needs such as anxiety, depression and struggles with conflict management, but still had 30 vacant psychologist positions, a district official said this month.

Even before the pandemic, some schools struggled to find psychologists. New practitioners have not been entering the field fast enough, and others have been switching to telehealth or private practices with higher pay and often better working conditions.

“We can’t afford to pay professionals enough to make it a desirable position,” said Sharon Hoover, a psychologist who co-directs the National Center for School Mental Health at the University of Maryland.

Counselor staffing has been a challenge for some districts, too, with nine of the large districts down counselors this year, while another nine saw increases.

Where hiring has been toughest, schools have turned to alternatives. In Hawaii, which had 31 vacant counselor positions and 20 vacant psychologist roles at the start of the year, the state has trained educators to spot signs that a student is in distress — an increasingly common practice — and pays a private company to provide tele-mental health services.

To help with student counseling, the state also employs about 300 behavioral health specialists — a position created before the pandemic partly in response to a longstanding school psychologist shortage, said Annie Kalama, the department official who oversees student support services.

“We’re trying to attack it from every angle,” she said.

It isn’t just hiring challenges that have led to smaller-than-expected staffing increases. Some school systems spent most of their federal aid on more lasting investments, such as technology or building repairs. And many opted not to add new mental health workers at all.

In the Chalkbeat analysis, half of the 18 large districts budgeted for fewer counselor or psychologist positions this school year than they did in fall 2019.

In April, just 4 in 10 districts reported hiring new staffers to address students’ mental health needs, according to a national survey.

“For all the talk about mental health, the actual money they’re spending on it is not that high,” said Phyllis Jordan, associate director of FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University that tracks school spending. School districts only planned to spend about 2% of the largest round of federal COVID aid on mental health hiring, according to the group’s analysis of more than 5,000 district spending plans.

Schools have added social workers

One bright spot in the school mental health landscape, though, is the increase in social workers.

Montgomery County in Maryland, Gwinnett County in Georgia, and Orange, Broward, and Palm Beach counties in Florida all started the year with dozens more social workers than they had in fall 2019. Chicago added the most — nearly 150 additional social workers — in part due to staffing promises in the latest teachers union contract.

The Chalkbeat analysis echoes national data collected by the White House that show the number of school social workers was up 48% this fall compared with before the pandemic, while the number of school counselors was up a more modest 12% and the count of school psychologists inched up 4%.

In Houston, staffing increases meant nearly every school started this fall with a counselor or social worker.

Newly hired social worker Natalie Rincon is able to meet one-on-one with students who are in crisis and teach other students calming strategies, such as tracing their hand with a finger while breathing.

Still, need often outstrips capacity at Rincon’s school, where many students are refugees or recent immigrants coping with trauma. She often has to prioritize helping students with urgent issues, leaving less time to check in on others.

Natalie Rincon, a social worker, has seen the benefits of having a fuller mental health team at her Houston elementary school.

“I want to be able to meet with a kindergartner just to talk about how they’re feeling,” Rincon said. “Those are the kind of things that I think slip through the cracks.”

And in some schools, the social worker doesn’t have any backup.

As the sole mental health professional at a charter school in Buffalo, New York, social worker Danielle Dylik provides counseling to more than 40 students most weeks. She also assists with discipline issues and is setting up a food pantry and clothes bank for families.

But as just one person, she knows she can’t help every student who needs it.

“There’s just not enough hours in the school day,” she said.

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Annie Ma is a reporter for The Associated Press.

Memphis school board chair aims to rebuild trust, focus on academics as superintendent search starts

2022-11-11T11:00:00+00:00

Althea Greene understands the assignment.

Memphis-Shelby County Schools is in a moment of major transitions. The school board is preparing to embark on its first nationwide superintendent search in a decade — over two months after the school board cut ties with former Superintendent Joris Ray, who had been under investigation over claims he abused his power and violated district policies.

Meanwhile, the composition of the school board has drastically changed after it gained three new members in less than two months.

But as Greene begins her tenure as the elected chair of the MSCS board, she wants to keep the district focused on what matters most: Ensuring its more than 110,000 students recover from the catastrophic academic, social, and emotional consequences of the pandemic.

“I don’t want our teachers or our students worrying about the next leader,” Greene said on a recent crisp autumn morning in Memphis. “I want teachers to worry about their students, I want students to worry about learning, I want administrators to worry about staying a Level 5 school, and you let the board worry about the other piece.”

Greene, a former MSCS educator who joined the board in 2019, invited a Chalkbeat reporter to shadow her on visits to three schools in her district — Jackson Elementary, Wells Station Elementary, and Trezevant Middle School — one morning in late October.

During the visits, Greene shared her vision and discussed her top priorities as the new leader of the board governing Tennessee’s largest school system. Beyond finding a new superintendent who can “take the district to the next level,” Greene hopes to build on the momentum of MSCS’ improvements on the latest state standardized tests, restore trust in the school board and entire district, update aging school buildings, and address hundreds of millions of dollars of deferred facilities maintenance.

To Greene, that starts with building relationships and being present regularly inside school buildings and across the community.

“I don’t want to walk in the path that other board chairs walked in. I want to blaze my own trail,” Greene said. “I want to be that school board chair that works on building and bridging relationships.”

What inspires Greene’s priorities for the work ahead is her background as an educator of nearly four decades who personally appreciates their “heart and hard work each and every day” and understands that they’re the key to recovering from the damages of the pandemic.

Michelle McKissack, the board’s previous chairwoman who is now mulling a run for Memphis mayor, said she enjoyed having Greene as her vice chair over the last year. She praised Greene’s teaching experience and her willingness to work with everyone, even those she disagrees with.

“I think this was an absolutely perfect time for her to become chair, as a former educator,” McKissack said. “As we’re going into the next phase looking for our next superintendent, to have someone at the helm who’s done that and had that classroom experience is great.”

Newly elected Memphis-Shelby County Schools board chair Althea Greene talks with school staff during a late October visit to Treadwell Middle School.

Greene’s experience as a teacher is crucial

Greene often thinks about the serendipity of her serving as a school board member for part of North Memphis, where she grew up and taught in for much of her four-decade career as an educator. She taught at seven schools, and today, she represents four of those schools, plus three schools she herself attended as a student.

“I never thought I would get to represent the schools that invested in my education and helped to make me the person that I am,” Greene said.

As Greene drove around District 2, which includes neighborhoods like Binghampton and Berclair, as well as some of North Memphis, many streets and schools merited stories — her heartbreak early in her career when she was transferred from Snowden School to Jackson Elementary, a school she had never heard of. And there was the time she portrayed Michael Jackson in a school talent show, complete with the King of Pop’s iconic hair and moonwalk.

Over those 38 years she spent working in MSCS, Greene doesn’t recall hearing much about the school board at all, except for a few major controversies. And she doesn’t remember school board members visiting her schools, at least until she was transferred back to Snowden, where she spent the remaining 25 years of her career.

Greene wasn’t alone in that experience. Since being appointed to the board by the Shelby County Commission three years ago, teachers and other school staff told Greene on countless occasions that they’d never or rarely seen school board members set foot in their buildings.

That’s why Greene has prided herself on visiting at least one school every week and every school in her district at least three times a year. She plans to continue that practice as board chair. Greene believes it helps improve morale among the district’s 6,000 teachers and, in turn, uplift COVID recovery efforts.

Helping principals keep school staff happy

At all three of the schools Greene visited, she asked each principal the same first questions: “How can I support you? What do you need?”

Using the $125,000 annual budget each school board member can allocate to schools and projects of their choosing, Greene then allocates funding to address those needs — whether it’s for new technology, office furniture, staff lunches to boost morale, or student incentives to reward good behavior and attendance.

MSCS saw a near 10 percentage point increase in chronic absenteeism last year — a problem many districts across the nation are grappling with after the pandemic.

Greene has supported many of the district’s flagship COVID recovery initiatives, including expanding before- and after-school tutoring programs, adding teachers assistants to lower the student-to-adult ratio in K-2 classrooms, and adding an academic intervention period to the school to help students catch up. But Greene also believes boosting teacher morale is also key to the district bouncing back.

Recently, Greene used a portion of her $125,000 to provide a taco bar to teachers at Jackson and every other school in her district that received the top rating for growth in literacy, numeracy, and composite student growth as measured by end-of-year state testing. And during her late October visit to Jackson, Greene pledged more funding for student and staff incentives.

For Greene, it was the little things that made her a happy teacher — something as small as a soda and a bag of chips at lunch or a candy bar at 2 p.m. That’s why she encourages principals to find different ways to appreciate their staff.

“I always say to my principals,” Greene said, “keep your folks happy and they will come to work every day. They won’t leave.”

Althea Greene, chairwoman of the Memphis-Shelby County Schools board, chats with Corey Jones, principal of Jackson Elementary, during a recent visit. She’s helped Jones with funding for teacher appreciation events and student incentives to boost attendance.

Corey Jones, principal of Jackson Elementary, said Greene’s help “makes life easier” when he needs something to make his staff feel appreciated or one of his teachers needs something for their class and is unable to buy it themselves.

To Jones, having a former educator at the helm of the school board is a blessing.

“It’s tough out there. You know that,” Jones said, with a pointed glance at Greene during her visit last month. “You can always call her for help.”

Keisa Jackson, principal of Wells Station Elementary also looks forward to Greene’s visits.

“Sometimes I have to call and be like ‘when are you coming to see me?’” she said with a laugh, as she and Greene greeted students entering the lunch room. Jackson later asked Greene for help getting new laptops for three of her administrators. On the spot, Greene committed to arrange it.

“On a personal level, she’s helped me help” students and staff, Jackson said. “I can honestly say that Dr. Greene is in the trenches with us and, in every conversation, it’s students first.”

Hoping for new schools for students

In recent months, the support Greene has given Brandon Hill, principal of Treadwell Middle School, has focused on beautification projects at the school, which was built in the early 1900s.

As Greene pulled up to Treadwell Middle School, she pridefully pointed out the new marquee she got a good deal on after a recent storm damaged the old sign, and the freshly painted crosswalks she helped fund.

Then, she let out a large sigh. “All of these buildings are so old,” Greene said. “It is embarrassing that stuff is still here from when I went to school in ’75.”

As she walked around the school with Hill, Greene shook her head at the worn, wooden seats in the auditorium — the same seats she sat in for assembly and performances when she was a student there. And because the middle school shares a cafeteria with the connected Treadwell Elementary, Greene pointed out that students have to begin eating lunch every day at 9:30 a.m. — if you can even call that lunch, she added.

Greene hopes that in the near future, MSCS can build a new $34 million Treadwell K-8 — or any school at all. District officials had targeted 2026 for completion of the new Treadwell school to replace the existing elementary and middle schools. But that project and many others in its Reimagining 901 improvement and facilities plan remain in limbo due to funding issues.

As chair, Greene said she hopes to do whatever she can to get Reimagining 901 back on track.

“Many of our students graduate and they’ve never gone to a brand new school. They don’t get to live in brand new houses. Let’s face it, we’re a poor city,” Greene said. “My prayer is that, before they leave from being a student here from pre-K to 12th grade, they get to attend at least one brand new school.”

Former Memphis-Shelby County Schools board Chair Michelle McKissack (center) speaks with reporters during a press conference on Aug. 23, after the board approved an agreement ending Joris Ray’s employment with the district. McKissack is joined by fellow board members Charles Everett and Althea Greene.

Rebuilding trust during the superintendent search

Key to all of Greene’s goals — COVID recovery, improving district facilities, and finding the best possible next superintendent — is restoring trust in the MSCS board, after a summer filled with controversy surrounding Ray’s alleged sexual relationships with subordinates.

“I felt that for a while, the community lost trust in us as a board,” Greene said. “They didn’t think we were operating with integrity, but there was so much going on behind the scenes.”

After the board launched an investigation into Ray and placed him on paid administrative leave, Greene thought the community “realized we were listening.” Still, she acknowledged there is a lot of ground to recover, even after the board decided to spend nearly $500,000 to buy out Ray’s contract.

“It was painful, and I cried a lot, but I had to do what was best for children,” Greene said. “I want people to trust me. I’m excited to make that happen.”

Greene also plans to involve the community as much as possible in the superintendent search. She is in the process of forming several committees to provide input on candidates — one composed of community education leaders, another of board member-appointed representatives from each of the district’s nine districts, as well as a student committee.

“We are partners and we want them to support us and work with us,” Greene said. “We must be willing to listen.”

Samantha West is a reporter for Chalkbeat Tennessee, where she covers K-12 education in Memphis. Connect with Samantha at swest@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago schools attendance continued to decline last year

2022-11-10T18:26:29+00:00

During the last school year, when academic recovery remained elusive, Chicago schools continued to struggle with lagging attendance, new data show.

This fall, they are making a fresh push to boost student turnout.

School-level data for the 2021-22 school year shows attendance in Chicago continued to slide and remained well below pre-pandemic levels.

The largest declines happened in the city’s charter schools and district-run campuses with majority Black student populations. Shrinking high schools on Chicago’s South and West sides also saw some of the most dramatic declines — though, at some, attendance rebounded somewhat last year after dropping off earlier in the pandemic.

The average attendance rate for Chicago Public Schools stood at about 85% last school year, more than 6 percentage points below the 2018-19 school year, the last before the pandemic upended learning. Meanwhile, chronic absenteeism — the share of students who missed 18 or more days — rose to 45% districtwide last year, compared with 24% on the cusp of the COVID outbreak.

District officials in Chicago and across the country are making attendance a major focus this school year. That’s because for students whose attendance remains spotty, academic and mental health recovery will be harder to attain. Boosting attendance is especially critical for students of color and low-income students, who were hit the hardest by the pandemic’s disruption.

Educators and school leaders have said last year — marked by two COVID surges, staffing shortages, and other challenges — tested them like no other. The basic habits of in-person attendance — getting up, getting dressed, and arriving at school on time — took longer to reestablish than expected. Quarantines and other disruptions killed momentum for some students, and regular attendance remained a national issue.

In Chicago, officials and others say efforts to increase attendance this fall — from a push to intervene faster when attendance lags to a larger role for student enrichment activities — might be starting to pay off. The district’s overall attendance rate so far this fall stands at just more than 90%, an uptick of about half a percentage point compared with this time last year.

“Cautious optimism is the overarching theme,” said Robin Koelsch, senior director of partnerships at Communities In Schools, a national educational nonprofit that works with about 200 campuses in Chicago.

Attendance worse at high schools and South, West Sides

Overall, attendance in Chicago during the fully in-person 2021-22 school year dipped compared with the 2020-21 year, which the district started online before shifting to a hybrid model in the spring. However, comparing in-person and virtual attendance is tricky: Students who logged on to remote classes with their cameras off were not always actively engaged in those lessons.

Schools grappled with how best to track virtual and hybrid attendance. Multicultural Arts High School, where attendance stood at about 85% pre-COVID, saw its rate shoot up to almost 99% in 2020-21, then plummet to 72% last year.

Last year, district data shows the drops were most pronounced for high school juniors and seniors, whose attendance dipped below 80%. Citywide, charter schools and those serving majority Black student bodies saw steep attendance drops in 2020-21, but didn’t lose much additional ground last year. For campuses serving primarily Latino students, both pandemic school years brought dips in student turnout.

Some South and West Side neighborhoods hard hit by the pandemic saw dramatic drops in attendance. Austin, South Chicago, and Woodlawn all experienced declines of almost 10 percentage points in 2020-21 — and those lower rates largely persisted last year. South Shore, where average attendance at 11 neighborhood schools dropped by 13 percentage points earlier in the pandemic, saw a significant rebound, though rates remained below where they were before COVID hit.

Attendance rates and the pandemic’s impact varied widely among campuses. Alternative high schools — whether contract, charter, or district-run — were hit hard. These campuses, which serve high-needs students who previously dropped out or have fallen behind at traditional high schools, generally have lower attendance; amid the pandemic’s upheaval, they saw some of the steepest drops.

On several Ombudsman and YCCS campuses, the attendance rate for the school year dipped below 50%, and in the case of Ombudsman’s South campus, below 40%.

Small high schools serving largely Black students on the city’s South and West sides, from Manley to Phillips, were hard hit as well. Phillips, with an attendance rate of about 61%, remains about 20 percentage points below its pre-pandemic rate. Some schools, such as Austin College and Career Academy, Hirsch, and Tilden, also had significant drops, but regained considerable ground last school year.

The pandemic’s varying impact on different campuses stand out in emerging data, said Elaine Allensworth at the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research. That schools with comparable student bodies fared so differently raises key questions about what made some campuses better prepared to handle the disruption,

That was an important takeaway in a recent study the consortium released on pandemic-era grading: Elementary schools serving Black students experienced larger declines in grades overall, but ultimately which campus a student attended mattered more than the school’s demographics.

Allensworth’s team is now looking into the relationship between attendance and grades in 2020-21. It found that attendance — traditionally a key predictor of student achievement — appeared to have an even stronger effect on grades during that year of upheaval.

“When attendance suddenly drops, and the more you have differences between students, the more you can see that relationship with other indicators of achievement,” Allensworth said.

District pushes for better attendance

This fall, schools are redoubling their efforts to boost attendance, officials say.

In a statement, Chicago Public Schools highlighted the work of campus-based Multi-Tiered System of Supports teams, on which educators and administrators parse attendance, grades, and behavior for individual students to steer help to those who need it. The interventionists the district staffed in each school this fall use the data to work one on one or in small groups with students to help them catch up academically.

The district said it’s also leaning on stepped-up family outreach and expanded after-school programs, including more opportunities for students with disabilities, to help reengage students. A more general emphasis on social-emotional learning, including activities such as healing circles to talk about difficult events, are helping as well, the district statement said.

As of the 11th week of the school year, the district-wide attendance rate was 90.4%, compared with 90% at this time last year. Officials also touted a 93.4% attendance estimate for the first day of school.

“While there is much more work to do, we are pleased that the attendance rate is slightly above this time last year,” the district said.

Campuses are also betting big on the kinds of enrichment opportunities that the pandemic took away from students. Field trips and visits from arts and other community organizations are back this fall — and schools are more thoughtful than ever about tying these opportunities to their instruction, said Koelsch, of Communities In Schools (CIS), an education nonprofit that helps connect campuses with mental health and other community resources.

For example, Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium — one of roughly 250 community partners CIS helps connect with schools — is offering a series of virtual lessons on dolphin and other animal communication, culminating in a visit to the aquarium that lets students get up close to the animals and their caretakers. Those types of programs help build engagement and a sense of connectedness to school and the community at large, Koelsch said.

“Many of our schools are asking for opportunities to get students out of the building,” she said.

Student support managers CIS staffs in some of the schools the nonprofit works with have also started book, art, anime, and other clubs during the school day, giving students a chance to connect with each other based on shared interests.

“It’s a way for our students to be seen and valued,” said Shipra Panicker, senior director of intensive student supports.

She added, “Attendance is always a priority for schools, but even more so now.”

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.

Hope, healing, and the return of an annual camping trip for Brooklyn high-schoolers

2022-11-09T19:50:17+00:00

Surrounded by her classmates on a bright October morning in the woods of Fishkill, New York, Diana Ramirez had no trouble making herself heard.

The 14-year-old enthusiastically initiated chants and cheerfully shouted instructions to her peers during team-building activities on a multi-day camping trip organized by their Brooklyn public high school.

Speaking up hasn’t always been so easy for the high school freshman — especially during the past several years overshadowed by the pandemic.

“Socialization was really hard, stuck in my home for months doing nothing but talking to myself,” Diana said. The teen still gets so nervous sometimes talking to new people that she shakes. “It’s hard to talk to people, and it’s hard to have an actual conversation face to face, not on the phone,” she said.

Helping teenagers like Diana find their voice is central to the mission of Leaders High School, a small public school in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, that’s part of a network of NYC Outward Bound Schools across the five boroughs. The network’s model focuses on forging tight-knit relationships between kids and staff, often through shared outdoor experiences.

Nearly three-quarters of teenagers across the country reported at least one traumatic experience linked to long-term mental health difficulties during the pandemic.

That mission has taken on extra urgency for this year’s freshmen, whose entire middle school experience was upended by the pandemic, and who are still cautiously emerging from its shadow as they begin high school.

Nearly three in four teenagers nationwide reported at least one “adverse childhood event” — a traumatic experience linked to long-term mental health challenges — during the pandemic, according to a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Thirteen percent of teens experienced at least four.

Yodit Stevens, a Leaders High School special education teacher.

“These were the COVID babies,” said Yodit Stevens, a special education teacher at Leaders, and Diana’s chaperone during the camping trip. “They’re just coming out of their shells.”

The school’s annual camping trip, where kids spend several days in the woods with classmates, a teacher, and trained guides, is a cornerstone of Leaders’ approach. It serves as a foundational bonding experience and a chance for teens, many of whom have never spent a night away from home, to get a taste of independence.

The excursion was canceled for the past two years because of COVID-19. But the trip was back this year, and school staffers hope it can offer the new class of ninth graders a fresh start and a way to process the lingering pain of the past three years to begin healing.

For Diana, it’s already working.

“Everything has changed,” she said. “I’m talking to people, I’m a little more social … you have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.”

Mental health tolls add up

Schools across New York City resumed full-time, in-person classes last year after more than a year of fully remote or hybrid instruction. But COVID still loomed large.

Mask rules remained in place until the spring, and a COVID wave last winter kept kids home in droves, driving up chronic absence rates at schools across the city, including at Leaders.

“A lot of kids were getting sick, and then once they were sick, they were also just scared and isolated … it was like we have to stay home to protect ourselves,” said Tom Mullen, the principal of Leaders.

Stevens, who worked with eighth graders last year, noticed that even when her students were in school last year, they were often reluctant to open up to classmates or teachers.

“There was a lot of pain, resistance. It was hard to get them to speak in class,” she said. “As far as the interpersonal relationships, they were very closed off.”

COVID took a large toll on students, between illness, trauma, and social isolation.

Diana remembers those fears vividly. She watched multiple family members get sick one by one, and spent long stretches barely leaving her room.

For a teenager who thrived on interaction and social experiences, the isolation was devastating.

“It hit her very, very hard,” said Diana’s mom, Rosa Ramirez. “She had a lot going on in her head … it was worse for her to think, ‘What’s going on with my mom, my cousin? Are we going to be able to survive?’”

Mental health challenges for teens were widespread during the pandemic.

Across the country, 44% of teenagers reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless at some point in 2021, a different CDC survey found.

At Leaders, staffers are just starting to scratch the surface of what their new students may have gone through before arriving.

“Some of them come from some really hard backgrounds, some traumatic situations,” Stevens said.

Convincing wary families to let kids travel

Administrators at Leaders High School knew that restarting the annual camping trip would be a critical part of their efforts to give incoming ninth graders a positive start to their high school experience — and a chance to start to heal pandemic wounds.

Students spend the trip getting to know peers in their “Crew,” a signature NYC Outward Bound course that lasts all four years of high school. “Crew leaders” like Stevens serve as faculty advisers for the same group of students throughout their time at Leaders, and act as chaperones on the camping trip.

In New York City, where middle school students fan out to high schools across the five boroughs and often start ninth-grade knowing few or no other classmates, that social home base can be a lifeline.

Leaders High School ninth grade students play a game called Zombie-Zombie at Sharpe Reservation Camp ABC. Students work together in their “Crew” for their entire time in high school during Outward Bound.

“Going out and having this experience together is a catalyst for really intense bonding,” Mullen said. “They’re craving it. They know what they’ve missed and … they want to connect with each other and they want their high school experience to be special.”

But school officials knew it would also take some work to convince wary families and kids to leave their homes, city, and cell phones behind after three years of being largely hunkered down.

Diana’s mom Rosa said she was nervous about sending her youngest daughter — who has never spent a night away from home — on the camping trip, even after watching her two older sons thrive on the excursion years earlier.

“Being that she’s the only girl, it was a little more difficult,” she said.

School leaders didn’t shy away from families’ concerns and dispatched alumni and older siblings to share their experiences to help ease fears. They talked through communication and safety plans with families, and some staffers, including Stevens, offered to keep in touch with parents by text throughout the trip.

That openness and proactive communication ultimately won Rosa over.

“I see how they get along with the children, they treat them like family and don’t treat them like students,” she said. “They’re very vigilant.”

Convincing families to send their kids on this trip required the school to relax their concerns after almost three years of staying at home. NYC Outward Bound also had to recruit new staff and refresh training for all of their employees for the camping trip.

Getting families on board wasn’t the only hurdle.

NYC Outward Bound, the nonprofit that supports schools like Leaders and funds the annual excursion, had to staff up and refresh existing employees’ training after two years without a camping trip.

“Before anyone’s on site, we go through simulations and trainings with our staff,” including what to do if a student is injured or lost, said Vanessa Rodriguez, the CEO of NYC Outward Bound Schools.

The nonprofit ultimately decided to shorten the trip from five days to three to ease the transition.

A chance to ditch screens and unplug

For teens who spent years glued to their devices as crucial academic and social outlets, they initially found the no-phone rule of the camping trip hard to take.

One 2021 survey of more than 5,000 12- and 13-year-olds from across the country found that middle schoolers reported an average of nearly 8 hours a day on screens during the pandemic, up from an estimated average of 3.8 hours a day for the same group before the pandemic.

But once the teenagers got out in the woods, they were surprised by how quickly they forgot all about their devices.

“Everyone’s actually saying, ‘Oh I realize I haven’t been looking at my phone, I haven’t been grabbing for it because I’ve been enjoying myself,’” Diana said.

Without phones, students were forced to focus more explicitly on the tasks at hand — and on each other.

For 14-year-old Gabriel Alexandre, that meant trying something completely new: preparing dinner with his classmates.

“The materials were already there, but it was cool putting them together for our class as a community, that’s … bonding,” he said. The experience has even given him some more confidence to experiment in the kitchen at home, he added.

(Top) Leaders High School ninth grade students play a game called French Fry. (Bottom, from left) Leaders High School students Gabriel Alexandre and Diana Ramirez, both 14 years old.

Mullen said offering activities that don’t feel contrived or have a prescribed outcome is key to making the camping trip a meaningful learning experience.

“We let the kids get lost sometimes, and they’ll see like, ‘Hey I don’t think we’re going the right way,’ and reset their course,” he said. “I think education is most powerful when students are grappling with non-routine problems where the answers aren’t obvious.”

The open-endedness of the trip gives kids with a wide range of personalities and skill sets a chance to shine, staffers said.

That’s especially important for a school like Leaders, where students come from a broad array of racial, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds.

One student, a native Urdu speaker, won praise for being especially observant during group activities. Another, an accomplished athlete, volunteered to cart her classmates’ heavy backpacks when they got tired and hoisted her peers up a steep hill during a hike. A third, who had arrived at the school just a week before the camping trip, leapt into the role of navigator, directing his classmates around the Sharpe Nature Reservation in Fishkill.

And then there was Diana, the group’s vocal leader, who displayed a special ability to “bring everyone together with a lot of love,” according to Stevens, the group’s faculty adviser.

“They are all leaders. Each in their own way, and literally each one of them brings something special,” she added.

(Top, from left) Leaders High School ninth grade students play a game called Fox Walk. Leaders High School ninth grade students review the map during their hike. (Bottom) A Leaders High School student helps one of her peers as they hike up a hill.

But the most memorable moment of the trip came when the kids shed their individual labels, dropped their guard, and came together as a group.

It happened around the campfire on the second night. Stevens set the tone by sharing some raw and painful news: She’d recently learned that a family member had fallen seriously ill.

“I had them just close their eyes and sit for a moment and just feel the breeze, feel their own heartbeats, listen to the sounds around them, and check in with themselves,” she said. “I told them … life waits for no one at all.”

Stevens’ disclosure opened the floodgates and gave students permission to share some of their own lingering traumas.

“She set an example that feeling your feelings are OK and ... we’re all here for each other,” said Diana. “Everyone was kind of letting it out. There was a lot of tears.”

The conversation opened a window for Stevens to bring up the importance of mental health support, and the stigma surrounding therapy.

“We talked about needing therapy … in some of our communities it’s not big for you to go and get therapy, but it’s needed, it’s absolutely needed,” Stevens said.

Diana hopes the feelings and honesty from that night will linger when the kids get back to school, much like the smoke that clings to clothes after a campfire.

“We’re going to be talking about this trip for years,” she said.

Leaders High School students put their hands in together during a group exercise.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Remote learning not ‘primary’ driver of academic losses, new analysis suggests

2022-10-28T23:15:06+00:00

Exactly how much did remote learning contribute to students’ academic losses during the pandemic?

A new analysis released Friday inches us closer to a complicated answer.

Using the latest national and state test score data, a team of researchers found that districts that stayed remote during the 2020-21 school year did see bigger declines in elementary and middle school math, and to some degree in reading, than other districts in their state.

But the losses varied widely — and many districts that went back in person had bigger losses than districts that stayed remote. The pattern is inconsistent enough that school closures, it seems, were not the primary driver of those drops in achievement.

“Based on the discussion before these results came out, you’d think that the only thing driving achievement losses would be remote learning, but actually that does not seem to be the case,” said Thomas Kane, a Harvard professor of education and economics who co-led the research. “I was really surprised by these results.”

Earlier research by Kane and others found a strong tie between declines in academic performance and remote learning, which posed huge challenges for students and families nationwide.

The new analysis is the first to look at how the pandemic affected math and reading achievement in many individual school districts. The team relied on testing data for 29 states, spanning around 4,000 school districts that serve some 12 million students in third to eighth grades — or around half of the U.S. student population for those age groups.

Researchers then combined that information with scores released this week from a key national test known as NAEP, which allowed them to compare student performance in spring 2019 and spring 2022. They found that, this year, the students in the median school district had learned about half a grade level less in math and about a quarter of a grade level less in reading, compared with their pre-pandemic peers. (Those conversions of scores to time are inexact, but the researchers say they offer the clearest picture for parents.)

There were drastic differences in performance among districts in each state, they found, with a number of districts actually doing better since the pandemic, a small number doing much worse, and most seeing some declines.

“The pandemic was like a band of tornadoes, leaving devastating learning losses in some districts, while leaving many other districts untouched,” Kane said. “But until now, that damage has been hard to see.”

The research team also found that high-poverty districts suffered greater academic losses, offering a more sobering picture than the national NAEP results did and echoing some earlier pandemic research.

The differences in lost learning between low- and high-poverty districts weren’t large, but were noteworthy, particularly in math. The trend held for reading, though the differences were smaller.

Researchers said math was likely more affected than reading in high-poverty districts — a trend in that subject that’s been widely observed — because school plays a bigger role in how students learn to do math.

These findings, Reardon said, should prompt federal and state leaders to make sure high-poverty schools have the funding and mental health support they need long-term, “so that we don’t end up with a permanently larger amount of inequality than we had before the pandemic.”

How remote learning affected academics

The researchers cautioned that their analysis can’t disentangle the effects of remote learning from other factors. It’s possible the districts that stayed remote longer differed in other meaningful ways from districts that reopened quickly, Reardon said, so researchers will have to do more digging “to really tease out” what happened.

The team will be adding data from more states as it becomes available. Some states that haven’t yet been analyzed, such as Maryland and New Jersey, saw high rates of school closures and big drops in student achievement.

In the coming weeks, the team plans to look at how COVID death rates, internet access, and parent job losses may have contributed to score declines.

“All of those things affected children’s ability to be able to learn,” Reardon said. “So while the remote learning is probably a piece of the story, it’s probably a small piece of all the ways the pandemic affected children’s outcomes.”

The uneven quality of remote instruction likely contributed to the variation in student performance, too.

Some students had access to daily live instruction with their teachers, while others spent large chunks of time working on their own, or doing work in paper packets. Students with spotty internet access often weren’t able to watch live lessons and teachers reported that some students logged on while they were working or caring for siblings. Others stopped attending virtual class altogether.

Kane said he hoped their data would urge school districts to beef up their academic recovery plans this spring and summer with strategies like tutoring and extra instruction during vacations — while schools still have time to spend their COVID relief dollars. Too many districts have put smaller efforts in place, he said, that won’t be sufficient to tackle the losses his team found.

“The average kid missed half a year of learning in math, and we’re not going to make up for half a year of learning with a few extra days of instruction or by providing tutors to 5% to 10% of kids,” Kane said.

What he doesn’t want to see is schools waiting to make changes until spring 2023 test results come in sometime next year when they may find: “Wow, kids are still way far behind.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Sweeping research effort tackles big question: How to get tutoring that works to more kids

2022-10-27T18:05:14+00:00

Tutoring is one of the most popular strategies for helping students catch up in the wake of the pandemic. But cost, staffing, and scheduling challenges often make it hard for schools to get these programs off the ground.

A sweeping $10 million research effort announced Thursday aims to tackle that problem by studying 31 different tutoring initiatives across the country this school year. The goal is to answer some of the biggest open questions about how schools can put successful tutoring programs in place for more students — and then figure out if they worked.

“It feels like out in the education ecosphere people are sort of yelling at districts and saying: ‘Why aren’t you doing more?’” said Kevin Huffman, the head of Accelerate, a nonprofit that awarded the grants. Districts are trying, he said, but it’s been complicated to staff in-person programs and difficult to vet tutoring services run by outside companies.

The research has the potential to help schools know which tutoring efforts are worth their time and money — before their COVID relief funding runs out.

“I think we’ve delivered the message collectively to the field that tutoring benefits all students, which is true based on the research, but it’s not a useful message when it comes to implementation,” Huffman added. “It’s just too broad and overwhelming, and I think the more we can help people narrow the scope on how to get started, the more likely we are to get traction.”

The research will look at tutoring efforts that are in-person, virtual, and a combination of the two. Accelerate expects some of the research will be available as early as next summer, while other studies will take more time.

Some of the research efforts are large, high-profile initiatives, such as the partnership between Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, the American Institutes for Research, and NWEA, which is studying the effects of tutoring and other academic recovery strategies on some 700,000 students across six states. Other studies will look at smaller efforts, like a student-launched virtual tutoring program called Tutor Teens that will partner with four high schools in the Cincinnati area.

Accelerate was launched earlier this year by the nonprofit America Achieves, which initially raised $65 million for the effort from private philanthropy — Arnold Ventures; the head of Citadel, Kenneth C. Griffin; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and the Overdeck Family Foundation. (Chalkbeat also receives funding from the Gates Foundation.)

The nonprofit received more than 200 interested applicants, and tried to choose initiatives that were different from each other so the research would cover lots of ground. Accelerate also looked for efforts that zeroed in on specific student groups, such as English learners and struggling readers.

Some winners already have a proven track record, while others are start-ups that showed promise, Huffman said. The grants range in size from $100,000 to $800,000.

“A lot of these groups and organizations are taking first stabs at things that will need to be studied more,” Huffman said. “But our hope is that we’re starting down this path where instead of simply asking the question of whether tutoring works, we’re getting at the question of what are practical solutions” for getting that help to many more students.

The programs being studied include:

Amira Learning, a company that uses artificial intelligence to help students with literacy. The research will look at the effectiveness of pairing Amira’s virtual platform with in-person reading tutoring provided by young adults in California’s Central Valley to struggling elementary schoolers.
Amplify, a literacy tutoring company. The research will look at how a student’s race, gender, and language can affect the quality of a student-tutor match.
Deans for Impact, a nonprofit focused on teacher training, which will work with teacher prep programs to train and pair aspiring teachers with students who need tutoring, with a focus on math.
Guilford County Schools in North Carolina, which has an in-person tutoring program that targets high-need students in math, reading, and science. The research will look at how providing extra support to tutors can affect their relationships with students and student performance.
Great Oaks Foundation, which will recruit and train young people to be placed in schools for a year to tutor students in math and reading through AmeriCorps.
Green Dot Public Schools, a charter network in California, which will expand its math tutoring program for middle and early high schoolers and work with the company Saga Education to provide tutors with more feedback on their work.
Matheka, a math tutoring company, which will recruit and train bilingual tutors from Latin America to provide English learners who speak Spanish with virtual tutoring in elementary school. The research will look at the effects on their math scores.
OnYourMarkEducation, a virtual literacy tutoring program, will work with the National Student Support Accelerator to conduct randomized control trial studies looking at whether different tutor-to-student ratios affect student performance.
Reading Partners, a nonprofit that’s been shown to provide effective literacy tutoring, will conduct a randomized control trial of the virtual version of its in-person program.
Teach for America will look at the effects of its program that uses college students to provide virtual tutoring to elementary schoolers in reading and middle schoolers in math.
Zearn, a virtual math tutoring company being used by the Tennessee education department to offer tutoring to half the state’s elementary and middle school students, will use preliminary data to look at student outcomes.

Huffman hopes the research will help show whether it’s possible to train high schoolers, parents, college students, and pre-service teachers to effectively tutor students in large numbers. Many schools would prefer to offer tutoring in person, but have faced major challenges finding enough staff locally.

There are a few other trends, too. As more schools look to put programs in place that follow the science of reading, several grantees are looking at the effectiveness of virtual early literacy tutoring.

Other research efforts aim to determine the right balance between in-person and virtual support.

“Broadly, we don’t have a great handle across the country yet on: What happens if you go from in person to Zoom?” Huffman said. “What are the ways that reduce the lift on in-person? Can you find those things without reducing the statistically significant impacts that tutoring in-person shows?”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Illinois uses federal COVID money to expand high-impact tutoring. Will it help students catch up?

2022-10-25T14:31:25+00:00

Jack Goodwin was already struggling with math in middle school when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, upending his education even more. His mom, Shelly, knew he needed extra help to catch up.

But Shelly Goodwin couldn’t find a tutor in their small town of Paris, about four hours south of Chicago.

“I would ask the teachers, ‘Do you know anybody that tutors or can you tutor?’,” Shelly Goodwin said. “They would try to meet with [Jack] after school but they had five or six kids after school and they would say, ‘We don’t really know anyone that tutors around here.’”

Now, Jack is a high school freshman and spends one hour three days a week with a tutor provided through a high-impact tutoring program called the Illinois Tutoring Initiative.

His district — Paris Union School District 95 — was one of seven that were a part of a initial rollout of the $25 million effort to help students catch up on reading and math by using federal COVID recovery money for the program, which state officials aim to expand to 60 districts by the end of this semester.

In order to roll out the program, hire tutors, and expand the initiative to districts, the state partnered with local universities and Pearl, a tutor management platform. But the federal relief money supporting the initiative will dry up in two years, raising questions about how effective the effort might ultimately be.

The Illinois State Board of Education, the Illinois Board of Higher Education, and Illinois State University teamed up to create the initiative in the spring semester of last school year. The state’s P-20 Learning Council recommended high-impact tutoring in a report in 2021 to help get students back on track.

The program provides tutoring to districts that serve a majority of students from low-income families and were hit hardest by the pandemic. Students from kindergarten to eighth grade work on reading and math with an in-person tutor while high school students work on math online.

This fall, 300 tutors are working with 800 students across 30 districts throughout the state. The initiative expects to double the number of districts in the next few weeks.

Chicago Public Schools has invested $25 million of its federal COVID recovery money into a similar program called the Tutor Corps, which helps match students with a tutor. The district has provided 230 schools with at least one tutor to work with students in math and reading.

As of Oct. 18, the district had hired 662 tutors to work with 9,000 students. The district plans to expand the corps to 20 more schools, with a total of 800 tutors to work with 12,000 students this school year.

High-impact tutoring could help students catch up

At first, Jack Goodwin balked at getting a tutor. He would rather play football over the summer, he told his mom. But she insisted and he started meeting in person with his tutor, Cody Sanders, three times a week. Since school started this fall, he has switched to online tutoring after football practice and started working with a new tutor.

Just like Jack, students in the program meet with tutors one-on-one or in small groups with no more than three students for one hour, three times a week for eight to 14 weeks. The program doesn’t give students new lessons to work on, but supports what teachers are already doing in classrooms.

Education researchers call this approach high-impact tutoring and say it is the most effective way to get students back on track after the pandemic.

Only about a third of Illinois fourth and eighth graders are considered proficient in reading and math, according to the results of the National Assessment of Academic Progress, known as the “nation’s report card,” released yesterday. Fourth graders performed somewhat better on the math test, with 38% considered proficient.

Miguel Cardona, Education Secretary, called the national test results “appalling and unacceptable” and said how the nation responds would determine “our standing in the world.”

He noted that more than half of districts across the country are turning to high-impact tutoring to recover.

That’s because it is one of few programs that show students making gains in math and reading, according to a 2021 report from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University and the University of Virginia.

The report defines high-impact tutoring as more than three days per week or at least 50 hours over 36 weeks. It recommends that students work one-on-one with tutors or in small groups of no more than three to four students.

Tutors do not have to be current educators in order to help students, the report concluded, but they need adequate training and ongoing support.

Community members step up to tutor

When Cody Sanders was first assigned to work with Jack over the summer, Shelly Goodwin was relieved because she already knew the tutor from their Paris community.

“I am overprotective of my children, and they will tell you that,” Shelly Goodwin said, laughing. “It made me feel really good that I actually knew him and he is from the community. He’s a really awesome person.”

Sanders wanted to tutor students after losing his leg to sepsis due to diabetes in October 2020. He wasn’t feeling like his usual self and thought that helping people would be good for him.

Sanders has been tutoring third to eighth graders at Paris Union School District students since the program started in the district in the spring. Tutoring has benefited Sanders as well as his students, he said. “These kids have also helped me to come out of my shell.”

In addition to placing future educators from partner institutions of higher education into the classroom, the program also hires current teachers, retired educators, and community members such as Sanders. Potential tutors only need a high school diploma. For high school math, program leaders look at transcripts to see if tutors are proficient in the subject they are tutoring.

The program trains tutors to help them adjust to working with students, learn about high-impact tutoring and culturally responsive teaching, and understand how to support students. Before working with students, potential tutors are required to pass an assessment of the content with an 80% or higher.

During the initial rollout of the program in the spring, tutors received $20 an hour for one-on-one tutoring and $30 an hour for group tutoring. Now tutors can make $50 an hour regardless of class.

Christy Borders, director of the Illinois Tutoring Initiative, said that it was important to increase the pay rate because the program was struggling to recruit tutors who could work somewhere else for the same amount or more

While the main goal of the initiative was to address learning needs for students, Borders said, the program is also helping create jobs in communities that need them.

Will tutoring continue after COVID money expires?

Shelly Goodwin says the tutoring program improved her son’s mood and gave him confidence. Jack even smiles now, she noted.

This was the first time Jack’s district was able to provide this kind of tutoring and school leaders say they are seeing students make progress in reading and math. Jeremy Larson, the superintendent of Paris Union School District 95, said the district saw gains in both subjects on the state’s annual spring assessment for third through eighth graders.

There are also signs that the tutoring is paying off in more than just better test scores.

“We noticed that students who participate in it have better attendance,” Larson said, “which we believe is a social-emotional factor of having an interest in coming to school.”

Even as positive results are emerging from the rollout of the tutoring initiative, the program may be running out of time.

Federal COVID relief funds are set to expire in 2024, with much work still left to do. Since the initiative is still young, there is not enough data to prove the program has helped students recover from the pandemic and make significant academic progress.

For her part, Shelly Goodwin has seen Jack improve in math and hopes that the tutoring program lasts through his high school career. She still remembers the struggle to find affordable tutoring in her rural community and hopes she’s not left in the same position after federal funding dries up.

Correction: Oct. 25, 2022: This article has been updated to reflect that Pearl is a tutor management platform, not an online private tutoring company.

Samantha Smylie is the state education reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago, covering school districts across the state, legislation, special education, and the state board of education. Contact Samantha at ssmylie@chalkbeat.org.

‘Unsafe, unwelcoming’: LGBTQ students report facing hostility at school

2022-10-25T11:00:00+00:00

Patricia Reeves and her husband have tried to make school safe for their child.

They pushed administrators at one school to stop students from bullying Milo, who is nonbinary, and withdrew Milo from a different school after a teacher refused to use the correct pronouns. Inside their West Texas home, the parents do their best to replenish their child’s self esteem and resilience — to “build up our little soldier,” as Reeves put it.

But try as they might, they can’t completely shield Milo from the difficulty, even the danger, of being different at school.

“As long as you’re a fierce mom, you can get out in front of it,” Reeves said. “But the damage is already done.”

The damage is extensive: Most LGBTQ students feel unsafe at school and struggle with mental health, according to two new reports based on large-scale student surveys.

Reported rates of depression, hopelessness, and suicidal thoughts were far higher among LGBTQ students than their peers last school year, and highest among transgender and nonbinary youth, according to a survey of students in 20 states by the nonprofit YouthTruth. Released Monday, the survey also found that girls’ mental health is worse than boys’.

Another recent report helps explain LGBTQ students’ distress: The vast majority experienced harassment or assault during in-person school, and many heard school employees use homophobic language, according to a national survey of LGBTQ students conducted in 2021 and released this month by GLSEN, a group that promotes safe and inclusive schools.

“Most LGBTQ students are going to schools that are unsafe, unwelcoming, and not affirming,” said Caitlin Clark, a senior research associate at GLSEN who co-authored the report.

The reports highlight how the youth mental health crisis, like the COVID-19 pandemic, has ravaged marginalized groups more than others. They also suggest that the national campaign to bolster young people’s mental health could fail LGBTQ students if it ignores the sources of their pain, including mistreatment at school and social stigmatization made worse, advocates say, by the recent surge in anti-LGBTQ laws.

In her support group for parents of gender-nonconforming children, Reeves hears about what happens when vulnerable young people are subjected to such hostility.

“Every single one of our little ones has some sort of mental health challenge,” she said, “because of not being fully accepted.”

Worse mental health outcomes for girls and LGBTQ students

Already on the decline for at least a decade, young people’s mental health spiraled downward during the pandemic so rapidly that medical groups declared a “national emergency.”

But warnings of a widespread crisis can obscure a consistent trend in the data: LGBTQ students and girls are struggling more than their peers.

More than 80% of high school students who identify as transgender or nonbinary and nearly 70% of girls cited depression, stress, or anxiety as obstacles to learning last school year, compared with 40% of boys who reported such struggles, according to the YouthTruth survey, which was taken by more than 220,000 students during the 2021-22 school year but is not nationally representative. And from elementary to high school, boys were more likely than girls and nonbinary students to report feeling happy.

The survey also showed that roughly a third of LGBTQ high school students had seriously considered attempting suicide over the past year — four times the share of non-LGBTQ students who said they had considered it.

Similar trends have emerged in surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the pandemic and over the preceding decade: High school students who are female or LGBTQ are the most likely to report poor mental health and suicidal thinking.

Those students “all were doing worse prior to the pandemic,” said Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health, which conducted a nationally representative student survey in 2021. “What we saw in this data was really a continuation of that.”

LGBTQ students find limited support at school

Tati Martínez Alvarez wishes their school had a club for LGBTQ students, “a place where we could come together without fearing judgment.”

But despite students’ demands for such a club, their small public high school in South Texas does not offer one, said Tati, who is in the 11th grade. Even though many students identify as LGBTQ, Tati said the school does little to acknowledge their community, much less embrace it.

“I don’t see that happening,” they said. “Maybe in like 20 years.”

Tati’s experience is the norm nationwide, according to the GLSEN survey, which polled more than 22,000 students in grades 6-12 who identify as LGBTQ. The students are based in all 50 states, as well as Washington D.C. and several U.S. territories.

Just 35% of respondents said their school had an active Gay Straight Alliance or similar club during the 2020-21 academic year. Less than 30% said their classes include any LGBTQ-related topics, and only 8% said their schools had policies supporting transgender and nonbinary students.

Instead of support, many LGBTQ students face hostility at school, according to the survey.

More than 80% of respondents who attended in-person school at some point in 2020-21 experienced harassment or assault based on personal characteristics, including sexual orientation, gender expression, or race or ethnicity. Nearly 60% of students reported hearing teachers or other school staff make homophobic remarks, and more than 70% heard staff make negative comments about gender expression.

Such intolerance is sadly common in schools, said Dr. Morissa Ladinsky, a pediatrician in Alabama who provides gender-affirming care to transgender young people.

“While some have faced bullying from students (which most don’t report for fear of reprisal or not being taken seriously), many experience intimidation and even straight up bullying from the adults in their school,” she wrote in an email, adding that the constant threat of mistreatment can lead to “anxiety, depression and academic underachievement.”

LGBTQ students who are victimized at school are more likely than their peers to be absent, earn low grades, and suffer from low self-esteem and depression, the GLSEN survey found.

“When you don’t see yourself represented” at school, Tati said, you “can feel very confused, very anxious, very depressed, because there’s nowhere to turn.”

Anti-LGBTQ laws add to anxiety

In many states, LGBTQ students cannot turn to elected officials for support.

Instead, some Republican politicians have sought to restrict the rights of LGBTQ students and prohibit school practices designed to support those students.

At least 18 states have passed laws barring transgender students from sports teams or school bathrooms that match their gender identity. Last month, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration proposed new restrictions on transgender students, including a requirement that teachers use the pronouns associated with students’ sex assigned at birth rather than their preferred pronouns.

Other states have sought to limit classroom discussions about gender and sexuality, which is the focus of a new national bill that Congressional Republicans introduced last week. Meanwhile, some school districts have quietly removed books with LGBTQ content and ordered teachers to take down LGBTQ pride flags.

The new policies are making life harder for many students, advocates say.

In Alabama, which passed several anti-LGBTQ laws this year, Dr. Ladinsky said some of her transgender patients have stopped using the restroom during the school day because of restrictions on which facilities they can use. She also heard from teachers who disbanded their LGBTQ clubs, presumably due to pressure from administrators. (In April, Dr. Ladinsky joined a legal challenge against a new Alabama law that would criminalize gender-affirming medical care for minors. A judge has temporarily stopped the law from taking effect.)

Some students see efforts to restrict LGBTQ rights as a personal attack, said Tati, the Texas high schooler.

“It just spreads the message that they genuinely don’t see you as a person,” they said. “They just see you as something that they need to get rid of.”

Protecting LGBTQ students

The new reports show the urgent need to make schools safer for LGBTQ students, advocates said.

Schools can establish LGBTQ clubs, enforce anti-bullying policies that explicitly protect LGBTQ students, provide staff training on inclusive practices, and give transgender students access to facilities that match their gender identity, experts said, though laws in some states might restrict such policies.

Kathleen Ethier, the CDC official, said policies that make schools more welcoming for LGBTQ students have been shown to also benefit their peers.

“Something about creating an inclusive school” and removing “anti-LGBTQ toxicity,” she said, “makes the school better for everyone.”

There are many ways to make schools safer and improve students’ mental health, said Tati, who has championed the issue as a youth advisor to the Intercultural Development Research Association, a Texas-based nonprofit that promotes educational equity. The challenge is convincing adults to take action.

“People don’t realize that the culture isn’t going to change,” Tati said, “unless everyone makes an effort.”

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

Why are students missing so much school? The answer may lie in the chronic absenteeism ‘black box’

2022-10-13T20:45:00+00:00

Alarms are going off nationwide about absenteeism.

Many more students than usual missed big chunks of school during the pandemic, with some school districts seeing their chronic absenteeism rates double.

That metric, which looks at the share of students who missed 10% or more of the school year, is an important one. But it doesn’t offer any insight into why a student missed so much class — especially important in a period when students were often told to quarantine — or how best to help them.

Research released this month suggests that if schools want to answer those questions, they’ll have to open the “black box” of that chronically absent label.

“Because it’s super simplified, it’s hiding a lot of nuances,” said Jing Liu, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland’s College of Education. “We need to differentiate the reason behind absences to know how to help an individual kid.”

That’s what Liu and a colleague set out to do when they examined daily, class-level attendance data for nearly 40,000 middle and high school students in a big-city California district from the 2015-16 to 2017-18 school years.

A few patterns jumped out: Unexcused absences spiked as the year progressed, while excused absences held steady. Black and Hispanic students and students from low-income neighborhoods racked up unexcused absences faster than their white and more affluent peers. And when students missed a lot of class at the start of the year, their absences stacked up at a faster rate, too.

With that level of detail, Liu said, “you can intervene in a much more timely manner.”

Together, the findings underscore the power of detailed attendance data as schools try to re-engage students and curtail absenteeism. And though more districts are beefing up their tracking efforts with the help of COVID relief funds, many lack the details that would tell them what last year’s absences truly mean or offer clues about how to prevent students from missing class in the future.

“In most cases,” Liu said, “a sufficient system is not in place.”

How the pandemic complicated attendance tracking

Over the last decade, schools have begun paying closer attention to absenteeism, as the federal education department required schools to report this data and several states tied the metric to school ratings. The stakes are high: chronic absenteeism has been linked to higher dropout rates, lower academic achievement in reading and math, and school disengagement.

Nationally, about one in five students was chronically absent during the first full pandemic school year — an increase of 2 million students, according to newly released federal data analyzed by researchers at the nonprofit Attendance Works and Johns Hopkins University.

National data isn’t yet available for last school year, but several places have reported eye-popping increases. In New York City, 41% of students were chronically absent last year, up from around 27% the year before the pandemic began. In the Las Vegas area, the rate skyrocketed to 40% from 22% over that time. In Connecticut, 24% of students were chronically absent last year, up from 10% before COVID hit. And in Ohio, the rate soared to 30% from 17%.

As a result, districts are hiring more attendance staff, visiting students at home, or offering students gift cards for improved attendance. San Antonio’s district foundation is even hosting a car giveaway.

But figuring out exactly why chronic absenteeism is up can be tricky, especially since required quarantines, and COVID itself, kept lots of students out of school for stretches of time. Some districts tried to gather more details about these types of absences, but there wasn’t much consistency.

“There just got to be a lot of confusion,” said Hedy Chang, the executive director of Attendance Works.

A few districts, like Los Angeles Unified, gathered enough details to pinpoint COVID’s effect. There, about half of all students were chronically absent last year, up from 19% before the pandemic. Quarantines accounted for 20 percentage points of that increase, district officials said, but another 11 points were due to other factors.

Others tried to untangle the various causes, but data issues ultimately left them in the dark.

In Fargo, North Dakota, for example, when attendance specialists followed up with parents who frequently reported their child was home with COVID or in quarantine, they sometimes found out the real reason was that the child had anxiety about coming to school, was being bullied, or felt they had fallen behind in a certain class.

“A lot of times though, parents are very keen to kind of hide what’s going on in their lives from you,” said Gabe Whitney, a district attendance specialist. “That’s the difficulty of our roles, is trying to figure out exactly why the students are gone.”

New Mexico’s Santa Fe schools created a special ‘Q’ code — which didn’t count as an absence — to indicate when a student tested positive for COVID or had been sent home with COVID symptoms. But officials think the code was underused and some students who should have been marked as ‘Q’ racked up absences.

What schools are most worried about is students missing school because they are uninterested or unwilling to attend. But the line between the disengagement and COVID issues isn’t always clear either, Chang noted.

“Let’s imagine a child, they’re quarantined for 10 days,” she said. “They were in chemistry, and now they don’t come back because they feel so far behind. Was that due to quarantine, or not?”

Districts look for better data to understand absenteeism

Some districts are moving toward collecting the kind of data that notes why students are absent and who most needs extra outreach.

Santa Fe schools purchased a new attendance-tracking system that makes it easier to spot racial or other disparities.

Schools in North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg County are launching a new system this month that will flag students trending toward chronic absenteeism — but if a student is simply out sick, that label will drop off once they’ve returned to school for a bit.

And Fargo is using a new system that sorts students into different tiers based on attendance data that updates daily.

“We’re able to click a button and get real-time data,” said Tamara Uselman, Fargo’s director of equity and inclusion. “We also know for whom the system is working well, and for whom we need to make some changes.”

With that detailed data in hand, school officials say they’re more quickly able to get support to students missing the most class time.

In Santa Fe, after a student is gone a few days, a teacher calls home to check in. But when absences start piling up, school attendance teams and an expanded team of attendance coaches step in with strategies like family meetings and home visits.

“We are going to the home and saying: ‘Hey, we haven’t seen you in a while and we’re really worried about you and want you back in school,’” said Crystal Ybarra, the district’s chief equity, diversity, and engagement officer, who is overseeing the attendance initiative. Staff are also trying to figure out: “What is happening that has prevented you from going, and let’s see if we can get some ideas for how to fix this.”

Other findings in the research conducted by Liu and Monica Lee, of Brown University, suggest that efforts to improve school climate and culture could be a promising way to combat absenteeism.

By combining attendance and student survey data, Liu and Lee found that students who accumulated unexcused absences more quickly were also more likely to feel like they didn’t belong at school and were getting less academic help than their peers.

Chang has noticed more districts paying attention to those dynamics and helping students build nurturing relationships with adults as part of their attendance initiatives.

In Fargo, where the chronic absenteeism rate shot up to 30% last year — nearly three times higher than pre-pandemic — staff noticed even higher rates of absenteeism for Native American and Black students. To Uselman, that disparity signaled the need to improve school culture.

So with the help of COVID funds, the district hired a cultural specialist who works with teachers to make sure Native history is taught accurately and that Native perspectives are regularly included in lessons. And the district added a writers workshop run by two Black instructors that’s been popular with Black students.

The district’s two attendance specialists are also meeting with students who’ve missed a lot of class time to ask how their school could help.

“A lot of kids that are absent in school, they may be behind in the class, really feel like they don’t have a place in the class, or the teacher doesn’t understand them or respect them as the person they are. And that creates issues where they don’t want to be in those classes,” said Nick Hawkins, one of Fargo’s specialists. “It all begins with respect and feeling welcomed and feeling understood.”

Sarah Darville contributed reporting.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Are efforts to support student mental health working? Help Chalkbeat investigate.

2022-10-05T19:25:52+00:00

A historic campaign is underway to support students’ mental health. But is it working?

As the pandemic has frayed students’ nerves, worsened rates of anxiety and depression, and fueled a rise in behavior issues, schools have raced to offer support. They’ve tried to hire more psychologists and social workers, paid private agencies to provide counseling, assessed students’ social-emotional skills, offered training to students and parents on how to manage difficult emotions, set up rooms where students can relax and meditate, and even brought in therapy dogs.

The rapid expansion of services has been bankrolled by the nearly $190 billion in federal COVID relief money for schools. A new federal law to address gun violence will send even more money to schools, including $280 million in mental health grants.

Most large urban districts say they intend to use some of the COVID aid on social-emotional and mental health support for students, according to a review of 100 district plans by the Center on Reinventing Public Education.

But while it’s clear that schools are ramping up support for students, it’s much less clear how well those efforts are working. Have schools been able to hire enough mental health professionals? Has new training enabled teachers to spot students who need extra help? Are students applying the lessons on emotional regulation? Is anyone using those new wellness rooms?

Chalkbeat is exploring how the campaign to support students’ mental health is playing out in schools — but we need your help. Please take the survey below and tell us what’s happening in your school and how well it seems to be working.

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‘We all know what we need’: Detroit youth work to boost mental well-being

2022-10-03T21:47:09+00:00

Across Detroit, young people responded to an ambitious pitch this spring: Come up with a strong idea for a program that would address the emotional and mental well-being of their peers, and possibly earn thousands of dollars to pull it off.

The result was scores of ideas that were as diverse as the young people themselves: A wellness room with Zen and calming activities. A spa day for male youth with incarcerated parents. A kitchen renovation so youth can come together for dinner and fellowship. A safe haven for LGBTQ students.

Those are just a few of the 40 ideas, proposed by people ages 9 to 23, that have received a piece of a $544,000 pot of money provided by the Skillman Foundation (a Chalkbeat funder), part of a new grant program aimed at addressing mental health and wellness. The awardees received between $5,000 and $20,000 to develop their plans.

The one thread through all of these concepts is that even though there are adult allies helping, the students were in charge. They came up with the ideas, they decide how the money is spent, and they decide how to turn their ideas into reality.

“We all know what we want. We all know what we need,” said Charles Patterson, 16, a junior at Davis Aerospace Technical High School.

What they need, Charles said, is connection with one another.

Charles is part of a youth group at the Eastside Community Network whose grant will go in part toward renovating a kitchen at the center and turning it into a place where young people can go to cook, eat meals, and spend time together.

Young people like Charles “are ready and capable leaders,” who are “enriched with lots of ideas,” said Lindsey Barrett, an associate program officer at Skillman who led the effort.

Charles said the pandemic left him feeling isolated, and turned him into an introvert because he spent so much time learning remotely. Things are better for students now that they’re learning in person, he said, but not all young people have re-engaged.

“You have to consider that maybe certain students went through something over the pandemic, maybe they had a family member pass away,” Charles said. “For me, three of my family members passed away during the pandemic and it was hard for my family, and for me personally.”

Report after report has highlighted the heightened mental health and emotional needs of students due to the pandemic. Long stretches of remote learning left students feeling isolated and disconnected from school and their classmates. Educators are trying to address that by investing COVID relief money into mental health, but staffing challenges have hampered efforts.

In Detroit, young people have been telling officials at Skillman that they need safe spaces to connect with their peers and the community. They also said they wanted to use physical activity, the arts, and creative expression to create these safe spaces, Barrett said.

“We know that these bright young people are really prioritizing their wellness, and they’re doing it by leading their own solutions,” Barrett said

On a recent Saturday, dozens of the grantees gathered in a room at the Northwest Activities Center in Detroit to receive training on project planning that was facilitated by the Neutral Zone, an Ann Arbor youth-led organization. They spread out on the floor, working in groups as they plotted their goals and the steps they need to take to accomplish those goals.

The young men from Developing Despite Distance, a program for males ages 10-24 who have a parent who is incarcerated, already knew one of their signature ideas was to take the group out for a spa day. Their adult leader, Tiffany Brown, guided them through the steps they would need to take to get there, like finding a spa and booking it in advance.

“We passed one coming up here,” Michael Glenn said as the group tossed around spa ideas. Michael, 16, is a junior at the School at Marygrove, and he’s looking forward to the spa day to help him nurse an old back injury from football.

Getting young people involved in addressing their mental health needs is important, Michael said, because many of them would otherwise stay silent about their struggles.

“Young adults don’t really express themselves,” he said. “It’s not that we’re afraid to. I guess it feels uncomfortable or unnatural. We don’t want to be a burden to others. So … this really helps out.”

Developing Despite Distance provides group counseling to the young men. The organization also works with them to connect with their incarcerated parents and helps them with visits.

The grant program “is a blessing,” said Brown. Not only will it allow for the spa day, but it will also pay for fitness training, more counseling, and a stipend for the young men for participating in Saturday counseling sessions. It’s the first time the participants will receive pay.

“When we have money in our pockets, we feel better, and that is really a form of self care,” Brown said.

Brown has often talked to the youth about her own self-care practices, which include getting massages. It gave the students the idea to do the same for themselves. Society, Brown said, doesn’t always give Black boys and men “the space to act like their wellness matters.”

“They’re often just putting on this mask like they’re OK. And so places where we can intentionally make them pause and really identify how they’re feeling in a safe, non-judgmental way, and provide support so that they can refill and recharge — that’s the root of what we do.”

Having an incarcerated parent means these young men have challenges that go beyond the pandemic.

“My biggest challenge is that they’re in schools, community centers, on our sports teams, and we’re not acknowledging that they even exist as a community … as a system. So the biggest challenge is that they are often suffering silently,” Brown said.

Over at the Eastside Community Network, cooking was the most popular program before the pandemic. Students would come together, cook, and then dine together.

“The students have said that … builds community,” said Tanya Aho, the adult leader for the group. But the kitchen was in need of a remodel, so the cooking sessions ended.

“This is completely student-led,” Aho said of the kitchen remodel. “They did the budget, they did all the research of the cabinets and the stove. They’ve done the design. They did the demo. They’ll be painting the cabinets.”

Charles, who has relied on sports and drawing to stay connected, wasn’t there for the demolition. But he’s involved in all of the planning and helping choose the finish on the cabinets, the color of the floors, and the type of countertops. He said bringing back the cooking program will be good, in particular, for students who feel disconnected.

“It brings a family atmosphere to our youth group,” he said.

Can Chicago revitalize its tiny high schools?

2022-09-27T21:03:43+00:00

After 18 months of virtual learning, Terrence Smith returned to Chicago’s Austin College and Career Academy last year — and was struck by how empty the four-story building felt.

The West Side school lost more than a third of its student body during the pandemic, shrinking to fewer than 160 students, in a campus meant to serve almost 1,900.

To Terrence, then a junior, the course offerings felt thin, with only one music class and Spanish as the sole foreign language option. The school’s career programs had been scaled back. And with lackluster attendance adding to the sense of a hollowed-out campus, the social fabric felt threadbare.

“Kids weren’t motivated to come to school because Austin didn’t have a lot to offer,” Terrence said.

Dramatically shrinking South and West Side high schools such as Austin have bedeviled Chicago leaders for more than a decade. These campuses, which serve several thousand mostly low-income Black students, have been largely left to limp along — resulting in lean course offerings, fewer sports, clubs, and other extracurricular activities — and often, lower attendance, graduation, and other outcomes.

COVID-era disruptions magnified the problem: Even as high school enrollment remained stable districtwide, campuses enrolling 250 or fewer students lost a third of their student bodies on average since 2018. This week, the district is slated to release preliminary fall 2022 enrollment numbers showing added student losses at the elementary level, even as officials are forging ahead with plans for a new Near South South high school.

Now, Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez is vowing to boost the district’s tiny high schools as part of a broader plan to revitalize neighborhood schools with input from their local communities. He promised more details later this fall, but has made it clear salvaging these campuses will cost the district and has called on the state to chip in.

Small-by-design high schools in Chicago and elsewhere have yielded strong student results thanks to close relationships and collaboration.

But the question remains: Can CPS reverse-engineer a successful small high school out of what’s left of a once bustling large school?

District leaders, who cannot close schools until 2025 under state law, have signaled the answer for some schools might be a strong new academic or career focus, making up for the lack of breadth in coursework and activities. Experts say that approach can work — but the plan needs to be more than a shallow rebranding gimmick, and one that families and educators rally around.

“You can really focus on building a distinctive identity in that school that people own and have a hand in shaping,” said Jack Schneider, an associate professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. “But central office shouldn’t decide what that identity is without community input.”

Chicago’s tiny high schools are a perennial issue

Steven McIlrath, who has taught math in Austin for 28 years, was also taken aback by Austin College and Career Academy’s pandemic-era loss of students.

McIlrath fears some students didn’t transfer but simply stopped coming to school. The campus needs engaging coursework and after-school activities to nurture students’ sense of connectedness, he said.

“The school feels like a shadow sometimes of what it could be,” McIlrath said.

The enrollment blow that the pandemic dealt small district-run schools such as Austin underscores how vulnerable these campuses and their students are to upheaval and trauma. But these enrollment losses are not a COVID-era phenomenon.

The number of charter and other high schools in the city grew markedly in the 2000s, even as the high school student population ticked up only modestly. An exodus of Black families from Chicago and other demographic changes have put added pressure on South and West side schools.

Critics of a city plan to build a new high school that would serve Chinatown and the South Loop have said the move will siphon yet more students from shrinking South Side high schools, such as Phillips and Tilden.

The district has propped up these and other shrinking schools with “equity” grants and federal pandemic recovery money that help them pay for essentials, such as the salaries and benefits of administrators and core subject teachers.

Under former CEO Janice Jackson, the city launched a competitive process to give neighborhood schools a boost with funding for new, in-demand programs. Hirsch High School, for example, sought to rebrand itself as a performing arts high school. But like a number of other small high schools, including Manley and Uplift, it didn’t get the money.

Mary Long, a Hirsch supporter whose nonprofit contracted with the school to provide restorative justice and coaching, appealed to the school board last spring not to let that school wither.

Already dramatically down from a heyday of more than 1,000 students, Hirsch’s enrollment dipped slightly during the pandemic. Last year, it was down to about 80 students, in a building with capacity for 1,500 students. Enrollment inched up this fall — to about 100 students.

“The soul has been taken from Hirsch,” Long, who was wearing a Hirsch shirt, told the board. “We have the barebone minimum of a school.”

A new career and technical education program could help the school find a niche in the area and draw more families, Long said.

Long, who became involved with Hirsch after her son was shot and killed a block away from the school in 2012, recently came together with supporters of five other shrinking South Side high schools, including Bowen and Corliss — an informal “East of the Dan Ryan Expressway” group that rallied to advocate jointly for solutions. Their main fear: closure.

“Students are constantly asking: “Why?’” Long said in an interview. “‘Why don’t we have swimming when we have a pool in the building?’ ‘Why don’t we have more programs that prepare us for the real world?’”

Across the Dan Ryan in Englewood, CPS built a new state-of-the-art $85 million high school — with a focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, athletic fields, a library with floor-to-ceiling windows. But it came with a condition: The neighborhood’s four under-enrolled high schools had to close.

Hirsch principal David Narain says he doesn’t think closure or consolidation is the answer for his school. It serves students with high needs, and has tried to capitalize on its smallness to do that better, emphasizing social-emotional learning and training staff in responding to trauma. It just brought on a full-time social worker.

“It’s my theory that if this school is no longer here and our students scatter to larger schools, they’ll be lost in the shuffle,” he said.

But, says Narain, the school’s size makes it difficult to offer richer coursework, including access to college-credit classes. For now, a grant makes it possible to offer after-school programs, such as a new campus garden. The performing arts focus the school pursued before the pandemic would enrich the student experience, but won’t double or triple the enrollment — what Narain says the school needs for a robust, sustainable program. The neighborhood’s poverty and instability are the real enrollment roadblocks, he argues.

During the pandemic, Hirsch’s per pupil spending increased from about $23,000 to $30,500. Overall, the district now spends $12,000 per pupil on average at high schools with more than 250 students and almost $26,000 on average per student at smaller high schools.

Martinez has said he is a fan of small schools. But he’s also acknowledged that operating Chicago’s severely under-enrolled neighborhood high schools is expensive. Despite spending more per student, some of these schools still don’t deliver a well-rounded student experience.

He told the school board last month about visiting some of these schools and admiring the beauty of their historic buildings.

But, he said, “I came out sad, feeling like this could be better. I kept thinking about the student experiences.”

In Chicago, more than 75% of CPS students go to high school somewhere other than their neighborhood school. In Austin, 93% of CPS students living in the school’s boundary go elsewhere. A Chalkbeat analysis found that about 95% of CPS high schoolers living within the attendance boundaries of schools with fewer than 250 students don’t choose that school.

In order to revitalize these shrinking high schools and attract more students, Martinez has called on the state legislature to provide small school grants along with the moratorium it put in place through 2024. He said that would allow the district to explore innovative models, such as converting some into career academies that prepare students for jobs in growing industries, such as aerospace.

Lessons from the past can inform small school revival

McIlrath, the Austin teacher, arrived at the school before it was converted into smaller schools-within-the-school, in a bid to create tighter-knit, more collaborative school communities.

The move played out against the backdrop of a national small schools movement, backed by the Gates Foundation and other reform-minded funders who funneled hundreds of millions of dollars toward launching small-by-design high schools and carving up existing larger ones. Chicago got more than $24 million over several years to transform a dozen schools, including Bowen.

Then, the funders moved on. Austin’s three small schools shrank, until the district merged them back into one high school.

Experts who studied the small schools movement found some of these schools showed promising gains in attendance and grades, as well as college persistence. But others languished. W. David Stevens of the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research said the most successful campuses had strong principals and a highly collaborative staff culture.

“There are benefits to smallness, but unless you are intentionally cultivating those benefits, you won’t see them,” said Schneider, of the University of Massachusetts Lowell, who has also studied the small schools movement.

One of the superpowers of small campuses, Schneider says, is that they make it easier to hear out students, parents, and educators and include them meaningfully in setting goals and making decisions.

The nonprofit Kids First Chicago set out to get that kind of community input before the pandemic. The group worked with community leaders to hold quality-of-life conversations in Austin and North Lawndale, areas that have seen large enrollment declines.

One idea that emerged was the concept of turning these school buildings into “community hubs” where under-enrolled schools lease extra space to nonprofits and other community organizations. That arrangement not only provides a revenue boost, but also brings needed services directly to families.

It can also shift perceptions of the schools by drawing residents into those buildings and creating more local ownership of their programs.

Kids First notes 36 campuses, most of them high schools, have more than 2,000 square feet of available space — some in areas where nonprofits are looking to expand, and the city has said it wants to encourage development.

There are examples — including in small high schools — of shared space. Several Chicago Public Schools host health clinics; others lease space to community-based organizations.

“What parents are saying is, ‘Can we bring some of these investments into school buildings?’” LeShonne Segura of Kids First said.

It’s not clear if Martinez will incorporate this concept into his revitalization plan.

Both McIlrath and Terrence, the student who is now a senior at Austin High School, feel a sense of possibility on campus this fall.

Teens this year seem “spongy” to McIlrath, eager to learn.

“We’re getting some momentum and traction,” he said. “I hope we’re going to survive this next wave of people outside the community prescribing solutions for us.”

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.

Study: Chicago students failed more classes during pandemic, but A’s rose too

2022-09-27T11:00:00+00:00

Chicago students got more failing and incomplete grades during the pandemic, though that increase was much steeper at elementary schools than high schools, a new report out today finds.

But researchers with the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research say COVID-era grading data also offers some bright spots — and clues about how to steer recovery dollars to the schools that need them the most.

At the elementary level, twice as many Chicago Public Schools students got Fs or incompletes during the spring of 2021, compared with 2018 and 2019, according to a new consortium study of pandemic grading in the district.

But at the high school level, an uptick in failing grades was relatively minor, suggesting the majority of students remained engaged in learning despite the pandemic’s disruption. As previously reported, both elementary and high school students also earned more A’s, with many students who were previously getting B’s now receiving higher grades.

Racial, income, and gender disparities predating the pandemic continued during the outbreak. Elementary schools with the largest increases in failing grades and incompletes were more likely to serve predominantly low-income and Black students. But even among schools serving similar student populations, there were major differences in grading.

That variation merits closer study to see why some campuses were better able to weather the upheaval — and could guide efforts to target resources for academic recovery, said Elaine Allensworth, who leads the consortium and co-authored the study.

“We’ve seen the headlines about a ‘lost generation,’” she said. “The fact is that it was really hard for everybody, but most students were able to stay engaged.

“Let’s focus our efforts on the students who really had a hard time,” Allensworth added. “It’s a hard task, but it’s not an overwhelming task.”

Over the past year, emerging national test score data showing major academic damage from the pandemic has drawn much attention. But grades are also a revealing measure of how students have fared, Allensworth noted.

Chicago’s grading data raises some concerns, she said, but it’s not doom and gloom across the board. However, the study did not look at grades for first through third graders, cohorts that data suggests might have experienced the brunt of the pandemic’s learning fallout.

The consortium study zeroed in on grading among students in grades 4 through 12 during the spring of 2020, when all learning abruptly shifted online, and 2021, when Chicago school buildings reopened but most students continued to learn virtually. It compared grades to those from the 2017-18 and 2018-19 school years, the last two before COVID upended public education across the country.

For high school students, the portion of failing grades in 2021 increased only slightly — from 6% to 8% of all course grades — compared with the pre-pandemic years. A larger portion of high school students, particularly those who were earning B’s before COVID hit, got A’s.

The study did not explore the reasons behind these shifts, but some educators have reported giving students more grace amid the trauma and upheaval of the COVID outbreak.

At the elementary level, the picture is more troubling: During 2017 through 2019, about 11% of students in grades 4 to 8 failed a class. In spring of 2021, that portion had jumped to 21%. On some campuses, that increase was much more dramatic.

Allensworth said the differences between the elementary and high school level don’t come as a complete surprise: High school students are more mature, and their coursework is set up for more independent learning. In high schools, there’s also a stronger focus on ensuring teens stay on track for graduation, placing these campuses in a better position to flag struggling students earlier.

That said, the increase in high school students who struggled to stay on track with learning is real, and ongoing efforts to re-engage them are important, Allensworth said. If students disconnected from school in 2020 and stopped coming from school, for example, they would not be reflected in 2021 grading data.

The district needs to understand these differences better, said Allensworth, whose team is poised to explore that question through student surveys and virtual platform engagement data. The district’s school board is slated to vote Wednesday on a no-bid contract with the University of Chicago for up to about $286,000 to administer surveys of students’ classroom experiences.

“Everyone was trying to figure this out on the fly — dealing with the crisis as best as they could,” she said. “Some schools seem to have figured out better strategies.”

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.

Schools scale back home internet help as remote learning fades

2022-09-27T04:01:00+00:00

With students off Zoom and back in classrooms, many schools have stopped helping students get online at home, new federal data shows.

Just 45% of public schools are providing home internet access to students who need it this school year, down from 70% earlier in the pandemic, according to August survey data released Tuesday by the National Center for Education Statistics.

The sharp decline in schools giving students Wi-Fi hotspots or covering the cost of home internet coincides with the end of widespread remote learning, first caused by school closures then by COVID quarantines. Yet even with schools fully reopened, students still are likely to need home internet for homework, sick days, temporary school shutdowns, virtual tutoring, and parent-teacher conferences.

And while home internet and device access expanded during the pandemic, 1 in 4 low-income families still did not have broadband internet at home a year after schools shut down, according to a 2021 survey. Instead many students had to put up with frustratingly slow internet speeds or work on their phones.

As recently as this spring, about a quarter of teenagers living in very low-income households said they sometimes can’t complete their homework because they don’t have reliable computer or internet access.

“I think there’s an inaccurate belief that more students and families actually have connectivity than actually do,” said D’Andre Weaver, chief digital equity officer at Digital Promise, a nonprofit focused on expanding student access to high-speed internet.

Weaver suspects that schools’ retreat from home internet assistance also reflects a new wariness of online learning based on the negative experiences had by many families and educators during the pandemic. But he argues that schools should try to improve online learning and expand internet access rather than turn away.

“Now it’s like, ‘Let’s throw the baby out with the bathwater,’” he said. “And that’s the wrong viewpoint.”

Just over 900 public schools participated in the survey, which was conducted August 9-23.

While less than half of schools said students will be provided with internet at home, 56% said students can get online at other locations, such as public libraries. Laptops and tablets appear to be much more readily available, with 94% of schools saying that students who need a digital device this academic year will be provided one.

Funding is another likely factor in schools’ scaling back support for home internet access. The federal stimulus money that school districts used to pay for hotspots and free internet plans is drying up, forcing schools to find other funding if they want to keep providing assistance.

Also, the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that Congress passed last year included $14.2 billion for the Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides a monthly subsidy to help low-income families pay for internet service. Several major internet providers agreed to lower their prices so that the subsidy — up to $30 per month for most eligible households — would cover the full cost of a high-speed internet plan.

In a sense, the federal program removes schools as intermediaries by giving the internet subsidy directly to families. However, advocates say that schools still must support families who haven’t enrolled in the program or aren’t eligible.

New Jersey parent Nadirah Brown said she earns too much to receive the new subsidy but not enough to pay her more than $100 monthly internet bill without cutting other expenses.

“For the parents who don’t qualify, there is no program available for them,” she said, whose daughter is an eighth grader in a Newark public school.

The school lent her daughter a laptop and offered a Wi-Fi hotspot during remote learning, Brown said. But it did not offer either device this school year, even as teachers continue to assign homework that must be submitted online through Google Classroom, she added.

“It’s definitely still needed whether they’re working virtually or not,” she said about home internet.

A Newark Public Schools spokesperson did not immediately respond to emailed questions Monday.

In Newark, like many other cities, high-speed internet is widely available. The main problem is that many families cannot afford it, said Ronald Chaluisán, executive director of the Newark Trust for Education, a nonprofit whose mission includes promoting equitable internet access.

While they could benefit from the new federal subsidy, Chaluisán said many families are not aware of it. (Nationwide, less than 25% of eligible families enrolled in a previous iteration, called the Emergency Broadband Benefit.) Some families also struggle to complete the multi-step enrollment process, said Chaluisán, whose organization is partnering with the nonprofit Project Ready to spread awareness about the subsidy program.

He added that one lesson of remote learning is that every student needs a computer and internet access at home.

“They’re not luxury items,” he said. “They’re just necessities.”

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

What students told us they love about 5 stellar teachers

2022-09-20T11:00:00+00:00

“Abbott Elementary,” a wildly popular television sitcom centered on an optimistic Philadelphia school teacher, will return with new episodes this week — just in time for a new school year and following a successful Emmy Award run.

Chalkbeat asked readers to nominate teachers who are their real-life versions of “Mrs. Howard” — teachers who continuously demonstrated dedication and caring during the pandemic. Barbara Howard, played by Sheryl Lee Ralph, is a stern and compassionate teacher on “Abbott.”

Dozens of you responded to our request with nominations of wonderful teachers. We are featuring five of the nominees, who told Chalkbeat they are seeking to build a stronger sense of community and mutual support among school leaders, teachers, and students this year.

Their work is especially notable in a moment when many teachers are struggling, as schools and students continue to deal with the fallout of the pandemic and disruptions to in-person class. Nevertheless, many educators who persevere say they aspire to make meaningful changes within their schools and encourage students to recognize their own potential.

Here’s what students had to say about the teachers who inspired them, and how teachers answered our questions about what they need.

Briana Morales, left, with her student Taylor Ackins.

Briana Morales, 11th and 12th grade English teacher, East St. Louis, Illinois

What students had to say:

Taylor Ackins said in their nomination that students could always rely on Morales as “a friend, mentor, mother, and a shoulder to cry on.”

Damiya Brown, who also nominated Morales, agreed: “Even when I felt like I couldn’t do it, she never let up and helped me believe in myself.”

Morales teaches English at Gordon Bush Alternative Center in East St. Louis, Illinois. Morales lost three students to gun violence during the pandemic, and wanted to help students navigate their own trauma, especially during quarantine.

“What kept me motivated was staying connected to students who needed a sense of normalcy and consistent support in a time of uncertainty,” she said.

She said she was able to push her students toward academic success by validating their emotions and treating them like more than simply “kids that I teach.”

For the upcoming school year, Morales said teachers need more wraparound services to provide care for students, families, and educators who had traumatic experiences and are still processing them.

“Leaders need to be prepared to address the harm that is being done when we expect our communities to ‘continue business as usual,’ and make a true, honest commitment to transforming educational spaces into conduits of healing.”

Student Francisco Carrillo, left, stands next to teacher Andrew Cogswell.

Andrew Cogswell, instrumental music director, Colorado

What students had to say:

Cogswell “makes everything mean something in a student’s life. He is the biggest role model for many students, even by just being a band director. He supports and helps with anything for the future, even if it doesn’t relate to music,” said Francisco Carrillo.

Andrew Cogswell teaches and directs instrumental music at Alameda International High School in Lakewood, Colorado. During the pandemic, Cogswell said he reconnected with his reason for teaching by realizing the most important part of his job was not simply teaching music, but providing students with a safe place to be themselves.

“It took some time to realize the safe place didn’t need to be a physical one but that it was simply the time we spent together. I found the conversations we had were important in helping teacher and student alike in navigating life during a pandemic,” Cogswell said.

“While other schools and instrumental music programs are shrinking, ours is growing,” said Cogswell, adding that many school instruments are still in disrepair and need to be replaced.

This year he would like school leaders, community members, and local governments to help the school acquire new instruments.

Desiree Fuller poses for a photo with one of her students.

Desiree Fuller, 11th grade English teacher, Oak Park, Michigan

What students had to say:

“I’m grateful for the mother role she plays in my life, her being my teacher, her being a good friend and also being a good role model to me and my brothers,” said Javier Briggs, Fuller’s former student.

Desiree Fuller is a restorative justice trainer and an 11th grade English teacher at Oak Park High School in Oak Park, Michigan. Multiple parents and students who nominated Fuller said they appreciate her dedication to building relationships with students, partnering with parents, and being available to talk about students’ progress and setbacks.

During and after the pandemic, Fuller said she restructured her teaching strategies to adapt to changing circumstances. But the community she created remained strong.

“I had to learn a myriad of new teaching strategies to keep my kids engaged and motivated through virtual learning. When we returned to in-person learning, I completely restructured my courses in order to minister to the socio-emotional needs of my scholars,” she said. “Our classes were rooted in respect and empathy.”

Fuller’s ask: equity in school funding, so that more students can have access to resources and programs that address learning loss from the pandemic. She also is urging school leaders to raise teacher pay to attract and retain educators and to enable the school to offer after-school and Saturday programs.

Samuel Bendinelli

Samuel Bendinelli, English teacher, Newark, New Jersey

What students had to say:

“Mr. Bendinelli has made the school year easier for me by being a trusted confidant and someone whom I could be my authentic self around,” said Dashawn Sheffield, a former student of Bendinelli’s. “There were often times when I entered his classroom with negative feelings, but it was like once I reached his classroom, I would instantly brighten due to his warmness, empathy, jokes, and overall optimistic demeanor.”

“I also think that it’s important to really believe in your students,” he said. “In the same way that their effort helped strengthen my resolve, your belief in your students’ abilities can translate into their own.”

Bendinelli said he believes that teachers need more training and professional development that involves coaching, practicing, planning, and rehearsing “key moments of lessons or important discussions with students” to get better.

He also calls for state leaders to listen to teachers, specifically about working conditions.

State leaders should “solicit feedback about conditions that keep young teachers from making their new position a career, or that cause experienced teachers to feel a sense of burnout,” Bendinelli said. “Make sure that our desk in the classroom also means a seat at the table.”

Nicole Monte

Nicole Monte, special education teacher, Brooklyn, New York

What students had to say:

“I am grateful that she was the greatest teacher and the most helpful person when in need of help,” said Christofer Perez, Monte’s former student.

Nicole Monte is an educator at Dyker Heights Intermediate School in Brooklyn, New York. During the pandemic, Monte said she struggled to maintain a connection with her students and provide emotional support while teaching them academically.

“I took for granted just being able to walk over to their desk and support their learning,” Monte said. “I went to extraordinary lengths to engage my students who were struggling, not just during instruction, but in their personal lives as well.”

Monte said giving school communities opportunities to weigh in on solutions to local issues would be one way to better support students.

“We need to strengthen our community-school partnerships, better develop our parental collaborations, connect our curriculum to real-world experiences, and give our students real platforms to have their voices heard,” Monte said.

Elena Johnson was Chalkbeat’s 2022 Community Engagement and Listening Intern.

41% of NYC students were chronically absent last school year

2022-09-16T20:40:00+00:00

About 41% of New York City students were chronically absent, missing at least 18 days of last school year, according to city data released Friday.

The figures from the Mayor’s Management Report show that as the city required all students to return to class in person last school year for the first time since March 2020, hundreds of thousands of children still missed large stretches of instruction.

Last year’s chronic absenteeism rate was the highest the city has recorded in decades, according to figures from NYU’s Research Alliance, and also the highest rate during the pandemic.

In the years leading up to the pandemic, chronic absenteeism rates remained closer to 25%. But absenteeism skyrocketed in the coronavirus era, reaching 30% two years ago, when students were allowed to choose in person or virtual learning options. Last year, the share of students considered chronically absent spiked by 10 more points.

Officials said their chronic absenteeism goal for this school year is 30%.

Absences due to the coronavirus — for students with COVID or who were quarantining because they were close contacts — likely play a significant role, though there were other possible factors. Many students took jobs to help make up for their family’s financial hardships, perhaps missing school to attend work. Others may have cared for siblings or struggled with mental health issues that kept them away from school.

It’s also possible that factors such as masking and social distancing made it harder for students to build relationships with teachers, which are a factor in attendance.

Chronic absenteeism is typically seen as a key metric of school performance: missed school typically means missed learning. Absences can also hurt student achievement in the long run.

Matt Brownstein, an assistant principal at P.S. 330 in Queens, said last year was particularly destabilizing for many families, especially during winter’s omicron surge that sickened many students and staff. With few exceptions, city officials kept school buildings open during that wave.

“Families were scared so they didn’t send their kids every day,” he said. “In some instances, a parent was sick and just wanted to keep everyone close by and wanted to keep everyone out.”

Over the past year, more than 258,000 students and staff have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to city data. The figure may be an undercount, as not all cases were officially recorded.

The city’s figures may not accurately capture the number of missed in-person instructional days, as attendance policies changed in the middle of last school year to allow schools to provide some remote work to students and mark them as present.

The latest figures do not include demographic breakdowns, but a previous Daily News analysis focused on the 2020-2021 school year found that Black and Latino students as well as those in poverty or learning English saw higher jumps in chronic absenteeism than their white and Asian American peers.

The attendance data also suggests that educators may have lots of ground to make up, though city officials have refused to provide results from last year’s assessments given to students three times throughout the year. State officials have yet to release last year’s standardized test scores in math and reading for students in grades 3-8.

“It’s an enormous task that they have getting students back in the rhythm of being in school every day and being engaged back in the learning process,” said Dia Bryant, executive director of Education Trust New York, an advocacy group. “Without assessment data, we don’t have a picture.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

‘Stop the shooting’: Inside the effort to protect students from neighborhood gun violence

2022-09-13T11:00:00+00:00

Cars streaked past Bashir Muhammad Ptah Akinyele last month as he stood at the corner of a busy intersection across from a high school, baking under the midday sun.

Then he stepped off the curb and faced the oncoming traffic.

Desperation drove Akinyele to join the street protest, as it had many times before. A veteran teacher in Newark, New Jersey, Akinyele can name well over 40 former students who have been killed by guns. “One day you have a kid in your class,” he said, “and the next day he’s gone.”

Akinyele realized long ago that the only way to protect his students is to stop the shootings where they occur — not in his school, but in the neighborhoods around it. So he started attending rallies like the one in August, calling for an end to the shootings and the conditions that cause them.

“I have to do something outside of the classroom,” Akinyele recalled thinking. “I was losing too many students to the violence in the city.”

Over the course of his career, Newark teacher Bashir Muhammad Akinyele has lost over 40 students to gun violence.

At the start of this new school year, classrooms across the country were dotted with empty desks, a silent testament to summer gun violence. From June through the end of August, more than 600 fatal shootings were reported nationwide involving children under age 18 as either victims or suspects, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which relies on public records and news reports.

Almost all the shootings occurred away from schools, in homes and neighborhoods. And yet community violence is rarely seen as an education issue. Instead, voters and policymakers tend to focus disproportionately on school shootings, endorsing measures to “harden” schools with armed guards and metal detectors and turning school security into a $3 billion industry.

But out of the spotlight and with far less money, communities across the country are finding innovative ways to combat neighborhood violence.

From Oakland to Chicago and Philadelphia, city agencies and local nonprofits are partnering with the police to both prevent and respond to shootings. Often called community violence intervention, much of this work centers around young people, helping them process trauma and settle conflicts peacefully. Congress and the Biden administration recently expanded funding for such efforts, which are backed by a growing body of evidence.

With the new school year underway, this violence reduction work in communities — where shootings are far more common than in schools — will arguably do as much to protect students as ramped up school security, according to advocates and experts.

Akinyele understood this when he stood in the intersection last month disrupting traffic. He was joined by a crew of community members — parents, recent high school graduates, former gang members — who are paid to prevent violence in the neighborhoods where Akinyele’s students live, play, and go to school.

“Stop the shooting,” Akinyele said over a loudspeaker, the non-violence workers echoing his words. “Stop the killing.”

Most shootings happen outside schools, but learning still suffers

The nation’s epidemic of gun violence is especially lethal for young people.

After shootings surged at the start of the pandemic, 2020 became the first year in which gun violence was the leading cause of death for children and teens. Young Black men run the greatest risk of being fatally shot.

Even with the sharp rise in school shootings, the vast majority of gunfire erupts off campus. According to federal data from 1992 to 2019, less than 3% of youth homicides occurred on school grounds.

But while most shootings happen in communities, they reverberate inside schools. Exposure to violence is closely associated with trauma symptoms, including anxiety, disrupted sleep, and difficulty concentrating, and it can lead to lower grades and more absences.

“It literally gets under their skin and makes children more biologically stressed,” said Daniel Semenza, who directs research on interpersonal violence at Rutgers University’s New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center.

One study found that students performed worse on reading tests after a murder occurred in their neighborhood, even if they didn’t witness it.

“No way somebody is going to be able to pull off the same level of cognitive performance,” Semenza added, “if they have that running through their minds.”

Starr Whiteside, a Newark 12th-grader, is constantly on alert for gunfire in her neighborhood.

Starr Whiteside has seen how the constant threat of gunfire can warp your world, shaping where you go, what you feel, and how you act.

“Young people my age, it makes us feel like we always got to be on guard,” said Whiteside, a 12th grader in Newark. “Even going to the corner store, we have to watch our back.”

She’s also watched violence in the community seep into schools. Last year, her school went into lockdown after a student brought a loaded gun into the building, apparently because he had been jumped outside of school.

“It’s like there’s no escape,” she said.

How Newark’s grassroots groups keep students safe

Newark has emerged as a national model of community violence intervention, thanks partly to pressure by advocates like Akinyele and the support of the city’s mayor, Ras Baraka.

A tight-knit network of local groups leads the anti-violence work, in partnership with the city. They help protect young people in two main ways: by addressing the underlying causes of violent behavior, and shielding students from violent acts.

A member of the Newark Community Street Team, Malachi Muhammad keeps watch over students outside of school.

The Newark Community Street Team does the latter through its Safe Passage program, which hires community members to patrol the routes students take to and from school. Trained in de-escalation, the staffers help defuse tensions between students while watching for external threats.

Last November, a Safe Passage worker was speaking with two students outside a Newark high school when a gunman exited a car and fired nearly a dozen rounds their way. The worker, Malachi Muhammad, a graduate of the high school, rushed the students to safety.

“I’m responsible for them,” he said last year.

The incident illustrates why such groups are essential to student safety: Violence in the community often follows students to school, and school conflicts often spill out into the community. In fact, the impetus for the Safe Passage program came partly from a Newark health department analysis that found neighborhood conflicts frequently originate in schools, said Aqeela Sherrills, who co-founded the Street Team.

“Schools are an extension of the community,” he said. “They’re not these siloed institutions.”

The small number of young people who commit violence usually have been victims themselves, so healing their wounds can help stop the cycle of harm.

To that end, the Street Team offers counseling and life-skills training to young people at risk of violence, while The HUBB Arts & Trauma Center, another Newark nonprofit, provides art therapy and mentoring. Newark’s Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery sends social workers into some high schools, and the city is paying for 40 students who have been affected by violence to attend college.

The efforts reflect the public health approach that is central to community violence intervention, with education, counseling, and support services used to treat rather than punish perpetrators.

“If you look at it as a sickness,” Baraka said, “then these people are obviously infected and we have to give them treatment.”

The HUBB specializes in such treatment, helping young people address the trauma that is both a symptom and source of violence. One of those young people is Tah’gee.

This spring, the 16-year-old left his Newark charter school after a disciplinary issue, was arrested, and spent a brief time in jail. Not long after, his cousin was gunned down.

The police referred Tah’gee to the HUBB, where Denisah Williamson took up his case. Williamson is what experts call a “credible messenger,” a mentor to troubled youth who has experienced many of the same challenges they have.

As a teenager growing up in Newark, she was sexually assaulted and expelled from school. Later she was arrested and stabbed.

Despite the violence she endured and the discrimination she faced as a Black woman growing up in a low-income community, she pressed on, eventually earning a master’s degree in social work.

“I had a bad childhood, but it didn’t define me,” said Williamson, who directs programs, data, and community relations at the HUBB and mentors students. “There’s no judgment here.”

Williamson convinced Tah’gee to start showing up at the HUBB’s community center, where young people study photography and video production, create podcasts, and record songs in a state-of-the-art studio. They also participate in a youth-led forum called My Thoughts Out Loud, freely discussing relationships, drugs, and whatever else is on their minds.

Tah’gee credits the HUBB for guiding him towards a new path in life.

During a workshop this summer meant to build trust between Newark residents and police and address collective trauma, Tah’gee shared a harrowing story. He said that he was walking with a friend when a crew of 10 or so young men approached and put a gun to his head, then attacked him after he fled.

“Yes, it should never have happened and it’s not normal,” he said, talking about the “crazy stuff” he’s experienced. “But to me it was normal.”

Over time, Williamson watched Tah’gee evolve. He learned to manage his emotions and check his impulses. He signed up for the violence prevention office’s summer work program and applied to Newark Street Academy, a city program that helps out-of-school youth earn GEDs.

Today, Tah’gee credits the HUBB with putting him on a new path.

“It messed up my life,” he said, “in a good way.”

The anti-violence movement gains momentum

Groups like the HUBB curb violence person by person, but evidence of their impact is more than anecdotal.

A number of studies have found that local anti-violence groups play a significant role in reducing shootings and improving public safety.

The Becoming a Man program, which offers weekly group counseling to young men in more than 140 schools nationwide, has been found to decrease arrests and increase graduation rates. Groups like Cure Violence and Advance Peace, which intervene in conflicts and support high-risk individuals, have been associated with fewer shootings. And Safe Passage programs have been shown to reduce crime along students’ routes to school.

The evidence base for such interventions “is now extremely strong,” said Patrick Sharkey, a sociology and public affairs professor at Princeton University, who found that local nonprofits contributed to the historic decline in violent crime that began in the 1990s.

“These organizations have tremendous capacity to create safe communities,” he said. “We just haven’t given them the commitment and the resources that we devote to institutions like law enforcement.”

That is beginning to change.

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which President Biden signed into law this June, includes $250 million for community violence intervention. Biden has also urged local governments to use some of their federal stimulus money for violence prevention, and over $2 billion has already been earmarked for anti-violence groups, substance-abuse treatment, and mental health services, according to the White House.

The White House also convened 16 counties and cities, including Newark, to share their experiences with community violence intervention. Backed with philanthropic funding, the collaborative is also providing technical assistance to more than 50 grassroots anti-violence groups.

“We’re spreading this model to cities across the country,” said Sherrills, the former Newark Community Street Team leader whose new organization is training other groups through the White House initiative.

Newark is using stimulus funds and other sources to invest $19 million in violence intervention programs. The city’s Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery also ran a work program this summer that paid students — many of whom had been arrested or struggled in school — to intern at city agencies and nonprofits and take classes on conflict resolution, financial literacy, and other life skills.

“We’re teaching them how to integrate and be a part of something,” said Lakeesha Eure, the office’s director. “We’re teaching them how to belong to the city.”

Lakeesha Eure is the director for the Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery in Newark.

Now that school is back in session, the city’s small army of anti-violence workers will continue doing what they can to keep students safe. They will keep a watchful eye as children walk to school, step in before teenage taunts escalate into shots fired, and help young people like Tah’gee envision a future — graduation, college, a good job — that does not involve violence.

Akinyele, the Newark teacher and peace activist, knows there will be setbacks.

Last month, he learned that another former student, 20-year-old Yasir Manley, had been fatally shot. Yet when Newark held its annual 24 Hours of Peace festival the weekend before school started, Akinyele still showed up.

He stood on stage facing a crowd of parents and teens, police officers and outreach workers. Knowing he needs their help to protect his students, he began his call-and-response.

“Stop the shooting,” he said, and the crowd repeated it back to him. “Stop the shooting.”

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

New Jersey’s Black, Latinx students face shrinking access to school mental health staff, report says

2022-09-09T18:17:40+00:00

Black and Latinx students in New Jersey have less access to school mental health staff today than they did a decade ago, a troubling trend found in a study released this week as the need for such services intensified after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the last 10 years, as access to mental health staff in schools declined for Black and Latinx students, it increased for white and Asian American students across the state, according to the analysis of state data from New Jersey Policy Perspective, a progressive think tank.

The opposing trends highlight the inequity of access to these school-based resources as Black and Latinx children have a higher chance of living in poverty, going to schools that impose disciplinary actions such as suspensions, and experiencing disproportionate negative effects from the pandemic.

The decline in access to mental health school staff for students of color could be a consequence of years of school underfunding in New Jersey and can’t solely rely on the influx of federal COVID relief money that’s set to dry up by 2024 for a fix, said Mark Weber, author of the report and an education policy analyst.

School leaders and policymakers taking a heightened interest in addressing student mental health issues should be looking at school funding to ensure districts with students of color have the money to get mental health staff in the long term, the report suggests.

“We need to be looking at these things within the racial equity framework that we’re proposing in this report,” Weber said. “It is important to think about how these resources are being distributed unequally among students with different races and different ethnicities.”

The study analyzed state Department of Education school staffing and student enrollment data, looking at the number of nurses, counselors, psychologists, social workers, anti-bullying specialists, and substance use coordinators per 1,000 students by race or ethnicity.

In 2008, public schools across the state had 8.2 mental health staff per 1,000 students on average, which increased to 8.6 staff per 1,000 students in 2020. In that period, mental health staff per 1,000 white students increased from 7.4 to 8.5.

Meanwhile, mental health staff went from 10.3 to 8.5 per 1,000 Black students in that time period. For Latinx students, the ratio also declined from 9 to 8.4 per 1,000.

Access to school mental health staff now hovers around the same ratio of 8.5 staff members per 1,000 students for students across races. But the slump in this ratio for Black and Latinx students is occurring amid a greater need for mental health support.

State health assessment data show that about 25% of Black children under age 5 and 23% of Hispanic children were living in poverty in New Jersey between 2016 and 2020. During that time period, 11.4% of white children and 4.5% of Asian American children were living in poverty, the statistics show.

Living in poverty can lead to a higher risk of mental health illnesses, chronic diseases, and other developmental setbacks in children, according to research on the impact of poverty on health.

The NJPP study on mental health staffing trends also showed that school counselor staffing increased for white students, going from 2.7 per 1,000 white students in 2008 to 3.2 per 1,000 in 2020. But there was a steep drop for Black students, going from 4 counselors per 1,000 Black students in 2008 to 2.6 per 1,000 in 2020.

In Newark Public Schools, the board of education passed a budget for 2022-23 that included an increase in staffing social workers and counselors for the district’s 38,000 students. For this new school year, the budget covers salaries for 45 new social worker positions, for a total of 164 social workers, and one new counselor position, for a total of 89 counselors.

If those positions are filled, the current ratio of 483 students to one counselor, which is far above the American School Counselor Association’s recommended 250 students to one counselor, could be slightly improved.

Cultural perspectives are often overlooked

Another component of addressing students’ mental health needs is the stigma that still persists in some communities today, said Kirk Johnson, assistant professor of justice studies and medical humanities at Montclair State University.

“Religion and spirituality are still very important in people’s lives, especially in Black and Latinx communities,” Johnson said. “Some families feel that if they have mental health issues, they should leave it to God, pray about it, and use spiritual and religious practices to reconcile those issues.”

There may be hesitation among Black and Latinx students to go to a school counselor and open up about issues going on internally or at home, Johnson said, adding that addressing the stigma with students and their families is key.

“That cultural and religious dynamic is a big one that I think we often overlook but adds more to this conversation about mental health access and actually using those available resources,” he said.

Weber said that underfunded school districts have a more difficult time getting the necessary staff to provide students with mental health resources they need.

“When you have an underfunded school, you have fewer music teachers, art teachers, gym teachers, nurses, science teachers,” Weber said in a virtual news conference on Wednesday. “There’s no reason to believe that that isn’t the case with school guidance counselors.”

He added that policymakers should be focusing on adequately funding school districts such as Newark.

“This has been a problem that has been occurring over a decade and a half, and if we have a long-term problem, we have to have a long-term solution,” said Weber. “While it’s very useful to have federal funds, we cannot rely on them to be the sole solution for this problem.”

Catherine Carrera is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Newark, covering the city’s K-12 schools with a focus on English language learners. Contact Catherine at ccarrera@chalkbeat.org.

It’s back-to-school for NYC. Here’s what we’re watching this year.

2022-09-08T10:00:00+00:00

Larger classes. Fewer opportunities for music and art. Not enough counselors to address students’ emotional toll. Too much time learning on computers even when in the classroom.

These are some of the concerns on the minds of educators and parents as New York City students return on Thursday, marking the first full year with Mayor Eric Adams and Chancellor David Banks helming the nation’s largest school district.

Many educators and families are heading into the year frustrated by the back-and-forth over budget cuts, with the majority of schools’ budgets slashed this year, forcing schools to cut staffers and other programs even as the city still has more than $1 billion in relief funds to spend this year.

Many are also looking forward to going on class trips once again. They’re hopeful that a renewed focus on literacy will help more children learn to read. And they’re looking forward to the new year with fewer disruptions than the previous COVID-dominated three years.

But some educators are already starting off the year feeling burned out after trying to teach through the pandemic.

“This year is expected to feel more like a ‘normal’ school year. Yet I don’t think teachers are ready, emotionally,” said kindergarten teacher Jeffrey Catano of P.S. 280 in Queens. “I love my job and come to work everyday with a smile, yet I feel undervalued by my city and the [education department] as a whole.”

Here’s what we’ll be watching this year:

Who will show up?

New York City’s public school enrollment in kindergarten through 12th grade (excluding charters) declined 9.5% since the pandemic began, and officials are expecting 30,000 fewer K-12 students this fall compared to last year.

The schools with the greatest losses are those serving the city’s most and least affluent, a previous Chalkbeat analysis found. Schools with the greatest share of affluent families saw the greatest drop in enrollment, followed by schools serving the highest numbers of low-income families. Meanwhile, the city is also seeing an influx of thousands of asylum seekers, who may need intensive support.

On top of monitoring the larger enrollment trends, we will be looking at day-to-day attendance. Last year, chronic absenteeism was high, likely for a lot of reasons, including COVID-related quarantines (whether for children who tested positive or because of classmates in the first half of the school year), work-related obligations, or mental health reasons.

What’s happening with the budget?

With funding tied to enrollment, and rosters dropping, Adams shrank the amount of money sent to most schools this year, touching off a political firestorm.

Many educators are concerned about having fewer teachers, larger classes, and less enrichment. Because of budget cuts, Shakira Provasoli is moving from teaching science to leading a second grade class at the Manhattan School for Children.

“I don’t mind, and I love second grade, but it does affect the academic growth of the students at my school in terms of science,” she said.

The budget, however, is not a done deal, with a lawsuit challenging the budget approval process due back in appeals court on Sept. 29. (The city pushed back on a lower court’s decision to redo the education department’s budget.)

If schools end up getting money after the start of the year, the question remains: How will they be able to use it? School leaders who spoke to Chalkbeat said they would welcome more money, especially to hire staff, but doing that after the year begins can be tricky.

Additionally, the administration is fighting Albany legislation that would phase in class size caps through 2027, fearing it will cost too much to implement. Though Gov. Kathy Hochul hasn’t signed it yet, she has signaled her support.

How will schools address academic needs?

Budget cuts forced many New York City schools to let go of educators, but the academic needs remain high, especially for the lowest performing students. Math and reading scores for 9-year-olds from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, whose test is known as “the nation’s report card,” plummeted. It remains to be seen how the city will address this. (Scores for New York City students are expected in October.)

Hiring more staff, having high-dosage tutoring, and strong after-school programs are among the strategies the federal government hopes districts will spend stimulus money on.

Already, however, the city is scaling back its academic recovery program for students with disabilities, many of whom struggled significantly with remote learning. Last school year, city schools were responsible for providing additional support after school or on Saturdays to all students with individualized education programs, or IEPs. The program was slow to get off the ground, however, hitting roadblocks on recruiting educators as well as signing up families. The majority of eligible students did not participate. This year, the city is putting more of the onus on families to advocate for additional support for their children with disabilities.

Manhattan mom Lisa Brassell moved her first grader, who is on the autism spectrum, from his traditional public school to a charter this year due to the lack of support for students with disabilities.

“My son really hated school last year because the teachers didn’t provide proper supports,” she said. “I hope his new school is able to help him like school again.”

How will schools address mental health?

“Students are emotionally fragile,” Provasoli, from the Manhattan School for Children, said.

Last year, the city implemented a social skills screening tool as one way to address mental health needs. The questionnaire, which is expected to be used again, is meant to assess students’ decision-making skills, self-awareness, and taking personal responsibility, for instance. Many educators said they didn’t feel equipped to assess students on these skills, but some schools that have been using them for years — and have had a lot of support around using the data — have been able to use the assessments to shift their schools’ culture.

The city has roughly 5,000 social workers and guidance counselors for its nearly 900,000 students, with at least one social worker or clinician from a school-based mental health clinic in every school. But many educators say their schools need more mental health resources.

“We have excellent counselors that have been at our school for many years. Yet there are only two for 700 students and much of their time is (rightly) taken by IEP mandates,” said Tom Griffith, a sixth grade teacher at Brooklyn Collaborative Studies, a middle and high school.

The school is fortunate to have three “invaluable” counselor interns and an administration focused on empathy-building, he said. It’s still not enough.

“We need more money for more support in this area,” he said. “The pandemic continues to weigh heavily on our whole community. The students are anxious, staff is dealing with personal trauma, and COVID lurks in the background still.”

How will COVID impact schools this year?

Schools are ditching most of the city’s COVID mitigations this year. Say goodbye to the daily health screeners and onsite PCR testing. Continue to expect take-home rapid tests. Masking and quarantines were already dropped last year. One thing that remains, however, are COVID vaccine requirements for staff and visitors, as well as students participating in sports or extracurriculars.

The city is continuing to report COVID cases in communities. On Tuesday, for instance, 148 cases were reported among students and staffers. (Students at many charters have already returned.)

Beth Kopelowitz, who works with students in various classes as an English as a new language teacher at Brooklyn’s P.S. 215, said she still doesn’t feel safe because of the coronavirus.

“I will probably still wear a mask in the classrooms,” she said.

What about literacy and other instructional changes in the classroom?

Adams is pushing to overhaul literacy instruction in New York City schools, calling for more phonics in the early grades and implementing screening tools for students up to 10th grade to catch students with print-based challenges. Whether educators have enough support and training to implement the changes successfully remains to be seen, especially as some educators said their schools have cut reading specialists because of budget cuts.

The Adams administration also created its first virtual schools this year, opening them up only for ninth grade students to start. Adams and Banks have put their weight behind some other initiatives, including expanding career and technical education programs and adding “gifted and talented” seats, signaling less interest in tackling integration in one of the nation’s most segregated districts.

Meanwhile, Adams and Banks have spent a lot of their time and political capital on reorganizing the education department bureaucracy, requiring district superintendents to reapply for their jobs in a process that attracted some backlash. In the latest game of musical chairs, the city is moving about 1,000 staffers from central and borough offices to district offices.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

A Chicago school confronts a wave of grief after losing 2 students to gun violence

2022-09-07T17:31:14+00:00

Word reverberated through Simeon Career Academy — in hushed conversations in living rooms and kitchen tables, through frantic announcements at drumline practice, over text messages among friends:

Jamari Williams, a 15-year-old sophomore at Simeon, had been shot and killed after school just blocks away at a nearby shopping center — a typical hangout for students.

A few hours later about six miles away, Kentrell McNeal, another 15-year-old Simeon freshman, was shot outside a Hyde Park McDonald’s before dying at a nearby hospital early the next morning.

Staff and students buoyed one another to get through the tumultuous days and weeks that followed the back-to-back shootings on Sept. 21. A balloon release and vigil gave the community a chance to grieve. Chicago Public Schools dispatched extra counselors and social workers and worked with outside groups to provide mental health support.

But much of that attention soon faded.

Students, staff, and alumni interviewed by Chalkbeat indicated things at the tight-knit Chatham high school seemed to return to normal by the holidays.

For some, the shock of losing classmates waned, replaced with numbness at yet another student shot and killed. For others, the heartache has lingered, even as the first anniversary of the shootings approaches.

Grief also spread beyond Simeon’s borders — to other schools where Jamari and Kentrell had friends and families and to other campuses where students have been lost or injured in Chicago’s pervasive gun violence.

Last year, more than 50 school-aged children were shot and killed and hundreds more were wounded, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Since January, 38 people 17 and younger have been shot and killed this year.

And, just three days into this new school year, four Schurz High School students sitting at an ice cream shop patio across from the campus were injured — two critically — in a drive-by shooting. In the week after the shooting, CPS and the Chicago Police Department offered additional safety support before and after school and the district’s crisis teams and counselors provided healing circles and one-on-one therapy.

But the district must do more than flood a campus with resources in such moments of tragedy, say students, staff, and community members at Simeon. A one-time crisis response is just not enough. Instead, they say, schools need proactive, sustained mental health support to help all students — at all times.

Students walk through the halls of Chicago schools carrying “so much trauma,” said Jamari’s cousin Catlyn Savado, who attends Julian High School. “It’s just really, really, really bad.”

Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez has repeatedly acknowledged the problem and vowed to address it.

“We see it every week,” Martinez said during a press conference in October two weeks after a shooting outside Phillips Career Academy that left a 14-year-old student and a security guard injured.

“We can’t ignore it,” Martinez said. “We have to join together. We need to provide these services to students that really need it.”

In 2019, Janice Jackson, the district’s former CEO, spoke before Congress, asking for more funding to address childhood trauma.

Children exposed to trauma are at higher risk of lower grades, poor attendance, behavior problems, and dropping out, Jackson said during the hearing. Trauma can also trigger mental health issues and substance abuse, she added.

Now, a flood of federal dollars has given Chicago Public Schools an opportunity to spend money to address the mental health impacts not only from COVID, but also from the city’s other pandemic:

The trauma of gun violence.

Simeon Career Academy, 8147 S. Vincennes Ave., is located in Chicago’s Chatham neighborhood on the far South Side.

Simeon searches for healing after shootings

Jamari and Kentrell used sports as a refuge, the Sun-Times reported.

Kentrell loved basketball, while Jamari dreamed of giving his family a better life through football, a pastor told Block Club Chicago.

But even before their deaths, both teens had also been deeply impacted by gun violence. Shortly before his death, Jamari lost his father to gun violence. Kentrell was a member of GoodKids MadCity, a youth organization that fights to end violence.

Following their deaths last fall, Chicago Public Schools dispatched crisis teams to Simeon. Some counselors followed Jamari’s and Kentrell’s class schedules, offering support to their peers.

The school also partnered with organizations such as Bright Star and New Root Learning Institute for additional support that included group therapy sessions and healing circles. Dozens of students who witnessed Jamari’s shooting received additional support, principal Dr. Trista Harper told LSC members in October.

Harper, who described the incident as one of the “worst days” of her career during that meeting, declined multiple requests for interviews to discuss the school’s response.

“There were so many kids that needed help,” student Jamal Anderson recalled a few months later.

In a statement, Chicago Public Schools said it takes the health and well-being of its students seriously.

“The District staffs schools with the resources needed to foster a welcoming learning environment,” the district statement read. “Simeon Career Academy has a Behavioral Health team and two full-time social workers, along with two mental health partners for additional support.”

As part of the 2023 budget, the district plans to implement a curriculum “rooted in trauma-informed practices and a restorative approach to student discipline.” It is also working to expand the idea of school-level “care teams” across all schools.

These teams establish a core group of building staff as a frontline response for struggling students. Along with trained crisis counselors and social workers, they help deal with crises including the loss of classmates from gun violence. Simeon has all of these positions now.

But Simeon student London Carter, 17, said the school needed outside counselors more readily available sooner. Some students don’t feel comfortable speaking openly about their trauma with school counselors and would prefer outside professionals for those types of services, she said.

“We need more people to talk to about this,” London said.

Part of the problem, many in the Simeon community said, is that the need is so much greater at a time when students are already dealing with waves of stress and loss spurred by the coronavirus pandemic.

New Root Learning Institute, formerly known as Umoja Student Development, was already working with the school on restorative programs and student engagement prior to the shootings.

Kristin Moore, New Root director of impact, was at the school to help with the district’s crisis response, and noted the back-to-back shootings hit students hard.

“It affected students in a way that I don’t think the adults were really ready to deal with,” Moore said, noting the situation was not unique to Simeon.

“They’re not just dealing with this in school,” Moore said. “This is happening in their neighborhoods. A lot of times these things that happen in schools are related to things happening in their neighborhoods.”

“They’ve experienced a lot of trauma, a lot of death, and it’s almost as if they just sweep it under the rug,” Moore said. “And then one small event happens and it’s almost an explosion.”

Trauma of one incident can ripple through multiple schools

“Here we go again.”

That’s what Chris Thrower recalls thinking when he heard about Jamari’s death.

The former Simeon Local School Council student representative, who graduated in June, said the loss brought back personal memories from when one of his friends was shot and killed his junior year.

“Why do we got to keep going through this?” Thrower said.

Catlyn Savado learned through a text message that her cousin Jamari had been shot and killed.

The 15-year-old sophomore remembered how hard it was to process.

Even as Simeon students and staff received crisis support in the immediate aftermath of Jamari and Kentrell’s deaths, Catlyn had no access to it. She recalled some of her school’s administrators asking if she was OK, but ultimately she didn’t receive any mental health services.

A shooting may hit hard at one school, Catlyn said, but people rarely acknowledge how far the pain caused by gun violence can spread: “Yes, this shooting happened at Simeon, but we have kids at Morgan Park, we have kids at Julian, we have kids at Fenger who are all affected by this.”

Beyond simply responding to the aftermath of a shooting, Catlyn said, the district and the city need to invest in children and young people now.

“We are living now,” Catlyn said. “Invest in the fact that we’re breathing.”

CPS leaders are planning to leverage the district’s $2.8 billion stimulus haul to do just that. In spring 2021, district leaders unveiled a $30 million healing plan for students. It will expand care teams to all 500-plus CPS campuses over the next three years. The money will also pay for 50 to 60 schools to partner with organizations that specialize in mental health and widespread trauma training for educators.

It’s not clear what will happen when stimulus money runs out.

Simeon Career Academy students, parents, alumni gathered on Sept. 25, 2021 for a balloon release and vigil. A year later after the back-to-back shootings, trauma at the school lingers.

Parents, teachers, alumni pick up where the district falls short

In the immediate days after the shooting, parent Keshia Spraggins was among hundreds of parents who kept their children home.

She remembers hugging her son tight and having hard talks with him about the rise of gun violence and the pain left in its wake.

Spraggins wanted to make sure her son, a junior at the time, was OK — physically and mentally. The message she wanted to impart to her son: You do not have to try to be strong. You do not have to try to carry the weight of all of the violence.

“That’s tough as an adult to deal with,” Spraggins said. ”But as a 15- and 16-year-old, they’re still trying to navigate through life. That’s a lot.”

For many years, she tried to shield her son from the gun violence, but when he returned to school last fall they had to confront the topic head-on.

On the first day of football practice, about a month before the shootings, Spraggins’ son and his teammates were rushed off the field after hearing gunshots. Afterwards, parents would park near the field during practice to keep watch, she said.

In a town hall last fall with Simeon parents, Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown promised increased police presence during dismissal to assuage the fears of the school community.

Inside the school, the deaths of Kentrell and Jamari weighed heavily on wary teachers already navigating a tumultuous few years.

Four years ago, then-principal Dr. Sheldon House was ousted from Simeon after the Tribune’s Betrayed series on sexual assault investigation. An internal investigation revealed systemic issues in how the school handled volunteer background checks. The initial investigation found school leadership failed to effectively safeguard students.

Since June 2018, Simeon has had two different principals following House’s removal.

The fall shootings were yet another shock. Between September and May 2022, at least seven teachers resigned from Simeon, according to data obtained by Chalkbeat.

The district’s response was rote — a standard typically given after a student is shot and killed — and just not enough, especially in a year when students were also dealing with the effects of the pandemic, according to teachers who spoke with Chalkbeat on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the school’s administration.

Simeon alum Kenyatta Starks knows the anguish of losing students to gun violence. She remembers losing six students during her time as principal of Harper High School in Englewood a decade ago.

When a shooting happens, district and school leadership need to also provide support to teachers and staff who are on the frontline with their students, Starks said.

“I think that is the biggest gap,” Starks said. “If we don’t equip them with the social emotional support and training to support students, we are going to continue being this hamster on a wheel.”

Teachers have to replay these conversations several times a day, said John Michael Johnson, organizer of Project Simeon, which helped organize last fall’s balloon release outside of the school.

“We need to train the trainer,” Johnson said. “It needs to be institutionalized and part of professional development. It needs to be ongoing. Because if it’s not, it may not manifest itself for weeks or months.”

Project Simeon, founded as a way to forge ties between students, administrators, alumni, and the faith community, has been working with other alumni groups to foster a supportive community around the school. But over time, Johnson says they’ve had to shift some of their focus to help raise money to support families with burial costs.

The scars of a shooting heal over time but that trauma stays with a community, Johnson said.

“It’s going to take more than prayers to help solve issues around gun violence,” he said.

Johnson thought back to the balloon release in late September. It was a moment of healing and coming together.

As he watched hundreds of blue, gold, and white balloons drift above the school’s majestic building, Johnson said he thought about Jamari and Kentrell — and all the others lost to gun violence.

He thought, too, about the work left to be done.

“You may exhale,” Johnson said, “but you’re still holding your breath.”

Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago, covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org.

Reading skills gap grows in Michigan

2022-09-01T19:30:16+00:00

Researchers found alarming increases in the proportion of Michigan third graders reading significantly below grade level and widening gaps in performance between Black and white students, and between students from low-income families and peers from wealthier families.

The performance disparities provide more evidence of the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on at-risk children.

“This should be a clarion call to us,” said Katharine Strunk, director of the Education Policy Innovation Collaborative at Michigan State University. “What are we doing to help these particular students?”

EPIC on Thursday released its annual data report on the number of students eligible for retention under a controversial Michigan law that says third graders can be held back if they score at least a year behind grade level on the reading portion of the Michigan Student Test of Education Progress, or M-STEP. The report is based on results of reading tests given this spring.

The results are important because they help policymakers and schools target resources. They’re also a gauge of the effects of the pandemic on young children during crucial years when most children learn to read. Some researchers say reading by third grade is “a make or break benchmark” correlated to later academic success.

Nearly 5,700 of last year’s third-graders scored low enough to be eligible for retention. That’s 5.8% of all third-graders, up from 4.8% the previous year. The Michigan Department of Education hasn’t yet collected data on how many of them are actually repeating third grade this year.

More than half would have been eligible for automatic exemptions based on, for example, their status as English learners or special education students, according to EPIC’s report. In the past, the vast majority of others were exempted too, because administrators and parents agreed that retention was not in the child’s best interest.

It rarely is, said Elizabeth Birr Moje, dean of the University of Michigan School of Education.

“Everything we know from research tells us that retention at a young age has negative consequences across the board,” including on dropout rates, future earning potential, and incarceration rates.

That’s one reason why the Reeths-Puffer School District near Muskegon promoted all third graders to fourth grade, even though 10 of them had reading scores that made them eligible for retention. Instead, those students will get extra help with reading this year, Superintendent Steve Edwards said.

“You’d struggle to find much evidence anywhere of the long-term benefit” of retention, he said.

Academics are more focused on what the M-STEP data reveal about learning disparities between demographic groups than on the retention component of the third-grade reading law.

“The hope with the retention law was not so much that we would actually be retaining children but that it would motivate people — whether families, or teachers, or school leaders — to do early intervention, to engage kids (in reading) very early,” Moje said.

The retention law also provides an accountability benchmark to let parents and community members know how well their schools are educating children in early literacy. And it helps schools focus resources on students who need the most help.

Advocacy groups like Education Trust-Midwest are concerned by the results.

“While it’s not surprising that so many children have fallen so far behind, we are now seeing the evidence of the impact of the pandemic, especially for underserved students,” said Executive Director Amber Arellano.

Michigan’s declines mirror results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress also released Thursday. NAEP scores show sharp declines across the country in math and reading during the pandemic. Among 9-year-olds who took the national test, reading scores dropped more sharply than they have in more than 30 years.

Remote learning and pandemic-related disruptions emerged as clear factors in student performance on the M-STEP.

Of Michigan third graders who spent all or most of second grade learning remotely, 10.6% were eligible for retention, twice the rate for those who learned in person all or most of their second-grade year.

In Reeths-Puffer schools, where students attended in person for all of 2020-21, 34% of students scored at or above the proficient level, down from 38% in the last two test cycles. It might have been worse if Reeths-Puffer schools had closed to in-person learning that year, as 16% of Michigan districts did for at least part of the year. Another 16% used hybrid models, teaching partly online and partly in classrooms.

“Most students learn best in a face-to-face environment,” said Edwards, the superintendent. “From a social-emotional and academic perspective, being face-to-face as much as we were at least mitigated what was a very difficult situation” during the pandemic.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that remote learning alone caused sinking scores, Strunk said.

Black students and those from low-income families, who historically underperform white and wealthier peers, were more likely to be in districts that used remote instruction during the pandemic.

Fifteen percent of Black third-graders scored low enough to be eligible for retention. That’s grown from 13% in 2020-21, and 10.9% in 2018-19, before the retention law took effect. Students were not tested in 2019-20 because of the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the percentage of white third-graders eligible for retention grew from 2.3% in 2018-19 to 3.3% last school year.

“That’s a very large gap between Black students and everyone else, so we have to ask what’s happening there,” Strunk said.

The performance of students from low-income families is concerning, too, she said. Nine percent of third-graders from low-income families last year scored low enough to be eligible for retention, compared with 6.3% before the pandemic.

Among more affluent students, 2% were eligible for retention last school year, compared with 1.3% before the pandemic.

The state’s lowest performing schools also saw big declines in third-grade reading scores. Those buildings have been designated by the state as partnership schools based on factors including low graduation rates, attendance, and test scores. Those schools — including many in Detroit — have been in a turnaround program for the last three years and had shown progress before the pandemic.

A quarter of third-graders in partnership schools were eligible for retention based on 2022 scores, up from 22.3% last year, and 19.1% in 2018-19.

“Partnership districts have really been through it over the last couple of years,” Strunk said. “The communities in which partnership districts and schools exist faced the most dire economic and health consequences of the pandemic. We need to be working as hard as we can to support those communities and schools so they can help students recover from an unbelievably challenging time.”

Policymakers, administrators, and teachers need to target resources to districts and students struggling the most, Strunk said.

“I’d be doubling down on training our teachers to help them teach kids who may be very, very far behind grade level,” she said. “I don’t think we can assume they will catch up without targeted intervention and support.”

Schools in Michigan and across the country received federal COVID relief dollars that can be used, in part, to provide tutors to improve reading skills, but districts are having trouble finding enough tutors to meet their needs.

Arellano said those interventions should include specialized support for students with dyslexia. That’s an area the state Senate has begun to prioritize with legislation that advanced in May, although the state House hasn’t yet taken it up.

Schools seem to be working with parents to help struggling readers instead of holding them back from fourth grade, said Mike Testa, a member of the Michigan PTA Advocacy Committee and parent of four Livonia Public Schools students.

“Districts have done a good job working with parents to see what is actually best for that specific student,” he said. “They’re coming up with a course of action and a plan, not just putting a kid in fourth grade with no support but actually doing something to get that child caught up.”

That’s the kind of approach Moje advocates.

“Reading is a very complex endeavor” that requires an understanding of phonics, an ability to understand clues from syntax, an understanding of how sentences are put together, and a comprehension of meaning, she said.

“You have to assess where children are, why they’re there, and then intervene appropriately,” she said. “The sheer volume of children makes that difficult.”

She is hopeful that schools will be able to help struggling readers catch up to their peers.

“The idea that if you can’t read proficiently by third grade you’re doomed is a fallacy,” Moje said. “Somebody has to be intervening to help you make progress, but it’s not actually the case that you stop learning to read at third grade.”

Tracie Mauriello covers state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan. Reach her at tmauriello@chalkbeat.org.

NYC: What’s the No. 1 thing you’d like your school to provide this year?

2022-09-01T18:25:44+00:00

New York City public schools plan to welcome back roughly 900,000 students next week, marking the start of yet another critical year.

Many children continue to feel the academic and emotional toll from prolonged classroom closures and interruptions during the coronavirus pandemic. And the nation’s largest school system as a whole is continuing to grapple with declining enrollment, though it is also seeing an influx of thousands of asylum seekers, who may need intensive support.

Chalkbeat wants to hear from students, parents, and educators: What are you looking forward to this year? Are you concerned about the city’s budget cuts affecting your school? Do you think your school is offering enough mental health support?

This summer’s battle over school funding cuts, along with an ongoing lawsuit challenging the education department’s budget process, made planning more complicated for many principals — though perhaps not as difficult as the previous two years when they had to reconfigure so much of what teaching and learning looked like because of COVID guidance. Schools will drop most of the city’s COVID mitigations this year, ditching the daily health screeners and onsite PCR testing, along with previously dropped layers such as masking and quarantines.

The city is still planning to spend more than $1 billion in stimulus funding this year, but it remains to be seen how much of that will go directly to help students with tutoring programs or other ways to catch them up academically and socially. The education department already said it plans to scale back special education recovery services this fall.

In response to the plummeting math and reading scores — especially for the lowest performing students — from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, whose test is known as “the nation’s report card,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said that schools should use their federal aid “even more effectively and expeditiously.” He cited strategies like high-dosage tutoring, after-school programs, and hiring more staff.

Meanwhile, budget cuts forced many New York City schools to excess educators, sending them to find positions elsewhere in the system.

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Math and reading scores plummet on national test, erasing 20 years of progress

2022-09-01T04:01:00+00:00

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In a grim sign of the pandemic’s impact, math and reading scores for 9-year-olds across the U.S. plummeted between 2020 and 2022.

The declines erase decades of academic progress. In two years, reading scores on a key national test dropped more sharply than they have in over 30 years, and math scores fell for the first time since the test began in the early 1970s.

Put another way: It’s as if 9-year-olds were performing at the same level in math as 9-year-olds did back in 1999, and at the same reading level as in 2004.

“I was taken aback by the scope and the magnitude of the decline,” said Peggy Carr, who heads the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the test. “The big takeaway is that there really are no increases in achievement in either of the subjects for any student group in this assessment — there were only declines or stagnant scores for the nation’s 9-year-olds.”

The scores, released Thursday, are the first nationally representative look at how students across the U.S. performed in math and reading just before the pandemic compared with this year. They come from a long-running version of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test known as “the nation’s report card” that’s able to compare student achievement across decades.

The sample included nearly 15,000 9-year-olds from 410 schools, about two-thirds of whom were in fourth grade.

Carr said while her team usually shies away from ascribing a reason to score increases or decreases, it’s obvious in this case that the disruptions wrought by the pandemic were a major factor in the declines.

“It’s clear that COVID-19 shocked American education and stunned the academic growth of this age group,” Carr told reporters on a Wednesday call. “No other factor could have had such a dramatic influence on student achievement in a relatively short period of time.”

The scores could influence how state and district officials choose to spend their remaining COVID relief dollars — and fuel debates about whether public schools are adequately serving students in a time of great need. Many school districts already are devoting chunks of federal money to academic recovery, but there’s little evidence so far showing what difference those efforts have made for struggling students.

“Supporting the academic recovery of lower-performing students should be a top priority for educators and policymakers nationwide,” Martin West, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and a member of the board that oversees the national test, said in a statement.

Federal education officials cautioned that these scores shouldn’t be used to penalize schools. Rather, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement, these results should spur states and schools to use their federal aid “even more effectively and expeditiously” on strategies like high-dosage tutoring, hiring more staff, and running after-school programs. High-poverty schools especially have an unprecedented amount of money at their disposal, but some have struggled to spend it.

The education department would be watching, Cardona said, to make sure schools are “directing the most resources towards students who fell furthest behind.”

Reading and math score declines were most severe among students who were performing at the lowest levels. That means kids who hadn’t yet mastered skills like addition and multiplication, or who were working on simple reading tasks, saw their scores fall the most.

The gap between higher- and lower-performing students was already growing before COVID hit, but federal officials say the pandemic appears to have exacerbated that divide.

“There is still a widening of the disparity between the top and the bottom performers, but in a different way,” Carr said. “Everyone is dropping. But the students at the bottom are dropping faster.”

Officials noted that when they asked students about the tools they had available to them during remote learning, higher-scoring students were more likely than their struggling peers to say a teacher was available to help them with their math or reading work every day or almost every day — a disparity that could have contributed to the growing divide.

There were some differences across subject areas. Declines in math were pervasive, but Black students saw a particularly sharp drop.

Reading scores dipped by similar amounts for white, Hispanic, and Black students. But reading scores held steady in city schools, rural schools, and for English learners. To Carr, those were the only bright spots in the data.

“The fact that reading achievement among students in cities held steady, when you consider the extreme crises that cities were dealing with during the pandemic, is especially significant,” she said.

Officials said while these scores are an important indicator of the pandemic’s effect on elementary schoolers, the data doesn’t offer any insight into how long it could take for students to rebound academically. That won’t be clear, Carr said, until there’s more district, state, and federal data to analyze.

Data gathered from other state and national tests this year show elementary-age students are starting to rebound in reading and math after students saw dips, or made less progress than usual, earlier in the pandemic. But by some measures, middle schoolers are recovering more slowly, or not at all — raising concerns about whether enough is being done to support older students, who have less time to catch up.

Schools have a tall order ahead this year: Academic recovery efforts have been hampered by a host of issues, including a rise in student absenteeism, staffing challenges, and growing student mental health needs. In some schools, educators are also contending with an uptick in behavioral challenges and classroom disruptions.

A trove of federal data slated for release in late October will shine more light on how older students are faring. That will include scores from fourth and eighth grade students across the U.S., in individual states, and in certain cities.

“I am a little worried,” Carr said. “It’s difficult to predict what the recovery will look like. We’ll just have to see.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

How New Jersey and Newark plan to beef up school security this academic year

2022-08-30T23:50:00+00:00

In an effort to keep students safe, New Jersey will direct $6.5 million to have school districts digitize building maps for use in emergency situations and Newark plans to hire more security guards, launch a new student identification system, and use updated software to track incidents.

The state and local efforts to ramp up school security come months after a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas that left 19 students and two teachers dead. Districts nationwide have invested significant portions of their budgets and federal relief funds to upgrade school security measures in the months prior to and following the massacre, as school shootings hit a 20-year high in the 2020-21 school year.

“Ensuring school safety is among my, and I think, our collective, most sacred obligations,” Gov. Phil Murphy said on Tuesday at a news conference the week before the new school year starts for most districts in the state. “An important part of school safety is ensuring that first responders have the tools they need to answer any emergency of any size and at any time.”

Money for the digital school mapping effort will come from the state’s American Rescue Plan funds, Murphy said. The announcement follows a directive from Murphy earlier this month for school districts to create threat assessment teams by next school year, who will be tasked with identifying students who might be a threat to school safety.

About half of all 3,000 public and private schools throughout the state have already created the digital school building blueprints, known as “Collaborative Response Graphics” and created by Hamilton company Critical Response Group.

The digital maps allow police to easily pinpoint key access points, stairwells, and other locations, which could be useful if, for example, a school is under threat of a shooting.

The funds for this initiative will be used to support the creation of the digital maps for the remaining 1,500 schools, Murphy said. The governor’s office did not share which school districts already have the digital building maps.

Critical Response Group, run by former and current members of New Jersey state and local police departments, has been providing the digital blueprint service to hundreds of schools across the country for years, according to trade magazine articles about the company.

Governors and school district leaders in other parts of the country have also been announcing plans to invest in digital school maps, including in Iowa and Virginia.

“When every second matters, the first and perhaps most important tool is the ability to know without delay not just where an emergency is within a building, but also the fastest and safest route to get there,” Murphy said at the news conference, which was held in the East Brook Middle School of Paramus.

The renderings combine aerial imagery, floor plans, and other features into a gridded graphic, which allows various agencies to better communicate on strategy both inside and outside of a building in emergency situations, the company says.

“I think it’s a pretty good strategy to have and a step in the right direction,” said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, in an interview on Tuesday. “But as we talk more about technology, we cannot dismiss the human element of this whole piece of school safety.”

Canady said he urges law enforcement and public safety officials to visit schools in their regions, getting familiar with the physical layout of the buildings and the people who run the schools.

“This cannot be overlooked, it’s critical and makes all the difference in the world,” Canady said.

He also suggests that while districts invest in upgraded technology and cameras, they should also consider basic maintenance of doors and reporting systems when there are malfunctions.

Last school year, Newark schools faced multiple bomb threats and saw an uptick of disruptive behavior.

Newark has earmarked $2.8 million from its second coronavirus federal relief package for security measures, including about 5,000 new security cameras, six new patrol cars for school safety officers, and equipment at high school entrances to scan students for contraband and weapons.

Some education experts are critical of districts using federal relief money for school security measures, arguing the money was intended to address academic recovery and mental health support after students experienced months of disrupted learning.

For the upcoming school year, the district’s Office of Safety has hired 40 permanent security guards and is looking to hire an additional 50 guards on a per diem basis, according to a board operation committee report.

At a school board meeting last week, Superintendent Roger León said there will also be a new student identification system.

The district will be using a newly upgraded command center in the Office of Safety this coming school year to monitor the district “with our remote surveillance system while dispatchers utilize our new incident tracking CAD (computer-aided dispatch) system,” the operation report stated.

“We will continue to resource all security staff with superior training for the ever changing security threats we face in public education,” the report said. “All implemented security upgrades will benefit NBOE students, staff, and community.”

Catherine Carrera is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Newark, covering the city’s K-12 schools with a focus on English language learners. Contact Catherine at ccarrera@chalkbeat.org.

What we’re watching as Detroit district students return to school

2022-08-29T11:00:00+00:00

Happy first day of school!

The Detroit Public Schools Community District will reopen classrooms to students Monday morning for another year of learning amid a pandemic. This will be a critical year for efforts to address enrollment losses, chronic absenteeism, and facilities. The year will also feature a school board election in which a majority of the seats are up for grabs.

The Chalkbeat Detroit team will be following these issues and more. Here’s a closer look at them:

Will students return to the district?

Students have left the Detroit school district in large numbers, wiping out some of the small enrollment gains the district had experienced in the years before the pandemic. It raises important questions about the district’s future.

Superintendent Nikolai Vitti puts the loss at nearly 3,000 since the pandemic began. During the 2019-20 school year, the district enrolled nearly 51,000.

A slimmed down district has some dire consequences. In Michigan, state funding for schools is based largely on enrollment. The district will receive $9,150 in state per-pupil funding this school year, which means a decline of 3,000 students could add up to about $27 million in lost revenue.

The district has managed to weather the declines so far, because a big injection of federal COVID relief money has helped fill in the gaps. But that money will run out, and the district could soon face a reality in which it must operate with much less money. In the district’s past, steep enrollment declines forced major budget cuts, led to numerous schools closing, and put the district under state control.

District officials have been urgently attacking this issue with initiatives that include a door-knocking campaign and fun events designed to attract parents back to the district. But will they be enough? What will it take to get parents to bring their children back? And where are they, for that matter? Are they being homeschooled? Are they enrolled in charter schools? Did they flee for suburban districts? Are they attending virtual schools? These are all questions Chalkbeat Detroit will be seeking to answer this school year.

Can new initiatives address chronic absenteeism?

The pandemic has created or worsened a number of challenges. Among the top ones in the Detroit school district is chronic absenteeism, which has surged.

The district had seen a reduction in its chronic absenteeism rate in the year before the pandemic, when about 62% of the students had missed 10% or more of the school year (the definition of chronic absence). In July, Vitti reported the rate had risen to 77%.

That rise has district officials planning more aggressive efforts. Vitti has repeatedly said that if the district can’t get kids back in school consistently, efforts to recover from the pandemic won’t succeed.

These new plans involve broadening the circle of district and school officials with responsibility for monitoring student attendance, using data to understand the challenges that prevent students from coming to school, and resolving them.

Chalkbeat Detroit has identified chronic absenteeism as a crucial storyline to follow this year. We want to write about efforts, in Detroit and beyond, to get students in school, explore reasons why students aren’t coming to school, and highlight success stories.

Wayne State researcher Sarah Lenhoff told Chalkbeat recently that the district’s plans to beef up its attendance teams is a start, but she believes fixing chronic absenteeism will require coordinating with city agencies to address employment, health, transportation, and housing inequities.

When Detroit’s kids don’t make it to school, Lenhoff said, “it really speaks to the need for the city to invest more in employment, invest more in stabilized housing, (and) make sure that families have the food and the health care that they need, so that they can give their children what they want to give them … get them into school.”

How will the school board election affect the district?

November’s general election could be a pivotal one for the Detroit school district.

Four of the school board’s seven seats are up for election, and 18 people are running for those four-year terms. Among the candidates are the four incumbents, several former school board members, a couple of parents, a few former educators, and a recent graduate.

Why are we watching this race? Because a change in the makeup of the school board could affect turnaround efforts in the district. Relations between the school board and superintendent are a key part of a district’s success, and Vitti and the current board have had a seemingly strong relationship since he was hired in 2017.

If any of the district detractors — and there are some among the candidates — is elected, that may change the dynamic on the board.

Stay tuned for Chalkbeat Detroit coverage. We’ll be profiling the candidates and holding an event so you can hear from the candidates directly.

Will a $700 million investment transform school buildings?

The Detroit school district has had longstanding facility problems, but lacked enough cash to fix them. COVID relief money is changing that. The district is investing $700 million of the nearly $1.3 billion of COVID relief funds it received to address its facilities.

What to keep an eye on this year: Work is expected to begin this fall on some of the projects. Work overall will continue through 2025.

The district will spend $281 million to rebuild five schools, $296 million to renovate buildings, and $128 million to reopen previously closed school buildings, expand pre-K, build additions onto existing schools, and demolish or sell some vacant buildings.

Earlier this year, Vitti said the district “has been using a bandage approach to our facilities districtwide.”

Vitti, who was hired in 2017, inherited a district that after years of state control had a number of schools that were in poor condition. When he interviewed for the job in 2017, he told reporters he was enraged that “our children have to go to schools where there are holes in the wall, tiles that are not replaced.” He has made investments since being hired, but the district has had limited funds.

“One of the most repugnant examples of the injustices our students and staff face is having to learn and work in school buildings that do not meet the standards of wealthier cities and school districts,” Vitti said in a statement in May, after the Detroit school board approved a facility plan.

A feature of the facility plan that will please students and teachers? When all the projects are finally done, nearly every school building will have air conditioning. That will make learning conditions better and it will mean the district won’t have to shorten school days because of stifling heat.

Will the district be fully staffed?

Two weeks ago, the district expected to begin the school year fully staffed with teachers, with some openings among support staff. But last minute resignations have put that in jeopardy.

“We have had about 30 unexpected teacher vacancies surface over the last two weeks,” Vitti told Chalkbeat Friday. “Most of these vacancies are related to teachers leaving the district for suburban districts for additional pay.”

As of Friday morning, he added, “about 80% of our schools are still fully staffed with teachers.”

As we noted Friday, the district is still in a better position than it was in previous years. In 2017, for instance, the district had 200 vacancies in the month leading up to the school year.

We’re your Chalkbeat Detroit team, and we’re ready for the new school year

2022-08-29T11:00:00+00:00

It’s been well over 30 years since I had a first day of school, but I still get excited around this time of year. As an education journalist for ages, I’ve always seen the new year as a time for a reset — a time to develop new goals and set new priorities for the kind of stories I want to write.

Our team at Chalkbeat Detroit has been talking a lot about goals lately. We know schools are still struggling to recover from the pandemic, and our coverage plans are aimed at tracking how educators are tackling these challenges. There are some weighty issues at the forefront, such as chronic absenteeism, enrollment losses, learning difficulties, mental health strains, school funding inequities, and staffing shortages. (Read more about the issues we’ll be watching this school year in Detroit)

But we also want to have fun. We want to write stories that make you smile. We want to track progress and write about promising initiatives that are helping students succeed. We want to visit more classrooms (please invite us!). We want to elevate the voices of students, teachers, and parents — the folks who have the most at stake in policy decisions made at the district and state levels. If you have a story to tell, reach out to us.

In the spirit of having fun, read below for an introduction to the members of our team, with old childhood photos and some fun facts about us.

We want to get to know our Chalkbeat Detroit readers, too, so be sure to save our individual email addresses and reach out to us. You can reach the whole team by emailing us at detroit.tips@chalkbeat.org.

Also, be sure to sign up for our newsletter here.

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. She has never gotten over her mother sending her to school on picture day with lopsided ponytails.

Lori Higgins, bureau chief

Where I’ve been: I’m a Chicago native, spent nearly 19 years as an education reporter for the Detroit Free Press, and did stints writing about education in Wisconsin and Kansas. I’ve been at Chalkbeat nearly four years.

What I do: As bureau chief, I lead a group of three reporters, helping them develop and execute story ideas, editing their work for accuracy and proper context. I lead our goal-setting, keep us organized (mostly), and ensure we have a steady pace of stories for our readers, and I manage our relationships in the community.

Fun facts to know about me: In high school, I was a championship typist and a baton twirler (not at the same time). I love to sew bags and other fun items. I know the joys and pains of being a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan. I have a cat, Lucy, who runs my house and my life.

How to reach me: lhiggins@chalkbeat.org

What I’m looking forward to the most about the 22-23 school year: I’m looking forward to giving students, parents, and teachers a voice in a big way in our coverage.

Ethan Bakuli covers the Detroit Public Schools Community District and is an avid Boston Celtics fan.

Ethan Bakuli, reporter

Where I’ve been: I moved to the east side of Detroit in 2021. Before that I worked at a local paper in Burlington, Vermont. I grew up in western Massachusetts.

What I do: I cover Detroit public schools for its students, families, and teachers.

Fun facts to know about me: I’m an avid reader and record collector, alongside being a loyal Boston Celtics and Arsenal F.C. fan.

How to reach me: ebakuli@chalkbeat.org

What I’m looking forward to the most about the 22-23 school year: The chance to visit classrooms and connect with students and families out in the community.

Koby Levin covers early childhood education and K-12 education issues and is looking forward to visiting a lot of classrooms this school year.

Koby Levin, reporter

Where I’ve been: On the east side of Detroit for the last four years. Before that, I worked for a community newspaper in southwest Missouri. I grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Bloomfield Township, Michigan.

What I do: I inform Michiganders about inequities in our education system. I also write about early childhood education and school choice.

Fun facts to know about me: I speak fluent Spanish because I attended a language immersion program at a public school in Maryland. I played soccer in college and still play soccer and hockey whenever I get the chance.

How to reach me: klevin@chalkbeat.org

What I’m looking forward to the most about the 22-23 school year: I’m hoping to visit a lot of classrooms. One of the joys of my job is watching teaching and learning up close.

Tracie Mauriello covers state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan. She loves to volunteer at a cat cafe.

Tracie Mauriello, state education policy reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan.

Where I’ve been: I came here three years ago for a Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan and fell in love with the state. Previously, I worked in Washington, D.C. and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, covering state and federal politics and policy for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where I was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team. Before that I was an education writer for newspapers in Ohio and in my home state of Connecticut.

What I do: I help Chalkbeat readers understand how laws affect them. I spend a lot of time trying to understand the nuances of policies, but what I really like to do is visit schools to see how decisions made in Lansing change what happens in classrooms.

Fun facts to know about me: I volunteer at a cat cafe. I directed a children’s theater company. I have performed on stage in front of three presidents, once in a beaver suit. I can beat you at Ms. Pac-Man.

How to reach me: tmauriello@chalkbeat.org

What I’m looking forward to the most about the 22-23 school year: I’m looking forward to a close-up look at some of the innovative uses that districts find for federal COVID-relief money. I also hope this year to learn more about the particular challenges facing rural districts.

Krishnan Anantharaman never took a drum lesson, but spent four years on the drumline for the very competitive South Brunswick H.S. Viking Marching Band in New Jersey, working his way up from cymbals to snare.

Krishnan Anantharaman, story editor

Where I’ve been: I grew up in New York City and New Jersey, and worked at The Wall Street Journal, Automotive News and PolitiFact. I’ve lived in suburban Detroit for two decades.

What I do: I work with the reporters and bureau chiefs in Detroit and Tennessee to develop and refine story ideas; edit stories for mechanics, clarity and structure; and prepare stories for publication.

Fun facts to know about me: I help administer free and fair elections for the City of Pontiac as a poll inspector and precinct co-chair. And I’m fond of vintage “Sesame Street.”

How to reach me: kanantharaman@chalkbeat.org

What I’m looking forward to the most about the 22-23 school year: Watching the youngest of my three children go through his last year of high school and discover what’s next.

New York schools see a big disconnect between spending and test scores. Why?

2022-08-26T11:00:00+00:00

This is the second in a two-part project on school funding. Read the first piece — focusing on national data on whether students in poverty receive adequate funding for their education — here.

New York state leads the country in spending on public schools, and it’s not particularly close. In 2020, the state spent over $25,000 per public school student, $4,000 more than its closest competition, Connecticut.

For many of the state’s elected officials, this first-in-the-nation status is a point of pride worth maintaining. The latest state budget, boasted Gov. Kathy Hochul, “includes historic investments that will make a difference in people’s lives now and for years to come, including a record investment in our public schools.”

But New York doesn’t lead the way in educational performance. On national math and reading tests, its students only score in the middle of the pack.

On their own, the middling scores don’t prove that New York’s high spending is ill-advised or failing to help students. The state might be doing far worse without it. Or the resources might be helping students in ways that aren’t captured on tests.

But as more and more research has shown that more money typically leads to better schools, New York’s outlier status amounts to a discomfiting puzzle — one that state leaders, education officials, and experts who study this issue can’t fully explain. Figuring out how money can best be used to help students is crucial right now, as officials in New York and across the U.S. have large sums of COVID relief money to spend and large gaps in student learning to close.

“We spend a lot of money in this state,” said Amy Ellen Schwartz, a professor at Syracuse University who has studied New York schools. “The question we should be asking is, are we spending it in the best way to get the most for our kids?”

An Empire State gap between spending and test scores

A recent study asked a crucial but difficult-to-answer question: How much would every school district in the country need to spend to get students to average proficiency in reading and math?

Then it compared that number to what districts actually spend. In many places, particularly high-poverty areas, schools aren’t spending nearly enough, claimed the research, which was released by the Shanker Institute, a think tank affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers.

Few New York districts had this problem, though.

Nearly every district in the state was spending enough to get adequate scores, according to the Shanker Institute study. In fact, most were spending far more.

Based on these spending levels, the researchers predict that most New York districts would perform well above average on national fourth and eighth grade math and reading exams, while New York City would be above average for a large city.

In fact, students in the state as a whole performed at roughly the national average on federal exams taken in 2019. Students in New York City, the best-funded large district in the country, also scored at about the average for a large American city and below the overall national average.

The Shanker Institute study is an estimate taking into account a variety of important factors — including student poverty, the share of students with disabilities, and cost of living. But it doesn’t look at what happens when a school loses or gains money. That’s probably a better way of showing whether dollars improve schools, and recent national research taking this approach has generally shown that, yes, money does make a difference.

At least three studies looking at funding changes in certain New York districts have found that, too. “This money doesn’t seem to be wasted,” said Lucy Sorensen, a University at Albany researcher and author of two of the papers.

Still, Sorensen says she’s not sure why New York’s national scores aren’t higher. “I can’t answer the underlying puzzle,” she said.

Money could be buying improvements beyond test scores

New York officials say the Shanker Institute research puts too much emphasis on test scores, missing out on other ways the state’s spending benefits students.

“The authors do not recognize that multiple measures are needed to measure the effectiveness of educational programs and successfully prepare students for college, careers, and civic engagement,” said JP O’Hare, a spokesperson for the state’s education department.

O’Hare, who declined to make someone available for an interview, did not provide any data to indicate that New York performs better using other metrics.

In fact, New York doesn’t excel on one obvious measure: high school graduation. The state’s graduation rate was actually slightly below the national average in 2019. These sorts of comparisons are tricky, though, because different states have different graduation standards. New York, unlike many others, has required students to pass a battery of exams to earn a diploma.

New York’s spending could be also buying other benefits: more extracurricular activities, school-based health services, new buildings, or a variety of non-academic classes.

Bruce Baker, a professor at the University of Miami and lead author of the Shanker Institute report, acknowledged the limits of focusing on test scores. Schools spending more, he said, often “offer lots of different types of programs — more sports and arts,” he said. “That’s not picked up in the outcomes.”

It’s also possible data quirks in spending or student achievement might be skewing comparisons, Baker said. For instance, New York City students seem to perform relatively better on state exams than national tests.

Or perhaps there are unique factors in the state that make it harder to account for schools’ costs or student needs.

“The one-size-fits-all approach in this study doesn’t necessarily apply to New York State and in particular to New York City,” said Democratic state Sen. John Liu, who oversees the Senate’s committee on New York City education. He pointed to potentially higher transportation costs in the city.

Still, he said, “We should pay attention to the findings of this study and see what can be done to further improve educational outcomes.”

Segregation, spending choices could hurt New York test scores

Other potential explanations for New York’s less-than-stellar test scores are more concerning.

One possibility is that something about New York’s school system is pushing down scores. For instance, New York State schools are among the most racially segregated in the nation, which could be hurting students of color.

Some advocates also point to the state’s limited oversight of school curriculum. “Our policy landscape doesn’t really have strong policies that say math instruction must be [this], or reading instruction should look like [this],” said Dia Bryant, executive director at The Education Trust-New York, a group that focuses on the education of disadvantaged students.

Another explanation is simply that the state’s schools aren’t spending money as effectively as they could be.

Some research suggests that students in poverty are most likely to benefit from additional funding. But unlike many states, New York’s high-poverty districts don’t get meaningfully more money than their affluent counterparts. In fact, until recently, those better-off schools tended to get more funding.

The state’s particularly high-spending, affluent districts may feel less pressure to allocate money in a way that improves test scores. “The districts that tend to be most inefficient are small, wealthy, affluent suburbs,” said Baker. “Because they can.”

New York may also be investing in areas without a clear payoff in student learning. It’s one of the few states that requires all of its teachers to obtain master’s degrees, and districts typically boost pay once they do. But research has found only a tenuous link between master’s degrees and effectiveness in the classroom.

New York also spends larger sums than most other states on teacher benefits, including retirement. Teachers value these benefits, but some research suggests that money for base salaries may be more effective for recruiting teachers.

The list of potential explanations could go on.

“I don’t think we’ve done nearly enough work … digging into the particulars around differences in how dollars are spent and trying to tie that to outcomes,” said Josh McGee, an education researcher at the University of Arkansas.

That’s a problem in New York and elsewhere. Even researchers who have found that money matters for student learning agree that how it is spent matters, too. But there is little research-based guidance for educators about how to best spend additional funding, like the unprecedented sum of federal aid schools are now using to help students recover from the pandemic.

Meanwhile, New York advocates and officials are approaching the Shanker Institute study, as well as the broader questions about money and outcomes, gingerly.

“The report does point to things that we should be looking out for in both funding as well as the operation for school systems,” said Liu, even as he questioned some of its conclusions.

Jasmine Gripper, executive director of Alliance For Quality Education, an education advocacy organization that has pushed for more school funding in New York, said this research shouldn’t dissuade policymakers from investing in high-poverty schools, particularly since the state’s highest spending districts are affluent ones.

“Are we spending the most on the students in the highest poverty areas? We are not. Are we spending most on the students with the greatest needs? We are not,” she said.

At the moment, New York lawmakers are continuing to pump money into its schools, recently agreeing to fully fund a formula that sends more money to high-needs schools.

They’re also pushing New York City to use its increased state funding to reduce class sizes — an investment with some much-debated research behind it — through a bill that hasn’t yet been signed by Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has opposed it.

“It’s not about just giving New York school districts a blank check — it’s also about making sure they adhere to basic standards that have been set forth,” Liu said of the bill. “The most basic of this standard is a sound, basic education, which includes class sizes and teacher quality.”

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

Perseverance and ‘productive struggle’ at Denver’s Castro Elementary

2022-08-25T21:29:36+00:00

Before school started this week, two numbers — 85 and 69 — showed that the perseverance of teachers and students at Castro Elementary in southwest Denver was paying off.

The numbers mean that as the pandemic stretches into a fourth school year, Castro is doing a phenomenal job of helping students make progress, even if most are still far from grade level.

“The staff and the teachers here just didn’t give up,” said Patricia Nestorick, who has worked at Castro for 13 years and is now the dean of instruction. “They just kept digging in.”

The numbers are known as growth scores. They show how much progress students made on state math and literacy tests from year to year.

Castro’s scores show that its students made more progress in math than 85% of comparable Colorado students — defined as those with similar test scores the year before. Nearly all of Castro’s students are Hispanic and from low-income families. The school also has a bilingual program where students learn primarily in Spanish.

In literacy, Castro students made more progress than 69% of comparable students. The high growth is even more important because most Castro students are behind: only 21% of third- through fifth-graders scored on grade level in literacy, while just 7% scored that way in math.

“We have a lot of work to do still,” said Principal Gilberto Muñoz. “But I think the growth scores really do show we’re at least moving in the right direction.”

Despite the challenges created by the pandemic, Castro Elementary’s students have made higher-than-average progress in math and literacy.

The challenges at Castro are similar to those facing elementary schools across the city: declining enrollment, pandemic-related trauma, and academic gaps. And their strategies for addressing them involve all the latest education buzzwords: accelerated learning, culturally and linguistically responsive education, and social emotional learning.

The strategies are easy to say and hard to do. But Castro has been working on some of them for years. Here’s what they looked like on the third day of school this year.

Third graders decorated the white covers of their brand new journals, which teacher Ryan Fune described as a place for them to process their private thoughts if they’re having a bad day so they can be their best student, do their best thinking, and have their “healthiest heart.”

Fifth graders read quotes from the book “Esperanza Rising,” about a young Mexican girl whose family goes to California during the Great Depression in search of work. They used the quotes to infer the theme of their first literacy unit, which is about human rights.

And on a giant piece of sticky paper, second graders made a class contract — a set of promises for how they’d treat each other. A boy named James suggested the teacher add “patient.”

“Yeah, of course!” teacher Katherine Matthews said. “When somebody is needing some ‘think time,’ we’re not going to jump in right away and give them the answer, right? That takes away from their learning. It’s good for them to be able to work through it on their own.”

Muñoz said allowing students “think time” is an example of what culturally responsive education looks like in the classroom. It’s more than having books, such as “Esperanza Rising,” with characters that share students’ cultural identity. It’s also about having high expectations for students who have historically been marginalized in school.

“Teachers are nurturers and they want to help their kids,” Muñoz said. “But we want to make sure that doesn’t come at the expense of kids learning and grappling with a concept and struggling a little bit — just that productive struggle.”

Dr. Ryan Fune, right, helps Julian, 8, center, with a writing assignment during his third-grade class.

Fifth-grade teacher Maddi Dullea admitted that can be hard to do, especially when students have gaps in their learning because of the pandemic. She and other Castro staff said they felt deflated this summer when they saw how few Castro students scored on grade level on the state tests.

But the high growth scores, which were released later, lifted their spirits.

Dullea attributed the growth to “working with kids on persevering through challenges.”

“I had a lot of kids who, while they were motivated and wanted to do well, would feel really defeated because they were given a big challenge and were missing the skills they needed to do it successfully,” Dullea said of her students last year.

When they were faced with a tough problem, she’d tell her students to ask themselves: “Is this too overwhelming? Or is it just challenging right now and I can keep going?”

That’s exactly what Castro plans to do this year.

Melanie Asmar is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado, covering Denver Public Schools. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

As pandemic aid runs out, America is set to return to a broken school funding system

2022-08-25T11:00:00+00:00

This is the first in a two-part project on school funding. Read the second piece — focusing on New York state’s disconnect between spending and test scores — here.

Deirdre Pilch has spent much of her career as an educator frustrated.

The superintendent of schools in Greeley, Colorado — a high-poverty district 50 miles north of Denver — has never felt she’s had the money to provide students the education they deserve.

Remarkably, it took a pandemic to change this.

After COVID first hit, experts predicted financial ruin for schools. But state budgets recovered quickly. Then, the federal government sent nearly $190 billion to schools — an unprecedented sum.

“That funding feels like I can actually now do some of the work I’ve needed to do, really my entire career in Colorado,” said Pilch.

Now, each of Greeley’s 27 schools has at least a part-time counselor and social worker. There is a small army of attendance workers who try to track down missing high school students. Class sizes are smaller. Every student has a Chromebook. The summer program has grown.

The federal dollars turned out to be a radical experiment in funding schools based on student need, with Pilch and school officials in high-poverty areas across the country receiving a stunning windfall. But the money is now dwindling and must be budgeted in the next two years. That means the country is hurtling back toward a status quo that defies the advice of experts of many stripes.

“When the COVID relief funds run out, that big gain in school funding equity will evaporate if states don’t step up,” said Zahava Stadler of The Education Trust, an advocacy group that focuses on disadvantaged children.

There’s significant agreement that low-income children need more funding for their education — perhaps a lot more

Before the pandemic, children from low-income families attended school districts with roughly the same amount of funding as non-poor children did, according to two recent studies.

That’s an unheralded victory. Students in poverty aren’t typically getting less, as is widely assumed.

In another sense, though, the victory is a hollow one. Experts who study these issues say that the same amount of funding isn’t enough: Schools serving low-income students should get more.

“The field has come to a consensus that high-poverty kids need more resources than advantaged kids,” said Lori Taylor, a school finance researcher at Texas A&M University.

Even some right-of-center organizations and researchers who question spending more as a strategy for improving schools, agree.

“You want to pay more money to kids that need more help, that are needy in various ways,” said Eric Hanushek, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution and a prominent skeptic of school funding increases.

How much more do high-poverty schools need? Here, there’s no agreement. But one recent study is the first effort to come up with a nationwide estimate.

Researchers from the Shanker Institute, a think tank affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, statistically estimated how much money it would take to get every district in the country to recent average scores on national reading and math tests.

Some experts, including Hanushek, are skeptical of this study’s approach. Even researchers who use it acknowledge that it’s more like a statistically informed prediction than an exact science. Some districts that spend a lot on schools, including many in New York, don’t actually achieve the average outcomes that this study would predict.

But it’s a useful starting point for discussions about how much more children in poverty and their schools need.

The study’s conclusion: High-poverty districts in most of the country need more money to even get close to the performance of affluent districts.

In Greeley, it would take $2,000 more per student. Baltimore needs nearly $10,000 more per pupil. Schools in Selma, Alabama, need a breathtaking $17,000 more per kid. The typical high-poverty district needs close to $6,000 more, the study estimates.

Many factors drive costs up. Rural districts and those in high cost-of-living areas generally need more. Another particularly important factor is child poverty.

In total, it would cost $105 billion to fill in all these funding gaps every year — a major increase on the $771 billion in funding K-12 schools received in 2020. And that probably underestimates the cost, since the research is based on data before pandemic-induced learning loss.

“This is a tremendous figure,” wrote the Shanker Institute researchers. “It may even sound like an impossible gap to bridge.”

Poverty presents educational obstacles for children

Another way of thinking about that $105 billion number is as a rough estimate of unequal opportunity outside of school facing children from low-income families.

Consider: Children in poverty are more likely to be exposed to pollution and lead, which affects brain development. They’re more likely to have asthma that causes them to miss school frequently.

They’re more likely to be homeless, face eviction, or move around a lot, switching schools frequently.

They’re more likely to be exposed to violence.

They’re less likely to have enough healthy food to eat every day.

They’re less likely to receive preventative medical and dental care and less likely to receive needed treatment for mental health issues.

They’re less likely to be raised by two parents.

They’re less likely to have internet access at home to do homework.

They’re less likely to go to summer camps or to visit museums, among other enrichment activities.

Most of these factors have been linked to lower reading and math achievement. “It turns out that one of the biggest predictors of student performance is things that happen outside of school and not just the effects of school environments,” said Margot Jackson, a Brown University sociologist who studies inequality and child poverty.

These and other hurdles in mind, $105 billion doesn’t seem so surprising.

The point of listing the challenges that many children in poverty face is to help policymakers address them, including by improving how schools are funded — not to stigmatize low-income families.

The difference between low-income and affluent parents is not the aspirations they have for their children, said Jackson, but simply the money they have to buy things like safe and stable housing or enriching summer programs.

“Families across the economic distribution have highly similar values about parenting,” said Jackson.

Child poverty is not inevitable. Giving families money can directly reduce or eliminate it, and improves children’s outcomes in school, too.

But America’s child poverty numbers are going up now that the expanded child tax credit for families, which provided $3,000 annually per school-age child, has expired.

Benjamin Mosley, the principal of Glenmount Elementary/Middle School in Baltimore, is aware of how poverty affects many of his students.

Poverty affects schools, but funding can help level the playing field

On a bright spring morning earlier this year, Benjamin Mosley, the principal of Glenmount Elementary/Middle School in Northeast Baltimore, stood outside, welcoming students as they filed in. As he walked through the hallways, he greeted students by name, fist-bumping, hugging, cajoling, asking about their lives.

Mosley, a former middle school English teacher, has been the principal of the school for eight years, and during that time he’s prioritized creating a warm environment. In the most recent school survey, the vast majority of parents who responded gave the school high marks.

Mosley doesn’t focus on the fact that most of the children at Glenmount come from low-income families. “I don’t know what child is in poverty,” he said. “I hold every student accountable with high expectations.”

But Mosley is also aware of all of the ways that poverty affects the school. The housing instability so many families face, for one, leads more students to switch in and out of Glenmount.

“We had a kid enroll last week!” he exclaimed, speaking in his office with two weeks left in the school year. “It impacts the psyche of teachers.”

Mosley estimates that only about a quarter of students end up as Glenmount “life-longers,” meaning they remain in the school from kindergarten through eighth grade. That’s hard on the kids who are regularly switching schools, and a challenge for teachers, who have to adapt to those who enter class in the middle of a year. Research has found that having students enter mid-year disrupts learning of other kids in the class.

On that morning, Mosley encountered another challenge. He popped into the class of a middle school math teacher and found students barely paying attention to a warm-up exercise that seemed more appropriate for early elementary students.

“The students weren’t engaged,” Mosley said as he stepped out of the teacher’s classroom, frustrated. “He’s talking to himself.”

This teacher had been struggling for some time, and Mosley was wrestling with what to do, as he wasn’t sure whether he could find a better replacement. “What’s worse: Someone who’s ineffective at teaching or an empty classroom?” Mosley wondered aloud in the hallway.

Research has long found that there is essentially a tax on schools with more low-income and more Black and Hispanic students: Those schools have a harder time finding and keeping teachers, a key reason that they usually have more inexperienced educators.

The list of extra costs high-poverty schools face goes on. Children in poverty are more likely to be identified as having a disability, which entitles them to additional services.

Low-income children may also experience more trauma outside school, which means schools often need more counselors.

“They can come to me, but there are times it’s like a waiting room in here,” said Jeanette Placeres, a counselor at Glenmount.

Of course, these challenges show up in middle class and affluent schools too, but they are more prevalent in poor areas — and funding typically does not keep pace.

The Baltimore area is racially and economically segregated in part due to a history of government policies that concentrated low-income Black families in certain parts of the city.

Today, about 1 in 3 Baltimore children fall below the federal poverty line, which is one of the highest rates in the state and the country. For a family of four, poverty is defined as having a household income of just $26,500. Many other families are just above that threshold.

That’s the main reason the Shanker study estimates Baltimore needs so much more funding than surrounding districts, despite the fact that it already gets somewhat more than nearby schools.

“Due in no small part to the segregation-fueled concentration of poverty within its borders, Baltimore City is a large peninsula of severely inadequate funding,” wrote the researchers.

Additional money for schools now can only do so much to address the cascading consequences of poverty and segregation. But recent studies suggest that when schools find themselves with more funding, students benefit. Their math and reading scores tend to improve, and they are more likely to graduate from high school and enroll in college. These gains tend to be small but meaningful, and often students in poverty benefit the most from additional school spending.

Many parents also believe that money can make a difference. For years, the most common complaint about public schools from parents and teachers has been a lack of resources, polling shows. Another recent poll found that three-quarters of parents were supportive of providing extra funding for students with additional needs.

“Do we need more funding? Absolutely,” said Terrence Allen, who walks his second-grade grandson to Glenmount every morning. “You get more money, you can do more.”

To be clear, how dollars are spent is crucial too. Some high-poverty districts seem to have enough money but still see achievement lag. Certainly, in many cases, schools could spend money more effectively.

Take Mosley’s struggle to find a better math teacher. Yes, higher salaries for all teachers would probably help. But so could using existing funds to raise pay for teaching roles in hard-to-fill subjects like math, something that is not permitted by the city’s teachers’ contract.

There is no real tension between these ideas, though. Additional money could be paired with efforts to use those funds as effectively as possible.

“It’s not just money — it’s money spent well, invested well, with a lot of other things,” said Sonja Santelises, CEO of Baltimore public schools.

At Glenmount, Principal Mosley has used funding for extra support staff for his student, as well as new programs.

Schools brace for return to broken system

At this point, it’s impossible to issue a verdict on the COVID-era experiment in pumping money into high-poverty schools. There’s no evidence yet of how much of a difference the money has made, and tracking systems created by the federal government and states have been of limited use.

To a person, though, educators like Mosley say the dollars have been essential for addressing both the pandemic’s health and academic challenges.

At Glenmount, the funding has brought in extra support staff who can work with students in small groups, new science and social studies teachers so those courses are available all year for middle schoolers, and a new drama program, Mosley said. The district as a whole has used the money to add summer programming, hire mental health staff, and upgrade buildings, among many other things.

“Without the money, we would have been in chaos regarding coverage and following COVID protocols,” Mosley said. “We could not have afforded the after-school enrichment and instructional programs that were led by classroom teachers.”

But the last of the federal money has to be budgeted by September 2024, and once schools fall off that funding cliff, they will likely land back on the old funding structure.

The reasons are predictable, even understandable. Many voters don’t want higher taxes. State legislators from better-off communities advocate for their own local schools. (This cuts across political lines, with many purportedly progressive states funding schools in a not-at-all progressive way.)

Improving funding systems is certainly not financially or politically impossible. Maryland, for instance, approved additional funding for high-poverty schools last year, which is another reason Mosley finds himself flush with funding. But state-level politics are often challenging.

Pilch, the Greeley superintendent, says there have long been discussions in Colorado over how to improve school funding. But voters have rejected tax raises to increase funding, making it politically fraught to overhaul the formula. Just recently, an effort to put a school funding measure on the ballot failed.

“Every year we talk about the state formula, and every year it becomes apparent it’s too complex to try to change it,” she said.

States spend wildly different amounts on education, and low-income families are often concentrated in states that spend less. The disparities this creates are hard to solve without more federal funding.

But President Biden’s proposal to double funding for Title I, the formula that sends money to high-poverty schools, has gone nowhere. Instead, Congress approved only an anemic bump. This year, Biden has once again proposed a large increase, but that’s seen as a long shot.

So schools and educators are bracing for a return to the old system.

“Money is a variable — it’s not the end all, be all,” said Mosley. “But without the money, you’re already starting the race miles back from everyone else.”

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

Chicago schools chief unveils his blueprint for bouncing back from the pandemic

2022-08-24T21:06:09+00:00

Chicago schools chief Pedro Martinez says a new three-year “blueprint” will help the district emerge stronger from the pandemic’s disruption.

Martinez offered a high-level overview of his plan at the school board’s monthly meeting Wednesday. The plan promises to improve services for students with disabilities, strengthen career and technical education, make grading and school admissions fairer, and expand after-school and summer programs, among 10 academic initiatives the district will tackle in the coming years.

The first order of business, though: a push to revitalize the district’s neighborhood schools, with more details on the blueprint’s inaugural initiative coming next month.

“The only reason I came to CPS is to reimagine our neighborhood schools,” said Martinez, who voiced particular concern about the district’s shrinking high schools.

The blueprint is Martinez’s bid to put his own stamp on the direction of the district as he enters his second year at its helm. He has said that in Chicago the pandemic dealt a setback for a district showing promising growth in graduation rates and test scores, widening racial and income gaps in academic outcomes.

Fewer Chicago Public Schools students, across all racial groups, met state standards last year, according to 2020-21 data presented by district officials Wednesday. Gaping disparities between racial groups continue to persist. For example, less than 6% of Black students met state math standards, while 53% of Asian American students did.

The gaps widened at the high school level, with a quarter of Black students meeting reading and writing benchmarks on the SAT, compared to 77% of white students — a disparity that increased by more than 10 percentage points compared to the cusp of the pandemic.

Experts have cautioned that comparing pandemic-era and pre-pandemic scores is tricky because of significant disruption to test-taking during the outbreak and demographic changes in which students took the test. But Chicago officials said the data does offer insights into the pandemic’s damage — and fills them with a sense of urgency.

“Clearly we see that what worked in the past may no longer be sufficient,” said Bodgana Chkoumbova, the district’s academics chief.

Although the district was able to stem the fallout this past school year, Martinez said, academic and mental health challenges remain.

“This blueprint really is a response to that,” he said. “We now have an opportunity for innovation, for refocusing, for reimagining.”

Along with the blueprint’s “reimagining” initiatives, the district is vowing to streamline its operations — ensuring cleaning schools and feeding and transporting students run more smoothly — and to rebuild trust with families. Officials said families and school communities will drive the fleshing-out and rollout of the plan.

“We recognize that some of the decisions of the past have left some communities feeling a breakdown of trust with the district,” said Fatima Cooke, the district’s deputy chief of schools.

Martinez has framed that pandemic disruption as an opportunity to reimagine learning and to address longstanding inequities that the COVID outbreak highlighted.

Amid a youth mental health crisis the pandemic deepened, for instance, schools can take on a larger role in providing social-emotional and trauma support to students. After the pandemic accelerated enrollment declines, districts can explore innovative models for shrinking neighborhood schools instead of letting them limp along or closing them. Some small high schools, for example, could become career academies focused on specific high-demand industries, from aviation to cybersecurity to construction, Martinez has said.

The blueprint builds upon the five-year vision for the district that Martinez’ predecessor, Janice Jackson, had unveiled on the eve of the pandemic, but adjusts for the fallout from the past three years.

Martinez, the former superintendent of San Antonio Independent School District, took over Chicago’s public schools in late September last year, amid a challenging return to full-time in-person instruction and the delta variant surge. He is a district graduate who served as its finance chief during former mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration. He has said pandemic recovery proved elusive last year as schools grappled with staffing shortages, a rise in disruptive student behaviors, and other issues — but the current school year offers a much more promising outlook.

As part of his three-year plan, Martinez also said the district will double down on early literacy, and expand world and dual language programs, with a goal of ensuring every student in the district becomes bilingual. The plan also covers efforts to rethink school accountability and build a more equitable school admissions process, which predate Martinez’s arrival in the district.

Martinez once again said that more robust career preparation, ideally beginning in the middle grades and including meaningful hands-on opportunities such as internships, is “the future of education.”

A recent Chalkbeat Chicago series on career and technical education showed that data on how the roughly 15,000 students participating in these programs do is limited and often unreliable. Still, it suggests a relatively small portion take part in key opportunities — from work-based learning to industry certification to college credit courses — that are considered the gold standard for today’s career training programs. Those opportunities are uneven among different campuses and parts of the city, and are especially limited for the city’s alternative high school students.

Chicago and many other large urban districts are raising the profile of their high school CTE programs amid a growing reckoning that the “College for All” push of the past decade has left many students behind.

School board members offered positive feedback on the plan, particularly what they described as a genuine effort to bring in family and employee input, including at back-to-school gatherings earlier this month. Some pushed for details on initiatives under the plan, but district leaders said they have more public engagement to do before spelling out specific solutions.

“Even when we have the right solutions,” Martinez said, “the way we implement them and the way we work with communities has to be different from what we have done in the past.”

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.

On Chicago’s first day of school, a mix of enthusiasm and jitters

2022-08-22T23:44:02+00:00

Outside Falconer Elementary school on Chicago’s Northwest side shortly after 7:30 a.m., fourth grader Sebastian Benitez beamed with pride as he shook hands with Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

Surrounded by his mom and younger siblings, the politics lover dressed in a blue polo and sweater said he hoped to get straight As, after bringing home one B last year.

“I’m going to try to boost that up,” he said. “I’m going to try to do better.”

Like Benitez, Lightfoot and her hand-picked schools CEO Pedro Martinez are hoping for a better year, after two tumultuous ones navigating the pandemic’s massive disruption to learning.

“I expect this to be one of the CPS strongest years ever,” Martinez said during a mid-morning press conference at Excel Academy of South Shore, an alternative school on the South Side.

The district is pledging to redouble efforts to have the recovery year officials hoped for last year, before COVID surges, staffing challenges, and other issues emerged.

Martinez will soon outline a three-year blueprint for the district that aims to strengthen neighborhood schools, career and technical education, services for students with disabilities, and more.

Despite notable challenges, Martinez said he and his team were working to ensure student safety, up-to-date COVID-19 protocols, and providing students with high quality teachers and staff.

Staffing challenges still linger

According to publicly available data, there are roughly 3,000 additional positions district wide compared to pre-pandemic and more dollars for professional development.

However, not all additional positions are filled. As of Monday, Martinez said the district had 900 vacant teacher positions districtwide, an uptick from last year when it had 600.

“We’re in a much better place than last year,” Martinez said, while acknowledging that hiring is ongoing. “We’re still hiring bus drivers. We’re still hiring custodial staff. We’re still hiring crossing guards.”

The district is planning to deploy long-term substitutes, Martinez added.

The tenor of the first day of classes also signaled a more cordial tone between district leadership and the teachers union.

Outside Back of the Yards College Preparatory High School, Chicago Teachers Union leaders and members suggested a new era of more cooperation with the district is within reach.

“There’s a great opportunity for setting a fresh start,” said Rebecca Martinez, the union’s director of organizing. “I think that’s what’s wonderful about the beginning of a school year.”

Others spoke about the difficulties of filling some vacant positions, particularly for educators and support staff who work with students with disabilities and English language learners.

Maggie Slavin, a teacher starting her second year at Back of the Yards, said the high school is entering the new school year fully staffed with special education educators and paraprofessionals. But she worries that’s not the case at all CPS schools. She urged district officials to streamline and speed up the process for hiring and onboarding new staff.

Music teacher Felix Ponce called on the district to deliver on promises to invest in more equitable access to arts education — an issue he said the district and union leaders should tackle together.

Recent Back of the Yards graduate Britney Quiroz, now a student at New York University, urged leaders to stay tuned in to what students are telling them they need — and encouraged fellow students to get involved.

“Student voice is crucial to the growth of our community,” said Quiroz. “The youth are gifted with the ability to reimagine.”

Some students face bus rides longer than an hour

Over the summer, district officials took steps to avoid busing issues that last year left students waiting for rides that sometimes never came. Martinez admitted Monday that hundreds of students are still facing bus rides that are more than an hour each way.

Union president Stacy Davis Gates alluded to those challenges during a speech at the City Club, noting that some children with disabilities will need to ride the school bus “for hours,” she said.

Despite a national shortage of bus drivers, the district has managed to route over 15,600 students across CPS. It continues to work to hire more drivers by increasing hourly wages, offering alternative modes of transportations such as taxis, and monthly stipends for parents.

Families who made transportation requests after July will need to wait a few weeks. About 80% of routes were under an hour, but Martinez noted that he was looking at a percentage of routes that are longer and would be looking at opportunities for improvements to those longer commutes.

“I ask families to be patient with us,” Martinez said. “Give us a couple of weeks. There’s going to be opportunities for us to get more efficient on the routes.”

Safety concerns heightened after mass shootings, city violence

Davis Gates offered a starkly different take on the state of Chicago Public Schools than Martinez in his own City Club address last week, when the CPS chief said the pandemic had disrupted but not broken a district on the rise — with record graduation rates and rapid academic growth.

Davis Gates said a decade of school closures and experiments in education reform and school turnarounds had failed students.

“We should all be disappointed in ourselves,” she said. “That’s an F.”

Offering up an alternative to Martinez’s yet-to-be-released blueprint, Davis Gates said the union would advocate for beefing up arts and athletic programs, and expanding the sustainable community schools model, in which campuses partner with community organizations to offer students added support.

Martinez and Lightfoot touted the steps the district plans to take this year to support students’ mental health and get them re-engaged in school.

While the festive mood filled schools, some parents said school safety weighed heavily in their minds following the mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas and Highland Park earlier this year.

Jonathan Martinez and Natasha Alcedo, parents of a fifth grade Falconer student, were nervous about the “unfortunate” shootings, but hopeful for a safe and blessed school year.

“As parents, we always get nervous when children go back to school,” Alcedo said. “We hope that they’re learning well and that the teacher and kids are nice to them — along with any other safety precautions that we’re always worried about on a day to day basis.”

Jadine Chou, CPS’ chief of safety and security, said the district and multiple city agencies, including the Chicago Police Department and the city’s Office of Emergency Management, conducted a drill last week in preparation, Chou said. The district conducts over 3,800 drills every year, she noted.

The district has also implemented a new visitor management system, new safety video training, and expanding programs that go beyond physical safety to offer social, emotional, and mental health support, Chou said.

“We take safety and security in CPS very seriously,” Lightfoot said.

Chicago Public School CEO Pedro Martinez, center left, and Mayor Lori Lightfoot, center right, greet students on the first day of classes after summer break at Falconer Elementary School in city’s Belmont Cragin neighborhood.

As Lightfoot and Martinez greeted families at Falconer, they peppered students with questions about their first-day hopes and offered compliments on haircuts and lunch boxes.

Hundreds of students and parents awaited the opening bell — a signal of the official end of summer for students — including Ethan Duran, his mother, and two siblings. The third grader has been eager to return to the classroom, in part, to play on the newly installed playground.

His mother, Soledad Galvan, was cautious about the return to school. She said unknown questions around the monkeypox virus and making sure schools were secure “no matter what” were top of mind for her.

Despite those concerns, she is hopeful for a good year for her three children.

So is her son, who eyed the playground and said: “I’m excited!”

Mauricio Peña is a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago, covering K-12 schools. Contact Mauricio at mpena@chalkbeat.org.

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.

When students don’t show up, attendance detectives are on the case

2022-08-22T22:55:40+00:00

The front door of the house was ajar when Domanic Castillo and Julia Madera approached. They were looking for a teenager named Jason who’d missed the first five days of school at Northridge High in Greeley.

The boy wasn’t there, but his father was — dusty from working on renovations inside.

After Castillo explained that they hadn’t seen Jason at school yet, the man quickly dialed the boy’s mother and handed over his cell phone. Madera took the call and, speaking in Spanish, learned that the family planned to send him to one of the district’s alternative schools.

The father of a no-show student hands his phone to an attendance advocate from Northridge High School during a home visit so she can talk to the boy’s mother.

“She said she meant to call,” Madera said as she and Castillo returned to her SUV, ready for the next stop on their home visit list.

Castillo and Madera are on the front lines of a push to get kids back in school after a pandemic that compounded many of the problems that contribute to chronic absenteeism, including student disengagement, academic struggle, and financial insecurity. The rationale is simple: Students have to be in class to learn.

The Greeley-Evans district in northern Colorado is one of many districts nationwide using federal COVID dollars to fund attendance-boosting efforts. The 22,000-student district is in the second year of a three-year, $644,000 contract with the Denver-based consulting company Zero Dropouts to track down missing high schoolers and help them catch up on coursework or credits.

Castillo, the Northridge cheer coach, and Madera, a former secretary at the school, are among 14 Zero Dropouts employees, also known as attendance advocates, embedded in the district’s five high schools this year. They have a host of responsibilities, from helping out in classes and monitoring hallways to calling and visiting the homes of absent students.

The job is part detective work, part social work, and part paperwork.

Before the pandemic, 35% of Greeley-Evans students were chronically absent, meaning they missed 10% or more of school days. That number rose to 40% during 2020-21, well above the state rate of 26%.

Lanny Hass, special projects manager at Zero Dropouts, said advocates help intervene quickly when warning signs pop up: an increase in absences, a grade that’s fallen to a D or F, or problematic behavior. The team works in tandem with counselors, mental health specialists, and other school staff.

During a home visit, Julia Madera, an attendance advocates from Northridge High School, talks by phone with the mother of a student who hasn’t shown up to school, as another advocate, Domanic Castillo, looks on.

“Attendance and course recovery are probably your two biggest challenges at a high school,” said Hass, who formerly served as a high school principal in nearby Loveland.

“The challenges are the same pre- post- and during the pandemic,” he said. “They’re just more pronounced now.”

No falling through the cracks

The four attendance advocates at Northridge High use a small room connected to the main office as their home base. It’s rimmed with computer workstations that often display color-coded spreadsheets showing period-by-period absences and other metrics that help them flag kids in danger of slipping away.

Along the wall is a cardboard box of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookie packs. Students zip into the room occasionally to grab a snack from the box.

On a recent morning, Erin Eckenrode, an advocate who previously worked as a juvenile probation officer, made phone calls looking for 54 students on that day’s no-show list. She talked to some parents, left messages for others, and sometimes hit dead ends.

She did solve a few mysteries. She found that two families had moved out of the district — one, refugees from Ukraine, had relocated to California, and another had moved to a nearby district.

Like high schoolers everywhere, Northridge students struggle for many reasons. They may find their classes boring, face chaotic home lives, or hold jobs that leave them too exhausted for school. About two-thirds of the school’s 1,200 students are eligible for federally subsidized meals, a measure of poverty.

“We have students here that work at the meat factory,” Eckenrode said. “They come to school and then they go home and sleep from four to eight and then they work the overnight shift cleaning the meat plant.”

A Northridge High School student works on course recovery through the online platform Edgenuity.

JBS, the world’s largest meat processing company, operates a plant in Greeley.

Attendance advocates say the pandemic has also eroded students’ social and self-advocacy skills. Teens are dialed into the digital world, but can be muted when it comes to real-life interactions.

Castillo, who helps monitor a class where students work online to catch up, said he’s seen students stare at a locked computer screen rather than raising their hands to ask for help.

“I just stopped going”

Last year, Angel, now a 10th grader at Northridge, missed lots of school — more than 300 class periods last time he checked.

Some of his friends had already dropped out, joining their fathers on construction jobs.

“I started ditching a lot towards the end,” he said. “Sometimes, I just feel school ain’t for me so I just stopped going.”

But Angel eventually came back, and he counts Shena Lopez, one of the school’s attendance advocates, as someone he can relate to at Northridge. Often, he’ll stop by to see her three times a day.

“We’ll just have a good conversation about my day or her day,” he said. “She’s nice to me, so I really like her.”

Connecting with kids in a non-teaching role creates a different relationship, said Lopez.

“It’s different work. We’re their friends. We’re here for them,” she said. “I always tell them I’m going to do whatever it takes to help you succeed.”

Sometimes, the moments that mean the most aren’t what attendance advocates expect.

When a girl named LaWren, a senior cheerleader, recently stopped by, she mentioned how surprised she was when Eckenrode pronounced her name right on the first try during an advisory class.

“Wow, you remembered that?” Eckenrode asked.

“That was like a life-changing moment,” LaWren said. “That’s the first time someone’s gotten my name right in my whole life, my whole 17 years.”

When calls and visits fail

Even when attendance advocates track students down, it can be difficult to get them back in class. Madera recalled one student she worked with last year who stopped coming to school completely after a couple months, his absences a long red stripe on his attendance chart.

Julia Madera and Domanic Castillo, attendance advocates from Northridge High School, approach the home of three high school students who missed the first five days of school

The 10th grader didn’t seem to want to go to Northridge or anywhere else. When she dropped off an application for an online program, he threw the papers on the floor. She ended up calling the family more than 20 times, visiting their home four times, and texting the boy’s mother a few times.

Nothing changed until she referred the teen to truancy court.

“I didn’t want it to be like that,” said Madera.

But the move worked, and the teen returned to Northridge last April — at first shy, with his hood pulled over his head. He attended consistently for the last two months and made up some of his missed work. This year, Madera spotted him on the first day of school, Aug. 11.

“Oh my God, he’s here,” she thought.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat, covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Staffing, attendance, behavior: 7 big issues facing schools this year

2022-08-18T19:24:19+00:00

After surviving two school years “completely veiled in the pandemic,” teacher Kathryn Vaughn says this year is off to a different start.

Her stress levels are down. COVID protocols are relaxed. Teachers are feeling hopeful.

“It feels a little lighter this year,” said Vaughn, who teaches elementary school art in Tennessee. “It really feels like we’re just kind of back to business as usual.”

Many students and educators are returning to classrooms this fall with a sense of cautious optimism. But there are still many open questions after last year’s staffing shortages, student absences, and mental health and behavioral challenges interfered with academic recovery efforts.

Here are seven big issues facing schools:

How will schools handle staffing challenges?

Some schools are stepping up efforts to boost student attendance this year.

First, some reassuring news: Despite what you might have heard, there isn’t evidence of an unprecedented teacher shortage nor an exodus of teachers fleeing the profession.

Yet some schools are struggling to staff up — partly for reasons that predate the pandemic. High-poverty schools have long had trouble recruiting and retaining teachers, and the supply of new educators has dwindled over the past decade as fewer people enroll in teacher-prep programs.

But the pandemic also has created new complications. Many districts used federal relief funds to add more positions, including tutors and extra substitutes, creating huge demand for a limited pool of workers. Schools also must compete with other employers for lower-wage workers, such as bus drivers and custodians, spurring some districts to hike their pay and offer bonuses.

Those hiring pressures are bearing down on Paterson Public Schools, a high-needs district in New Jersey. Some 130 teaching positions remain unfilled, or nearly 6% of the total teaching force, about three weeks before students return, said Luis Rojas, Jr., the district official who oversees human resources. While some vacancies are expected, Rojas said the number has surged as teachers take advantage of the tight labor market.

“They understand the demand,” he said, “and folks are jumping around from school district to school district trying to move up the salary ladder and get as much money as they can.”

The causes of the staffing crunch are ultimately less important than the effect on students. Schools that can’t find enough teachers might have to raise class sizes, hire less qualified candidates, assign teachers to subjects in which they have limited training, or rely on long-term substitutes — all of which can get in the way of learning.

“I would tell you that one is too many,” Rojas said, “when you have a vacancy.”

Will student attendance improve?

Chronic absenteeism rates rose last year, as quarantines and COVID infections kept students home for long stretches.

This year, the CDC is no longer recommending that students quarantine after an exposure. Many think that will help stabilize attendance, though it’s possible other factors could persist, such as lingering student disengagement.

In Los Angeles, about half of all students were chronically absent last year. Even without quarantines, 30% of students were chronically absent, up from 19% before the pandemic.

“That is just not acceptable,” Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said last week as he announced a new campaign to boost attendance by visiting student homes.

In Detroit, 77% of students were chronically absent last year, up from 62% the year before the pandemic began. There, the spike was especially concerning because the district has long worked to raise attendance. Now, officials are stepping up efforts to get kids to school.

Lisa Blackwell, a district attendance agent, is part of that. This summer, she’s been knocking on doors to talk up her elementary school’s new before- and after-school care options, and explaining to parents the COVID precautions her school is taking. She’s also planning incentives to reward students, like bringing an ice cream truck to school.

“I want to focus more so on getting the kids excited to go to school,” Blackwell said. “Maybe that will push parents a little bit more to say: ‘Well, my kid is very excited to be at school, so I as a parent, I’m held accountable to make sure they get there.’”

Can schools meet students’ mental health needs?

Inside classrooms across the country last year, the crisis in young people’s mental health was all too evident. After many months of social isolation and learning by laptop, some students were prone to outbursts, meltdowns, and squabbles.

“These kids are very anxious,” said Aaron Grossman, a fifth grade teacher in Reno, Nevada. “The uptick in behavior is very real.”

The distinct but overlapping challenges of worsening student behavior and mental health were fueled by the pandemic — and the stress, financial hardships, and trauma it caused. Federal survey data from this spring confirmed the twin crises: 70% of public school leaders reported an increase in students seeking mental health services during the pandemic, and 56% said disruptive student misconduct had become more common.

Efforts to address both issues have achieved mixed results. Some schools responded to student misbehavior by leaning into restorative practices, which aim for healing over punishment, but others issued more suspensions than usual. Many schools used federal aid to hire more counselors, social workers, and school psychologists, but not always as many were needed. In an April survey, just over half of school leaders said their schools could provide mental health services to all students who require them.

Nance Roy, the chief clinical officer of The Jed Foundation, which focuses on youth mental health and suicide prevention, says schools should encourage students to reach out for help and connect them with service providers.

“It’s developing a culture of care and compassion in schools,” she said, “where there’s no wrong door to walk through for support.”

What will public school enrollment look like?

U.S. public school enrollment held steady last fall, according to federal data released this week. That came after student head counts dropped 2.8% in the fall of 2020, following years of national enrollment growth.

Last year saw a spike in preschool and kindergarten enrollment, both of which dropped sharply when many districts turned to virtual schooling. The return of full-time in-person learning, declining COVID safety concerns, and additional family outreach likely helped boost those grades. But enrollment continues to fall among students in other elementary and middle school grades, a trend that could spell trouble for some districts as the extra funding from federal COVID relief packages dries up.

The issue weighs especially heavily on school leaders in big cities where the share of small schools has ballooned. Now, some are considering school closures, which can create schools that are less expensive to run and have a wider range of programs, but will mean more disruption for students who’ve faced a lot of it in recent years.

“There are really awful tradeoffs,” Shanthi Gonzales, a former school board member in Oakland, California, told Chalkbeat this summer.

Can schools get extra academic help to students who need it most?

Many schools are offering tutoring and other kinds of academic interventions, but it doesn’t always reach the students who need the most help.

The road to academic recovery is coming into focus as data rolls in. So far, elementary school students seem to be recovering more quickly than middle schoolers, but students of all ages are still significantly behind where they would normally be on reading and math tests.

Katrina Abe, a math teacher in Houston, has seen that. Last year, her eighth graders needed extra help with seventh grade topics like interpreting graphs and understanding rates of change. Those concepts are harder to grasp virtually and without working in groups, which happened if students learned online or missed a lot of class the prior year.

This year’s class is noticeably behind last year’s, she said, likely because half of them had three different math teachers in seventh grade. To help, Abe is planning small-group instruction every day and more turn-and-talk time so students can problem solve together. She’s also going to review some fifth and sixth grade standards.

“We’re going to just take that slow, depending on their level,” she said.

Many schools are offering tutoring and other kinds of academic support, but data on which recovery efforts are working is limited. More than half of public schools said they provided high-dosage tutoring in a recent federal survey — a highly effective strategy — but schools often have trouble staffing and scheduling that support. Some districts have turned to virtual tutoring, but it often doesn’t reach students who need help the most.

Meanwhile, educators are keeping their eyes on the larger crop of teens who are behind in credits needed to graduate.

Will schools ramp up COVID relief spending?

Schools have an unprecedented pot of federal money to spend, but many are still struggling to put it to use. There’s a few reasons for that. In some states, money got stuck in red tape and arrived late. Elsewhere, schools are having a hard time finding staff to fill new positions, or hiring contractors to make building repairs.

Some districts that have been slow to spend say they’re planning to ramp up spending over time. Indianapolis Public Schools, for example, had spent only 10% of its federal COVID aid as of late June, mostly to avoid staff cuts and buy PPE. But the district says it has budgeted all the money, including to tutor more students.

Still, this aid doesn’t always feel like new money. New York City recently gave schools the OK to use $100 million in federal aid that was previously set aside for academic recovery to pay teachers, after announcing $215 million in school budget cuts.

This money also has been difficult to track: School district spending plans vary widely in quality and there’s often limited data at the state and federal levels.

But some trends are apparent. When FutureEd, a Georgetown University think tank, looked at spending plans for some 5,000 school districts in June, it found a quarter of federal funds were budgeted for staff, and another quarter were earmarked for academic recovery. Just under a quarter was set aside for facilities and operations, mostly to upgrade heating, ventilation and cooling systems.

How will the culture wars shape what students learn?

America’s latest culture wars are being waged inside schools.

Seventeen states now ban lessons on racism or sexism, six states restrict teaching about sexuality and gender identity, and 18 states don’t allow transgender students to play on sports teams that match their gender.

Peyton, a 12th grader who is part of a support group for Black queer youth in Alabama, said the laws send a clear message to LGBTQ students.

“It’s just enforcing that you’re not normal and society does not want you here,” they said.

In addition to making some students feel less safe, the laws are limiting what they learn.

Some teachers have curtailed class discussions about the oppression of Black people and Native Americans, and some schools are restricting students’ access to books by or about people of color and LGBTQ Americans.

The Biden administration has proposed new rules to protect LGBTQ students, but conservative states are expected to challenge those rules in court. Meanwhile, school districts that run afoul of the new state laws already are facing consequences, and more attacks are likely: Florida’s new law allows parents to file complaints or even sue if they believe their children are taught banned topics.

But for every lesson that is challenged, many more will never be taught as schools seek to avoid sanctions and controversy. In a new survey, 1 in 4 teachers nationally — and nearly 1 in 3 teachers in states with curriculum restrictions — said higher-ups told them to steer clear of contentious topics in the classroom.

As Andrew Kirk, a high school teacher in Texas, told Chalkbeat: “This chilling effect is already happening.”

Jessica Blake contributed reporting.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

As Chicago gears up for a new school year, CEO previews plan to ‘reimagine’ learning

2022-08-17T21:19:43+00:00

Hundreds of thousands of children across Chicago head back to school on Monday — and district CEO Pedro Martinez is promising it will be the “strongest year ever.”

Martinez offered a sneak peak at how he plans to make that happen: a focus on early literacy, expanded dual language programs, a push to revive neighborhood schools, and stronger career and technical education. It’s all part of a three-year blueprint Chicago Public Schools will unveil in the coming weeks.

Martinez spoke Wednesday during a City Club of Chicago luncheon, as he nears his one-year anniversary at the district’s helm. “I am still new, folks, and I’m using that,” he joked.

Next week, Martinez will preside over kicking off a new school year in Chicago for the first time. Previously the superintendent of the San Antonio Independent School District, he took over the district in late September last year, just as it contended with a rocky return to full-time in-person instruction amid the delta COVID variant surge.

At the luncheon, he said his second school year will be a chance to double down on efforts to bounce back from the pandemic, and pledged “a strong recovery year that brings the district back to its pre-pandemic upward trajectory.”

Officials said more details on what the CEO described as a blueprint to reimagine learning in the district are coming soon. Martinez’s plan, which encompasses 10 initiatives, also aims to bring better services for students with disabilities, more equitable grading practices, and more after-school and summer school programs.

As Martinez has acknowledged in recent months, his first school year as CEO did not end up being the pandemic recovery year district leaders had hoped. Staffing shortages, clashes over COVID safety protocols, and an uptick in behavioral issues – among other challenges – disrupted learning once more.

But Martinez said he is optimistic about the district’s future — and ambitious about rethinking how it meets students’ academic and social and emotional needs.

Staffing remains a major concern, Martinez said. The district is seeing an uptick in its teacher vacancy rate on the eve of Monday’s school start, in part because schools added more than 600 additional teacher positions and numerous new support staff roles.

Declining enrollment is also a key challenge, Martinez said, but he said he also sees an opportunity to explore innovative models for the district’s smallest schools — for example, as career high schools focused on specific high-demand industries, from aviation to cybersecurity to construction.

Under his blueprint, Martinez said he wants to reinvest in neighborhood schools and engage local communities in planning for their future.

“We need to make sure without exception that every neighborhood has schools that offer academic and enrichment options that are attractive to our students,” he said.

In an ideal world, he said, he wants to see every student graduate bilingual and biliterate. On the career training front, Martinez said he wants to see more opportunities for middle school students to sample possible careers and even get high school credit, while high school students earn college credit and take part in internships, apprenticeships, and other hands-on training:

“This,” he said, “is the future of education.”

Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.

Teachers head back to school with optimism and some worry

2022-08-17T18:33:45+00:00

As Nick Altman heads back to school, he’s trying to think of the year ahead as a regular year.

A radio and TV teacher at Huntington North High School just outside Fort Wayne, Indiana, Altman is learning students’ names and getting settled in. Hopefully, he said, “We can just move forward.”

In the back of his mind, though, concern lingers. Last year, “There was some excitement going into the school year that maybe, ‘Hey! This could be a normal year,’ and then shortly after we got in, there were quite a few COVID infections, even amongst staff. And it kind of took the wind out of our sails,” Altman recalled.

“I’m feeling more confident that this year will be a little bit more normal, but there is a degree of cautious optimism.”

After years of exhaustion and disruption thanks to the pandemic, many educators like Altman say they’re going into this year with a little hope.

In many parts of the U.S., school will work differently than it has since COVID arrived. Few districts are enforcing a mask mandate, and recently updated federal guidelines did away with the quarantine recommendations that led to cascading student and staff absences. At many schools, there’s a new emphasis on rebuilding a sense of community.

Some educators say that after so much struggle, this year has to be different.

But having experienced whiplash from earlier changes to COVID protocols, and the letdown of last year’s hopes for a comeback, many are still cautious. COVID is still around, and so are many of the other challenges facing educators and their students.

“Last spring, because [schools] got to do prom and graduations and field days and things like that, we’re hearing a lot of hope,” said Amy Lopez, assistant professor of psychiatry at Colorado University and director of Colorado Educator Support. Still, she said, “I think there’s a lot of hopelessness about the profession as a whole.”

Big and small changes

Some educators are trying to step into this school year focusing on the little joys.

Aaron Grossman, a fifth grade teacher at George Westergard Elementary School in Reno, Nevada, anticipates a good school year ahead. He said subtle changes are giving him hope.

“Teaching through a mask, when you’re trying to project like that throughout the school day — it’s hard. I mean, it quite literally is physically taxing. So I don’t have to do that this year,” Grossman said. “You realize, oh, this begins to feel like several years ago.”

“Some of the things I’m hearing are excitement to head back into the classroom, some of the normalcy of getting to know a new batch of kids.”

Aaron Griffin, a middle school principal in Frenchtown, a small community just outside of Missoula, Montana, echoed those thoughts.

“Last year, when we had our first school dance after three years of not having a school dance, I think the teachers were more excited than the students,” Griffin said. “To have our students be able to go to the state science fair, to participate in the live spelling bee instead of the virtual spelling bee, I think that’s the kind of stuff that our communities in Montana really crave.”

Other educators are planning bigger shifts to how their classrooms or schools work — often, efforts to head off some of the behavior challenges schools faced last year or to respond to them differently.

Lopez talks to educators across Colorado when providing mental telehealth support services. Some teachers have told her they are using last year as a learning opportunity and may change how they approach their classes this year to put more emphasis on structure and personal relationships.

Anthony Perdue, a 12th grade African American and Latinx history teacher at KIPP Collegiate Academy in Newark, New Jersey, is seeing that kind of change at their school as detention is being restructured to prompt students to talk about what led them there in restorative justice circles.

“Honestly, I think that will be a really transformative space, just because there was so much negative behavior from the kids last year. But that negative behavior was a direct result of not being able to process a lot of the crazy things and trauma that they were experiencing under COVID,” they said. “I think that is a huge change and a big step in the right direction.”

Staff shortages still straining teachers

Some key issues that have been plaguing teachers throughout the pandemic remain. Filling positions, from bus drivers to special education staff to traditional classroom teachers, has remained a challenge for schools headed into the year. And when positions don’t get filled, that can mean larger class sizes or added responsibilities for teachers.

“As excited as I am to go back and teach, I’m anxious and a little nervous about what environment I’ll be stepping into,” said Nicholas Ferroni, a high school history teacher in New Jersey.

Last year, Ferroni was slated to teach six classes, but when another educator left Union High School mid-year, Ferroni had to take on a seventh class.

“Obviously we all want to help out,” Ferroni said. “But it definitely added an extra stress to the already existing workload that we have.”

In a RAND corporation survey given in January, staffing issues and the extra work taken on when a gap isn’t filled came in as the number one stressor for principals and the number three stressor for teachers. A different RAND survey showed that about 90% of school districts had to change how they operated in one or more schools at some point last year because they were short-staffed.

Quarantine changes and a summer staffing push are likely to help, and evidence of an unprecedented nationwide teacher shortage is thin. Still, the hiring challenges are real.

“For the start of the year, I told my staff we will probably have zero paraprofessionals,” said Griffin, in Montana.

More than 80% of school leaders reported concerns about teacher mental health in a more recent federal survey, and nearly 45% of principals listed supporting teachers’ and staff members’ mental health and well-being as a top stressor, according to RAND surveys. As mental health issues in schools get more visibility, teachers say they or their peers are sometimes struggling without support.

“If our students are our future, we’re in trouble, because our teachers are tired,” said Sonya Battle, founder of The Teacher’s Resource, a nonprofit educator support group.

As of May, only about 14% of schools said they directly provided staff mental health counseling. Another 39% reported that they made referrals outside the school.

Grossman said at his school teachers have been implementing mindfulness practices like “bear breaths” not just for their students but for themselves.

“We explain what a bear breath is, letting kids understand this is part of self regulation, that there are going to be moments of real anxiety,” he said. “People are trying to sort of incorporate those own outcomes in their lives, not just bring them to their kids.”

Navigating curriculum changes

The tensions surrounding curriculum choices are also a weight on some educators’ shoulders as they head into the new year.

Kathryn Vaughn is an elementary art teacher in rural southwestern Tennessee, where debates about critical race theory, and how to teach about racism and sexism, gained national attention and were a key topic of local discourse last year. She’s also the president of her local chapter of the Tennessee Education Association, and curriculum changes designed to add books with stories by people of color earlier in the pandemic prompted a wave of online harassment that shook her.

“It’s been a very tumultuous time to be a teacher,” she said. “I’m someone that’s worked here in this county for almost 20 years, I’ve dedicated my life to the success of children here, and so when people tell me, I’m stupid and don’t know anything, or call me a Marxist for being an educator, it’s incredibly hurtful.”

Over 60% of principals and nearly 40% of teachers reported being harassed because of their school’s policies on COVID-19 safety measures or for teaching about race, racism, or bias during the first half of the 2021-22 school year, according to RAND.

This year, Vaughn expects to hear more feedback about curriculum choices, but feels more prepared than in previous years. Her superintendent sent out an email voicing support for teachers, she said.

At KIPP Collegiate Academy in Newark, the school made changes to its history curriculum over the summer to focus more on the experiences of Black and Latino Americans. Perdue expects parents and educators to question and debate those changes, and will welcome that discussion.

“I think whenever you have a huge change like that, people are going to be resistant to it, because it is just a change from the norm,” they said. “It is different than what they’ve done before.”

Alex Magaña, executive director of the Beacon Network Schools in Denver, said that even with the challenges schools are facing, this year is a chance for educators to “reset.”

He’s thinking about ways to build trust among teachers, celebrate students, and return to even more of the school’s pre-pandemic procedures.

“I am very optimistic for this school year, going back to what we love and why we got into this profession,” Magaña said. “But I’m also pushing that we challenge the status quo. That means, how do we meet the needs of kids where they’re at?”

Jessica Blake is a summer reporting intern for the Chalkbeat national desk. Contact her at jblake@chalkbeat.org or on Twitter at @JessicaEBlake.

Back to school: Colorado teachers report first-day jitters, cautious optimism

2022-08-16T20:44:59+00:00

“Class, class!” second-grade teacher Allison George called out.

“Yes, yes!” quickly responded 18 small children in new outfits, neatly plaited braids, and fresh haircuts.

“I love that you did that,” George said. “You stopped what you were doing and looked up at me, because you knew something important was happening.”

That something important was the first day of school at Deane Elementary in Jeffco Public Schools, the first day of a year that teachers, students, and parents hope will finally be something resembling normal.

That something important was setting classroom norms and expectations for students who spent their first two years of elementary school living through historic disruptions inside the classroom and out.

In less than 30 seconds, George, a 16-year veteran of the classroom, got her students to leave behind their new school supplies and sit on their reading rug spots. As she counted down silently with her fingers, a hush fell over the room.

Then she read a story about a pigeon who goes from nervous to excited about his first day of school. In the space of five minutes, she checked for comprehension, tied the story to the students’ own experiences, had the students practice nodding quietly to show engagement and raising their hands to speak, and worked in some vocabulary.

“At the beginning, he was so scared,” George said of the bird. “I might even say terrified. What changed his mind?”

More than 800,000 Colorado students are returning to classrooms this month. Denver Public Schools will be the last to return on Monday. Like the pigeon, teachers, school leaders, and parents described a mix of optimism and apprehension.

Many educators felt they ended last school year on a positive note, securing a few months of mostly consistent in-person learning, able to make progress academically and mark end-of-year milestones. They’re eager to build on that growth.

Deane Elementary mascot Rocky the Husky greets students on the first day of school.

They also remember thinking that last year would mark a comeback, only to struggle through quarantines, widespread staffing shortages, and highly politicized debates about COVID protocols.

“We really feel like we have a chance to have a school year without interruption,” said Bret Miles, head of the Colorado Association of School Executives. At a gathering of superintendents before the start of the school year, he said, “I heard a lot of conversations about plans that districts have had on the shelf for two years, with constant interruptions and COVID, that we’re looking forward to implementing, things that we’ve wanted to do for a long time.”

Those include more hands-on learning, apprenticeships, and internships that send students out into the community, and new math and reading curricula that call for more teacher collaboration. Miles said school leaders are looking forward to having more consistent data on student learning and more capacity to act on it. They hope more teachers will get their planning periods back, interventionists will be able to meet with small groups rather than covering for colleagues, and administrators who coordinate improvement efforts won’t have to substitute teach so often.

Staffing challenges remain, particularly for bus drivers and special education teachers and classroom aides. But many districts report having a deeper pool of substitutes after raising pay and feel better prepared to weather illness and other absences.

Deane Principal Megan Martinez said she feels fortunate to have a teacher in every classroom after four teachers took leave at the end of last year. But like leaders at 20 other Jeffco schools, she’s still trying to hire a social worker to round out her mental health team.

Kindergartener Alcario Torres IV tells his father, Alcario Torres III, goodbye for his first day of school at Deane Elementary in Lakewood.

Teachers say they’re far more attuned to students’ emotional needs than before. Deane reading interventionist Chelsey Boswell greets students by name at the front door each morning so she can see their demeanor. Before starting a small group session on reading or math skills, she has each student check in using a color chart. Blue is bored, sad, or tired. Green is happy, focused, or calm. Yellow might be silly or worried — something distracting the student from learning.

“They experienced something that no other generation has,” Boswell said of her students. Balancing academic and emotional needs could be a challenge, but she quickly realized the two go hand in hand. “Having these feelings and overcoming obstacles is just a way of life.”

At Deane, a handful of parents and staff members wore masks, but most children and adults had bare faces. Martinez said she never thought she’d need to know so much about health to be a principal, and she’s looking forward to focusing more on learning instead of COVID protocols.

This year, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment is asking schools to keep an eye on COVID cases and inform parents of infection clusters. Those who test positive should stay home. Those are about the only COVID countermeasures for now. It remains to be seen how the next iteration of COVID will behave in schools with few mitigation measures, but the state’s near-term forecast sees cases continuing to decline because so many people have some immunity now.

Colorado school districts followed a range of protocols last year that reflected both community preference and political pressures. Amie Baca-Oelhert, president of the Colorado Education Association, the state teachers union, said just like the rest of society, some teachers still see masks as a way to keep themselves and the community safe, while others feel ready to move on. Some teachers said they still worry about COVID but won’t miss having to police students.

Other losses hang over the start of the school year. The Deane T-shirts worn by staff members feature a rocking husky in shades. A small heart on the shoulder represents a reading interventionist who died last year. A small bee icon on the back represents a former fourth grade teacher and her daughter killed in flash flooding in the mountains over the summer. Martinez spent some quiet time in a community circle with the teacher’s former students Tuesday morning.

Martinez said her roughly 280 students have been through a lot. They come from families that experienced economic hardships and the deaths and illnesses of family members. During times of remote learning, many students didn’t have good internet access or have parents who could stay home and monitor their learning. They missed out on school meals.

Martinez said she’s grateful to have students back in the building and ready to get to work.

“We have 175 days with students, and none of those days can be wasted,” she said.

Bureau Chief Erica Meltzer covers education policy and politics and oversees Chalkbeat Colorado’s education coverage. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Allison George has taught second grade for 16 years. On the first day of school, she helped students get used to the classroom.

Newark teachers focus on mental, emotional healing after challenging school year

2022-08-12T10:00:00+00:00

In a room full of Newark teachers, Thomas Luna, a seventh grade science teacher, took a moment to reflect on the previous school year filled with unprecedented challenges.

Luna jotted down his thoughts in a notebook while other colleagues in the room sighed as they remembered what it feels like to be an educator during the pandemic. When they were done, some took turns sharing their reflections with the group:

“Expressing how I was feeling was really important to me.”

“I needed space.”

“It was hard to focus.”

Their fellow teachers, sitting at desks, snapped fingers and nodded heads in appreciation.

They were healing, said Dr. Wenimo Okoya, founder of the Healing Schools Project, who led the exercise for KIPP Rise Academy teachers on Thursday, the week before students return to their classrooms.

After two years of pandemic-related stress, the stakes are high for schools and educators in Newark and across the country as students show an increase in emotional and social needs. Teachers and principals are also experiencing more job-related stress at a rate roughly twice that of other working adults, according to a new RAND Corporation survey.

A former Newark Public Schools teacher, Okoya believes that her work helps teachers heal and grow from stressors by creating a stable environment and allowing students to thrive in a healthy school setting. She partners with schools and districts to address and prevent teacher burnout and rebuild school communities after two years of pandemic-era uncertainty.

“During the pandemic, I and my other teacher friends and educators were really burned out from what we were experiencing during the peak of the pandemic,” said Okoya, who launched Healing Schools Project last year. “We started holding virtual healing circles with friends of friends and people wanted more of that.”

Okoya’s work includes workshops focused on fostering connection and care among school staff and leading healing circles as a way to connect with colleagues and promote better mental health at work. At KIPP Rise Academy, which has roughly 50 teachers and 460 fifth through eighth grade students, school leader Kyle Newsome said he invited Okoya because he’s responsible for ensuring the well-being of his staff and students.

An inspirational mural at KIPP Rise Academy greets students as they enter the building.

“If we’re really being honest, community work is people work,” Newsome said. “We’re a people-driven community and there’s no way to even do that if we don’t have some type of priority around it.”

Kerry-Ann McGaw, a fifth and sixth grade special education teacher at KIPP Rise and an educator for 14 years, said it’s more important than ever to have a space with other educators to talk about day-to-day life in the classroom.

For McGaw, having conversations with colleagues throughout the day helps her feel better about her role. She also practices the same coping strategies she teaches her students to deal with life in and out of the classroom.

“When I need to reset in the classroom, I model it by counting down on my fingers,” McGaw added. “I tell students at the beginning of the school year these are the things you can do when you feel frustrated, anxious, and overly excited. Us helping kids is, in turn, helping us too.”

Other teachers participating in Okoya’s exercise said having morning rituals, creating boundaries for themselves, and affirming each other are also ways they cope with the stressors of teaching.

“Providing teachers an opportunity to take care of themselves puts them at a place where they are not looking at students’ issues through a deficit,” said Tiffany Walker, founder of Journey Therapy Center in Clifton, New Jersey, and former program manager for youth development programs.

A clinical social worker, Walker adds that teachers need to create physical and emotional boundaries and make adjustments throughout the school year to prevent burnout and ensure they have enough energy for their families and personal lives.

“What are some of the things that you can commit to in the school year,” Walker added, “and what are some of the things that you have to make adjustments to so that you can ensure you’re showing that wellness for yourself?”

Okoya’s work primarily focuses on student trauma – a critical factor in Newark, where many students are exposed to poverty, discrimination, violence, and housing inequality. But in order to tackle student trauma, adults have to invest in healing their own traumas, especially after the pandemic, Okoya said.

“For our young people that connection is so critical because connection, support, and relationships are the primary factors to overcome trauma, especially in childhood but even in adulthood,” Okoya added.

Amid long-standing concerns over teacher retention, staff shortages, and COVID protocols, Newsome says he’s getting a head start on the year by creating healthy spaces for students. His goal is to invest in his teacher’s emotional and mental well-being for the sake of the students. Healthy teachers, he said, make great outcomes for students.

“Everyone here is excited and that’s something that I hoped for but I had my own concerns because it’s been so rough,” Newsome. “If we hope for the best, it’s gonna feel different for the kids.”

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org

Michigan school mental health program on track to expand with $50 million funding boost

2022-08-09T11:00:00+00:00

The last time administrator Kristina Hansen intervened in a school fight, she didn’t have to say much.

One of the students already knew what he should have done differently.

“That would have been a perfect time to practice my breathing, but I didn’t,” the student told her after a brief shoving match with another boy in the cafeteria at Bark River-Harris Junior High School in the Upper Peninsula. “I blew my lid.”

He had forgotten to use the tools he learned in TRAILS, a program his school adopted last year to help students manage emotions and make good decisions. With more exposure to the program and more practice using its techniques, he’ll be able to calm himself before his behavior escalates, said Hansen, who was hired last year as the Bark River-Harris School District’s student success coordinator. She runs programs to support students academically and behaviorally including TRAILS, which stands for Transforming Research Into Action to Improve the Lives of Students.

Developed a decade ago at the University of Michigan, the program now is in about 700 schools and could soon be in a lot more thanks to a nearly tenfold boost in state funding.

The state school aid budget signed into law last month provides for $50 million in funding over the next four years. That’s a big jump from last year’s overlapping state appropriation of $5.4 million over three years.

“The beautiful thing about the last two years’ worth of budgets is that the state has acknowledged that not only are children’s mental health challenges profound in the state, in the country, but that the Legislature has to be a part of the solution,” state Superintendent Michael Rice said.

The additional funding comes as schools struggle to find enough resources to help students recover from grief, loss, social isolation, trauma, and other mental health effects of the pandemic. School leaders across the country are reporting more classroom disruptions, student fights, and physical attacks that they attribute to lingering effects of the pandemic. Misbehavior was a defining characteristic that complicated efforts to get children back on track academically after two years of disjointed learning.

The boost for TRAILS is just one way the state Legislature is trying to address the problem in Michigan. The 2022-23 budget also creates a new $150 million program for mental health grants and provides $25 million for school-based health centers — up from $11 million last year. Many school districts also are tapping federal COVID relief funds to bring mental health programs to their students.

Elizabeth Koschmann, TRAILS founder and executive director, said the new funding will make a big difference in the number of students the program reaches over the next four years.

She couldn’t provide a total operating budget because TRAILS is funded on a project-by-project basis from numerous sources, including federal grants, private donations, and Medicaid reimbursements for its work in high-poverty areas.

TRAILS provides resources, training, and consulting to school staff members at all levels, from support staff through administrators. In some schools, only one or two teachers have gone through the training, but the program works best when everyone participates.

“What’s important is that we not delegate mental health to a single individual or a couple individuals in a school,” Rice said.

At Bark River-Harris, every staff member and all 725 students in the district have been exposed to the program’s first tier, which provides 15 hours’ worth of lessons teachers can deliver to their classes to introduce them to mindfulness and self-care practices.

Other tiers of the TRAILS program offer training in suicide risk management and facilitating small group sessions for students who need extra support.

Hansen said all of her teachers find ways to make time for the TRAILS curriculum, even if it takes time from academics. That’s true in other districts, too.

“We’re not hearing from (teachers) that it’s interfering with academic content delivery, because they need this content, too,” Koschmann said. “They’re saying their kids, almost across the board, are one to two years behind socially and developmentally from where they should be. … They’re saying they need an anchoring program to bolster basic skills.”

Nationally, spending on such social and emotional learning programs grew almost 50% between 2019 and 2021, according to one report.

While teachers are on board, some parents are skeptical of TRAILS’s focus on social and emotional learning, Koschmann said. Some conservatives say they believe SEL programs indoctrinate children with liberal ideas about gender identity and the lingering effects of slavery on modern institutions, neither of which is part of TRAILS or other programs. Others say schools should focus on academics, not social and emotional learning, which they believe to be parents’ job.

“They don’t want a classroom teacher teaching values to a child because that’s a family’s personal decision and they want to have control over that,” Koschmann said of the critics. “We don’t want to be teaching values to your child either. We want to equip your child with the tools that will help them manage really difficult emotions like disappointment, rejection, anxiety, worry, sadness, and fear so they can engage more fully in their classroom and can become better citizens in terms of how they handle feeling dysregulated, upset, or worried.”

None of that is political, she said.

“If a kid is showing a behavioral difficulty in a classroom but really wants to be behaving in a compliant way, our curriculum equips them with tools to help them manage their behavior more effectively,” Koschmann said.

That’s what Hansen saw happen in the Bark River-Harris cafeteria when the student realized he could have used a breathing technique to calm himself.

“You could almost see the lightbulb go off,” Hansen remembers.

Another student had a different kind of breakthrough that Hansen also attributes to TRAILS. A withdrawn high school student who wasn’t participating in class or socializing with friends suddenly became more engaged three-quarters of the way through the school year. He told her that listening to classmates talk during TRAILS lessons made him realize that he wasn’t the only one struggling with anxiety.

“Here was a kid floating along under the radar, and just by having it be a more acceptable practice to talk about feelings and struggles,” he was able to feel a greater sense of belonging that allowed him to participate more, Hansen said.

Hansen said a common lexicon is essential to the program’s success at Bark River-Harris. Everyone in the district speaks the same language and knows the same behavioral strategies.

When a child closes their eyes for a few moments in class, other students understand that they’re trying to calm their anxiety using a visualization tool, deep breathing, or another TRAILS strategy, Hansen said. If a food services worker asks a distressed student to name and rate the intensity of the emotion they’re feeling, they know how to do it because they’ve practiced using a feelings thermometer, she said.

Koschmann wants every school to be like that, and says the additional state funding will help a lot. Her team is still discussing the best ways to use it.

“We’re going to have to be really smart to make sure we can adequately staff our team to provide services at a high level but don’t set ourselves up for a fiscal cliff at the end of the funding period,” she said. “We can’t just hire, hire, hire and not have a long-term plan.”

Still, she said, there’s an urgency to train more teachers quickly.

“Schools need the support immediately,” she said. “They can’t wait. The demand for student mental health services, training for staff, materials for staff, and consultations is unbelievable.”

Tracie Mauriello covers state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan. Reach her at tmauriello@chalkbeat.org.

Advocacy group: Philly children need new wave of resources to overcome COVID

2022-08-08T23:23:34+00:00

Philadelphia’s children need a stronger public health care system, more robust government benefits, and more funding for school staff to counteract the long-term impacts of the pandemic, an advocacy group declared Monday in a new report.

Children First’s “COVID’s Impact on Philadelphia Children: The Case for an Ambitious Rebound,” reveals the setbacks Philadelphia students endured since schools were forced to shut down in-person classes in 2020, and recommended steps to remedy the damage that fell mostly on Black and Latino students.

The group, formerly known as Public Citizens for Children and Youth, also mentioned in its presentation that the pandemic’s negative effects have ranged from an increase in youth seeking suicide prevention to a spike in gun violence, which remains the number one cause of death for children over 15 in the city.

Federal policy did help lift over 16,000 children out of poverty in the city in the first year of the shutdown of in-person learning, the group noted. And Philadelphia families are vaccinating their children at a faster rate than other parents across the state.

But to counteract COVID’s effects and shield children from the next public health crisis, officials must improve the quality and accessibility of things like behavioral health services and child care, Children First said.

“COVID was a calamity and affected every one of our lives,” said Donna Cooper, the group’s executive director. “But our children continue to face persistent structural challenges to their safety, their physical well being and their mental health and well being.”

Child care, behavioral health are key

The Children First report highlighted several issues that caused acute problems for the city’s children, as well as recommendations to ameliorate the problems in light of COVID. In several instances, the group’s proposals call for government officials to prioritize children when deciding where to spend public money.

For example, as of September 2021, there were approximately 1,500 fewer child care workers in Philadelphia than before the pandemic; nearly a year ago, child care staff were earning 19% less than employees at big box retail stores or fast food franchises, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That wage gap and other factors, including the prohibitive cost for many families, led many child care centers to shut their doors.

Children First said that in response, federal and state lawmakers should provide the funding and resources necessary to make child care and pre-kindergarten affordable and accessible to more families, and to ensure families aren’t shut out of those services by inflation.

The group also wants people to pressure the federal government to reenact the expanded Child Care Tax Credit.

Children First also pointed to two K-12 issues, the teaching workforce and internet access, where more can and must be done.

The district stopped in-person classes in 2020 between March and June, and virtual learning remained in place for much of the 2020-21 school year. But district schools had neither the inventory of computers nor the technological capacity to quickly make the shift to virtual learning.

And according to a Pew Research study, about one in three students in the district — where 74% of students are from low-income households and 86% are students of color — did not have high-speed internet access, a key factor for the viability of virtual learning.

Philadelphia made some strides in providing more students with internet access during the pandemic, such as through the PHLConnectED program. But interruptions in learning driven by internet-related problems contributed to children’s academic struggles.

Children First wants state lawmakers to provide sufficient funds so that every school in the city can provide every student with a computer and, where necessary, free or affordable internet access.

But despite these efforts, the interruption of learning exacerbated the educational gaps across school districts in the state, hitting Philadelphia hard.

Once federal COVID relief funding for schools is used up in the next several years, the group said Philadelphia will likely have to boost class sizes because the district won’t have sufficient funds to hire new teachers, given the shortage.

To help undo COVID’s impact on the teaching profession, state lawmakers should provide enough funding so that each school can afford to hire an ample number of teachers, the report said.

Children First also offered proposals related to children’s mental well-being, as well as the city’s overall approach to public health issues.

For example, the city must work to close racial and economic gaps in behavioral health services

In addition, Children First said those officials should find ways to offer preventative mental health resources, mental health first aid, and therapeutic support for children in their communities.

The group said the city should craft a strategy to make sure children are better protected the next time a health emergency like the pandemic strikes. And Children First said the city must track COVID’s continuing impact on children and work to ensure they are vaccinated against COVID and other diseases.

As part of Monday’s presentation of its report, Children First invited a panel of leaders and students, including Philadelphia Superintendent Tony Watlington and Dr. Ala Stanford, founder of the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium, to discuss what to do next.

“The biggest lesson for the children, I’ll say, is to come through on the other side [of the pandemic], as a senior as a junior, you acquired skills that you didn’t even know you had that are going to propel you stronger and further than many,” Stanford said.

Watlington said he thinks technology could be a key factor in any turnaround for students. “It’s important for us to realize that we have this once in a lifetime opportunity to totally transform how we use technology as a learning tool,” he said.

Bureau Chief Johann Calhoun covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. He oversees Chalkbeat Philadelphia’s education coverage. Contact Johann at jcalhoun@chalkbeat.org.

NJ children facing anxiety, depression ‘at unprecedented levels,’ new report finds

2022-08-08T08:14:00+00:00

As Newark and other school districts prepare for another school year marked by an urgent need to expand and enhance mental health services for students, a new report shows how dire the crisis is among children in New Jersey and across the country.

Children in the state and nationally are in the midst of a mental health crisis, “struggling with anxiety and depression at unprecedented levels,” according to the 2022 KIDS COUNT Data Book released Monday by Annie E. Casey Foundation, a national nonprofit.

In New Jersey, 10.7% of children struggled with anxiety and depression in 2020 — up from 7.6% in 2016, the report found. Similarly, on the national level, that number went from roughly 9% in 2016 to 12% in 2020, the report stated.

The annual study also considered state and national data related to economic well-being, education, health, and family and community factors, such as children living in high-poverty areas.

Though the COVID-19 pandemic had a profound effect on all communities, early research, including this report, is showing disparities with mental health challenges based on those varying factors.

“It’s very hard for a person, especially a child, to engage in counseling or other mental health services if they don’t know if they have a place to live or if they have enough food,” said Mary Coogan, vice president of Advocate for Children of New Jersey. The nonprofit partners with the national foundation in releasing the annual data.

One of the report’s recommendations for policymakers to address the youth mental health pandemic is to use federal pandemic relief money to help give children better access to mental health service providers.

The state’s 2023 budget allocates more than $50 million in American Rescue Plan funding to “strengthen youth mental health supports” by improving access to services, increasing awareness and resilience-building, and providing support and professional development in communities, schools, and college campuses.

The budget also increases the pipeline for behavioral health care workers, a press release from the governor’s office states, though details on that effort were sparse.

“Though we are encouraged to see that the state’s budget has allocated federal dollars toward strengthening youth mental health programs, more must be done,” said Cecilia Zalkind, president and CEO of Advocates for Children of New Jersey. “Programs such as mental health services play a critical role in moving the state forward past COVID-19, but we need to do more to address the shortage of providers for mental health services.”

In the 2020-21 school year, the average student-to-counselor ratio in the state was 339 students to one counselor — above the recommended ratio of 250 to one, the report stated.

In Newark, the average that school year was 483 students to one counselor.

“It’s a nearly impossible task for that one school counselor,” Coogan said. “That means an unknown number of students’ needs are getting missed and the anxiety or depression they have can get exacerbated.”

Catherine Carrera is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Newark, covering the city’s K-12 schools with a focus on English language learners. Contact Catherine at ccarrera@chalkbeat.org.