Chalkbeat

Indiana’s new diplomas emphasize flexibility for older students, but some requirements are controversial

2024-05-17T11:00:00+00:00

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A proposed redesign of Indiana’s high school graduation requirements to emphasize student choice and work-based learning has drawn concerns from educators who say it’s too much change too soon.

The plan would offer Indiana students beginning with the class of 2029 two diploma options, one of which resembles today’s graduation requirements but with less advanced math and social studies, and another that would require significantly more work experience.

Indiana education officials presented their plan to significantly redesign diplomas to the State Board of Education in March, touting the new emphasis on career training in high school as a first-in-the-nation move.

But some educators say the proposed requirements leave out key academic courses like world history and language in favor of more work experience, which they say may not be the best track for all students.

Preparing graduates to enter the workforce immediately after high school has been a priority for Indiana, especially as college-going rates stagnate. In addition to proposing new diplomas, the state recently rolled out Career Scholarship Accounts that give students some state funding for workforce training in high school, as well as career-focused graduation tracks that often allow students to start work while in school.

The state’s current Core 40 diploma requires students to take a set of foundational classes throughout grades 9-12 in English, math, science, social studies, and other courses. Students can also earn an honors designation for academics or technical skills.

Beginning with the Class of 2023, all students also have to undertake some college or career preparation.

At a State Board of Education meeting this month, many educators said it’s too soon to change the requirements again.

“If there’s any broad advice, it’s please slow down,” said John Hurley, a Career and Technical Education teacher at the South Spencer School Corporation. “While portions of the new diplomas are labeled flex, smaller schools will likely not be able to offer all options, and students will become stuck in only one track for graduation.”

What’s new about Indiana’s proposed diplomas?

Indiana is proposing two diploma tracks.

One is the GPS Diploma, which is a combination of the current Core 40 diploma and the graduation pathways — the additional college or career preparation requirements added starting with the class of 2023.

The other is the GPS Diploma Plus, which requires more work experience and more evidence of college readiness.

Students will make graduation plans in middle school to determine which courses they’ll take throughout high school.

Both diplomas begin with foundational requirements worth a total of 20 points in grades 9 and 10. These require students to demonstrate:

Academic mastery of English, math, and science by taking four credits of each subject.
Civic, financial, and digital literacy by taking U.S. history, government, personal finance, and computer science, as well as demonstrating skills in one of the above by participating in a robotics team, starting a student-led business, or working as a poll worker.
Work ethic by taking P.E., health, and other activities during or after school. Students must also meet three of six other criteria, such as having a 94% attendance rate, a 3.0 GPA at the end of grade 10, or two seasons of an activity.
Communication and collaboration by participating in four school activities like debate, Future Farmers of America, or student council, and one outside activity like volunteering or leading a church youth group.
College and career readiness by taking one readiness course and showing competency in three other ways, for example, taking a career aptitude test or dual credit course, or attending a job fair or a job shadowing opportunity.

Beginning in grade 11, students pursuing the regular GPS Diploma would need to earn 20 more points — similar to the Core 40 requirements — but would be able to choose which courses they take to do so.

Meanwhile, those earning a GPS Diploma Plus will take additional courses they need to complete a work-based learning opportunity and earn a credential.

The GPS Plus diploma has three levels. First is the Level 2 Plus diploma where the student must complete 75 hours of work-based learning. A level 3 diploma requires 650 hours of a state pre-apprenticeship, or modern youth apprenticeship. And a level 4 diploma requires 2,000 hours in a U.S. Department of Labor Registered Apprenticeship.

Diploma Plus students must also demonstrate postsecondary readiness by earning a professional credential, an International Baccalaureate diploma, or an AP Scholar with Distinction designation.

Some new requirements are controversial

Some educators say the heightened emphasis on work experience comes at the expense of academics and could hurt students aiming to attend out-of-state universities.

But not everyone agrees that the work experience requirements are too much.

At a March State Board of Education meeting announcing the new diplomas, Secretary of Education Katie Jenner said the lowest tier of work experience required by the GPS Diploma Plus could be completed in one semester with an internship taken during one period. Some people had pushed for that bar to be higher, she said.

At a marathon public comment session during the May board meeting, teachers said the regular GPS Diploma was not rigorous enough for their brightest students, who would feel compelled to meet the work experience required by the GPS Plus Diploma perhaps at the expense of academic courses.

“What we are missing is a huge middle,” said Aaron Warner, a teacher in Terre Haute. “To get that bottom diploma, your maximum math class is Algebra I. No world history required. That is not the direction we need to be going.”

A junior at Borden Junior-Senior High School, told the board that the choice of the two diplomas requires high school freshmen to make a choice that’s difficult to reverse.

“Between those two options, I would feel far too intimidated by the strenuous workload of the higher level courses and would end up restricting myself to the GPS diploma, which in turn would inhibit my chance of changing my mind once I get into my later years of high school,” the student said.

Educators also told the board that classes like world history and languages are missing from the requirements.

Finally, they took issue with the state changing graduation requirements yet again when the graduation pathways have only been in effect for one graduating class so far.

Hurley, the South Spencer schools teacher, also questioned how students’ hours outside school would be tracked, and how the new requirements would affect students who transfer to Indiana schools late in high school.

What are the next steps?

The department will host two public comment periods this year, as well as accept feedback through its online form, prior to a final adoption of the requirements this fall.

Schools can opt-in to begin offering the new diplomas as soon as the requirements are adopted by the state board of education. They’ll go into effect for all students beginning with the Class of 2029, or today’s seventh graders.

The state will continue to offer the federally mandated alternative diploma for students with severe disabilities.

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

Denver mayor, schools superintendent announce youth summer programs meant to help curb gun violence

2024-05-21T00:02:08+00:00

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The city of Denver is aiming to connect 1,000 more teenagers with jobs this summer, help families find summer camps, and fund pop-up events like BBQs and basketball tournaments in some neighborhoods, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston announced Monday.

The efforts are meant to “prevent the risks of summer violence,” Johnston said, which tends to flare among youth once school is out. They come after several years of increased gun violence in and around Denver schools and community conversations about how to tamp it down.

“We all know it’s a shared responsibility to ensure our scholars are engaged over the summer,” Denver Public Schools Superintendent Alex Marrero said at a press conference with Johnston.

The last day for most public schools in Denver is June 5.

Marrero has been raising the alarm about increasing gun violence and pushing the city to take action since the fall of 2022, when an East High School student was shot in the face outside a city recreation center next to the school. The student was a bystander in a fight.

A few months later, in February 2023, 16-year-old East High student Luis Garcia was shot and killed as he sat in his car outside the school. Then, in March 2023, a 17-year-old East High student shot and injured two deans inside the school before taking his own life.

Johnston recently set a goal to reduce gun violence in the city by 20% by Dec. 31.

“Summer is a great opportunity to get young people engaged in positive activities,” Johnston said. “It can also be an at-risk time for young people who are not engaged in positive activities to be exposed to violence.

“So we are thinking about this as a multi-pronged approach to how we can engage young people into positive summer activities.”

The initiatives include:

The Mayor’s YouthWorks Initiative, which aims to connect 1,000 young people ages 14 to 21 with summer jobs. Young people who work 100 hours between May 1 and Aug. 16 and complete financial literacy training can get a $1,000 bonus. Priority will be given to young people who qualify for free or reduced-price school meals or other public benefits.
A new website that Johnston called a “one-stop shop” for finding summer camps and other programming. The website — at denvergov.org/youthsummer — allows families to enter a school name or home address and see all the summer programming within a certain mile radius. Many of the listed programs are free or offer financial assistance.
$500,000 in grant funding for local organizations to host pop-up neighborhood events for children and families that Johnston said “will bring life, and joy, and opportunity to communities where we know we have a real chance to drive down community violence.” Five hot spots around the city will be prioritized for the grant-funded pop-up events, a city spokesperson said.

Johnston encouraged employers in the city to sign up to be part of the YouthWorks effort, and he promoted two city-led youth job fairs, one virtual and one in-person:

Virtual job fair: Friday, May 24 from 4 to 6 p.m.
In-person job fair: Saturday, June 1 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

All of the new programming is being funded by a state grant known as GEER, which stands for Governor’s Emergency Education Relief and is funded by federal pandemic relief dollars. The city’s Office of Children’s Affairs won $1.7 million in GEER funds, according to a city spokesperson.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

70 years after Brown, too many U.S. schools remain hypersegregated and unequal

2024-05-17T22:46:21+00:00

I was 21 when I started teaching at Hope-Hill Elementary School in Atlanta. I had big dreams and bold ideas — some held, others fettered as the toll of teaching in majority Black schools suffering from resource deprivation took hold.

My first year was complicated by the fact that C.W. Hill Elementary closed, or merged with John Hope Elementary, depending on whom you ask. And in an effort to make the devastating change more palatable, John Hope Elementary School became Hope-Hill Elementary School.

Shannon Paige Clark

This was my introduction to austerity measures, or the practices in school districts that justified slashing resources, slimming budgets, and closing schools, which are often in working-class Black communities.

Hope-Hill was led by Black women and almost all of my colleagues were Black, as am I. We did the best with what we had, and many of us used our own resources to make our classrooms special. At the end of that year, I felt grateful to be in a community that felt like home, and I was happy I survived the first year of teaching in a system that set me and my colleagues up to fail.

Midway through my summer break, I received a surprise phone call inviting me to interview for a new teaching position. A neighboring school principal informed me that my name was listed as eligible for hire, which meant I was surplused, unbeknownst to me. In other words, I was the last one hired and the first one fired because the enrollment numbers at Hope-Hill did not justify the existing number of teachers — another austerity measure.

Two years, two schools. New grade, new curriculum. I was already disillusioned and not sure I had the wherewithal to start over so soon. In fact, research shows that Black teachers leave the teaching profession more than educators in other racial groups, commonly citing burnout, disrespect, and racism.

I stuck it out. I was a brand new teacher for the second year in a row.

One day, I read a book about Ruby Bridges to my third grade students. I began to explain that schools were no longer segregated, in part because of the courage of children like Ruby, who in 1960 became the first Black student to attend a Louisiana school that had previously been all white.

“Did you say segregation ended, Ms. Paige?”

Tatianna’s question stopped me mid-sentence.

I thought to myself: I did, but if you look around this classroom and school, you would not know.

“Yes,” I told Tatianna.”There are no longer laws, or rules, that forbid Black people like you and I from going to schools with white children.”

Then Tyreik chimed in, “So where all the white people?”

I replied, “That’s a good question. It’s tricky. Many of the neighborhoods we live in are still segregated even though the law does not say they have to be that way. And since we live in segregated neighborhoods, many schools still look like they did when the law said schools must be segregated because most children go to school near their houses.”

... research shows that Black teachers leave the teaching profession more than any other racial group, commonly citing burnout, disrespect, and racism.

If they were older, I would have told them about anti-Blackness and redlining and the ways unjust policies have been used to maintain de facto segregation.

Today, schools remain largely segregated by race and class, and I often think back to my first two years in the classroom, starting in 2009. All but three of my students were Black, and most of my colleagues were Black, too. We lacked material resources, but we had a lot of heart.

My teaching and coaching experiences in schools that were highly segregated by race and class fuels my passion for researching hypersegregated schools, places that 70 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling are still separate and unequal.

Read more of Chalkbeat's coverage of the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

According to the Center for American Progress, some 40% of America’s more than 1,700 school districts are hypersegregated, where at least three-quarters of students are from low-income households. Hypersegregated schools tend to get by on the bare minimum. Facilities may be inadequate, and the consequences of racial segregation and concentrated poverty make it harder to learn and even harder to thrive.

In my research, I focus on hypersegregated school communities where people lack the resources they need. I call this resource deprivation because those in power make decisions that deny necessary resources.

A CBS News investigation found that majority Black school districts have less money, and the students suffer as a result. School funding disparities exist across states, districts, and schools; high-poverty districts with the most students of color receive less funding per student, on average. EdBuild, which parsed school funding systems, determined that, nationwide, predominantly white school districts get $23 billion more than predominantly non-white districts, despite serving a similar number of children. This is resource deprivation.

Hypersegregation fuels inequity, and despite the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education 70 years ago, the resource deprivation that existed in 1954 remains for far too many Black children who are relegated to underfunded schools.

There are miracle workers in many of these school communities. But the weight of fighting a separate and unequal system can diminish the hopes and dreams of even the most idealistic people — educators and students alike.

Shannon Paige Clark, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern. She researches educational policies and family engagement in school.

Seventy years after Brown v Board of Education, school funding is the new frontier in education equity

2024-05-20T16:34:40+00:00

Read more of Chalkbeat's coverage of the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

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In 1969, Debra Matthews was almost nine years old and looking forward to fourth grade with her friends at Rowen Elementary when her mother told her she would be going to a different school five miles away from her West Oak Lane home.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Matthews recalled. Rowen had just built a brand new annex building that Matthews had been excited to explore. “I thought I would be going there. I was looking forward to that.”

Instead, until she graduated, Matthews, who is Black, rode a bus every morning, about a half hour each way, to predominantly white Northeast Philadelphia. First in a schoolbus to J. Hampton Moore elementary, then via SEPTA to Woodrow Wilson Junior High, now Castor Gardens Middle School, and then to Northeast High School.

All in the name of school desegregation.

This month marks the 70th anniversary of what is perhaps the most consequential U.S. Supreme Court decision of the 20th century, Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed Jim Crow laws in 17 states that required Black and white children to be educated in separate schools.

As the nation commemorates Brown, Philadelphians are reflecting on their own long and complicated history with school segregation.

Philadelphia was a city where segregation was not de jure, or imposed not by the laws that Brown struck down, but instead de facto – the result of personal choices, such as where people choose to live, that led to massive white flight.

For some civil rights leaders of the time, Philadelphia was a perfect test case for challenging segregation in many Northern states. While a federal case was never filed, the district experienced more than 40 years of litigation and oversight from the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission aimed at integrating schools.This resulted in generations of students like Matthews, almost all of them Black, bused to schools outside of their neighborhoods and decades of court pressure to implement other policies designed to end segregation.

But, today, the city’s students are still largely attending some of the most segregated and under resourced schools in the country. The district is 50% Black and 14% white, while the city’s overall demographics are nearly 40% Black and 34% white, reflecting a longstanding pattern of most white families attending private schools. Although the city is home to a few of the most racially-mixed schools in the state, a new study out of Stanford University found Philadelphia’s schools overall remain nearly as segregated as they were 30 years ago. White students are concentrated in a little over a dozen mostly special-admissions schools and comprise just a tiny percentage in the vast majority of neighborhood schools, the study found.

In the 70 years since Brown, “Segregation in the North has gotten worse, and the Philadelphia area is no exception to that,” said Michael Churchill of the Public Interest Law Center, a legal advocacy group.

Advocates like Churchill haven’t given up on desegregation as an ideal, but they have shifted focus to the new frontier in educational equity – school funding

“The schools that have the most minority children also have the least funding,” said Churchill, who has represented plaintiffs in the lawsuit seeking fair and adequate school funding in Pennsylvania. “And as difficult as it may be to fix the physical segregation of students, there is absolutely no excuse why there should be such funding disparities.”

The Brown anniversary comes at a time when Pennsylvania’s governor and state legislature are grappling with reforming the state’s funding system in the wake of Commonwealth Court Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer’s February 2023 decision declaring it unconstitutional. She said Pennsylvania overly relies on property taxes to fund education, depriving students in poorer areas of a “thorough and efficient” education. And she concluded, drawing on research and testimony, that Black and Latino students are disproportionately located in districts with inadequate funding.

While Philadelphia is surrounded by overwhelmingly white, better-funded suburban districts, the lead plaintiff in the school funding case is the William Penn School district on the city’s southwest edge, itself an example of de facto segregation: after more Black families moved into the district, white families once again left, perpetuating the largely separate and unequal system. Property values went down, tax rates went up, and those who could afford to move did.

And that unequal system has been proven to harm Black students, Hispanic students, and students from low-income backgrounds by depriving them of experienced teachers and educating them in aging buildings without proper temperature controls and often plagued with lead and asbestos, among other challenges.

“There is an anti-big city, anti-urban attitude,” said Roseann Liu, a visiting professor at Swarthmore College, at an event for her recently published book “Designed to Fail: Why Racial Equity in School Funding Is So Hard to Achieve,” which is a case study of the issue in Pennsylvania.

“What that really means is anti-Black. … I don’t think that state legislators are racists, but there is something to be said about people in power holding ideas about the value of different kinds of children.”

The history of desegregation efforts in Philadelphia

For decades until the 1970s, the school district strictly enforced policies and practices clearly designed to segregate its schools.

In the early and mid-twentieth century as they built new schools to accommodate the city’s growing population – including many Black families moving from the South – officials drew school catchment area boundaries to segregate students as much as possible.

And well into the 1950′s, the district maintained segregated elementary schools to employ a growing cadre of Black teachers and principals. The white power structure of the day was steadfast in opposition to allowing Black teachers to teach white students and to having black principals supervise white teachers.

While some practices had eased by then – there were a handful of Black teachers and principals in high schools – discrimination was still very much in evidence in 1970, when the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, which had begun monitoring city schools several years before, filed a complaint against the district. The commission, which at the time had the power to enforce anti-discrimination laws, wanted mandatory busing to remedy segregation.

School officials fought any effort to forcibly bus students out of their neighborhoods, especially white students, but they did agree to a voluntary plan in which students like Matthews took part. They also agreed, in the 1970s, to create several new, specialized schools such as George Washington Carver High School of Engineering and Science in the hopes of attracting a diverse student body.

When Constance Clayton became the city’s first Black (and first female) superintendent in 1982, she and her chief of staff, Penn law professor Ralph Smith, devised a more sweeping plan to satisfy the commission.

Clayton’s plan had two major components. One was to provide extra resources, including free extended day activities and art, music, and technology programming, to mostly Black schools in racially integrated areas as an incentive for white students to attend. Such a school was considered successfully desegregated if it reached 25% white population.

The second component was aimed at the significant number of neighborhood schools that remained virtually all-white, most in Northeast Philadelphia. Under this initiative, the district vastly expanded the voluntary busing program, with the goal of reaching 40% Black enrollment in as many of these schools as possible. Many more thousands of students than was the case in Matthews’ time were bused starting in the Clayton era.

While the voluntary busing did change the demographics of many schools, the commission, which continued to advocate for mandatory busing, took the district to court again in the 1990s. By that time, with more desegregation becoming virtually unattainable, the case evolved to focus on the adequacy and equity of funding.

Commonwealth Court Judge Doris Smith-Ribner ordered the district to invest more resources in the district’s poorest, “racially-isolated” Black schools. But when she also ordered Harrisburg to send Philadelphia more money to help pay for this, the state Supreme Court summarily took her off the case and the state legislature largely ignored her directive.

Around that time, when Superintendent David Hornbeck called the state’s education funding system “racist,” Gov. Tom Ridge took umbrage at the comment, an incident that helped precipitate the state takeover of the Philadelphia school district in 2002. The state controlled the district until 2018, an era that saw the rise of charter schools as the primary reform effort to improve the education of low-income, Black, and Hispanic students.

The busing continued until 2009, when the district’s second black superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, asked that it be ended, citing the expense of busing and a waning commitment to desegregation itself for its own sake.

Students at Henry R. Houston Elementary School in Mount Airy. Houston was one of the district's targeted desegregation schools which received extra resources to attract white students. Today it is 23% white.

“Integration 2.0″

As the nation reflects on the Brown anniversary, Philadelphia educators and policymakers have been pondering what next steps should be.

“The other legacy of Brown, is when desegregation did happen it was done at the expense of Black communities,” said Erica Frankenberg, who studies the subject at Pennsylvania State University. “It was done inequitably in that it made some communities question the importance of it.”

She said she has been “thinking about this idea of what would integration 2.0 look like, integration in a multi racial way, with equitable sharing who has to travel, making sure what is reflected in the curriculum and history classes, integrated teachers. All of that is done in some places, but it is not widespread.”

Sharif El-Mekki, a former school district and charter school principal who now runs the Center for Black Educator Development, said Brown was invaluable in that it invalidated what he described as an “apartheid” system. At the same time, he said, quoting activist Stokely Carmichael, it is not segregation per se, “but white supremacy we should be fighting against. What’s important is that we don’t have government-sanctioned forms of segregation.”

El-Mekki, who is working hard to recruit more Black teachers at a time when their attrition rate is greater than that for white teachers, said while the government and institutions should be vigilant about discrimination, they should also be doing more to support “all-Black spaces that are holistic and affirming.”

To mark the anniversary, Desireé Chang, the Director of Education and Outreach at the state Human Relations Commission that pursued the Philadelphia case for so long, said there is still work to be done.

“Students living in lower income communities are deprived of the same resources provided to students in higher income communities,” she said. “This underfunding has led to crowded classrooms, fewer teachers and outdated schools, textbooks, and an overall unequal education.”

In in Black community where Debra Matthews grew up, and still lives, and in others like it, there was long the assumption that schools with white students would be better than the one in the neighborhood. The students taking the opportunity to travel from Rowen to the Northeast filled the school bus.

Matthews, now 63, can’t say for sure how or whether she benefited from her experience traveling far from her home to attend school, having nothing to compare it to. She noted that at J. Hampton Moore, the building was more modern, the gym had more equipment, and the schoolyard was bigger than at Rowen. She recalls that she made new friends and enjoyed “a rainbow of classes.”

She remembers that at Rowen she had been on an accelerated track, whereas in her new school she was not. After her mother complained, however, she was switched.

And she recalls that when she arrived, as a nine-year-old, several of the girls in the class had letters from their parents saying that they were not to sit next to any Black students. And the teacher complied.

But, she said, over time, she made friends, even with some of the girls who had the letters. In an era when many students went home for lunch, something the bused-in students couldn’t do, she was invited to go home with a classmate.

“I did that one time, and I wasn’t impressed,” she said, laughing, recalling that the only difference between her Philadelphia rowhouse and theirs – down to the plastic covers on the furniture – was that her friend’s mother didn’t toast their bread.

“I thought I was going to see something with more splendor, grandeur. But they were just an average family. And I was missing pizza day.”

There were occasional conflicts and awkward incidents, but by fifth and sixth grade she and her girlfriends were sitting around together cutting out pictures from magazines of their favorite idols, which included both the Osmonds and the Jackson 5.

“We got along,” she said. “Sometimes, if adults just let children be children and stop trying to spread beliefs onto them, it will work out.”

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Amid Chicago’s migrant influx, one school is trying to help newcomer students navigate trauma

2023-10-27T19:24:21+00:00

An hour before dismissal on a recent Friday afternoon, eight Brighton Park Elementary School students huddled in a classroom with Jennifer Moorhouse, a teacher who works with English language learners.

They were there for a voluntary, biweekly support group run by Moorhouse and Stephanie Carrillo, a school counselor, for students grappling with the upheaval of immigration and the adjustment to a new country, new city, and new school.

She asked the children — a mix of sixth through eighth graders who had recently arrived in Chicago as part of an influx of migrant families — to share the best and worst part of their week.

One boy said the best thing was that his family had moved to a new house. Another child looked up, her hair slightly covering her face. She shrugged her shoulders and struggled to come up with a worst moment.

That’s OK, Moorhouse said in Spanish, she doesn’t have to have a low point.

The girl then added, “No mejor,” meaning there was no high point either. After a moment of silence, the whole group burst into laughter.

These students, who arrived in Chicago between last year and this year, are among the more than 20,000 newly arrived migrants in Chicago since last August, with many fleeing from Central, South American and African countries experiencing political and economic turmoil, according to city officials.

Chicago Public Schools does not track immigration status and has not shared how many migrant students have enrolled in schools. But the district has pointed to clues of an increase, including 7,800 more English learners enrolled this school year, compared to an annual average increase of 3,000 such students.

As of mid-September, 2,250 migrant children were housed in the city’s shelters, according to records from the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications that were obtained by Chalkbeat.

Educators have raised concerns that many Chicago schools don’t have the resources, such as staff, to provide new migrants with the right language instruction, recently pleading with the state to send more help.

But there are also questions about whether newcomers have the social-emotional support they need at school. These students have potentially endured dangerous journeys to the United States, on top of the stress of leaving their homes behind for shelters or other temporary living arrangements in a foreign place.

That latter concern led Moorhouse to launch the support group at Brighton Park last year after she met a migrant student who was showing signs of trauma. The student, whom Moorhouse met in January, didn’t want to be in school and sometimes, the student’s body would shake uncontrollably, she said.

At one of the sessions Moorhouse held, the student shared a personal story about his journey to the United States. Afterward, Moorhouse recalled, the student said: “My chest isn’t hurting. I can breathe.” Moorhouse felt it was a sign of healing.

In some ways, Brighton Park is well-positioned to host this support group. As a community school, it partners with a nonprofit organization to provide wraparound services for its students. Carrillo, the school counselor who helps Moorhouse with the support group, works with the school on behalf of its partner nonprofit, Brighton Park Neighborhood Council. Brighton Park Elementary’s community schools funding also helped to pay for the training on the model that the support group is based on, according to Cecilia Mendoza, the school’s assistant principal.

The model is known as STRONG, or Supporting Transition Resilience of Newcomer Groups, which focuses on teaching children how to understand and cope with their stress before they’re invited to share more personal details about their journey to the United States, if they choose.

It’s unclear how many schools have specific support groups for migrant students like the one at Brighton Park. About $35 million of the district’s budget this year was allocated for social-emotional curriculum, behavioral health supports for students, and additional social workers and counselors, according to a district spokesperson.

This year, Moorhouse and Carrillo are starting with the basics.

On that recent Friday afternoon, in the classroom where Moorhouse gathered with eight of her students, bright orange and blue strips of paper on the dry erase board described concepts of melting and freezing in English and Spanish: “Que le pasa al chocolate que se deja al sol?” (What happens to chocolate left in the sun?).

A plastic cupboard sat against the wall, filled with shoes, socks, and clothing donations Moorhouse had collected through her Amazon Wishlist. Sheets of paper taped to the wall have words of affirmation in both languages: “Tus emociones son validas.” (Your feelings are valid.)

A classroom for English learners at Brighton Park Elementary School has brightly colored phrases translated in English and Spanish on the dry erase board.

After their icebreaker, Moorhouse passed around crayons and a worksheet with the outline of a human body. She explained that stress can cause physical pain and asked her students to color in the part of their bodies that hurt when they are stressed.

“Entonces para mi, cuando yo estoy estresado, mi estómago me duele,” she told the students, explaining that her stomach hurts when she’s stressed.

One girl, wearing a pair of sneakers donated through the Amazon wishlist, used a green crayon to fill in the top of the head. She colored the shoulders with a green-yellow.

When Moorhouse asked students to share, one boy said stress gives him a headache, and then he feels like throwing up. A low “hmm” spread through the group, as if others recognized the boy’s feeling.

At 2:35 p.m., about halfway through the session, the students received a new worksheet. This one had a large triangle on it, and each point represented something different: pensamientos, sentimientos, y acciones. Thoughts, emotions, and actions. Moorhouse wanted the students to reflect on how a thought may lead to a feeling, which ultimately leads to an action.

After a couple minutes jotting down their thoughts, the students shared their responses. One boy smiled as he described an example: When he’s talking to other students and they suddenly begin speaking in English, he feels as if he’s been removed from the conversation.

“How does that make you feel?” Moorhouse asked him in Spanish.

“Bad,” he replied.

“What’s your action?” Moorhouse responded.

“I walk away,” he said.

That day, Mendoza, the assistant principal, was peeking in.

“I don’t think students or people in general sometimes realize the effect that has on others who only speak one language,” Mendoza said later. “So that really stuck with me, and I thought about how we could have that conversation, perhaps, with the students … because they might not be aware that they’re doing that.”

Moorhouse then presented a challenge for the students: How can they change their thinking about a situation, in order to elicit better action? One boy gave the example of taking a hard math test that he doesn’t know the answers to, so instead, he asks to go to the bathroom.

He was stumped when Moorhouse asked him to think of a better action. She opened the floor to the group, but no one came up with an answer good enough for Moorhouse. When she pressed them to think harder, they hit on a solution: He could ask the teacher for help — for understanding the exam, or perhaps even asking to take it another day.

With about 15 minutes left, Moorhouse and Carillo passed around stress balls shaped like bee hives. They asked the students to squeeze hard and pretend that they were squeezing out the juice.

A couple of kids laughed as they squeezed their fists and then released pressure.

Around 2:55 p.m. Moorhouse handed out a blank calendar worksheet. For the following week, students would be expected to log how they’ve practiced relaxation strategies, such as grabbing an ice pack from the nurse or using a stress ball, when feeling stressed. One student shared that drawing helps.

It was time for dismissal. The students didn’t run out the door. They stayed back to chat with each other. A few grabbed extra bags of Skinny Pop.

As the weeks go on, Moorhouse and Carrillo will meet individually with each student to assess whether they want to talk more about their personal experiences of coming to the U.S. and what would be appropriate to share with the other students.

In those conversations, students may show signs of needing more individual counseling provided by the school, such as bursting into tears while recounting a story, Carrillo said.

Some students take a while to open up, so it’s unclear how much they’ll participate going forward, Moorhouse said. One of those quieter students is the child who had shared that there was no highlight or lowlight of her week. During the hourlong session, this student gradually opened up a little more.

And when most of the other children left at the end of the day, that student stayed behind. She wanted to talk some more one-on-one with Moorhouse.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

As Chicago’s shelter rule for migrant families takes effect, here are three student rights to know

2023-11-27T12:00:00+00:00

Chicago educators and advocates are concerned about how Mayor Brandon Johnson’s new 60-day limit for shelter stays for migrant families will impact attendance and stability for migrant students.

The new rule comes as the city has struggled to house migrants. More than 22,000 have arrived from the Southern border since August 2022, many fleeing economic and political upheaval in Central and South American countries. City and state officials have promised to boost efforts to help families get resettled and find more permanent housing, a commitment that comes just as a state-operated rental assistance program will no longer apply to newly arrived immigrants who are entering shelters, Block Club Chicago reported.

About 50 families have already received the notices, and another 3,000 will get them on Dec. 4.

Advocates said losing shelter could mean more absences among migrant students who are homeless — formally known as students living in temporary living situations. That designation includes children in shelter, living doubled up with another family, or living in a public place. As of Oct. 31, average attendance rates this school year for homeless students are 5 percentage points lower than their peers with permanent housing, according to Chicago Public Schools data shared with the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless.

School stability is related to academic success. A 2015 study that examined New York City students found that children who transferred schools were more likely to be chronically absent or miss at least 10% of their school days. Chronically absent students who were also homeless were three times more likely to repeat the same grade than homeless students who missed fewer than five days of school, the report found.

“We’re talking about kids who have been around for two months, who have gotten into a routine, maybe made some friends, have some sense of control finally, where they can get two hot meals a day — we’re talking about sending those families back to the bus landing spot,” said Gabriel Paez, a bilingual teacher on the West Side, of the mayor’s new rule.

Sixty days is a “very short time” to find housing, especially for newcomers with language barriers who are dealing with asylum cases or have not been authorized to work yet, said Patricia Nix-Hodes, director of the Law Project of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless.

If families don’t have permanent housing lined up, they can return to the “landing zone” — the downtown area where most buses first drop off newcomers — and can request a new shelter placement. Families can stay in their shelter under “extenuating circumstances,” such as a medical issue, if there is extreme cold, or if they’ve obtained a lease with a move-in date that starts later than when they must leave shelter, the mayor’s office said.

A spokesperson for the mayor declined to comment. In a statement, a district spokesperson said it is working with the city and schools to “ensure new arrival students, who are nearly all considered Students in Temporary Living Situations (STLS), can get access to a Pre-K-12 education within our system that offers the appropriate services, including English Learner services.”

Homeless children have certain rights enshrined in federal law aimed at maintaining stability for them at school, including the ability to stay at the school where they’ve been attending.

Here are three education rights that families living in temporary housing should know about as the city’s new shelter rule takes effect:

Homeless students have the right to stay in the same school

Students living in temporary shelters who have enrolled in the local school or a nearby one are entitled to stay at the same school even if they’re forced to leave the shelter after 60 days.

This is true for any student who becomes homeless. Federal law protects their right to remain in their so-called “origin school.”

Just as any other Chicago Public Schools student, homeless students can enroll in the local neighborhood school in their new community by simply walking in. Also like any other student, they can apply to selective or magnet schools, but the deadline to apply for these schools for next academic year has passed.

Migrant students may also be referred by other city agencies, such as the Department of Family and Support Services, to receive enrollment help from the district’s central office, including at the city’s Pilot Welcome Center at Clemente High School on the West Side.

In that case, the district will enroll students based on where they live, the students’ needs — such as English language services — and “existing capacity and resources at the school.” If there are space issues at a school, the district “can assist with an alternate school assignment,” a spokesperson said.

Once 20 or more students with the same native language enroll at a school, state law requires they launch a Transitional Bilingual Education program. Such programs require instruction in both English and the native language, such as Spanish.

The district has budgeted $15 million to hire more bilingual teachers, dual-language program coordinators, and “other resources to support English learners,” a spokesperson said.

Homeless students have the right to transportation

Homeless students also have the right to receive transportation to school even if they move. And, according to CPS guidelines, their school must inform the student and a parent about transportation services. If a student finds permanent housing, they are still entitled to transportation until the end of the school year.

According to CPS guidelines, homeless students in need of transportation must receive a CTA card within three days of requesting one. Children in preschool through sixth grade can receive an additional card so that a parent can accompany them on public transit.

Students in those grades can also apply for school bus service if a caregiver can’t accompany them to school because the parent has work or education conflicts, a mental or physical disability, or the shelter won’t allow parents to leave during the hours of dropoff and pickup.

Citing a driver shortage, the district this year has limited school bus service to students with disabilities and those who are homeless. As of October, 113 homeless students qualified for busing, but it’s unclear how many of them opted instead for a financial reimbursement.

Homeless students don’t need paperwork to enroll

Schools must enroll students who are homeless even if they don’t have records normally needed to enroll, such as immunization or previous school records, proof of guardianship, or proof of residence, according to the district.

Families fleeing domestic violence or political turmoil may not have grabbed important documents, Nix-Hodes said.

It’s up to the school to “sensitively” identify that a family seeking enrollment is homeless without violating their privacy, Nix-Hodes added.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

As shelter limit for migrant families nears, NYC schools try to prepare

2023-11-29T23:37:59+00:00

New York City schools have started preparing for a massive reshuffling of students as early as next month, as thousands of migrant families face a new limit on shelter stays, education officials said during a Wednesday city council hearing.

Approximately 2,700 families have received notices since Oct. 27 that they’ll either have to reapply for shelter or find alternative housing within 60 days, according to a City Hall spokesperson. That means families will have to leave their shelters as early as Dec. 27. For families who do reapply for shelter, there’s no guarantee they’ll end up in the same site, or even the same borough.

Mayor Eric Adams has argued that the limits are necessary to relieve severe overcrowding in the city’s shelter amid an unprecedented and ongoing influx of migrants, many of whom are seeking asylum. Case workers will help families figure out next steps, according to city officials.

But educators and advocates have sounded the alarm for months that the policy could have devastating educational consequences.

Preparations are underway to try to minimize the disruptions and inform families of their rights, especially in Manhattan where the shelters are concentrated, Education Department officials said on Wednesday.

“What we’ve started to do is look very closely at where those students are located, engage principals, engage superintendents,” said Flavia Puello-Perdomo, an Education Department official who oversees students in temporary housing. “While we can’t fully control all the implications of the 60-day rules … as much as possible we’ll ensure every family is aware they have the right to stay in their schools.”

Federal law requires school districts to provide transportation for homeless students so they can remain in their schools. The city Education Department offers school buses for homeless students in kindergarten to sixth grade, and MetroCards for older kids. But arranging that transportation can take a long time, and the city’s sprawling school bus system is notoriously unreliable, according to advocates and educators.

Many families may opt to transfer rather than enduring that uncertainty and a potentially grueling commute.

One Manhattan school is getting ready to call all of its migrant families to ask if they’ve received the notices and walk them through their options, according to the principal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

But the principal said no amount of preparation will prevent the massive disruptions ahead.

“It’s going to be like musical shelters,” the principal said. “All these kids who we’ve spent the last 10 months building relationships with … we’re going to break that bond.”

Schools brace for logistical challenges

During Wednesday’s council hearing on immigrant students, Education Department officials offered a glimpse at the huge logistical challenges schools and families are facing as the 60-day deadlines hit.

The first task will be figuring out which families have even received the notices and where they are headed.

Staffers who work with the newly-arrived families said it’s possible some will leave the city or find their own apartments, but others will have no option other than reapplying for shelter.

“I’ve visited the shelter near me,” said the Manhattan principal. “My assumption is that if they had a better option, they would’ve already used it.”

The Education Department doesn’t have a data-sharing agreement with Health + Hospitals, the agency that administers many of the newly-created Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers, or HERRCs, where migrants are residing. That means schools won’t get automatic updates when children transfer from one shelter to another, officials said.

It could fall largely to schools to track down families to figure out if they’ve received a 60-day notice, where they’re moving, and whether they’ll need transportation – an especially daunting challenge given many of the newly-arrived families still may not have reliable phones.

The Education Department employs roughly 100 community coordinators who work directly with families in shelters – but that’s far short of the more than 360 shelters now operating across the city, according to an Education Department official.

Delays in figuring out where families have transferred will lead to delays in arranging transportation or finding new school placements.

Families face long commutes, school transfers

Even if the communication between schools and families is seamless, families who have to leave their shelters will face the tough decision of enduring a longer commute or transferring schools.

The Manhattan principal said several families have already switched shelters, and opted to remain at the school – but their attendance has suffered.

Schools across the city are already struggling with elevated rates of chronic absenteeism and the problem is even more severe for students in shelters, over 70% of whom were chronically absent last school year. The reshuffling from the 60-day notices will likely make that worse, the principal argued.

Transportation is especially challenging from the newly-opened shelter at Floyd Bennett, a former airfield in southern Brooklyn. The emergency shelter, which officials say can accommodate 500 families, has drawn fierce criticism from advocates who say it’s inappropriate for children, and some families have refused to stay there.

Education Department officials said on Monday that roughly 195 children staying at the shelter have registered for school. But Glenn Risbrook, the Education Department’s senior executive director for student transportation, acknowledged it’s in a “transportation desert” and said the agency has arranged for a coach bus to connect families to public transportation so they can get to school.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

What’s in a name? Students at NYC’s largest school for newcomer immigrants push for change

2023-12-05T18:48:01+00:00

The name of New York City’s largest public school for immigrant students succinctly describes who it serves: Newcomers High School.

The school, located near a cluster of newly opened homeless shelters in Long Island City, Queens, has lived up to its name, enrolling perhaps more migrant students over the past two school years than any other in the city. Its roster jumped from roughly 800 two years ago to more than 1,400 now, according to Education Department records.

Often, over the school’s 30-year history, the name has served as a badge of honor, especially when Newcomers won national recognition for its academic achievement. The school is one of about 20 across the city designed to provide more targeted support and help new arrivals acclimate to life in the U.S.

But as New York City grapples with political and economic tensions surrounding the ongoing influx of migrants, the school’s student government wants a name change.

“The brand ‘Newcomers’ does not identify us any more,” Brianna Segarra, a senior and the student government president, said at a recent meeting of the city’s Panel on Educational Policy. “We are hurt by it, by all the people in the U.S. who are against migration.”

The name, she worries, “puts a target on us.”

Changing the name of a New York City school isn’t easy. It involves securing the approval of the Parent Association and principal, soliciting public comment at a community education council meeting, and getting a final sign-off from the chancellor.

Students pushing the name change at Newcomers are still in the early stages. They haven’t come up with a replacement name and haven’t yet begun the process of gathering input from all kinds of people with a stake in the school, said teacher and student government adviser Aixa Rodriguez.

Principal Elizabeth Messmann, who couldn’t be reached for comment, said in an email to staffers on Monday that the School Leadership Team, a body composed of staff, parent and student leaders, has begun discussing “rebranding the school.”

There’s also likely to be pushback.

“The fear [is] that if we change the name, will it change the character of the school?” said Rodriguez. “Are we killing the legacy of the last 30 years?”

A sweatshirt design raises questions of belonging

Student government leaders say they began considering the idea of a name change while designing the annual school-branded sweatshirt.

Demand for the Newcomers hoodie was through the roof this year.

Many new arrivals lack winter gear, and were excited to add a warm item to their wardrobes, student leaders said.

But when the student government began gathering feedback on this year’s design, they heard the same thing again and again from peers.

New York City Public Schools Chancellor David C. Banks poses for a photograph with students from Newcomers High School.

“They said the name was really big. They said, ‘I don’t want the name ‘Newcomers’” featured so prominently,” said Lindsay Abad, a senior and student government secretary who hails from Ecuador. Students worried it would make them vulnerable to “suffering a hate crime or something like that.”

The influx of migrants that began in summer 2022 and has included roughly 30,000 students has spurred bursts of generosity as well as vitriol, with protests against new shelters springing up across the city.

Students are acutely aware of that charged political climate, said Rodriguez, the teacher who advises the student government. They’ve also confronted some of it head-on.

Students confided in staff that they’ve heard insulting comments on public transit, Rodriguez said. They’ve also heard them during sports games at other schools.

“They don’t want to be associated with something that feels negative. They want to belong,” Ridriguez said. “When they’re going on a train or a bus to a game, they don’t want that attention.”

Several students also said they were hurt by a New York Post article suggesting that swelling enrollment had forced students from a school that shares the building to relocate to another campus across the street.

An Education Department spokesperson denied that claim, but the story still stung, students said.

Many Newcomers students felt the implication was “we are here occupying a space that is not ours,” said Mary Barcarse, a senior and student government chairperson originally from the Philippines.

That’s not to say the enrollment boom hasn’t posed real challenges, said Rodriguez.

Class sizes have ballooned, while class rosters are constantly in flux as new students arrive and others leave due to transient housing situations, Rodriguez said. Many of the new students are carrying significant trauma while juggling competing responsibilities like a pressure to work or care for siblings, she added.

Students say they were steered to Newcomers

Some students said the discussion about the name “Newcomers” has pushed them to reconsider a more fundamental question about educating immigrant students: whether they should be enrolled in separate schools in the first place.

The student government leaders who spoke to Chalkbeat said they didn’t feel like they had much choice about where to enroll and were pushed towards Newcomers.

“They said, ‘You’re from Ecuador, you go to Newcomers,’” Abad recounted.

There can be advantages to attending a school populated exclusively by immigrant students: classmates who can relate to your experiences, teachers who are seasoned in supporting language development, and a climate that’s inclusive and welcoming, students and staff said.

But there are also drawbacks. With fewer native English speakers, students at Newcomers said they feel like they’re missing out on critical chances to improve their English. And because the school focuses so many of its resources on language support, some students felt it offered fewer options for acceleration, electives, and specialized tracks than other high schools.

Regardless of which model works best, students said they wished they’d gotten more choice in where they enrolled. They worry that many of the new arrivals are getting funneled into a similarly narrow range of schools.

The name “Newcomers,” they argue, reinforces the idea that immigrant students only belong in one type of school, and that only one type of student belongs at schools like Newcomers.

Students also said the name doesn’t feel entirely accurate. At least 50 members of the school’s senior class were born in the U.S. and are citizens, but recently returned to the country after time abroad, according to Rodriguez.

“They feel it labels them,” she said, “in a way that doesn’t reflect every single person who walks in this door.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Migrant families and schools brace for wave of shelter evictions

2024-01-08T10:00:00+00:00

This article is part of an ongoing collaboration between Chalkbeat and THE CITY.

Thousands of migrant families with school-aged children will begin having their time in city shelters run out starting Tuesday as the first 60-day eviction notices, which the city began passing out in October, start to expire.

Among those whose time runs out Tuesday is Joana, 38, a Venezuelan mother who asked that her last name not be used. She said in recent days she’s been having hard conversations with her 8-year-old daughter about what’s in store.

“I try to explain to her as gently as I can the reality,” Joana said in Spanish. “So she can understand why we’re leaving this place, where her school bus comes to get her, where she’s lived for a year, and where she feels like it’s part of her home.”

The shelter evictions for families with children mark the beginning of yet another city policy shift on homelessness, as Mayor Eric Adams struggles to contend with a ballooning shelter population driven largely by the arrival of more than 160,000 migrants, which cost the city $1.4 billion last fiscal year.

Through the end of December, 122,700 people were living in shelters, including over 68,300 migrants, the vast majority of whom are families with children.

Thus far only adults without children have been subject to the Adams administration’s attempts to eject migrants from city shelters. The city has limited their stays to 30 days. In order to reapply for another stint afterwards, adults must now brave long lines in the cold for hours and sleep on the floor of various waiting rooms for more than a week, with limited access to food and showers, before they can secure another cot.

To date, most families with children have been spared this kind of disruption. Adams has repeatedly said his administration’s goal is for no families with children to sleep on the streets — but exactly how family evictions will be carried out is still unclear.

Since the city unveiled its family eviction policy in October, about a third of migrant families in the city’s care have been hit with 60-day eviction notices, or around 4,800 families, a city spokesperson said.

Kayla Mamelak, a spokesperson for the Adams administration, said families who have nowhere else to go when their time in shelters ends will be directed to return to the Roosevelt Hotel, the city’s main intake center, to request another 60-day placement. The city will try to place families in or near the school district where kids are currently enrolled in schools, she added. No child would be forced to change schools, as is required by federal law.

But up through last week, those instructions still hadn’t been communicated to families directly in writing. Several 60-day notices distributed to families reviewed by THE CITY only said that the city would help send you to another location, and if you had any further questions you could talk to staff at the hotel. Parents who spoke with THE CITY said social workers had told them about the option to go to the Roosevelt Hotel.

Joana said that’s where she planned to do Tuesday: pull her daughter out of school for at least for the day and head to the Roosevelt Hotel to try to get another shelter placement.

“I’m trusting in God that we’ll have another place to stay,” she said in Spanish.

Mamelak reiterated Mayor Adams’ frequent plea that with 33,000 migrant children enrolled in schools since June of 2022, the city still needs more help from the state and federal governments.

“While we are grateful for the assistance from our state and federal partners, for months, we have warned that, without more, this crisis could play out on city streets,” Mamelak said. “It is crucial — now, more than ever — that the federal government finish the job they started by allowing migrants to immediately work, and to come up with a strategy that ensures migrants are not convening on one, or even just a handful of cities across the country.”

‘I have no idea what to do’

The evictions are slated to begin at the Row Hotel in Midtown on Tuesday, which has rooms for 1,000 families. Forty families will run out of time on the first day, and another 250 families will see their shelter stays expire during the first week, according to Josh Goldfein, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society, who is in direct communication with city agencies on behalf of the Coalition for the Homeless.

After the Row, other families at other Midtown hotels like The Stewart, The Watson, and the Wolcott will see their time run out, expanding to around 100 families ejected per day in the coming weeks, Goldfein said.

Ahead of the evictions, residents of The Row who spoke with THE CITY described a mix of anxiety, dread, and resolve.

“The kids have already missed so much school,” said Yeisi Zerpa, a 26-year-old Venezuelan mother of four, who said she’d had to pull the kids out of school to apartment hunt ahead of her eviction date Tuesday.

“If every 60 days I’m going to leave the shelter and get back in line, that’s going to be stress all the time, the kids won’t be able to go to school,” she said in Spanish.

With the help of a kind woman she’d met while begging for change and subsequently become friends with, she’d managed to find a room her family of six would share in a Bronx apartment.

Zerpa is still waiting for her work permit to come through, and was looking for work cleaning houses, but wasn’t sure how she’d pay the rent going forward.

“I have no idea what to do,” she said, adding she was still trying to figure out if she should keep her daughters at the same school or transfer them to somewhere closer. In the weeks ahead of her eviction, she said social workers at the Row offered little guidance.

“No one has helped us to find a rental,” she added. “You ask the social worker a question and they don’t know anything. You don’t have the help of anyone there.”

City officials didn’t return a request for comment about how many people had moved out ahead of their evictions this week. But several other families who spoke with THE CITY said they had managed to secure alternative living arrangements ahead of their final days at the hotel.

Lorena Espinosa Castro, a 36-year-old mother of two from Peru, was moving out trash bags of her belongings on a recent afternoon, headed to a studio apartment in Corona that she’d rented for $800 a month through a friend. In nearly a year in New York City, Castro had managed to find work as a server in a Mexican restaurant not so far from her new apartment.

“The truth is I always wanted to get out of there,” Castro said in Spanish. “I couldn’t cook. My girls, we didn’t eat well. It’s our moment to be more independent. I fought for it.”

“The help of the government is over,” she said.

At some Manhattan elementary schools with large populations of migrant students, families have already started disappearing as the deadlines for the 60-day notices approach.

“Since about two weeks prior to the vacation, we’ve lost a lot of students,” including around 10 this week alone, said a teacher at a Manhattan elementary school that’s enrolled a large number of migrant families, including many living at The Row. The teacher spoke on the condition of anonymity and asked that the school not be named for fear of retaliation.

Watching students who have been at the school for months and built connections abruptly drop off of the school roster is wrenching, the teacher said.

“There’s something really special about watching students grow in a space and become acclimated and familiar. So it’s hard when they’re moved,” the teacher said.

Many other migrants who spoke with THE CITY ahead of their eviction dates said they hadn’t been able to find anywhere else to go and planned to return to the Roosevelt Hotel hoping for another place to stay.

Piedad, a 49-year-old mother who asked that her last name be withheld, expressed a fear that they’d be sent to the far off tents at Floyd Bennett field, where families live in a quasi-congregate setting miles from the nearest neighborhood — a concern shared by many families in recent days.

“We’re hoping, with God’s will, we’ll get another shelter, and not the tents,” she said in Spanish.

‘We’re adding to these kids’ trauma’

Since October, the city has been issuing 60-day notices to families that have been staying in shelters run by the city Health and Hospitals system for more than a year, as well as many more recently arrived families, including all those at Floyd Bennett Field.

So far, the approximately 8,800 migrant families living in shelters overseen by the city’s Department of Homeless Services, which is subject to more strict state oversight, have been spared the shelter evictions. In November, however, city officials requested permission from the state to expand the policy to those families as well, according to Anthony Farmer, a spokesperson for the state’s office of Temporary Disability Administration. As of last week, the state had still not granted that request.

Goldfein and other advocates have looked at the daily chaos unfurling outside the city’s reticketing site in the East Village and fear a similarly dire situation could await families with young kids later this week.

“We’re certainly very concerned,” Goldfein said. “We asked about that and they believe they have it under control. But we’ll see.”

Schools are also preparing for another destabilizing shuffle, the Manhattan teacher told THE CITY, as some students leave and new ones come in.

“All year is just constantly readjusting to try to catch students up, readjust the dynamics of the classroom, rebuild community,” the teacher said. “It’s a heavy load for teachers.”

One Education Department source familiar with planning for the 60-day notices called the educational impact on children would be immense. “We’re adding to these kids’ trauma,” the source said.

Unlike the Department of Homeless Services, which has a data sharing agreement with the Education Department so schools can directly look up where homeless students have been transferred too, Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs large-scale family migrant shelters, has no similar arrangement. Schools will thus be flying blind come Tuesday.

“The only thing these children have consistently in their lives is school,” the source said. “So now you’re taking them out of shelter, you’re putting them someplace else. They’re not gonna be in school for a few days easily. They have to adjust to a new environment and if they’re lucky, they figure out how to get back to that school.”

The Education Department has been recommending families bring information about their schools with them to the Roosevelt Hotel, so that they might be placed in the same borough as their child’s school.

Nicole Brownstein, a spokesperson for the Education Department, said schools had been working directly with emergency shelters, “to support all students and their families and ensure there is no gap in services, whether they transition to a new school community or choose to stay in their current school.”

The city has touted their 30-day policy for adults for reducing the number of people who return to seek another 30-day placement to just 20% of those who had their time run out.

But Goldfein with the Legal Aid Society said if the city really needed to move people around, it could reassign them directly from their current hotels, instead of sending them into a lurch of uncertainty at the Roosevelt Hotel, where it’s not clear where they’ll end up or how long it will take. He described the situation as a “logistical nightmare merry-go-round.”

“There’s a bigger question of why do you need to do this,” he said. “Do you need people to move just to harass them? To push them to move out?”

Gwynne Hogan covers Brooklyn for THE CITY.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

NYC sends families from tent shelter to sleep on school floor during storm

2024-01-09T22:38:29+00:00

This article is part of an ongoing collaboration between Chalkbeat and THE CITY.

Officials hastily moved hundreds of families living at the Floyd Bennett Field migrant shelter in Brooklyn early Tuesday evening as a powerful storm with wind gusts exceeding 60 miles per hour hit the city.

The families were bused to relatively nearby James Madison High School, in Marine Park, to rest as best they could in chairs or on floors. By 4:30 a.m. Wednesday morning the winds had died down and families were bused back to Floyd Bennett, according to the city’s Office of Emergency Management.

Despite that scheduled departure time, an alert sent by the school late Tuesday afternoon advised students and their parents that classes would “pivot to remote” on Wednesday.

The sudden move by the Adams administration drew ire from all sides, with homeless rights advocates and the migrants themselves decrying the disruption for families, and local parents slamming the city’s use of the public school.

People living at the field shelter made of tents described a chaotic and stressful day that included: learning of the impromptu evacuation just hours before it was slated to occur before 4 p.m. racing back to the Floyd Bennett after picking up their children from schools to try to catch the buses to Madison; and crowding in the school’s auditorium and cafeteria with hundreds of others spending the night in chairs or on the ground.

“They want us like animals sending us from here to there,” a 31-year-old mother of three from Venezuela told THE CITY in Spanish, asking that her name be withheld out of fear of retribution for speaking out. ‘’This is craziness.”

She noted that she was thankful for the help of the city for a place to stay — “but this isn’t how children and families should be treated.”

A group of migrants race into James Madison High School in Brooklyn after city officials evacuated Floyd Bennett Field during a rainstorm, Jan. 9, 2023.

In an impromptu press conference early Tuesday afternoon to announce and explain the evacuation, city Office of Emergency Management Commissioner Zachary Iscol, said the agency started notifying families at the shelter at 11 a.m that buses would take them to Madison High School that evening.

By that time many families had already left the shelter for the day for jobs and school, though word spread of the planned evacuation on WhatsApp groups.

“We are doing this out of an abundance of caution because of the high winds,” Iscol said.

Iscol said that tents shelters for migrant adults on Randall’s Island and Creedmoor Psychiatric Facility were not slated for evacuation because both had more protection from the wind and pilings dug into the ground that made them more sturdy than the Floyd Bennett location.

“It’s a really complex operation,” he added.

Spokespeople for OEM, the mayor’s office, and the city’s hospitals system, which runs many migrant shelters, didn’t respond to requests for comment immediately about the lack of cots for the migrants staying at the high school.

Critics of Mayor Eric Adams’ handling of the arrival of migrants denounced the rapid move out of hundreds of children and families.

“The need for the city to find temporary shelter for the people already in temporary shelter demonstrates that the site was not adequately set up for extreme weather on top of the hardship this isolated and inadequately serviced location, miles from the nearest neighborhood school, already imposes on its residents,” said city Comptroller Brad Lander, a regular critic of the mayor.

‘It’s overwhelming’

The evacuation Tuesday came the same day evictions began for migrant families staying in the Row Hotel in Manhattan, as part of the city’s new policy limiting shelter stays for some migrant families to just 60 days.

Around 40 families were forced to leave Tuesday, officials from the city’s Health and Hospital corporation said, with the number expected to quickly ramp up to around 100 families per day. About 4,800 families have received 60-day notices that will force them out of hotel rooms in the coming weeks, city officials said.

Maria Quero, 26, who is eight-and-a-half months pregnant with her first child, said she’d begged her social workers at the Row to let her stay until after she gave birth. She’d presented a doctor’s note to staff, she said, but was denied an extension.

Pregnant migrant, Maria, leaves the Row Hotel shelter after receiving an eviction notice, Jan. 9, 2024.

Instead she trudged across Midtown with her husband from the Row to the Roosevelt Hotel Tuesday morning to ask for another 60-day placement while hoping to still make her prenatal doctor’s appointment later that day.

“I can’t be sitting down a lot, my hips are hurting,” she said in Spanish. “It’s overwhelming, it’s really stressful.”

By that evening Quero said she’d be reassigned to a shelter in Brooklyn.

Asked about Quero’s situation at the Tuesday press briefing, Dr. Ted Long, who oversees migrant shelters run by NYC Health and Hospitals, said: “We look forward to helping Maria.

“They deserve that stability — that stability can never be in the hotel room,” Long added, speaking generally about why the city has set 60-day shelter stay limits for families. “It can only be with our help, how we get them to complete their journey.”

‘Everyone is feeling sad’

Staff at James Madison — the alma matter of both U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer — said they first learned of the plan around noon Tuesday. They were told that the migrant families would arrive after students left Tuesday afternoon and would be gone by the time school starts Wednesday morning.

“It’s an enormous logistical challenge, but if you throw enough bodies at it you can do it,” said a staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Sixteen-year-old junior Spencer Katz said students learned about the evacuation Tuesday afternoon, and most of the discussion focused on whether or not school would be canceled Wednesday.

“I was expecting some people to be racist,” Katz said, but “I was pretty pleasantly surprised by how cool everyone was about it … Every single person I know has an immigrant as a parent or grandparent, so everyone was pretty understanding.”

As supportive as some students were, local Republican Councilmember Inna Vernikov denounced the use of the school in a video on X directed at Adams. “This is unacceptable!” she posted. “Stop this now and take the migrants into Gracie Mansion!”

The shelter has already proven a lightning rod in the GOP-leaning district and word of migrants moving into the school drew ire of right wing commentators and some residents. Video posted to X by a reporter for The New York Post showed a woman who identified herself as “an agitated mother,” heckling the migrants, yelling they were “taking over” her kids’ school.

“How does it feel that you kicked all the kids out of school tomorrow?” she yelled. “I hope you sleep really well tonight.”

The Adams administration also faced pushback from homeless rights advocates at the Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless, who issued a joint statement slamming the city’s hasty evacuation as “traumatic and disruptive.”

“This last-minute evacuation further proves that Floyd Bennett Field — a facility mired in a flood zone, miles from schools and other services — has never and will never serve as an appropriate and safe place to shelter families with children,” the group said.

An earlier wind storm in mid-December also caused chaos for migrant families, many of whom described a sleepless night with crying children, or were terrified the tents would collapse.

A 38-year-old mother of three, who asked that her name not be published to avoid repercussions from staff at the shelter said the latest commotion at the tents were stressful and exhausting for families.

“It’s not a life, it’s not good for the kids,” she said. “Everyone is feeling sad.”

Gwynne Hogan covers Brooklyn for THE CITY.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Brooklyn high school baffled by media frenzy over migrant families’ one-night stay

2024-01-12T02:59:30+00:00

This article is part of an ongoing collaboration between Chalkbeat and THE CITY.

Students at James Madison High School Madison returned to classes Thursday without fanfare, after the school received hate calls and even a bomb threat for serving as an emergency shelter Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning for migrants with children.

The families living in tents in an airfield arrived at the school after 5 p.m. on Tuesday to wait out a heavy rain and wind storm, and left the school before 5 a.m. Wednesday morning. Even before their departure, the migrants’ presence and the principal’s decision to shift to remote classes on Wednesday immediately became a talking point for right-wing pundits nationwide.

But parents, staffers and students who spoke with THE CITY expressed shock that the school had made it into the national spotlight, for what they saw, in the scheme of things, as a relatively minor disruption.

“I understand the frustration. No one wants their kids to be displaced out of their school, but it was just one day,” said Marsha Thompson-Miles, a mother of an 11th grader at the school and the head of its Parent-Teacher Association.

“In America we have so much and we have to deal with so little. Wars are raging around the world and we don’t really feel the effects of it,” she said, adding she felt pride that the school had provided a space for families in need.

“For one night people didn’t have to deal with rain and wind and the elements. They felt safe and warm,” she added.

While pundits raged about a supposed “takeover,” students had one day of remote lessons on Wednesday, with after-school activities canceled and a dance scheduled for that evening postponed.

School officials said the NYPD had thoroughly inspected the building and custodians gave it a deep clean before students and staff returned on Thursday.

A staffer who asked not to be named said Wednesdays tend to be a shorter day for students, and that the lingering impact of the storm would have made it difficult for some students to get to school in any event.

“It has been pretty quiet here,” the staffer said. “We went remote for one day, that’s it.”

Hate calls and a bomb threat

As 70-mile-an-hour gusts of wind bore down on New York City Tuesday, officials hastily evacuated 1,900 parents and children from a tent shelter located at the remote Floyd Bennett Field, busing them to the high school to shelter in the school gym, auditorium and cafeteria in chairs and on the ground for the night.

While their stay lasted for less than 12 hours, prominent conservatives treated the migrants’ presence at the school as nothing less than an invasion, with talk radio dedicating hours to the topic while Elon Musk tweeted that migrants “will come for your homes” next. Angry commenters followed suit, flooding the school’s Facebook page after officials announced the day of remote learning.

“They are putting these people over our students,” one commenter said. Another added: “That school needs to be disinfected.”

The vitriol wasn’t just online. A woman identifying herself as an “agitated mother” heckled the migrants as they entered the school in the rain Tuesday evening. And during a Zoom call hosted by Principal Jodie Cohen and Office of Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol, the two were shouted down by several outraged parents, several attendees said.

By Wednesday, city officials said the school had received “a torrent of hate calls and even a bomb threat,” Iscol said at a press briefing that morning. He added, “we don’t foresee us using James Madison High School again.”

Later on Wednesday, Assemblymember Michael Novakhov (R-Brooklyn) held a rally outside the school where he invoked the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, saying that “they wanna bring more and more people who rely on the government and vote for them.”

Republican Councilmember Inna Vernikov, who represents parts of southern Brooklyn, made the rounds on national television to complain that “our kids are really being punished.”

On Thursday, Curtis Sliwa, who ran against Mayor Eric Adams in the 2021 mayoral election and has been rallying against migrant shelters over the last year, blocked traffic outside of the Kings Plaza Shopping Center while calling for the Floyd Bennett shelter to close.

“Now the parents and the children who go to Madison High School have to be penalized,” he said. “Nobody’s happy about the situation.”

James Madison High School junior Akib Chowdhury said he wasn’t disrupted by migrants staying in the school’s gym during a storm, Jan. 11, 2024.

“It was kind of sad to see,” he said, when the migrants “just want a better place, a better place to live.”

‘Kind of crazy’

The neighborhoods of Marine Park, Madison, and Midwood surrounding the high school have trended Republican, voting heavily for Trump in 2016.

But members of the school community pointed out James Madison’s diverse student body; out of 3,700 students, 500 are English language learners; 19% are Asian, 16% are Latino and 10% are Black, according to Department of Education statistics.

Others pointed out the school’s history as the alma mater of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders and a place that’s long been a haven for immigrants of all kinds, from Holocaust survivors to Russians fleeing communism.

“Madison High School has always been a melting pot,” said Steve Kastenbaum, a veteran radio reporter and alumni of the school.

“People within the alumni community were quite frankly appalled that some people in Brooklyn exhibited the vitriolic rhetoric that was aimed at these people who were seeking shelter in a storm.”

A few students leaving the high school Thursday afternoon expressed their own trepidation about what had happened there.

“They put them over us students which is kind of crazy,” said a 15-year-old.

Another student lamented the school no longer felt safe for her. “It doesn’t feel like my safe space. It usually feels like my safe space.”

But many others took the remote day in stride, and said they felt their voices had been missing from the national news about their school. Zola Zephirin, a senior, said many students were upset by how things appeared on television and online.

“The hostility towards the migrants was definitely uncalled for,” she said. “These are people, they have families, they come here and attempt to make a better life, just like many of the students at Madison.”

Gwynne Hogan covers Brooklyn for THE CITY.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Many of Chicago’s migrant students may be entitled to bus service. But are schools telling them?

2024-01-19T19:06:28+00:00

After six months in a downtown shelter, Daniela and her 11-year-old son, Luis, faced a dilemma: The city had given them until Feb. 1 to find another place to live, which would mean moving farther away from the school the fifth grader was attending.

The family, which migrated to Chicago from Venezuela, secured an apartment in South Shore with the help of Catholic Charities. Chalkbeat is using pseudonyms in this story out of privacy concerns for the interviewed families.

But their new apartment is more than 13 miles south of Luis’ school, Ogden International School of Chicago’s Jenner campus — which could mean an hour-plus commute by public transit for Luis and his mother, who had planned to look for a job.

Daniela’s predicament is one many parents could face as Chicago enforces a new rule requiring migrant families to leave shelters after 60 days. She is one of about 3,000 migrants who arrived between January and July 31 of last year and began receiving 60-day eviction notices in early December 2023, according to a press release from City Hall. If families haven’t secured permanent housing, they must get back in line for a spot at a city shelter.

But many migrant families in shelters might not know the rights their children have to district-provided transportation — or even that they can remain in the same school despite moving — if schools are not informing them, or there’s no one to help translate conversations between school staff and families.

Every school has a liaison for homeless students who is supposed to inform homeless families of their rights, a district spokesperson said. Those liaisons, along with principals and staff with the district’s Office of Cultural and Language Education, tell newcomer families how to apply for transportation services, the district said. Each school also posts a list of homeless students’ rights in English and Spanish near the main office, the district said.

Until Daniela spoke with a Chalkbeat reporter, she didn’t know that the federal McKinney Vento Homeless Assistance Act allows homeless students to stay in the same school even if they move, such as to another shelter, and requires school districts to provide transportation. It also allows students such as Luis, who have found permanent housing, to stay at the same school until the end of the school year. No one at the school had told her, she said.

In fact, federal law says that districts “shall presume” that keeping homeless students in their original school is in their best interest unless that’s against their parents’ or guardians’ wishes.

After publication of this story, CPS provided Chalkbeat additional details about how schools are informing families of their rights under the law. They said every newly arrived family gets an enrollment packet, both in English and Spanish, that includes information about the rights of homeless students, according to the district.

Staff at the district’s Office of Language and Cultural Education also help these families fill out an application for homeless students, which “provides families with the first opportunity to review the process and ask questions,” the district said. Schools have a 24/7 translation line that staff can use to communicate with families who don’t speak English. CPS said it fulfills its legal obligation to provide transportation to homeless students by providing them with CTA cards.

The goal of the federal law is to provide stability for homeless students. One 2015 study found that New York City students who transferred schools were more likely to be chronically absent, and of those students, those who were also homeless were more likely to repeat the same grade.

Daniela also didn’t know Chicago Public Schools allows parents of younger homeless students like Luis to apply for yellow bus service if they can’t accompany their child on the commute. Or that CPS policy requires schools to inform families who are homeless of their transportation rights and options.

“We’re not, as a district, transporting any newcomers,” said Kimberly Jones, CPS’s director of transportation, in late November during an interview with WGN. On Tuesday, a district spokesperson said the transportation department does not see students’ immigration status, but still called Jones’ statement accurate, in that she’s unable to identify any students on bus routes based on their immigration status.

But district officials have indicated they are tracking immigration status internally. At a City Council Education Committee meeting in late November, a district official testified that CPS had enrolled at least 4,000 migrant students.

This year the district is exclusively busing students with disabilities and homeless students due to a driver shortage and as it’s under state watch to shorten commutes for students with disabilities. District officials have said migrant students are largely homeless, meaning they’re living in shelter, doubled up with others, or in public places.

Of the roughly 8,700 students the district is currently busing, just 128 are homeless, the district said. Another nearly 4,000 students who would typically qualify for transportation this year are receiving stipends, with just 18 of them homeless.

The school did give Daniela and her son free CTA cards for the school commute to and from their shelter, a service it is providing as part of its legal obligation to provide homeless students with transportation. But, “they did not provide the option for yellow bus service,” she said.

Ogden-Jenner did not respond to Chalkbeat’s request for comment. The district also declined to comment specifically on Daniela’s experience.

Schools must inform families of their rights, advocates say

CPS policy also allows families of young children who are homeless to apply for “hardship” transportation, which provides yellow bus service for children who are in kindergarten through sixth grade. Caregivers must fill out paperwork to prove they have a conflict that does not allow them to assist their child in getting to school. Examples of “hardship” include work, job training, schooling of their own, a conflict with shelter rules, court orders, or another “good cause,” according to CPS’ website.

The 60-day shelter rule is “going to require families to move more often, and it makes it more challenging to get to the school of origin and stay stable in their school of origin,” said Patricia Nix-Hodes, director of the Law Project of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. “If they are eligible for hardship transportation, they should be getting it.”

“The onus isn’t on the family who is newly arrived to Chicago to figure out what services might be available for transportation,” Nix-Hodes said.

School liaisons for homeless students often have other duties in schools, which may make it difficult for them to keep homeless families adequately informed, Nix-Hodes said.

In addition to informing families of their rights, the liaisons should also help families figure out if they’re eligible for bus service and with filling out any required paperwork, Nix-Hodes said.

Other families are in the dark about transportation rights

Edgar, a friend of Daniela’s who is also getting ready to move from shelter, also did not know he could apply for bus service so that his 8-year-old daughter could travel without him from their new home to her current school, Ogden Elementary.

Edgar is moving from the same shelter as Daniela to the same South Shore apartment building with his family. When he informed Ogden about their upcoming move, staff offered to find a school close to his new home — but they didn’t mention that he could apply for bus service to help get her to Ogden, he said.

Daniela's son, Luis, left, poses with Edgar's daughter, right, on Wed., Jan. 3, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois.

After learning the information from a Chalkbeat reporter, he went back to Ogden to ask about bus service. The school confirmed that service was available but “these are things that take time to approve,” Edgar explained in Spanish.

Instead, with Ogden’s help, he plans to enroll his daughter at a school that’s a 12-minute walk from their new home. While his daughter is OK with leaving Ogden, she’s sad about leaving her English class, he said. Ogden did not return a request for comment, and CPS didn’t respond to questions about Edgar’s experience.

Schools shouldn’t encourage homeless families to “move schools when their living situation changes,” Nix-Hodes said.

The law allows homeless students to stay in their same school because school stability is good for children’s academic performance and social-emotional health, especially when they’re coming to the United States from another country, Nix-Hodes said.

Gwen McElhattan, a social worker with nonprofit Chicago Help Initiative, which provides meals, clothing, and other services to homeless families, has received questions from many migrant parents on how to enroll their child in school. The city has created a “welcome center” for migrants at Roberto Clemente High School, which is supposed to help families with school enrollment and other resources. But McElhattan said that many people don’t know it exists — and doesn’t sense that many designated people are informing families of how to navigate school enrollment.

“They don’t know about it because they’re migrants — they don’t always know everything that’s happening,” said McElhattan, adding that their primary concerns are food and shelter. “They’re just trying to survive. They have children – they’re just trying to keep going.”

Luis, Daniela’s son, said he likes his teachers at Ogden-Jenner and he’s made some friends. But he’s had a tough time understanding lessons because there’s often no one who can help translate, he said. Because of the language barrier, there are days that he doesn’t want to go to school, his mother said.

Still, Daniela would prefer to keep her son enrolled at Ogden-Jenner if she can get busing because she senses it’s a good school. By state standards, it is: The school earned the Illinois State Board of Education’s second-highest rating for academic performance.

Daniela has not yet talked with the school about what happens next or what her options are.

It’s difficult to communicate with staff, she said. “En la escuela allí no hablan español” — At the school, they don’t speak Spanish.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago educators ask lawmakers to step up support for schools seeing increase in migrant students

2024-01-18T01:45:14+00:00

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Viviana Ortiz is overwhelmed. As the only advocate for students experiencing homelessness at Cameron Elementary School in West Humboldt Park, she supports 126 students — a workload that has dramatically increased with the influx of migrant students from Latin America and other countries.

“The amount of support that our families need is incredible,” said Ortiz, who noted that she has never seen families in such need of clothing, food, and other necessities.

On Wednesday, Ortiz joined other educators, local and national union leaders, including Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and parents of new arrivals at a roundtable at Cameron Elementary School to call for more support for migrant students from federal, state, and local governments and to draw attention to the struggles of migrant families at Cameron and across the city.

Gabriel Paez, an English learner program teacher at Cameron and chair of the Chicago Teachers Union bilingual education committee, estimate that about 200 migrant students at the school need access to more bilingual education, transportation, and basic needs — a reflection of the wider challenges presented by the arrival of thousands of migrant families to the city.

As of Jan. 17, more than 30,000 migrants had arrived in Chicago since August 2022, according to a city dashboard. Most crossed the southern border and were ordered bused here by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Families and children are often fleeing countries that have seen a rise of violence and political strife.

At a City Council Education Committee meeting in November, a CPS official said the district had enrolled at least 4,000 migrant students.

Teachers at Cameron Elementary school said they have noticed some migrant students arrive at the school without proper clothing, such as coats warm enough for Chicago winter, and in need of medical support. Many are without permanent housing.

A spokesperson for Chicago Public Schools said the district has provided additional funding for staffing and services to help schools with the increase of newly arriving students. Nearly all migrant students have been classified as English learners or Students in Temporary Living Situations. CPS officials said they are currently working with the city, state, lawmakers, and the U.S. Department of Education to receive more funding.

At the roundtable, organized by the Chicago Teachers Union, participants echoed the call for more resources to help migrant students, including more bilingual teachers and staff.

In Chicago, the number of designated bilingual teachers has declined in recent years, but teachers with bilingual or English as a second language endorsements have increased, according to an analysis of staffing data by Chalkbeat Chicago. Another finding from the analysis found that the ratio of staff with bilingual credentials or titles to students was increasing as more English learners have enrolled.

At Wednesday’s roundtable, Paez said the district should push to cover 100% of tuition costs for educators who want to get a bilingual endorsement. He applauded the district for currently covering 50% of tuition, but said he wants to see teachers who want to get that endorsement not go into debt.

Paez also said the school needs more bilingual staff who can help students and families dealing with emergencies. Paez said he and other staff members at the school have gone above and beyond their duties to support students.

“Taking children to the ER is not in my job description, but we do it because the need is there,” said Paez. “If CPS, or the state, or the federal government could pay for someone to be in our building day in and day out whose only purpose is to help get these people on their feet, that will make the teaching and learning part of this equation a lot more manageable.”

State Rep. Lilian Jiménez, who represents neighborhoods on Chicago’s northwest side, noted that families who have migrated from Latin America need transportation and access to bus passes to get to school.

Chicago Public Schools has grappled with a bus driver shortage over the past few years. This school year, the district decided to only bus students who are legally obligated to have transportation — such as students with disabilities and those experiencing homelessness. This leaves out 5,500 students who used to get buses to and from the city’s magnet and selective enrollment schools.

Migrant students might not know that they are eligible for transportation if they don’t have access to stable housing under federal law. The law also says students can stay enrolled at the same school even if they have to move to another shelter.

In November, Gov. J.B. Pritzker allocated $160 million to the Illinois Department of Human Services to address the ongoing migrant crisis, with $65 million going to the city to help set up a winter shelter. With state lawmakers kicking off the spring legislative session this week, advocates are hoping for more money to support families who have migrated to the United States.

Jimenez said she’ll work throughout the spring session to get more tuition reimbursement to help teachers get a bilingual education endorsement.

CTU President Stacy Davis Gates called on the federal government to support Chicago during the migrant crisis as the city and district lack the infrastructure to assist migrant families.

“We need our collaboration to extend beyond the city. The city is not set up to deal with an immigration crisis. We do not have the infrastructure,” said Davis Gates. “So, this idea that we are just going to focus in on what isn’t here, let’s focus on who is supposed to bring the things that we need here.”

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.

We are facing a migrant mental health crisis. More school social workers could help.

2024-02-05T13:00:00+00:00

A new student recently arrived in my third grade classroom in tears. She missed her mom, who was back in Colombia, she told me. She cried from 8 a.m. until lunch. The other students stared. Some cried, too. Some offered hugs. We all felt the heaviness of the moment.

I tried every trauma-informed technique I knew to comfort her: We took deep breaths, she visited our peace corner, I lent her a teddy bear, we looked at some calming books, and she wrote a letter to her mom. Despite my efforts, this child was inconsolable, and I could not just continue teaching. Our school’s lone social worker was dealing with cases that had already escalated into crises. I felt woefully unprepared.

Ashley Busone Rodríguez

I teach at a community school in Washington Heights where, like most New York City schools, we’ve recently received a dramatic increase in immigrant students. Unfortunately, it feels like we are failing them from the minute they walk through our school doors.

As teachers, we have a lot of training in literacy and math instruction. What we’re missing is what to do when trauma interrupts our teaching. Through my work with the City University of New York Initiative on Immigration and Education, I recently published this guide on trauma-informed practice for educators. I’ve been fortunate to gather resources and training on techniques that can support my newcomer students.

But even my practice isn’t enough to get teachers and students through this crisis. We need more social workers in our schools. Because if we don’t address their trauma now, these children won’t be able to get through the day, let alone learn.

Our one social worker for 450 elementary students does not have time in her overflowing caseload to do an intake with every new child. And our school is better than some in New York’s Department of Education. In 2023, there were about 907,000 students enrolled in NYC Public Schools, not including charters. There were around 2,000 social workers, according to the department’s press office. Like at our school, that’s roughly one social worker for every 450 students.

Instead of receiving trauma-informed resources and training from the city, I receive paperwork to fill out. Almost immediately, I must evaluate migrant students’ reading levels: Do they need English as a New Language services? I have to quiz them in math and determine if they will need intervention. I have to find out if they’ve been out of school and, if so, for how long. I am allowed to provide these students basic necessities, such as school uniforms or snacks from the teacher’s lounge if they have not eaten that morning, but a social worker could do so much more.

With more social workers, our school could offer consistent counseling to new students and their families, with periodic check-ins to monitor their mental and physical health and their academic progress. They could do more home visits and provide more preventative, rather than crisis, mental health care. They could take the time to really get to know families and build trust with them.

Due to time constraints, my own conversations with new families must be brief. I usually duck into the hallway to meet a parent or a relative who tells me stories of persecution, famine, poverty, or natural disasters that drove them to seek refuge in the United States. If I had time to linger, I might be able to understand the root causes of their child’s trauma. I could relay this information to a social worker who could apply their training when time permits.

Instead, I try to convince the family that their child will do just fine in my classroom, and then I have to return to teaching the rest of the class. When a child continues to cry, their tears remind me that they need more than milk and a math assessment.

On the same day I was trying to console our newest student, I got an email from the school district about Saturday School. I couldn’t help but think how the education system’s priorities were so backward.

Many schools in New York City run programs like Saturday School that help promote academic and test-taking skills. Where I work, we typically choose students who need a little extra help in math or reading and set aside money for curriculum and staff to run a remedial program. Our new arrivals are often considered for this academic support.

But how can we possibly be expecting these students to attend Saturday School for tutoring when they can barely get through school on a weekday?

Another “urgent email” recently came across my screen while I was reading a gut-wrenching article about the 11-year-old migrant who apparently died by suicide in a New York City shelter a few weeks ago. As I scrolled through, holding back tears, I saw the education department’s mandatory “Remote Learning Protocol” reminder pop up on my screen. That meant I had to reshuffle my schedule that day to ensure that students took computers home, that I assigned work in Google Classroom, and that parents had their passwords “just in case.”

Saturday School. Technology for every child. All of these are great initiatives and have their purpose. But what if, instead of test prep and technology, we use these resources to hire social workers and trauma counselors? What if there was time in every school’s schedule for social-emotional check-ins and self-care small groups? In the wake of a nationwide migrant mental health crisis, we must prioritize our students’ mental health before their ability to answer multiple-choice questions or log in to a Chromebook.

Ashley Busone Rodríguez is a third grade bilingual teacher at an elementary school in New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood. She’s also a project researcher and instructor at the CUNY-Initiative on Immigration and Education. She has 50 students on her roster between two classes, and 11 of them were new to the country last school year.

Bilingual program to launch at Malcolm X Shabazz to serve Newark’s growing population of English learners

2024-02-05T11:00:00+00:00

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A new bilingual education program will launch in the South Ward this fall to help Newark’s growing population of English language learners access services closer to where they live.

High school students learning English as a second language will be eligible to enroll in the new program next school year at Malcolm X Shabazz High School, where concerns over declining enrollment, student performance, and safety challenges have remained in recent years. The program will start with ninth and 10th graders and then add one grade per year.

The new program comes as the district’s enrollment grows amid the latest influx of immigrants to New Jersey. It also comes almost three years after the district agreed to overhaul services for English language learners as part of a settlement following a years long investigation by federal officials.

More than 10,000 students – a quarter of the city’s public school enrollment – are English language learners, district officials said.

The new program at Shabazz will offer South Ward high school students learning English the option to receive services near home, according to Superintendent Roger León, who announced the new program at a recent school board meeting.

“There are students that live in the South Ward that take two or three buses to get to Eastside or Barringer High School because they’re in a bilingual Spanish program,” León said.

Currently, South Ward high schools offer no programs for English language learners, León said.

The program previously existed at Shabazz but was removed under state control of the district, according to district spokeswoman Nancy Deering. Since León was appointed to the board in 2018, when local control was reinstated, the district has added an engineering academy, cosmetology program, and an aviation program to the school as part of the district’s high school redesign strategy.

Last school year, 272 students attended Shabazz and less than 2% were English language learners, according to 2022-23 state data.

The district’s English learners include a mix of students born in the country and abroad. Most speak Spanish or Portuguese, although some speak Arabic, French, Haitian Creole, or other languages.

With the influx of second-language learners in the district, officials are also wrestling with a shortage of bilingual teachers who can communicate in different languages.

During a January school board meeting, board member Vereliz Santana said the new program at Shabazz would alleviate some of the staffing pressures at Eastside and Barringer high schools. Barringer has “the highest number of bilingual and ESL vacancies,” she said.

“It’s a student population that we’re committed to serving and to educate and we’re rising to the challenge,” Santana said.

In 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice launched a nearly four-year investigation that found “wide-ranging failures” in the district’s English language program, officials said. The department’s civil rights division launched the investigation when the state still operated the Newark school system and in response to a complaint that the district was failing to properly serve English learners.

As part of a settlement agreement with federal officials, Newark agreed to overhaul how it serves English learners, but León has shared few details about plans to expand bilingual education districtwide.

In 2022, the Newark school board approved a 15-page resolution that restated the district’s responsibilities to meet the needs of students learning English as mandated by state and federal laws, such as screening students to identify English learners and providing teachers of English learners with relevant professional development opportunities.

Teachers and students are also grappling with the challenges of having English language learners in classrooms where there’s little support.

Sani Scott, a junior at Central High School, during the board meeting in January, said it’s tough to communicate with her bilingual classmates in her history class, and teachers are often stuck translating lessons and notes for students – “a process that takes up to at least 10 minutes of class time.”

Bilingual students “don’t get the proper education they deserve because they’re so busy trying to translate everything just to keep up with us,” Scott said. “That keeps them isolated and makes their social groups very small because of the language barrier.”

Yvette Jordan, chair of the Newark Education Workers Caucus, said at January’s board meeting that teachers aren’t getting enough support to help bilingual students. Teachers have to use their prep time to translate materials, which puts a strain on their time to plan lessons, Jordan said.

She read a statement from one of her Latina students who feels insecure because her classmates don’t understand her: “I don’t know if they are making fun of us, because they don’t understand me or my friends, and I feel bad.”

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Public Schools enrollment climbs as more migrant families arrive

2024-02-08T23:43:51+00:00

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More than 5,700 newly arrived immigrant students have enrolled in Chicago Public Schools since the beginning of the school year, district officials said Thursday.

Preliminary school enrollment data updated daily on the city data portal and analyzed by Chalkbeat shows overall enrollment increased by 4,500 students since the official count on the 20th day of school in September. After more than a decade of decline, CPS saw its enrollment stabilize this school year.

“The number is fluid and evolving,” CPS CEO Pedro Martinez said Thursday. “Our principals and teachers and school communities have been incredibly welcoming to the students and their families.”

His comments came during a virtual press conference about a new volunteer coordination effort launched by the City of Chicago aimed at supporting migrant families. It also comes after city officials once again delayed its plan to enforce a 60-day shelter stay limit on migrant families.

Publicly available data does not reveal how many CPS students are migrants or how many are living in city shelters. District officials said they do not collect information about the immigration status of students or their families “to support the City of Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance.”

Preliminary enrollment data analyzed by Chalkbeat indicates nearly 7,000 more students have been identified as English language learners since the end of September, when the district officially counted enrollment. English language learners can include both newly arrived immigrants, as well as students already living in Chicago.

Last school year, English language learners made up about one-fifth of all students; a decade ago, these students made up roughly 16% of CPS.

Last month, educators, union officials, and some local lawmakers raised concerns about schools without enough bilingual staff and other resources struggling to meet those students’ language and mental health needs.

District officials said Thursday that just under 6% of schools are lacking teachers with necessary ESL or bilingual credentials. Karime Asaf, the district’s chief of language and cultural education, said officials are prioritizing those roughly 30 schools — which officials did not identify — “for any kind of services or resources.”

Asaf said schools are working to get more teachers certified to teach English learners. District officials said they’ve allocated a total of $8 million to schools that saw increases in English learners since the 20th day of school.

Martinez said around 600 teachers are currently working toward getting bilingual or English as a Second Language endorsements.

Martinez said currently 7,200 teachers have these qualifications, up from about 5,100 teachers in 2018. However, bilingual staffing can vary by school, and often support staff, such as social workers, are not bilingual. CPS does provide a 24/7 language interpretation hotline that schools can call to get assistance communicating with families, but some parents have said they’ve struggled to communicate with schools or understand their school options when it’s time to move.

Students who are homeless — those in shelters, living doubled up somewhere, or living in a public place — have a right to remain at their school even if they move out of the school’s boundary and are entitled to transportation provided by the district, such as free CTA passes. By state law, if a school enrolls 20 or more students who speak a language other than English, the school must set up a bilingual education program with qualified staff. Asaf said this is “a multi-year process.”

“Generally, the challenge we have is when families just walk up to our buildings and we always tell our schools: Enroll the families. And then we have a process to work with those families to make sure we find the nearest program,” Martinez said.

The district also has bi-weekly meetings with staff at the city’s largest temporary shelters that are housing migrants, to “make sure that our families understand that there’s always a way to connect with the Chicago Public Schools … to make sure all their questions are answered,” Asaf said. She added that most school leaders attend these meetings.

Martinez said CPS is planning to hire newcomer adults who have received work authorization for “critical needs” at schools, including as custodians, as well as positions in transportation, nutrition, and classroom support.

Many of Chicago’s migrant families have been searching for work but need authorization to obtain jobs legally. Axios reported that about 1,000 newcomers have received work permits as of late January, four months after the federal government expanded eligibility to nearly half a million immigrants from Venezuela, where political and economic turmoil has pushed many residents to leave.

“We were proactive working with the city to say, since we know we have these families who are looking for jobs, we have many openings,” Martinez told reporters on Thursday. “We are now just trying to make it easier for our families to be able to apply for these different jobs.”

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org. Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Four square, fútbol, and phonics: A day at Denver’s Valdez Elementary with two newly arrived migrant students

2024-02-14T00:43:59+00:00

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Fourth graders streamed one at a time through the playground door at Denver’s Valdez Elementary, a snaking jumble of energy and untied shoelaces.

Most bounded up the stairs to their classrooms. Only a few stopped to give a quick side hug to the staff member who was squinting in the sun and holding the door. Two of the huggers were Jesus and Leiker, who arrived in Denver from Venezuela a few months ago.

The boys, ages 9 and 10, are among the more than 38,000 migrants who have come to Denver in the past year after fleeing political and economic crises in their home countries.

Some of the new arrivals are families with children like Jesus and Leiker. Denver Public Schools has enrolled more than 3,200 of these young people since the start of the school year.

A majority arrived after the October cutoff date that determines how much per-student funding DPS gets from the state, creating a financial shortfall for the state’s largest district and causing schools to scramble for resources.

But not all schools. The new students are concentrated in a couple dozen of DPS’ more than 200 schools, which the district has been calling hotspots. The main reason is because the schools offer specialized instruction in both English and Spanish.

Valdez, also known as Escuela Valdez, has a longstanding dual language program. It’s also right up the street from a city-run shelter inside a Quality Inn, which Principal Jessica Buckley said everyone simply calls “The Quality.” Valdez, which had about 400 students last year, has welcomed more than 100 new students in the past few months.

Valdez Elementary — or Escuela Valdez — is a dual language school in northwest Denver.

Every classroom in the northwest Denver elementary school is at capacity with 35 children — except the fourth grade, which before last week had 29 per class.

In the face of this new reality, Valdez has had to make adjustments. Some of the shifts have been beautiful. Others have been hard. “The bright spots are the growth of our kids and our community,” Buckley said. “The challenge is resources.”

Jesus and Leiker met at The Quality, where both of their families were staying, and became fast friends. They say they are like brothers: “Somos como hermanos.”

This is what one school day looked like recently for Jesus and Leiker, whose last names Chalkbeat is withholding to protect their identities as they navigate life in a new country.

Valdez is ‘an excellent place to land’

The boys were the first two to enter the classroom, walking shoulder-to-shoulder and chattering.

“OK! Sit in a place where you think you can focus well,” teacher Isabelle King said in Spanish.

Jesus and Leiker scurried to opposite corners of a classroom rug imprinted with a map of the United States. Jesus sat cross-legged above the state of Michigan, and Leiker scrambled to a spot near California. They said “buenos días” to the classmates next to them. Following the teacher’s prompt, they also named their favorite sport.

“Fútbol,” Jesus said with a smile.

The fourth grade class had been watching video clips about children with disabilities. That day’s clip featured a girl who was Deaf and used a sign language interpreter at school.

When the teacher paused the video to ask for one way the students were the same as the girl and one way they were different, Leiker raised his hand. In Spanish, he said that he was different because he could talk to his friends directly, without an interpreter.

Jesus, in the blue polo shirt, listens as teacher Isabelle King gives instructions during morning meeting in her fourth grade classroom.

That’s possible at Valdez because all of the students speak Spanish. As a dual language school, Valdez doesn’t admit native English speakers after kindergarten. In the younger grades, as much as 90% of the classroom instruction is in Spanish to immerse students in the language.

Whereas other schools in Denver and around the country have had to use technology, sometimes as rudimentary as Google Translate, to communicate with new students and families from Venezuela, no interpreters are needed at Valdez.

“We are an excellent place for these kids to land,” Buckley said. Because everyone speaks Spanish, she said, the new students are “able to interact and learn and be themselves.”

Students learn the language of play

In the gym, P.E. teacher Jessica Dominguez told the students to split into teams.

“Me and Leiker!” Jesus shouted in Spanish.

For the next 40 minutes, their team rotated between basketball, four square, and a rock climbing wall. The boys dominated at basketball, sprinting around the half court and shouting “rápido, rápido!” — fast, fast! — as their teammates were shooting.

The girls dominated at four square. Jesus struggled. After he lost for serving the ball when he wasn’t supposed to, a girl paused the game to explain the rules to him in Spanish.

“He didn’t know,” she told her classmates.

Leiker, in the top left square, and Jesus, standing behind him in line, play four square with their classmates during P.E.

Staff at Valdez agree that the new students have enriched the school linguistically. Whereas in the past students — and even adults — would often default to English when speaking with each other, now it’s most practical to speak in Spanish. That way, everyone understands.

The phenomenon was on display at recess, too. Soccer has long been the most popular activity at recess, Buckley said. But now, Spanish is what is spoken on the field.

“Leiker! Leiker! Atrás! Atrás!”” a teammate called out, urging him to pass the ball behind.

The second most popular game is a new one called gaga ball. In contrast to the Spanish spoken on the soccer field, all of the students playing gaga ball spoke in English.

At the shrill tweet-tweet of a whistle, Jesus, Leiker, and the other soccer players ran to the cafeteria for lunch. Leiker’s cheeks were flushed pink as he waited for his macaroni and cheese. Jesus brought his lunch from home, but he still stood in line with his friend.

Together, they found seats at a round table with two other fourth-grade boys.

“You guys played soccer today?” Assistant Principal Cesar Sanchez asked in Spanish.

“Sí!” they answered in unison.

“We lost,” Leiker added.

“Does it matter if you win or lose?” Sanchez asked. “What matters?”

“Have fun!” they said in unison.

Soccer is the most popular game at recess at Valdez Elementary. On this warm winter day, Jesus, kicking the ball, Leiker, and the other students used rock-paper-scissors to pick teams.

Teachers make academic adjustments

It’s always been the case at Valdez, like at all schools, that some students are ahead academically and some are behind, and teachers must adapt their lessons. But with the newly arrived students, teachers have had to differentiate to new extremes. Valdez has welcomed some fourth graders who don’t know how to write their names, Buckley said.

Jesus and Leiker can read and write in Spanish. They said they went to school in Venezuela before coming to the United States. Still, their teachers — especially literacy teacher Giovanni Leon, who the students call Don Gio — have had to make adjustments, working to strengthen the new arrivals’ reading and writing skills in their native language while also starting from scratch in English, teaching them the alphabet and the sounds the letters make.

On this day after P.E., Jesus and Leiker’s class started their literacy block on the carpet, where Leon explained the day’s assignment: to read an 1873 speech by women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony and answer questions about the text.

Leiker, far left, and Jesus, third from the left, work on writing complete sentences.

But the text and the questions were in English, part of Valdez’s 50/50 split between English and Spanish in the upper grades. For years, the language rotation was very black-and-white. With the new students, it’s become more gray.

As most students paired up to begin reading the Susan B. Anthony speech, Leon called Jesus, Leiker, and three others to a C-shaped table in the back of the room. They would be reading and answering questions about another text, a fairy tale, in Spanish.

First, however, Leon had them practice writing complete sentences with a subject and a predicate, a capital letter at the beginning, and a period at the end. He gave them a subject in Spanish — el perro, the dog — and asked them to finish the sentence.

Many newly arrived students at Valdez are practicing literacy skills in their native Spanish while also learning English.

“The dog is playing in the yard,” Leiker wrote in Spanish in his notebook.

“The dog is barking,” Jesus wrote.

A while later, when Leon pointed out that Leiker was missing a period, the boy swirled the tip of his pencil several times, making a period so big his teacher couldn’t miss it.

Jesus has a lightbulb moment

While many things are different at Valdez these days, some things are the same. One of those is that students, including the new arrivals, continue to have what teachers call lightbulb moments — the moment of joy and discovery when an academic concept clicks.

On this day, something clicked for Jesus in math.

Math is not Jesus’ favorite subject. Both boys said they like recess and lunch best, followed by snack. Leiker said he thinks music class, where they learn to play instruments, is the hardest. Shaking his head, Jesus said that for him, it’s math.

Leiker, left, and Jesus, right, giggle as they work side by side on math problems on their computers.

During part of the math block, the boys were sitting with King at her C-shaped table. To help explain 5 x 30 to Leiker, King took out a bucket of yellow cubes stuck together in groups of 10. Leiker portioned the cube stacks into five piles of three and counted them up.

Jesus sat next to him, working on addition. But the yellow cubes caught his eye.

When Leiker got the right answer — 150 — Jesus let out an, “Ohhhhhhhh!”

Jesus put his own work aside and helped Leiker with his next problem: 30 x 40. Using a bigger set of yellow cubes, the boys counted in Spanish. They spoke in unison, just like they had when they were talking about soccer at lunch. “100, 200, 300, 400…

“1,200!”

“That’s it,” King said.

The boys beamed.

Valdez will need more desks

Just past 3 p.m., Jesus, Leiker, and their fourth-grade classmates streamed out of Valdez through the same playground door they’d entered seven hours earlier, in the same jumbly line.

Buckley stood on the blacktop, surveying the scene.

Valdez has more students now than at any time in recent history. The school is so full that when newly arrived families show up in the office looking to register their children, as three had that day, the secretary often has to redirect them to nearby elementary schools.

Jesus, left, and Leiker, right, walk to their classroom at Valdez Elementary, which has welcomed more than 100 newly arrived students this year, many of them from Venezuela.

Valdez has hired more paraprofessionals and an intervention teacher to help the new students catch up. It has also bought more books and scrounged for hand-me-down furniture. The assistant principal, Sanchez, has at times driven around the city in his own truck, collecting spare desks from elementary schools that don’t have as many students.

A few hours before class was dismissed for the day, Buckley learned the school would need two more desks. The district was in touch to share that two newly arrived students — in fourth grade, the only grade at Valdez with any more room — would be enrolling the following week.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Colorado budget committee plans aid for schools enrolling more migrant students

2024-02-14T22:25:39+00:00

This story has been updated to include a comment from the governor.

Colorado lawmakers on the powerful Joint Budget Committee want to provide some financial assistance to schools grappling with educating an influx of migrant students this year.

The idea from state Rep. Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat who sits on the committee, would allocate up to $24 million, to be split among school districts that have enrolled newly arrived students after the October cutoff date that determines districts’ per-pupil funding. But the funding would be far less than what the state provides to educate a student.

The budget committee, which plays a major role in how the state spends its money, voted unanimously earlier this month to draft a bill allocating the funds.

Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, an Arvada Democrat and vice chair of the committee, said she plans to co-sponsor the bill once it’s ready. The bill has not yet been introduced.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Gov. Jared Polis said he’s working with the legislature on a proposal to provide additional funding for school districts that have new arrivals after the October count date.

Public school enrollment in Colorado: Here’s what you need to know

The state annually adjusts districts’ education funding up or down during the legislative session based on each district’s student enrollment on Oct. 1. But the surge in migrant students since the official count has overwhelmed many districts and prompted calls from school leaders for more aid to teach recent arrivals.

Sirota said while the state doesn’t have an exact tally, she’s heard estimates of up to 8,000 new student arrivals statewide since October. Some schools have needed to increase class sizes and have a greater need for services that help English learners, she said.

“This crisis is being felt across our cities, counties, and the state,” she said.

The state money would be a one-time infusion for districts. Joint Budget Committee members have said they want to ensure school districts wouldn’t need to apply for the money, but instead would have to provide the state with a tally of eligible students.

How much money districts would get likely will depend on whether the committee decides to allocate the full $24 million Sirota has proposed and how many newly arrived students have enrolled statewide since the October count.

The $24 million sum is not a calculation of how much it costs to fully educate the migrant students in Colorado. Rather, it is money the state would otherwise put in its savings account for education. Increasing local tax revenue means the state needs to spend $24 million less on schools this year than anticipated.

The proposed bill would reallocate those funds, but committee members have said they want to also find other funding sources.

The extra money would help districts, but it would be less than the $10,614 per student, on average, they get for students who are enrolled during the October count.

Sirota said funding is tight this year, especially when there are many competing budget priorities. But the extra funding would help districts bearing the brunt of the costs.

“I want to help our districts better absorb the costs that they are incurring with so many new students who are new to the country that they have taken on since October,” she said.

States across the country have seen a spike in recent migrant arrivals. The Denver area has dealt with the brunt of those arrivals.

In Denver Public Schools, migrant student enrollment has ballooned by more than 3,200 of these young people since the start of the school year. Many arrived after the October count that determined state per-student funding sent by the state.

The impact has also been uneven within the district. New students are concentrated in about two dozen of Denver’s schools.

But schools and cities across the metro area and state are reporting more students arriving every day, either from families moving to find work or recently coming to the state. The influx has caused financial shortfalls and pushback from some communities.

Correction: This story has been corrected to update the per pupil figure districts get from the state.

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.

An existing program for migrant students can’t help schools with the current influx of new students. Here’s why.

2024-02-22T18:59:22+00:00

Some of Colorado’s most diverse school districts, including Aurora and Greeley, are used to waves of immigration bringing in new students in the middle of the year.

Recently, families from Burma have moved into Greeley, and Aurora officials recall hundreds of new students from Afghanistan after U.S. troops pulled out.

But this year, the midyear wave is even bigger, with most students arriving from Venezuela and other South American countries. And it is overwhelming some district systems.

“We’re running at 300% our normal typical average for the school year,” said Brett Johnson, chief financial officer for Aurora Public Schools, referring to the number of midyear enrollments, which are up from the typical 500 to 800 in a year.

Schools need everything from new desks and more classroom space, to more teachers, bilingual staff, and specialized teachers who can administer screening tests to determine students’ levels of English proficiency and help them learn English.

But many of the new students from South America arrived after the Oct. 1 cutoff that determines how much per-student state funding each district will get. And although government officials refer to this new group of immigrants as “migrants,” the students do not qualify for money from the federal Migrant Education Program.

What does the Migrant Education Program do?

The Migrant Education Program began in 1966 and was designed to support the children of farmworker families. To qualify for the program, students must have parents who work in agriculture, or work in the field themselves, usually in temporary or seasonal positions, and must have moved between school districts within the last three years.

Some of the children might belong to families who travel around the country following the seasonal availability of farm work. They aren’t necessarily new to the country, and many already are fluent in English. Immigration status doesn’t matter, just as it doesn’t for the students who arrived this semester. By law, all children can access free public education.

In Colorado, there were about 4,500 agricultural migrant children aged 1 through 21 this year — fewer than the thousands of new students from South America. The $7.5 million federal allocation for the state helps younger children succeed in school and focuses on keeping teens and young adults up to age 22 in school instead of dropping out to work full time.

Advocates from the program travel to farms or worksites to enroll children in the program and convince older students up to age 22 to stay in school. The program works with families, visiting their homes, supporting their mental health, and figuring out what other barriers might exist for the students to learn. The funding also pays for school supplies, tutoring, and summer programming.

“A lot of our families have needs that are pretty basic, if we just try to push education on them they’re not ready a lot of times,” said Tomás Mejia, Colorado’s director for the Migrant Education Program. “If we help them be well enough, help the parents and adults be well enough to help the kids, that can really help a lot more.”

The new South American students also need the same types of support. For both groups of students, educators say there’s a need to build trust and provide help that goes beyond the classroom.

The Greeley school district usually enrolls the largest number of agricultural migrant students in the state, and Greeley also is seeing a wave of non-agricultural migrant students. One school recently enrolled 19 new students in one day. An elementary school is now so full that teachers are starting to operate out of mobile carts, moving from room to room, instead of having a classroom.

School districts are addressing student needs

The Greeley district’s existing welcome center, which has always helped the community’s immigrant population, is playing a big role in helping the district welcome and make families feel like they belong, said Brian Lemos, director of instruction and English language development.

But the district is also relying on community partners to help families learn to use technology, learn English, and to offer help with housing or employment.

“There’s definitely unique needs,” Lemos said. “They’re new to the country. All of them have needs as far as language acquisition.”

“A lot of these students are coming to us with severe trauma,” said Theresa Myers, a spokesperson for the Greeley district. “Some of the families from Venezuela, they’ve been trying to travel for months. Our impact on our mental health services is real.”

Right now, the district has a mental health counselor at every school. But 35 counselor and social worker positions in the district were funded by ESSER dollars that won’t be available after September. Now the district is trying to figure out how to keep the much-needed positions.

Although Colorado gives school districts extra money to assist students who are learning English, most school districts say they have to use money from their general fund to cover the services they provide because that specific money isn’t enough.

And since so many of these students arrived after October 1, the districts didn’t get the money for them this year. (If students are still enrolled next fall, the districts will get money then.) In the meantime, school districts are having to hire new staff including paraprofessionals to help teachers with larger-than-normal class sizes. In Aurora, “We have several instances in which elementary schools came back from Christmas break with almost 100 more kids than before,” Johnson said.

Legislators in Colorado are drafting a $24 million proposal to give districts some funding for these midyear enrollees. It won’t be the total funding that districts usually get per student, but it might help.

State lawmakers haven’t filed the proposal, but there are promising signs it’ll pass once they do. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has said he supports sending extra funding to districts enrolling new students, and the proposal is coming from lawmakers on the powerful Joint Budget Committee, which plays a major role in how the state spends its money.

Johnson said that Aurora isn’t waiting to see that money transferred before hiring needed positions or addressing needs. He hopes the state will reimburse some of the expenses if the money does come.

While leaders say they aren’t cutting budgets or making adjustments, they are starting to think ahead. Maybe that will mean having roaming teams that can go to the schools most impacted on a short term basis to deal with the work of helping students new to the country.

“The hard part is no one knows how long this phenomenon will last,” Johnson said. “We are trying to start putting in some thought in the long-term, if there’s a better system.”

For now, schools are helping new students from South America adapt.

“When a new student enrolls who is new to the country it’s also a matter of the daily school routines — it’s also teaching them the routines of a typical school day,” Johnson said.

That can take up a lot of time for school staff. But not all schools are receiving high numbers of new students. Schools near shelters, apartments or housing where agencies have helped migrants get settled are enrolling more students.

Educators say they aren’t currently thinking about transferring students to different schools to avoid overcrowded classrooms, but Greeley leaders say they have changed enrollment boundaries when schools were getting too full in previous situations. They might consider it if the enrollment boom continues.

School educators say, still, they want kids in school, they understand that children must learn and the faster they can connect them to educators, the better.

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit schools are enrolling more migrant students. Can the district meet their needs?

2024-02-26T19:29:50+00:00

As an influx of school-aged migrant and refugee children have resettled with their families in Detroit in recent weeks, schools are working to quickly adapt to meet their needs.

Some are more prepared than others.

Detroit Public Schools Community District campuses on the southwest side of the city have long served diverse student groups and have many Spanish-speaking teachers and administrators who can easily communicate with parents. But a large number of students who have recently migrated to the U.S. are being placed in available shelter beds on the city’s east side, where schools have historically served children with different needs.

“It’s no fault of the schools,” said Elizabeth Orozco-Vasquez, CEO of Freedom House Detroit, a nonprofit that supports asylum seekers and refugees. “It’s just that they’ve never had to prepare for that before. Meeting the needs of a new population of kids is a big ask to put on an already tasked school system.”

Translation services in those schools are often limited. Additionally, transportation for kids to attend schools in southwest Detroit can be difficult to arrange, advocates say. The district is required by the federal McKinney-Vento Homelessness Assistance Act to help students without a fixed address maintain school stability.

“We are seeing a lot of school-aged children come in, primarily in schools outside of southwest Detroit that aren’t necessarily prepared for children coming from other countries who don’t speak English,” said Orozco-Vasquez. “It’s a resource that has to be built.”

About 70 families who recently arrived from Venezuela enrolled their children in DPSCD, according to the district, and the number continues to grow. Administrators say they are providing language interpretation and translation, and training staff to understand new students’ unique needs. In the long term, the district is considering establishing newcomer programs, which would centralize students at specific schools to streamline services for migrant and refugee children.

Detroit hasn’t seen the large numbers of migrants and refugees arriving that large cities like Chicago and New York have in recent months. But some of the families arriving in Detroit are coming from those cities because shelters and humanitarian organizations there are overwhelmed.

DPSCD is working to meet students’ needs

Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said in an email all schools in the district are now receiving support as they adapt to meet the needs of migrant students. Staff are being trained to use translation tools, to identify curricular resources to help students learn English, and to address the trauma the kids may have experienced.

The district has formed a small team of teacher training and support coordinators specializing in English language learning to deploy to schools with newcomer students, he said. DPSCD is also continuing to collaborate with community members through its Bilingual Parent Advisory Council as well as the Office of Family and Community Engagement to meet the families’ needs.

Staff can request a live interpreter and document translations, said Vitti. The district also offers over-the-phone and remote video interpreters, and students and staff are able to use Microsoft Translate.

“The district is working with all school leaders and teachers to make sure that they are fully aware of these resources and use them consistently to communicate with families who need language services,” said Vitti.

Part of the challenge, said Orozco-Vasquez, is that the newly arrived students are speaking many languages. In addition to Spanish-speakers, some speak Portuguese or French.

Some nonprofit organizations work with school districts to fill gaps in providing language support to refugee students. Samaritas, a faith-based statewide nonprofit, works with DPSCD.

“If there is no comprehensive ELL program in place, we work with the school on providing that,” Rawan Alramahi, supervisor of Samaritas’ school impact program.

Funding from a $94.4 million settlement – from a 2016 lawsuit that alleged Michigan failed to teach Detroit students to read and described inadequate education for English language learners – will likely allow the school system to hire more academic interventionists to work with English language learners, the superintendent said. A task force formed to identify how DPSCD should spend the settlement recently recommended the district do so.

The settlement funding will also be used to help the district determine whether there is a need for more newcomer programs to be developed at schools in DPSCD to “better serve first- and second-year immigrants,” Vitti said. There is one existing program at Western International High School that provides academic and social support to newcomer families.

“Through this strategy, newly arrived students with limited English skills would be assigned to these schools so we can concentrate resources for support, such as ELL teachers and [academic interventionists],” said Vitti.

The planned Health Hub at Western International, which will provide medical, dental, and mental health care, will also have a resource center with services for newly arrived families, said Vitti. Other Health Hubs, which will expand over the next three years at schools across the district, may also have the same focus, depending on need, according to the superintendent.

For migrant students who experience homelessness or are housed in shelters, the district will provide all the services guaranteed by the McKinney-Vento Act, which mandates that unhoused students be allowed to quickly enroll in schools, stay in the same school even if they move outside of enrollment boundaries, and receive transportation to their schools regardless of the distance, among other protections.

Overall, the district’s system for identifying students who need services through the act has improved, said Vitti. The need for transportation services with that funding has increased in the community across the board and is not unique to newcomer or refugee students.

“Newcomer and refugee students are not always homeless, but when they are, we are committed to providing transportation services,” said Vitti.

In the past, there were concerns about DPSCD’s ability to educate English language learners, who graduate from high school at lower rates compared to their English-speaking peers. Parents expressed a need for more language access in the district, and felt their concerns were ignored.

Inequities for ELL students is not unique to DPSCD. Michigan ranks among the lowest in the nation for funding for students who are not native English speakers, according to an analysis by The Education Trust-Midwest.

Last year, the state passed a historic school budget that provided $1.3 million more in funding for ELL students.

Some migrant families arrive from Chicago, New York, Texas

Most of Detroit’s migrant students have come from Venezuela, according to the school district.

Others are coming from Columbia, Angola, Senegal, Haiti, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Orozco-Vasquez said there is a mix of families coming from larger cities like New York and Chicago as well as various cities in Texas, where officials have struggled to keep up with the growing need for services for migrants, as well as people coming directly from their countries of origin.

Samaritas is currently serving more than 250 school-age children, and has recently seen more families coming from Venezuela and Cuba, along with families from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine.

Both Freedom House and Samaritas said most of the newly arrived school-age children they serve have enrolled in DPSCD, and some are attending charter schools in Wayne County.

The increase in the number of families migrating to Michigan isn’t expected to slow anytime soon – officials expect to see a 40% increase in refugees settling in the state this year, which would amount to more than 3,600 people. As demand for temporary housing grows, the Office of Global Michigan this week asked residents to open their homes as part of a refugee support program.

Michigan has long been a destination for refugees and asylum seekers. Though the recent influx of migrants is sizable, it’s not the largest the state has experienced.

In 2013, more than 3,400 Iraqi refugees resettled in Michigan. And after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, more than 2,000 refugees came to live in the state.

DPSCD has also previously seen influxes of migrants. More than 40 refugees from Afghanistan enrolled in the district in May 2022.

Navigating a foreign school system

Ivan Nakonechngi, 13, works on his computer at home on Wed., Feb., 21, 2024 in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

In addition to DPSCD and other schools in Wayne County, refugees are also being placed and enrolling in schools in Macomb, Oakland, and Genesee Counties.

One mother, Svitlana Nakonechna, 33, arrived in the U.S. three years ago after fleeing the war in Ukraine with her son, Ivan Nakonechngi, now 13.

Nakonechna is still learning English, and she communicates with Ivan’s teachers at South Hills Middle School in Bloomfield Hills Schools through an online translator application in email and on video calls. The mother tries to keep up with Ivan’s grades and when his work is due.

“Usually, I keep track of that since she’s not really good with English,” said Ivan, who began learning English in school in Ukraine.

Ivan Nakonechngi, 13, left, poses for a portrait with his mother, Svitlana Nakonechna, 33, in their home on Wed., Feb., 21, 2024 in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Nakonechna said through an interpreter that she doesn’t know much about the curriculum Ivan is being taught, but she trusts he’s learning because she sees he’s engaged in his school work.

Though her sponsors and Samaritas have been helpful in enrolling her son in school and navigating the system, Nakonechna worries what may happen if she has to move out of the housing she receives through her employer to another school district.

“If we move from this place to another city and I need to find a new school, I still will need help because I don’t know how to handle it by myself,” she said.

Hannah Dellinger covers K-12 education and state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Almost half of migrant families who got 60-day eviction notices moved out of NYC shelters

2024-03-01T19:34:40+00:00

This article is part of an ongoing collaboration between Chalkbeat and THE CITY.

Beatriz, a Venezuelan mother of two young girls, got a 60-day notice to leave their Midtown migrant shelter last November.

The next day, she said, she was out hunting for apartments.

Working under the table in an Irish pub in Hell’s Kitchen, she’d been able to save some money, pooling it with her boyfriend and a cousin and his family. It was enough for the upfront costs to rent a three-bedroom apartment in Crown Heights they would all share. By the time her 60 days ran out, Beatriz and her girls had already moved out of the shelter.

“We’re totally thankful,” Beatriz, who asked that her last name be withheld fearing immigration consequences, said in Spanish. “We’ve been given so much.”

Beatriz is among the first swath of migrant families with children to see their time in city shelters run out under a newly implemented city policy for migrant families in certain shelters. Notices started coming due in early January, and of the around 7,500 parents and children who reached their 60-day limit, half have moved out, according data through late February from the mayor’s office.

A further breakdown of the data released by New York City Comptroller Brad Lander’s last month on the 60-day policy found that of about 4,750 families who’d had their time expire through early February, 29% of them, or about 1,300 families, reapplied for shelter and were transferred to new shelters. The remaining 16% stayed in the same shelter where they were originally placed.

Among those who’ve gotten the notices are families like Beatriz’ who came in the fall of 2022 and had more than a year to find work and make connections in New York City.

But many who received the notices have entered the migrant shelter system since the rule has been in place, like families living at the sprawling tent facility at Floyd Bennett Field, or those at a recently opened family shelter in an old warehouse in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill, who’ve had much less time to get their bearings in a new country.

Migrants leaving the Row Hotel stored their belongings on the sidewalk before heading to a new shelter, Jan. 4, 2024.

The mayor’s office didn’t return a request for additional comment on the new data, but members of the Eric Adams administration have repeatedly defended the shelter stay limits, crediting them for driving down costs. They also say the policy is keeping the number of migrants in city shelters — which hovers at around 64,000 people — from continuing to grow. The numbers have even slightly dipped in recent weeks, despite more than a thousand newcomers arriving each week.

For adult migrants who are subject to strict 30-day shelter limits, with days or weekslong waits to get another cot, many have resorted to sleeping on the streets or trains, in overcrowded mosques, or unsanctioned commercial spaces. This week, Gothamist reported on one couple living in a school bus.

The Adams administration has repeatedly said its main goal is not to have families with children sleeping on the streets. In all, city officials said they’ve given 9,100 families shelter eviction notices so far. While some like Beatriz have landed on their feet, critics of the 60-day policy say many more parents and children who can’t afford to move out have been put through unnecessary turmoil.

“The 60-day shelter limit for families with children is one of the cruelest policies to come from City Hall in generations, evicting families from shelter in the middle of winter, and displacing kids from their schools in the middle of the school year,” said Lander, who has promised to investigate the policy. He pointed out City Hall has relatively little information on what happens to migrants when they leave shelters.

“Where did those nearly 2,500 parents go? Were they in a dangerously overcrowded basement? Were they sleeping on the street? We have no idea.”

‘Families going dark’

Schools with migrant students forced to move because of the 60-day rule have been grappling with the logistical and emotional fallout of the disruptions.

“Just said goodbye to another four newcomers who are moving away after being with us for a year,” said one Manhattan principal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Lots of tears from the kids and adults.”

Upper West Side parent Naveed Hasan, who sits on the city’s school board, the Panel for Educational Policy, has been part of an informal group of parents, school staff, and local elected officials working to find students who disappear suddenly from classes.

“It’s really like families going dark and then leaving people really confused. Where are they, and how can we help them?” Hasan said. “And I think this is sort of the intended effect of a policy.”

Testifying at a City Council hearing Friday, Molly Schaeffer, the head of the city’s office of Asylum Seeker Operations, said that 90% of children who were evicted in the month of January remained in their same school, though she didn’t give specifics. “We really did prioritize education and the education of the youngest children when making these types of choices and moves,” she said, adding the office tried to keep families in the same borough as their youngest child’s school.

Migrants leaving the Row Hotel stored their belongings on the sidewalk before heading to a new shelter, Jan. 4, 2024.

Schools that recently got influxes of new students are already seeing them transferred to shelters in other parts of the city, leaving staffers with whiplash.

“In a month we had more than 50 students…and now I don’t know what’s going to happen with them,” said Carolina Zafra, a teacher at P.S. 46 in Clinton Hill, among several schools in the area that received a sudden surge in students, following the opening of a new shelter for families in a converted warehouse.

School staffers knew the new students were subject to the 60-day shelter stay limit, but were holding out hope that city officials wouldn’t enforce it, Zafra said.

The school wrote letters for families to bring back to the shelter showing they were enrolled in a nearby school in the hopes it might get them a reprieve. But when teachers came back from mid-winter break this week, they found that many of their students had already been moved. Zafra has one student who’s now commuting to the school from Manhattan and she heard about another living by JFK airport.

“I’m more concerned about all the emotional distress those children already experienced and now again moving them from something I thought was settled for them,” she said.

One mom who arrived from Venezuela in December and enrolled her two kids at P.S. 46 said her family was transferred from the Hall Street shelter to a shelter in Midtown Manhattan last week.

The mom, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said she never considered transferring her kids to a new school, even though her commute is now close to an hour.

“They have a lot of patience with the children,” she said of the school, in Spanish. “I didn’t want to change their school because they feel good there.”

Homeless students in New York City are entitled to transportation under federal law so that they can remain in the same school if they move. Kids and parents in temporary housing are eligible for free MetroCards, and younger students can also get assigned to school bus routes, though that process can take some time.

But the mom said their MetroCards are still pending, and since the family has no income to pay the fares, they often have to sneak through open emergency gates. Her husband has already received a fine for doing so.

Still, the Venezuelan mom considers herself lucky compared to other families from the school who were placed in shelters even further away, she said.

‘I felt such relief’

Among those 16% of families who’ve been able to remain in their shelters, according to the data from the comptroller, many are living at the remote tent shelter located at Floyd Bennett Field. Some describe their extended stay there as both a blessing and a curse.

Geraldine, a 38-year-old mother of three from Venezuela, who moved into Floyd Bennett Field last December, said getting used to the tents was a challenge: the long walks in the cold across a vast marshland to the nearest bus stop, the bathrooms and showers in trailers outside of the living quarters, the lack of privacy and constant cries of collicky children. The disruptions during severe weather have also been hard, like the January evening when the city evacuated thousands of residents to a nearby school due to high winds.

Venezuelan migrants Geraldine, Jhon and their daughter Yorliannys, leave the Floyd Bennett Field family shelter for the day, Jan. 25, 2024.

Still, as her eviction date approached she prayed the family would get to stay put, dreading the disruption of packing up and starting again somewhere new. The family collected their belongings the night before their mid-February move-out day, still unsure what would happen. But when her husband checked in with staff the next morning, he was told they could get another 60 days in the same cubicle.

“I felt such relief,” Geraldine said, who asked that her full name not be used to protect her family’s identity. “We didn’t have to go all the way to [Midtown] with the kids,” she said, referring to the process of reapplying for shelter at the Roosevelt Hotel. Instead their kids continued at their schools without interruption.

“The idea is to finish our time here, save up money and move out,” she said.

‘I feel good, and I’m afraid, at the same time’

Beatriz’ hunt for their new home was difficult, as it is for many New Yorkers. She fronted $500 to someone promising an apartment and spent a day standing in the rain outside what she thought was her new apartment in Astoria before realizing it was a scam.

When a rental finally came through, she and her daughters moved out little by little, shuttling their belongings on the subway over the course of several days. After the winter break, Beatriz pulled her kids out of school and transferred them to ones closer to their new Crown Heights home, unable to make the bi-borough commute. Her 7-year-old daughter seems to be adjusting, while her 11-year-old is having a more difficult time.

“She misses all her friends from class,” Beatriz said.

Beatriz relishes being able to cook for herself and the family again, something she couldn’t do for more than a year living in a hotel room. She’s enjoying the privacy and peace of having their own place. But she also feels the anxiety of so many New Yorkers living paycheck to paycheck, that a little disruption could lead to an inability to make rent and send her back to shelter.

“I feel good, and I’m afraid, at the same time,” Beatriz said. “And the fear, because if one of us loses our job, god willing, how would we pay rent?”

Gwynne Hogan covers Brooklyn for THE CITY.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Donald Trump falsely claims migrants are displacing NYC students. The city has empty seats.

2024-03-05T23:12:29+00:00

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Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed this week that migrant students are displacing other children from New York City’s schools.

In fact, the city’s public schools have struggled in recent years with the opposite problem: too many empty seats.

Enrollment has ticked up slightly this school year, thanks in part to an influx of migrant students, though still remains about 9% below pre-pandemic levels. Education Department officials have said boosting school rosters is a top priority, as lower enrollment can lead to smaller budgets, mergers, and closures.

In an interview with the Right Side Broadcasting Network on Monday, Trump claimed without evidence that “we have children that are no longer going to school” because of the influx of migrants.

“I’m not blaming them,” he said. “I’m saying they put the students in the place of our students like in New York City. We have these wonderful students who are going to school — all of a sudden they no longer have a seat.”

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request to elaborate on his comments. There is no evidence that any students have been left without a school seat due to the arrival of new migrants, and an Education Department spokesperson said the claims were false.

“We will continue to work with students, families, and partners to ensure that newcomer students have what they need in our public schools and that our schools are well equipped to support these needs,” Education Department spokesperson Nicole Brownstein wrote in a statement.

Immigration advocates also blasted Trump’s comments.

“The idea that we somehow don’t have space or that children are being removed from schools is just completely unfounded,” said Liza Schwartzwald, director of economic justice and family empowerment at the New York Immigration Coalition.

Trump, the likely Republican nominee for president, has sought to make immigration a centerpiece of his reelection campaign and has escalated anti-immigrant rhetoric, promising to revive a ban from some Muslim-majority countries and refusing asylum claims. He has also swept discussion of education into some campaign stops, claiming at a Saturday rally in Virginia that New York schools are overwhelmed teaching students who speak languages “that nobody ever heard of.”

Since the summer of 2022, Republican governors of southern border states have sent busloads of migrants to cities with Democratic leaders, including New York. Over that period, about 36,000 children who live in temporary housing have enrolled in the city’s public schools — including 18,000 this school year — many of them migrants. (City officials do not ask for a student’s immigration status when they enroll.)

The city’s Education Department is required by law to provide a seat to any school-age child who needs one regardless of their immigration status. Many school communities have worked hard to welcome migrant students and provide appropriate instruction in English and their home language.

And while there is no evidence that migrants have displaced other students, some parent leaders and other groups have protested the new arrivals.

In January, Brooklyn’s James Madison High School pivoted to remote learning for one day after migrant families were temporarily housed there because severe wind threatened tent shelters at Floyd Bennett Field that housed newcomers. The episode generated vitriol from some families and morphed into a talking point for right-wing pundits. But several students and parents were perplexed by the outrage and noted the disruption was minor.

“The hostility towards the migrants was definitely uncalled for,” senior Zola Zephirin told Chalkbeat. “These are people, they have families, they come here and attempt to make a better life, just like many of the students at Madison.”

Schools have sometimes struggled to accommodate newcomers. The enrollment process has been bumpy for some migrant families as the city scrambled to keep up, and schools often can’t hire enough bilingual educators, a long-standing shortage area. At the same time, city officials have tweaked the school funding formula to funnel more dollars to schools with more students living in temporary housing — which benefits schools with more migrant children.

For his part, New York Mayor Eric Adams has sent mixed messages about the influx of migrants. Last year he claimed the influx of migrants would “destroy” the city, drawing outrage from immigrant groups, and has blamed them for cuts to city services. But he also celebrated the uptick in public school enrollment, fueled in part by new arrivals.

Some advocates, including Schwartzwald, see parallels between Trump and Adams’ rhetoric and worry about the climate it creates for asylum seekers, some of which has reverberated in schools. Some students at Newcomers High School, for instance, have sought a name change in part because they fear the label “puts a target on us.”

“When Mayor Adams uses rhetoric where he — just like Trump — tries to create an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ — what he’s saying is not all immigrants are New Yorkers,” Schwartzwald said. “Anyone who comes to New York to make a life is a New Yorker as far as we’re concerned.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Many migrant students need mental health support. Here’s why this program is a go-to for schools.

2024-03-11T09:00:00+00:00

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When thousands of Syrian families fleeing violence resettled in Canada several years ago, Ontario’s school mental health agency wanted to give schools tools to help refugee children process their traumatic journeys and adjust to their new lives.

The children didn’t necessarily need intensive support. But kids were bursting into tears and struggling to explain how they felt. Parents, too, noticed their usually social children had become more withdrawn and were struggling to make friends. That was especially common after kids had been in Canada for a few months and the honeymoon period ended.

So a team of experts in child mental health put their heads together and developed a program for newcomers that focuses on their strengths and who they can turn to for support. Known as STRONG, the program is now used across the U.S. in several cities serving lots of newcomers, including Chicago, Boston, Seattle, New York, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., and Little Rock, Arkansas. Many others are asking for training, as schools struggle to meet the needs of students who’ve been through difficult journeys with limited school mental health staff, and even fewer bilingual ones.

STRONG, which stands for Supporting Transition Resilience of Newcomer Groups, can’t solve everything. Some kids may still need more intensive mental health support — and finding the time and staff to run these groups can be challenging. But many experts, educators, and students themselves see the intervention as a promising tool to help newcomers forge connections and head off mental health struggles before they turn into a crisis.

“They’ve just really appreciated the opportunity to connect with other kids,” said Lisa Baron, a psychologist who trains schools to use STRONG and directs the Boston-based Center for Trauma Care in Schools. “A lot of them said that they just had not really known that other kids were feeling the same way as they were.”

Why some newcomers struggle with mental health

Newcomer students can be refugees or asylum-seekers or the children of undocumented immigrants. Some arrive with families, some arrive alone. Some have been in the U.S. for just a few days or weeks, while others have been here longer. And while their experiences vary, they’ve often faced various hardships, from hunger to abuse.

Many children did not feel in control during their travels, and now crave stability and predictability.

It can also be difficult for newcomer families to access mental health services in the U.S. — driving home the importance of offering help at school. There’s often stigma around seeking treatment, and some families fear that doing so could put them at risk for deportation.

Here’s how STRONG typically works: The school identifies a group of students who are close in age and relatively new to the U.S. who could benefit from extra support. Then the school makes sure parents are on board, which can mean having careful conversations, especially if families are unfamiliar with schools offering mental health support.

The group meets for 10 sessions, usually during the school day. Early sessions help students understand that it’s normal to feel overwhelmed or stressed sometimes. Kids learn different relaxation techniques, such as curling their toes into the floor as if they were standing in a mud puddle, or visualizing the sights and smells of a favorite place.

In later sessions, they learn coping and problem-solving skills, such as how to map out steps to achieve a goal. Kids who are shy about speaking English could identify people they’d feel safe practicing with.

“The coping skills [are] what will stay with you forever,” one Ontario student told Canadian researchers for a 2019 report. “Whenever you are in a stressful situation, you will always remember what to do.”

In STRONG, students learn various problem-solving and coping skills.

What makes STRONG unique and appealing to many schools, said Colleen Cicchetti, a pediatric psychologist who helped develop the intervention, is that it takes a strengths-based approach.

“There were strengths that were inside you that you had in your home country that are still with you, here, today — how do we build on them?” said Cicchetti, who directs the Center for Childhood Resilience at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and now trains schools on how to use STRONG. “We really want young people and their parents to say: ‘This is a part of who I am and what I’ve experienced, but it shouldn’t define who I am entirely.’”

That’s what attracted the attention of mental health and school staff in the Madison, Wisconsin area. The district tried tweaking another group that addresses student trauma to help newcomers, but realized it wasn’t quite meeting their needs.

Kids need to “talk about good memories and coping strategies, not necessarily the exposure to the traumatic event,” said Carrie Klein, a school mental health coach for Madison Metro schools, which is considering using STRONG.

For Jennifer Moorhouse, a teacher who works with English learners at Brighton Park Elementary School in Chicago, STRONG has been transformative for her and her students.

Related: Amid Chicago’s migrant influx, one school is trying to help newcomer students navigate trauma

Over the last year, Moorhouse has run four STRONG groups — known as “clubs” at her school — alongside school counselor Stephanie Carrillo. The program helped Moorhouse get to know newcomers’ families, and has made students comfortable to seek her out when they need essentials like toothpaste or body wash.

Brighton Park Elementary School threw a quinceañera for newcomer students who were sad they would miss celebrating in their home country.

The group has helped in unexpected ways, too. When kids said they weren’t eating at school because they didn’t like the food, Moorhouse figured out they did like Ritz crackers and Skinny popcorn, so she keeps those on hand. And when she found out some newcomers were crying in the bathroom, upset that they were going to miss their quinceñera back home, the group threw a big party at school, complete with balloons and empanadas.

“The students really have created this bond with Ms. Moorhouse — that’s their person,” said Cecilia Mendoza, the assistant principal. “Every student needs someone. For someone new entering the country, entering a new school, having someone is even more important.”

Brighton Park is one of 83 schools across the district that’s been trained in STRONG, with another 50 schools in line to be trained next school year.

Why talking about their journeys can help newcomers

When experts first developed STRONG, they imagined it would be delivered by social workers, school counselors and other mental health staff, since many newcomers have experienced trauma.

But given that mental health professionals are often stretched or in short supply, more schools are asking for others to be trained, too, said Sharon Hoover, a psychiatry professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine who helped create STRONG.

Now, many schools run STRONG sessions with two adults. A teacher with language or cultural skills can act as the interpreter, while the staffer with mental health training takes on tasks such as screening children for post-traumatic stress.

“We don’t want to be irresponsible with the curriculum and just throw it into the hands of anybody who has no mental health training at all,” Hoover said. “But on the other hand, we don’t want to restrict it in a way that’s going to lead to it not getting to students who might benefit.”

On a recent Tuesday morning, Hoover and Bianca Ramos, a STRONG trainer, showed what a one-on-one session that invites students to share about their journey can look like during a virtual training for two dozen school staffers.

The group, mostly social workers and school counselors from Connecticut, had gathered to learn strategies to help newcomer students from many parts of the world, including Haiti, Guatemala, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, and Ukraine.

Related: We are facing a migrant mental health crisis. More school social workers could help

In the video demonstration, Hoover sat beside Ramos in the corner of a blue-walled room. Ramos, a Chicago-based social worker, played the role of a 13-year-old girl who’d fled Guatemala without time to say goodbye to family and friends after her father was killed. Hoover explained that talking about something hard can be like stepping into cold water.

“The more we do it, slowly and gradually, usually the more comfortable we get,” Hoover said. “You don’t have to dive right in.”

In early sessions of STRONG, students learn various relaxation techniques and that it's OK to feel stress sometimes.

In the scenario, as the young girl neared the U.S.-Mexico border, robbers threatened to take her family’s few belongings. Hoover asked how she got through that time, using it as an opportunity to draw out the child’s strengths.

“I had this picture of my mom and I just remember looking at it, and trying to stay hopeful that I was going to be able to see her again,” Ramos said. And she had her little sister to watch out for: “I was like a mom to her.”

“That’s amazing,” Hoover replied, pointing out how brave and caring the child had been.

Later, Hoover asked if the girl was having trouble sleeping, reliving any memories, or feeling sad a lot. She wasn’t, but thoughts of her dad did pop into her head in class, making it hard to concentrate. Hoover made sure that wasn’t happening too much, and then kept the door open to talk more in the future if anything changed.

In Chicago, Moorhouse has seen that some kids feel relieved when they share about their journey. But she also cautions that it can be a lot for other students and teachers to take in. After one student shared details that made Moorhouse tear up later, she realized she couldn’t probe too deeply in her conversations with the student, and needed to let the school counselor step in.

“We’re not therapists,” she said. “That’s very important for teachers to realize.”

STRONG can help students, but there are challenges

STRONG is still being rigorously evaluated in the U.S. But research conducted by Western University in Canada, where STRONG was first piloted during the 2017-18 school year, has shown promising results.

Evaluations from across Ontario found the program helped kids build trust, increase their confidence, and develop a sense of belonging at school. Students reported that STRONG helped them feel more welcome and connect with their peers.

STRONG can also shift school culture and help the entire staff become more attuned to newcomers’ needs. When Moorhouse notices certain patterns of behavior, she shares that with other teachers, so they can keep an eye out.

That could be explaining why some kids may not want to take off sweaters or jackets — after border agents took everything they had except for what they were wearing at the time — or that playing certain sounds, like chirping birds or rushing water, could be upsetting to kids whose journey involved swimming or walking through the jungle.

There can be practical challenges. School leaders may be hesitant to pull kids out of class for STRONG when they are struggling academically. Elizabeth Paquette, who’s part of the team that trains school staff in Ontario, said it can be tricky to get enough kids together in smaller schools and rural communities without resorting to virtual groups that can make it harder for students to make friends.

And if groups use more than two languages, the interpretation needs can take away from the group’s conversational flow.

Still, Moorhouse said the group can be a place for kids to talk about those academic struggles, whether they’re lost in class or frustrated because they already know the content, but can’t yet express themselves. This year, especially, kids want to talk about school stress even more than their journeys.

“They were struggling with: ‘Do I give up?’” Moorhouse said. And her message was: “Let’s keep finding other ways to work through this. What are your thoughts?”

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

Apps are helping teachers communicate with families that don’t speak English

2024-03-13T22:36:31+00:00

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Emma Gonzalez Gutierrez has struggled to communicate with the teachers of her five children for years.

She’s tried to stay engaged. She’s attended meetings, gravitated toward Spanish-speaking staff, and relied on translators, including her kids, over the years.

Now, thanks to an app that McElwain Elementary, her Adams 12 school, started using this year, she’s found opportunities to engage in new ways with her youngest child’s education.

Recently, the kindergarten teacher texted her on the app, ReachWell, which allows the teacher to text in English and parents to receive the messages in their own language. The teacher told Gonzalez Gutierrez that her daughter had won a student of the month-type award and invited her to come to the school to surprise her daughter when the award was presented. The small gesture that meant so much to Gonzalez Gutierrez.

“For me it was very exciting,” Gonzalez Gutierrez said. “It was so valuable that she was able to let me know.”

ReachWell and similar translation apps have become more common, and for some teachers, they’ve become crucial as educators work to communicate with the rising number of families that don’t speak English. The apps often allow the communications between parents and teachers to feel personal. Some teachers say it has helped parents open up about issues their child or family is having, which then helps teachers better engage with students.

In addition to seeing text from teachers in their native language on ReachWell, parents can respond in their native language and teachers see the replies in English.

Kayli Brooks, a teacher at Tollgate Elementary in Aurora, uses the app Talking Points, which also allows her to text parents. It also translates texts between parents and educators but does not require families to download an app.

“Families will share that they’re struggling with transportation, or here’s why maybe they’re acting out, or they might text me and say ‘hey this thing happened at home and I think my child is going to be really sad at school today,’” Brooks said. “It’s a huge deal. Families want to be involved in their child’s education no matter where they’re from, no matter what language they speak.”

Brooks said that since her Aurora school began using the app in 2020, she is much more successful at collecting permission forms, for example.

With migrant families who are new to the country and are “kind of overwhelmed,” she said, texting them through the app has also helped them better understand basic information they need to get their children started in school.

Communication that feels personal, through a text, is often more manageable for families than directing parents to online forms and resources, she said.

Sara Olson, principal of McElwain Elementary, said the ReachWell translation app is “a tool that provides equitable access.”

“It’s almost mind boggling to me that some of these folks have maneuvered schools for years not having access,” Olson said. “As a parent I can’t imagine not having access to the information, to the teachers. Every child and family member has a right to have that access.”

Olson said she did not have trouble having all families at her school download the app.

Zuben Bastani created the app ReachWell after he said he saw that some families at his child’s Denver school weren’t getting all the communications. He said he saw children excluded from field trips after arriving at school, unknowingly unprepared — wearing sneakers on the day of a snowshoeing trip, for example — because their families hadn’t understood the school communications.

“It became real apparent, real fast, which families were aware and showed up and which weren’t,” Bastani said.

The app is in use in many schools and districts in the metro area and across the country in places like Pittsburgh. In addition to schools, the company is also partnering with some emergency service agencies to provide emergency notifications — such as shelter-in-place or evacuation orders during natural disasters — that non-English speaking populations can receive in their home language.

Jean Boylan, a community liaison at McMeen Elementary in Denver, also uses ReachWell at her school, but said she also has used Google’s translation app on her phone to greet parents face to face as they pick up students from school. She said staff are all looking for as many ways as possible to communicate.

In her school, concerns about whether new immigrant families have access to the internet, have led staff to start printing materials too. McMeen is one of a couple dozen Denver schools that have enrolled a significant number of new students from Venezuela and elsewhere this year.

But anytime they can communicate with the ReachWell app, it saves time and energy, Boylan said.

The app helps because there are so many languages spoken by families. She said there’s a map in her office with at least 27 countries highlighted, reflecting where the school’s current families come from.

Bastani said ReachWell has found that because parents have to download the app and self-select from more than 130 languages what their preferred language is, many schools find that they’ve been undercounting how many languages their families speak.

On average, they discover 25% more languages after a few months, ReachWell leaders said.

Boylan is now working with Bastani to build out a resource page that ReachWell offers in the app for families. It may include ways for families to access help such as for food or housing.

For parents like Gonzalez Gutierrez, the personal communications they have with teachers are the most critical.

Gonzalez Gutierrez said earlier this year, she realized her kindergartener had become frustrated with an online program the school used for kids to learn math. It was causing the child stress and fear and Gonzalez Gutierrez said she didn’t know how to talk to the teacher about it — until she realized that she could text her.

Letting the teacher know what the problem was allowed them to work together to solve it.

“It’s worth it,” Gonzalez Gutierrez said. “It’s been such a gift for me.”

This story has been updated to reflect that users do not have to download the ReachWell app to get messages through ReachWell, though the downloading the app is an option.

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

‘Happier families, happier students’: How Denver’s community hubs are helping migrants and others

2024-03-11T21:35:17+00:00

Leer en español.

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While her 5-year-old son attends kindergarten at west Denver’s Colfax Elementary School, Maelka attends class too. In a trailer near the playground, she and three other moms learn English.

On a recent Thursday, the group practiced letters and numbers by playing bingo.

“B eleven,” the teacher called out.

“Eleven! Eleven!” Maelka said. Then she translated the number into Spanish — “once,” pronounced on-say — for her classmates.

The trailer at Colfax Elementary is one of Denver Public Schools’ six “community hubs,” and the English language classes are among the most popular offerings. Launched in 2022 by Superintendent Alex Marrero, the community hubs were meant to take a two-generation approach to improving students’ lives by helping both children and parents with everything from food and clothing to financial counseling and mobile medical appointments.

Now, as more than 3,500 migrant students have enrolled in DPS since the beginning of the school year, the hubs are increasingly serving their families as they build new lives in Denver. The influx has stretched the hubs’ capacity, but district leaders said they remain committed to soliciting more donations and grant money to support the work.

“I need to learn English to understand, to work — and to learn, too,” Maelka said in Spanish. “It is important to know the language in the country where you are.”

Maelka and her family arrived in Denver from Venezuela in early December. After spending time in the city’s shelters, they found a house to rent near Colfax Elementary. Chalkbeat is withholding Maelka’s last name to protect her privacy.

The free classes do more than teach English, which offers the promise of higher-paying jobs. The hubs also foster a sense of community, said Manager Jackie Bell. On Maelka’s birthday, another mom baked her a cake and brought it to class.

The hubs are also a safety net. When one of the moms showed up to class in pain with a tooth infection, hub staff scrambled to connect her with a free dental clinic. When staff saw students were walking to school without warm jackets, the hub got a grant to buy brand new kid-sized puffy coats for students. When a grandmother who’s raising a grandson with autism told hub staff he would only eat one brand of rice, they were able to stock it in their mini market.

“That’s the message to our DPS parents that says, ‘We want you here,’” Bell said.

Karen Rodriguez picks up snacks for her daughter Carely, 11 months, at the mini market inside the community hub at John H. Amesse Elementary School.

There’s ‘magic’ in the hubs’ differences

The community hubs are an expansion of a previous program called the Family and Community Engagement Centers, often shortened to FACE Centers. The hub at John H. Amesse Elementary in far northeast Denver was one of two original FACE Centers.

Marrero toured the center at John H. Amesse early in his superintendency. On her wall, Manager Carla Duarte has a framed map of the city on which Marrero scribbled his vision to have a similar center in every region of Denver. Now, two years later, the six hubs offer the same programming that the centers offered and more, depending in part on the hub’s space.

Two hubs have micro grocery stores with fresh produce and frozen meat, while others have food pantries stocked with dry and canned goods. All hubs distribute diapers, but some partner with a local nonprofit to give away car seats and strollers. At least one has a thrift store-sized used clothing boutique. Some are now partnering with Denver Health, which parks its mobile clinic on the curb and sees patients for half-hour appointments.

The hubs’ staffing differs, too. They all connect parents to programs that help pay their bills, but some have financial coaches and classes on household budgeting. Others help parents find jobs. The workforce development coordinator at the far northeast hub recently helped a migrant father who’d worked as a barber in Venezuela for 24 years get a job at a Denver barber shop.

When a hub doesn’t have a particular service, the staff refer families to one that does.

“That’s the magic of the community hubs,” Duarte said. “We’re all so different.”

The hub at John H. Amesse is among the biggest and busiest. Its spaces are sprinkled throughout the school in converted classrooms and once-empty offices.

On a recent Wednesday morning, adult Spanish-speaking students in a GED class were practicing math and celebrating with pink-frosted cupcakes a classmate who passed their tests.

In a small room off the library, two women rocked the babies of the GED students. One of the women, a refugee from Afghanistan with children in DPS, first came to the community hub seeking help paying her family’s rent. Through a translator who spoke Dari, the woman’s native language, Duarte said the woman asked an important question.

“She just looked at me and said, ‘Do you have any jobs for me?’” Duarte said.

Duarte was looking to fill a child care position, but she was unsure about the language barrier. Nearly all hub employees speak Spanish, but none spoke Dari. But DPS said yes, and the woman is now learning English through the hub’s classes — and picking up Spanish, too.

“She’s so amazing,” Duarte said. “It’s like the best thing we ever did.”

There’s a similar story across the hall, where a former participant leads a “play and learn” class for toddlers and their parents, who on this day were busy blowing soap bubbles with straws.

Many of the “play and learn” parents also attend GED or English classes at the hub. Ingrid Alemán had to stop because her 2-year-old son, Dylan, cried too much when he was separated from her in the child care room. But the mother and son still come to “play and learn.”

“He’s learning how to socialize with other kids,” Alemán said in Spanish. “And as a mom, it helps me to be with other moms who can give me advice. Because in the house —”

“You and the kids —” Duarte said.

“In the house, it’s crazy,” Alemán said, laughing.

Teacher Mayra Lagunas, right, works with students Hugo Esparza, center, and Janeth Carhuamaca, left, on math during a GED class at the community hub at John H. Amesse Elementary School.

Migrants are among the more than 4,000 families served

The hubs cost approximately $737,000 each to run, for a total yearly cost of about $4.4 million, according to Esmeralda De La Oliva, the district’s hubs director. When Marrero announced the initiative in 2022, he said the hubs would be partly funded with savings from cuts he made to the district’s central office as part of a reorganization.

In the past two years, the hubs have served more than 4,000 families, De La Oliva said. That includes more than 1,000 parents who are enrolled in adult education classes. In addition to GED and English language classes, some hubs offer classes to help parents pass citizenship tests and classes that teach Spanish to English-speaking parents.

About 350 newly arrived adults are enrolled in the classes and the hubs have served 600 migrant families this year, De La Oliva said. The GED classes are at capacity, and De La Oliva said she’s seeking more funding for the GED and English language classes, mini markets, and food pantries from private donors and nonprofit organizations including the Denver Public Schools Foundation’s newly launched New Arrivals, Students & Family Fund.

The work of serving migrant families, many of whom have harrowing stories, can weigh on the hearts and minds of hub staff, De La Oliva said, which is why the district plans to offer intensive self-care training for staff starting next month. But the work is making a difference.

De La Oliva recalled a family who came into a hub this school year looking for diapers three weeks after arriving from Colombia. Within a month, the mom was enrolled in GED and English language classes. Within two months, the dad was working for the DPS transportation department, which has been notoriously short-staffed.

The hub at Swansea Elementary in north Denver is a 15-minute walk from the Western Motor Inn, which has served as an unofficial shelter for hundreds of migrants. As of a month ago, Swansea had enrolled more than 50 migrant students — and the hub was serving their families and others who heard about it through word of mouth, Manager Sandra Carrillo said.

People would walk through the hub door, sometimes in groups of six or more family members, Carrillo said. “They were like, ‘We just arrived today.’” Hub staff jumped in, providing everything from socks and underwear to help enrolling families’ 4-year-olds in Colorado’s new free preschool program.

Among the new arrivals at the Swansea hub was a 27-year-old man who is blind, Carrillo said. He doesn’t have any documentation from Venezuela that he’s legally blind. That has led to roadblocks in getting services such as RTD’s Access-a-Ride, which provides transportation to riders with disabilities. But the hub is doing its best to clear those roadblocks for its own offerings.

The man’s goal is to eventually study economics and computer science at a university, Carrillo said. He enrolled in the hub’s English classes but all of the materials were on paper. Carrillo said the hubs’ higher-ups were quick to approve the hub working with a local nonprofit to get the man the software he needs to participate in the classes.

“When families let us know they’re going through something, it’s working with everyone in the community to see who has resources,” Carrillo said.

While the work can be complicated, the goal is not.

As Carrillo noted, “Happier families, happier students.”

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

NYC’s youth shelter system locks out hundreds as migrants seek entry

2024-03-12T19:10:05+00:00

This story was originally published on March 12 by THE CITY.

In the depths of January, without a coat on his back, an 18-year-old orphan from Guinea named Mamdou spent a week riding the subways, before a stranger handed him a $20 bill and led him to the Roosevelt Hotel, the city’s main intake for newly arriving migrants. He got a 30-day shelter stint in a converted office tower in Midtown and a few weeks of relative peace after a perilous journey across the world.

But his anxiety built as his eviction day neared. He’d heard about Covenant House, a special youth shelter for people under the age of 21 overseen by the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development, and was determined to secure a bed there.

“I went there every day, sometimes two or three times a day. They know me there,” he said in French on a recent afternoon, two days after he’d been ejected from his Midtown shelter after his 30 days ran out, under Mayor Eric Adams’ strict limits on stays for adult migrants in shelters.

Both nights since his eviction he’d slept outside on the sidewalk. “But every day when I go there they tell me there’s no room.”

The migrant crisis is increasingly intertwined with another crisis: an explosion in the number of homeless youth. Data obtained by THE CITY shows a dramatic increase in young adults between the ages of 16 and 24 reported as having been turned away from specialized shelters that serve young people in that age bracket, with 473 youth rebuffed in the second half of 2023 — up from seven in the first six months of the year.

Last year, DYCD funded about 800 youth shelter beds, with most of those available only to those under age 21, the agency reported to the City Council.

Service providers and advocates had warned for months that the city’s migrant response does not address the needs of the many young people arriving in New York on their own. Those advocates now say the official rejection numbers don’t begin to document just how many young people are unable to find a spot in a homeless youth shelter.

“I’ve been doing this work for 20 years,” said Jamie Powlovich, the director of the Coalition for Homeless Youth, a statewide consortium of more than 60 groups. “I have never seen the level of unmet needs and young people being further traumatized and forced to endure homelessness, especially street homelessness, ever.”

The coalition tallied more than 200 young people turned away from youth shelters in a 12-day period last fall, including seven children under the age of 18, after which they stopped keeping count.

“The list was getting too long, and it wasn’t moving,” Powlovich said. “We didn’t want to add people to a list and give them false hope.”

Advocates have been pressuring the city to make some concessions for youth in the adult migrant shelter system, urging that at the very least adopting the more forgiving 60-day shelter stay limits used for families with children under the age of 18.

“We’ve been told for about four months now that that is something that they’re working on,” Powlovich said. “But it hast happened yet.”

A spokesperson for City Hall didn’t respond to a request for comment, but Mayor Eric Adams has repeatedly defended the city’s handling of the arrival of migrants from the southern border.

“This is a national problem that has been dropped in the lap of places like New York and Chicago, Massachusetts and others who have similar programs, 30‑ and 60‑day programs,” he said at a press conference this week. “We’ve done our job. New Yorkers have done their job, and we’re going to continue to do our job, but this is a national issue.”

While the city’s “right to shelter” court consent decrees are supposed to guarantee a bed that day to anyone who requests one, no legal requirement exists for teens or young adults to be placed in an age-appropriate shelter.

As a surge of teen and young adult migrants arrived last fall, they were funneled into the same tent shelters, converted warehouses and office buildings as other adult migrants without children. The city’s migrant intake centers don’t distinguish migrants in their late teens or early 20s from other adults, and the city doesn’t keep separate data about that age group.

Through the organizing of mutual aid and community groups, some newly arriving migrants have found their way into the specialized youth shelter system, which allows youth to stay longer and offers more specialized support services. But last fall, that system became overwhelmed and securing a bed within it became next to impossible, as reflected in the new city data.

After their 30 days in shelters run out, migrant youth are directed to the East Village “reticketing site” inside an old Catholic school, where they can get in line for another shelter cot, a wait which takes days or weeks. Those seeking new shelter placements are directed to spend nights in outer-borough waiting rooms where they can rest on the ground, but a city survey found that, like Mamdou, hundreds spent the night on the streets or trains instead.

THE CITY reported last month that the city Office of Emergency Management was working on plans to close the “overflow” locations.

‘A human cost’

The city’s eight youth drop-in centers, run by nonprofits, are the formal gateway into the youth shelter system, providing young homeless New Yorkers with clothing, food and showers, and linking them up with case workers who can help connect them with youth shelter beds if they become available. Those centers, too, have seen a sustained spike in usage over the past several months.

In January, 1,600 youth spent time in city drop in centers, a 28% increase from July according to monthly data reported by the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development. Case workers at those drop-in sites served 1,700 people in the first four months of the fiscal year, 300 more than the city had planned to serve in the entire year.

Yet Adams’ preliminary budget released in January proposed slashing $2 million from the $52 million allocated for runaway and homeless youth, eliminating 16 positions that help young people access permanent housing options. The Adams administration is also refusing to implement a recently passed law that would allow people in youth shelters to access CityFHEPS housing vouchers, saying the mandate is too expensive.

Mark Zustovich, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development said funding to shelters themselves remained the same in Adams’ proposed budget.

The department and the nonprofits that run shelters for homeless youth “are providing vital services to all youth who seek support — even as the number of young people accessing drop-ins has increased,” he said.

The surge in homeless youth comes a year after a controversial order by the Adams administration banning people from sleeping in 24-hour drop-in centers.

Youth who can’t find shelter are in jeopardy, advocates warn.

“A young woman had recently been discharged from her shelter because her 30 days was up. She didn’t know anybody in the city, spent a night on the street, and was brutally assaulted. That’s preventable,” said Joe Westmacott, a project assistant at Streetwork, which runs a drop-in center for homeless youth in Harlem, referring to an incident that THE CITY has not independently verified.

“We know from decades of research that street homelessness is expensive…. And there’s also a human cost.”

‘They want to go to school’

Many employees at youth facilities are taking the surge in new arrivals in stride, scaling up programs, deftly finding ways to communicate with hand signals in a plethora of languages, and retooling day-to-day operations like how much food they serve on site.

On a busy day before the latest surge in new arrivals, Safe Horizon’s Streetwork daytime drop-in center on 125th Street served about 50 young people a day who would pop in to use computers, eat a meal, peruse the closet of free clothing, or drop off dirty laundry.

Now the center sees about 100 people a day, almost exclusively newly arriving migrant youth who’ve learned about their services through word of mouth. Last fiscal year, the program enrolled 306 new youths into their programs. Four months into this year, they’ve enrolled 542.

Sebastien Vante, associate vice president at Safe Horizon, said they had to halt all new intakes, unable to accommodate any more people. While they can’t connect their clients to specialized youth shelter beds, there are other ways they can support them, he said.

They’ve taken to sending advocates to the East Village reticketing center with their clients, in order to try to advocate for them to get beds in shelters closer to schools if they’re enrolled. They offer referrals to immigration attorneys, and on a recent afternoon, dozens of migrant youth crammed into a back room of the facility intently listening into a demonstration about the asylum application process held in French and Arabic.

“Right now, this is who this is who’s walking through our doors,” Vante said. “Their needs are no different. They’re looking for shelter. They want long-term housing. They want to go to school. They wanna do all these different things.”

But, Vante went on, with its staff already working at capacity, “we spend a significant amount of time managing the expectations of the young people who come into our space,” Vante said.

This New York City counselor used to teach math. Now she helps migrant students destress at school

2024-03-15T14:00:08+00:00

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As a middle school math teacher, Lisset Condo Dutan’s days often revolved around fractions and equations. But when the pandemic hit, her virtual classroom became a place where students came to confide in her.

“I would only see them through a screen, and they would share with me: I lost my grandma, I just lost my dad, I just lost my mom,” she said. She tried her best to listen, but she knew they needed more. “They didn’t really have the emotional support that they needed.”

Lisset Condo Dutan works with newcomer students at an elementary school in Queens through the nonprofit Counseling in Schools.

Driven by those conversations, Condo Dutan went back to school to get her master’s in counseling — while she was teaching full-time — and became a school counselor.

Last fall, she took a position with the nonprofit Counseling in Schools, which places school counselors in dozens of schools throughout New York City. Condo Dutan now works at P.S. 149 in Queens, not far from where she grew up. She was among a dozen bilingual or bicultural counselors that the nonprofit hired to meet the needs of a growing number of migrant students who’ve enrolled in the city’s schools.

Now, she spends her days popping into classrooms to see if newcomers need any help and meeting with students in small groups or one-on-one.

“Even though they went through a lot, they’re the strongest people that I’ve ever met,” she said. “I admire that.”

Condo Dutan spoke with Chalkbeat about how art therapy, breathing exercises, and sharing details from her visits to Ecuador have helped her connect with her students.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What are some of the mental health or social-emotional needs that your newcomer students have?

A lot of them have undergone some sort of trauma. Especially when they share their journey coming here to New York, either what they saw on their way here or what they saw at the detention centers at the border. It impacts them a lot.

Thankfully, a lot of the teachers pick up on these little emotions. Maybe they walk in sad one day or they look upset, or there’s a change in behavior. They’ll ask: Can you please just check up on the student? And when you check up on them, you realize that there’s a lot of things that are still bothering them.

They’ll share: You know, I had this nightmare, I’m still thinking about this. I remember when we were crossing the river. Or, honestly speaking, they’ve seen people pass away on their way here. Unfortunately, they’ve seen bodies and stuff like that. And these are third graders, second graders, fifth graders.

That’s still there for them. So, sometimes they do have days where they’re a little off. [It’s important] to provide them with that support and that safe space.

When you’re starting to build a relationship and a rapport with a student who has been through a really tough journey, what are some of the things you do to help establish that you’re a safe person and that they’re in a safe place?

I let them speak about their culture. A lot of these students are very proud of where they come from, so I give them that opportunity and that time to teach me about themselves.

Sometimes, we’ll share memories. But usually, we do a lot of art therapy. For most of them, that’s easier. Markers, crayons, glitter, pens, paints — anything that I have in the office.

They’re drawing their favorite dishes, their favorite places, or their favorite people that they left behind, as well as their pets or any traditional celebrations. For example, for Christmas, they shared that certain countries have a whole festival for like a week. They would draw bumper cars and parties, and certain cultural outfits.

What are some of the acculturation struggles that you’re seeing?

Usually, what they share is that it’s just hard overall. In their countries, they would have more freedom. There would be much more fresh air and free space for them to run around. Coming here and being in an apartment, or being stuck in school, it’s different for them.

They’ve slowly been getting accustomed to school life. It’s been a lot of teaching them how to schedule their time, time management, as well as asking them what other resources they need in order to feel comfortable.

What strategies or coping skills have you taught students that they’ve found helpful?

We’ve done a lot of breathing exercises. Sometimes [their exposure to trauma] does get them a little uneasy. They really like [an exercise called] smell the flower, blow out the birthday cake candle.

I usually ask them: If I had a flower in my hand, how would you smell the flower? And they would inhale and breathe in. And when I ask them to blow out a birthday candle, they blow out through their mouth. It teaches them how to not take quick breaths.

I’ve also done a lot of cooked spaghetti, uncooked spaghetti. I have students basically tense up every part of their body. So they’ll become very stiff, like uncooked spaghetti. And then I allow them to become like cooked spaghetti, very noodly, so they let go of everything.

It’s allowing them to take notice of what part of their body is under stress, and teaching them how to express themselves when they feel that stress.

How does being able to speak Spanish allow you to connect with the students in ways that wouldn’t be possible if you didn’t speak their language?

Instead of having to translate what they’re feeling, they’re able to just express themselves exactly how they feel.

If I don’t understand something, I do ask them: Oh, what do you mean by this? It could be because of cultural differences. I take that time to let them teach me about what they’re trying to say, or what they’re trying to get out.

Do you ever share things about yourself with the students to help make a connection with them?

My parents are Ecuadorian, and I do bring that to the table. When I go to Ecuador, I visit my grandpa, I go to the countryside, I go to the city, and I’m able to share that with them. Even if the child is not from Ecuador, they’re more open to opening up to me because they realize: She’s been outside of New York, she understands what’s going on in other countries.

Lisset Condo Dutan often shares stories about visiting her family in Ecuador as a way to connect with the students she works with.

They ask me: Have you tasted salchipapas? Have you tasted a traditional dish called tripa mishqui? I’m open to sharing that information with them, and they’re usually very happy [to talk about it].

Where my grandpa lives, it’s like a farmland. A lot of them came from farmland. So, me being able to say: You know, when I go to Ecuador, I spend a week with my grandpa, and I help him feed the cows and feed the horses. That usually sparks something in them. They look at me like: You did that? I used to do that! Little things like that have really helped me connect with them.

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

Inside a Colorado bill to provide extra funding to school districts serving migrant students

2024-03-16T00:37:32+00:00

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All Colorado school districts that have enrolled any migrant students since the Oct. 1 school funding cutoff date would get extra money — between $15,000 and $750,000 per district — under a draft bill approved unanimously on Friday by the powerful Joint Budget Committee.

But districts where the new arrivals have caused a net increase in students — meaning the district has more students now than on Oct. 1 — would get the most extra money. Those districts could get as much as an additional $4,500 for every newly arrived student.

The bill allocates $24 million to be distributed by May 31 to districts that have enrolled what it calls “new arrival students,” or students who moved to the United States less than a year ago, are not proficient in English, and are attending a U.S. school for the first time.

The city of Denver alone has served more than 39,000 new arrivals from Venezuela and other South American countries since it began keeping track more than a year ago, including families with children who have enrolled in public schools.

The details of how the $24 million would be doled out are somewhat complicated. First, there is a tiered system of lump sum payments to school districts based on the number of new arrival students they’ve enrolled since the October count. Districts would get:

$15,000 if they’ve enrolled between one and five new arrival students
$30,000 if they’ve enrolled between six and 10 new arrival students
$75,000 if they’ve enrolled between 11 and 30 new arrival students
$125,000 if they’ve enrolled between 31 and 50 new arrival students
$200,000 if they’ve enrolled between 51 and 100 new arrival students
$400,000 if they’ve enrolled between 101 and 200 new arrival students
$550,000 if they’ve enrolled between 201 and 500 new arrival students
$750,000 if they’ve enrolled 500 or more new arrival students

On top of that, districts with a net increase in enrollment would get $4,500 per student. Here’s where it gets complicated: Districts with a net increase would either get $4,500 for each migrant student they’ve enrolled or $4,500 per student based on the net increase, whichever is lesser.

If the $24 million isn’t enough to cover the costs, the bill says state officials can reduce the $4,500 per student to a lower dollar amount. If calculations show there will be leftover money, state officials could increase the $4,500 to a higher dollar amount.

State Rep. Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat who sits on the budget committee, said in a text message that she’s happy that the bill could provide relief for districts statewide that are dealing with a “very out of the ordinary influx of new to country students arriving.”

Lawmakers have been working on the bill for over a month, debating various ways to dole out the $24 million. Sirota said the tiered funding proposal acknowledges districts incur fixed costs to educate any and all newly arrived students.

Friday’s vote by the budget committee finalized the language of the bill, but it has yet to be filed for consideration by the full Colorado General Assembly.

“I know my colleagues, our school districts, and our educators are going to be very excited to shepherd this bill across the finish line in the coming weeks,” Sirota said.

The funding is less than what school districts get for each student enrolled on Oct. 1: $10,614 on average. However, budget committee members wanted to earmark the $24 million to provide some relief for districts struggling with the extraordinary influx — money the districts would never get otherwise. (Students who stay enrolled next year will be factored into the school funding formula, and school districts will get money for those students.)

“This sudden influx has strained existing school infrastructure and staffing, led to overcrowded classrooms, stretched resources, and increased complexity to the student learning environment,” the bill says.

The bill also acknowledges that newly arrived students may need extra services, including English language development classes, mental health support, and more. Some may have been out of school for long stretches of time and need help catching up academically.

“New arrival students face unique challenges, including language barriers, cultural adjustments, and various academic backgrounds,” the bill says. “These unique challenges require specialized resources and support services.”

How much funding districts might get under the bill

Denver Public Schools and Aurora Public Schools have enrolled the most migrant students since the October count, according to data obtained through open records requests.

Denver has enrolled an additional 2,340 newcomer students, and Aurora has enrolled an additional 1,366 migrant students. Denver’s numbers were as of March 4, while Aurora’s were as of Feb. 29. The bill uses Feb. 29 as the date to calculate the difference between October count enrollment and how many students districts are serving now.

Accounting for students who left the districts between the October count and those dates, Denver had a net increase of 1,025 students, while Aurora had a net increase of 727 students.

Under the legislation, Denver Public Schools would get a lump sum of $750,000 for the 2,340 newcomers it has enrolled. The district would also get $4.6 million for the 1,025 net increase based on the $4,500 per student formula.

In Aurora’s case, the district would also get $750,000. And the district would get about $3.3 million for its total increase of students since the October count.

Most other districts that have enrolled more than 100 migrant students since the October count had either a much smaller net increase or a net decrease.

For instance, as of Feb. 29, the suburban Cherry Creek School District had enrolled an additional 532 newly arrived students since the October count. But the district has had a net decrease of 41 kindergarten through 12th grade students since Oct. 1.

Greeley-Evans School District 6 had enrolled 488 more migrant students, but only had a net increase of eight K-12 students. Adams 12 Five Star Schools had enrolled 389 additional students, but its school population only grew by 42 students.

And Jeffco Public Schools and Mapleton Public Schools had net decreases, despite enrolling 382 and 140 more new arrivals, respectively.

The student influx creates financial challenges for schools across the state, Brett Johnson, chief financial officer for Aurora Public Schools, said in an interview before the bill text was approved.

“There’s a real and specific impact of these 1,200 kids who have enrolled in our schools in terms of hiring new staff, repurposing classrooms for those schools,” Johnson said. “And those are real costs that are being incurred in real time.”

The challenges remain even in districts that have net decreases in overall enrollment.

A Cherry Creek spokesperson said the district has hired six staff members since January to support the new arrivals. Three of those hires are in newcomer classes and three are cultural liaisons who provide interpretation and other support to families who do not speak English.

Correction: This story has been corrected to update the per pupil figure districts get from the state.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Newly arrived young adults face challenges to NYC school enrollment

2024-03-19T20:24:30+00:00

This article was republished from City Limits, an independent, investigative news source.

The 20-year-old from Mauritania arrived in the city four months ago with the dream of graduating from high school in the United States.

”I want to make my life better. I am still a baby, and I should go to school to have more experience, to have more knowledge,” the youth—who preferred not to be identified by name, citing past experiences with other media—said in fluent English, something he quickly picked up from daily interactions, adding to the multitude of languages he already speaks. “I don’t want to lose my time.”

In only four months, he has moved from one shelter to the other: living first in Manhattan, then Brooklyn, and now the Bronx, after the city instituted a 30-day shelter limit for adult migrants in the city last year, which was extended last week to 60 days for adults under 23 as part of the city’s “right to shelter” settlement.

Over 852 single immigrant youth between the ages of 17 and 20 were in the city’s shelter system as of March 3, according to City Hall. Dozens of them have told shelter staff they want to graduate from high school, but haven’t been enrolled—even though they are entitled to do so under federal law, according to several community-based organizations (CBOs) that are trying to assist them.

Eight local organizations that provide services to immigrants and/or youth described delays and difficulties in enrolling young migrants recently. The organization with the highest number of cases was Safe Horizon’s Streetwork Project, a drop-in center for homeless youth that has been serving an increasing number of asylum seekers since last year, which says it has referred around 60 cases of migrants directly to the New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) since January.

But only six have been enrolled so far, lamented Sebastien Vante, associate vice president of Safe Horizon’s Streetwork Project in Harlem.Other organizations—Afrikana, an East Harlem community center that serves young immigrants; Artists Athletes Activists, which greets asylum seekers upon arrival and connects them with support services; the Coalition for Homeless Youth; The Door, which offers legal aid, counseling, and various support services to youth; and the New York Legal Assistance Group—told City Limits that the youth they serve have faced difficulties in school enrollment.

Some have been told there is no space, some have been put on waitlists and others said they were only given the option of taking the General Educational Development (GED) high school equivalency test, according to these groups.

When asked about these complaints, a New York City Public Schools spokesperson said the education department “does not track enrollment referrals and students are not asked to disclose how they received information about the enrollment process.”

“Enrollment does not work on a referral basis,” added the spokesperson in an email.

The department said it is working to ensure that older students who want to attend classes are afforded academic options including traditional high schools, transfer schools—which serve students who are behind in credits or need alternative forms of education—as well as adult GED programs.

“Since the inception of Project Open Arms, we have made it clear—we cannot do this work alone,” the spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the city’s initiative to offer educational support to new immigrants and asylum seekers.

But stating now that enrollment does not operate on a referral basis, advocates said, has created confusion, departing from how the city has historically enrolled unhoused young people referred by social services organizations.

“Providers have always utilized certain processes through relationships with students in temporary housing liaisons,” countered Jamie Powlovich, executive director for the Coalition for Homeless Youth. “If that process is no longer something NYC Public School supports, they didn’t tell anyone.”

Under the McKinney-Vento Act, a federal law that protects the educational rights of homeless children and youth, these young adults should be enrolled in school immediately, even in the absence of documentation such as proof of residency, immunizations, school records, or other documents normally required.

The New York State Education Law stipulates that those between the ages of 5 and 21 who have not received a high school diploma are “entitled to attend the public schools maintained in the district in which such person resides without the payment of tuition.”

Further, State Education Department guidance notes that, “Districts may not force such individuals to forego a full-time high school program to pursue this alternative option [GED test], or otherwise steer such individuals toward this alternative option.”

“I feel like almost all my clients in that specific situation—17 to 20, trying to get into high school—are almost always pushed towards the GED program,” said Salina Guzman, immigrant youth advocate at The Door. “I think very often, there are many barriers that our clients face when trying to get into high school.”

Since July 2022, about 36,000 students in temporary housing have enrolled in city schools, according to NYCPS, though the agency could not detail how many of them were aged 17-21.

To enroll, the department stated, prospective students must go through a Family Welcome Center, with locations in each of the five boroughs to handle year-round registration and admissions to traditional high schools.

But advocates say many immigrant youth have learned the hard way that they needed an appointment at these sites before showing up.

“[It] doesn’t sound like a huge issue,” said Rita Rodriguez-Engberg, director of the Immigrant Students Rights Project at Advocates for Children of New York. “But if you’re brand new to the country, and you’re already very confused and trying to make a lot of pieces fit together, and make the trip to the Family Welcome Center, and they tell you that you can’t be there, that you have to go back—that might be a reason alone why a family decides to just stop trying.”

A NYCPS spokesperson disputed that appointments are required at Family Welcome Centers, saying they are recommended but that walk-ins are accepted too. Welcome Centers can provide referrals to students interested in transfer schools, but for other pathways to graduation, such as adult education programs, prospective students should visit a referral center instead, the spokesperson said.

However, migrants who do make appointments at these welcome centers are sometimes told there is no space or they have to go on a waiting list, advocates say.

In an email, a NYCPS spokesperson acknowledged the presence of waitlists at some of its Welcome Centers—one in Downtown Brooklyn, for example, had less than 20 students waiting at the time of publication—but said names are taken off those lists daily thanks to rolling admissions, and that prospective students have the option of applying through other enrollment centers if their local spot is full.

But advocates say what should be a relatively smooth process now takes several weeks to a little over a month, and depends on a variety of circumstances: available seats, the type of school (transfer school, international high school, etc.), the needs of the student, and the time of year.

“The biggest problem: there’s no room in GED or high school alternatives,” explained Chia Chia Wang, NY Director of Church World Service (CWS), an organization that works with unaccompanied children who have come to reunite with their family members, which has been assisting many young people who are 17 or older with enrollment.

A CWS case manager explained that it took a month for one migrant, who will turn 18 in April and is living in a youth shelter without a guardian, to be enrolled after visiting the Family Welcome Center and being placed on a waiting list. “Despite reaching out to several transfer schools, he remained on waiting lists,” the caseworker said in an email.

“His absence from an educational environment,” the case manager added, “was starting to impact his mental well-being, as he expressed feeling down while observing his friends attending school while he remained at the shelter.”

To enroll migrants, advocates have made appointments, visited the Family Welcome Center, and called a bunch of high schools directly. “And that’s how, you know, we get students in school,” described Rodriguez-Engberg.

But according to the law, and reiterated by both the U.S. Department of Education and the NYS Department of Education, enrollment should be immediate. A U.S. Department of Education spokesperson said that anyone who meets the eligibility requirements and who is identified as homeless by a local liaison that serves students in temporary housing and their families in schools, should be able to attend classes right away.

A spokesperson for the New York State Education Department (NYSED) said that NYCPS has not reported any difficulties, delays, or problems in enrolling immigrant students in this age group, nor in failing to enroll them promptly, as required by the McKinney-Vento Act. NYSED would provide direct technical assistance to ensure compliance, added the spokesperson.

As a recipient of McKinney-Vento funds, the NYCPS has submitted proposals and annual reports ensuring compliance with the act, NYSED explained.

The New York State Attorney General’s Office encourages people who have been denied enrollment to contact its office or to file a Civil Rights Bureau complaint form.

Aging out of classrooms

An applicant approaching 18 complicates enrollment, several advocates explained. Turning 18 often makes it even harder.

“I had difficulty enrolling a client that was 17 and a half,” a Church World Service caseworker said via email. “The family was told that he was going to be 18 years old soon and that he should go to take a GED program instead of enrolling him in high school.”

The two young men City Limits spoke to during a visit to the Safe Horizons drop-in center in Harlem, one 20 and the other 18, said they had both asked staff at their shelters to be enrolled in school, to no avail. Nor were they referred to a family welcome center.

The young man from Mauritania said he did not persist or revisit the request because, under the city’s previous 30-day stay limit rules for adult migrants, it would be too difficult to fully focus on his studies without a stable place to live.

“So if I finished that one month, I should wait two weeks—three weeks, or one week, whatever—to get a shelter. I cannot sleep in a church, or sleep in a mosque, and then wake in the morning and go to school and come back tired,” he said.

CBOs told City Limits this age group easily falls through the cracks of the city’s shelter system and tends to be perceived as adults, not as young adults or unaccompanied youth.

“For newly arrived migrant youth of that age group—17 to 20—it’s rare that somebody will identify them as a [school-age] student, as a youth who needs to be in school,” Rodriguez-Engberg said. “They’re looked at as like adults, or they’re overlooked, period.”

Many young adults are entering adult shelters, where it’s harder to access the programs designed to help them.

Young people under the age of 24 are eligible for specialized runaway and homeless youth shelters under the Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD), but with only 813 beds, it has long been near or at capacity. In addition to school enrollment assistance, these shelters provide mental health services, access to legal aid, job training, and other services.

After two years of new immigrants arriving from all over the world, organizations say it’s hard to know the magnitude of the problem: how many young people who could be enrolled who are not in school right now, and how their lives could have been changed with such access.

“A bigger problem is the fact that we don’t really even know what the actual need is,” Rodriguez-Engberg said. “How many are there actually, who just gave up and are working or trying to do something else, because they had no idea they could be in school.”

In 2020, the Migration Policy Institute estimated that 3,800 newly arrived immigrants in New York City, ages 16 to 21, were neither enrolled in city schools nor had a diploma.

While NYCPS expanded programs for new immigrants enrolled in the city’s transfer high schools in 2022, the same year that more immigrants began arriving in the city, advocates say it’s still not enough to keep up with demand.

Enrollment challenges have affected both young adults living alone in the city as well as those living with their families. “The problem that exists with the lack of options and the Family Welcome Centers referring students to GED programs, happens regardless of whether the student is here alone or they’re here with their family,” Rodriguez-Engberg explained.

The youngest, those between 17 to 19, advocates explain, have a better chance and more time to navigate the laborious enrollment process, but for older youth, time is limited, since federal law only guarantees their right to attend through age 21.

“Every beginning is hard, but in the end, it’s going to be okay, but we don’t want to lose time,” the young man from Mauritania told a City Limits reporter. “We’re not allowed to work, so we should go to school to get information. If we were allowed to work, that information can help us in the future.”

He cited his own multilingual skills as something he and many other immigrant youth can offer the local job market—if they can access it.

“Maybe, the U.S. is going to need us one day,” he said.

Editor’s note from City Limits: This story has been updated since original publication to include additional information provided by NYCPS.

Chicago Public Schools ‘hitting the gas pedal’ on expanding dual language programs

2024-03-19T21:12:40+00:00

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Chicago Public Schools plans to hit “the gas pedal” on an expansion of dual language programs, which teach students in both English and another language, CEO Pedro Martinez said Tuesday at an event focused on Latino students.

At the event hosted by advocacy organization Latino Policy Forum, Martinez said CPS has a “significant opportunity” to expand its existing slate of dual language programs, which are designed to help students become fluent in English and another language.

The district currently has dual language programs in 37 elementary schools, three high schools, and three charter schools, according to a presentation Martinez delivered Tuesday.

Officials did not immediately share details on how soon the district wants to expand its dual language offerings, what it would cost, or where new programs would open because the district is still planning, according to a spokesperson. Martinez said Tuesday his team also wants to create more world language options.

Dual language programs are one of three types of English learner programs available in CPS; however, dual language can also serve students who are not learning English as a new language.

By state law, schools with 20 or more English language learners who speak the same native language must offer a Transitional Bilingual Program, which provides instruction in English and a child’s native language but focuses on building up the student’s English skills. Schools with 19 or fewer students who speak the same native language have a Transitional Program of Instruction, which provides instruction in English, according to CPS.

Transitional programs work to ensure that non-English speakers can speak English, but “imagine if they could keep their Spanish and go deeper,” he told the crowd at Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy.

“We want biliteracy, not just transitioning out of the native language into English,” said Karime Asaf, chief of the district’s Office of Language and Cultural Education.

The district’s goal comes as CPS has welcomed more than 6,000 new migrant students into schools so far this year, Martinez told reporters after the event. Educators and union officials have expressed concern about a lack of staffing and resources at schools to properly support migrant students who have come to Chicago from the southern border since 2022.

CPS has struggled to provide bilingual programming to English language learners. In February, district officials said just under 6% of schools — or roughly 30 — did not have teachers with required bilingual or English-as-a-second-language credentials.

Asaf said this challenge has emerged as migrant families move out of shelters and find permanent homes through housing assistance programs in neighborhoods where the schools do not have bilingual programming or large numbers of English learners, Asaf said. The district is prioritizing helping teachers at those schools get certified to teach English language learners, if they are interested, she said. The district is also sending central staffers to help schools with students who are learning English, she said.

But even before the most recent wave of migrants, CPS bilingual programming lagged. In 2017, the Chicago Reporter found that 71% of 342 schools audited by CPS did not have adequate bilingual programming, in violation of state law.

CPS has gradually opened dual language programs over the past decade, with efforts stretching back to at least 2016 and an expansion in 2018.

Advocates for English learners have previously pushed the district to open more dual language programs. One study focused on fifth graders in Oregon found strong signs that dual language instruction can improve literacy achievement, according to a 2022 review of the research by the federal Institute of Education Sciences’s What Works Clearinghouse. However, that study and another out of Utah found no evidence that dual language instruction boosted math or science achievement, and reviewers called for more rigorous research.

Such programs can also be costly, which could make it challenging for the district to implement as it faces a $391 million deficit next fiscal year.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Amid influx of students new to the country, English development teachers in Colorado feel overwhelmed

2024-03-20T23:44:05+00:00

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This school year has been overwhelming for teachers like Joel Mollman.

As an English language development teacher at Hamilton Middle School in Denver, Mollman has had to take on more work to keep up with the growing number of students who need help learning English.

In previous years, for example, his school might have only received three students a month who needed to be screened for English fluency. This year, he screens at least three new students each week — a process that takes one to two hours per student.

“It could quickly take up two of my mornings where I could be in classrooms,” Mollman said.

Across the state, English language development teachers describe similar scenarios.

As many schools have experienced an influx of new students with limited English skills all year, their roles have been changing.

Traditionally, these teachers are tasked with screening new students, teaching English as a second language, administering English fluency tests, and coaching other classroom teachers.

Now they must also support many students who are new to the country in much larger classes than typical.

As of the end of February, seven of Colorado’s districts — Denver, Aurora, Cherry Creek, Greeley, Adams 12, Jeffco, and Mapleton — told Chalkbeat they had enrolled more than 5,600 students new to the country after October count.

Some schools, in particular ones where there haven’t traditionally been large numbers of English learners, have relied on their English language development teachers to be the main support for children new to the country. Some of the teachers describe helping students and their families navigate a new country, and even taking in a child whose family was living in a car, during a bout of chickenpox.

Often, they say, certain parts of their job have fallen to the wayside, and state advocates say that in small districts, even screening students to identify their English needs, a crucial step, gets skipped.

Cynthia Trinidad-Sheahan, president of the Colorado Association for Bilingual Education, said districts don’t have the manpower, and often don’t know what to do.

“The expertise is lacking with some of the districts,” Trinidad-Sheahan said. “How do we get training to the teachers that are in these rural districts? And it’s not just on the paraeducators and teachers. The administrators leading these buildings do not have a clear understanding of language acquisition.”

Teachers start by testing for English fluency

When a student who is suspected of not being fluent in English is enrolled in school, the district is required to screen them to identify their language level and needs for services. That screening is supposed to happen within two weeks of enrollment.

In a typical year, that occupies time in the beginning of the school year for English language development teachers. This year, with some schools receiving new students every week, that process has taken up a lot more time.

At Hamilton Middle, where Mollman is also team lead for the school’s multilingual team, he’s taken on the role of screening all students this semester. Official state numbers show 40% of Hamilton’s 700 students have been identified as English learners.

In addition to administering the tests, Mollman has to block off a few hours per week to do the paperwork for the district. That requires entering scores and other information into the computer, and three school staff members to sign off.

Last semester, another English language development teacher on his team was sharing the load, but with so many new students, that teacher had to take on another class, giving up one of her free periods. Mollman now does all the screening.

Each Monday, he starts his week preparing for testing, double-checking the schedules given to new students to make sure they’re in the right classes, tracking down Chromebooks if they haven’t received them, and sometimes making calls as he tries to figure out what proficiency the new students have in their native language.

Kayli Brooks, a teacher at Tollgate Elementary in Aurora, said screening new students didn’t consume her job only because her school was able to get help from Aurora district leaders who stepped in to do that work.

But she recalls how many of the students arrived just before the annual testing window for ACCESS tests, the tests English learners take each year to measure their progress in English fluency. Those students had to take both tests within days or weeks.

“Every office or room was filled with testing,” Brooks said. She said it was heartbreaking to pull students and have them realize they had to take yet another English test they wouldn’t be able to do well on.

It’s hard to find time to help more students

Both Brooks and Mollman said that in their schools, giving students a block of English language instruction — a legally required practice — has not stopped.

But other help for students and staff has.

Brooks, for instance, said she used to pull groups of students such as those new to the country out of class for extra English instruction where she would let them practice speaking. She used to cater those sessions to phrases and vocabulary the students might encounter in other content classrooms such as science or social studies so they might feel more able to participate.

“All of that stopped,” Brooks said. “It came to an absolute screeching halt.”

In recent weeks, as the number of new students has slowed, she started back on a rhythm of reconvening some small groups of students.

“They are so happy,” Brooks said. “They want to learn. I taught them last week some basic advocacy: I need water. I need the bathroom. I need food.”

Still, she isn’t doing as much as she would like. And she hasn’t been able to help other classroom teachers in her school. At Tollgate, she said, about 60% to 75% of students are considered level 1 English learners, which means they don’t have any English fluency.

“We have a little over half of every classroom filled with students who don’t speak English, so half of their students are understanding what they say,” Brooks said. “Our team wants to — and should be — supporting teachers and having professional development around this. It’s just been such an overwhelming time that it’s not something that’s happening.”

Trinidad-Sheahan said districts need to allow English language development teachers to coach other teachers so the responsibilities for teaching students gets shared.

At the schools seeing an influx of emerging bilingual students, she said, instructional coaches should be teachers with experience in teaching English learners.

Mollman said at his Denver school, his team is trying to help other content teachers, but “we’re still trying to figure out the best way to do this.”

In other years, at his school teachers may have paired new students with other students who also speak the same language. But with so many new students, including some who speak Spanish and others who speak Arabic, it’s not always possible.

He’s also trying to get teachers to adapt how they grade students who don’t yet speak English. But it’s all a challenge.

“Some teachers are very good at adapting,” Mollman said. “Some have really struggled with it and we haven’t quite found the solution.”

Teachers feel unprepared for student needs

Even teachers who have experience working with students learning English as a new language say they’ve felt unprepared at times this year.

Dakota Prosch, is an English language teacher at Academia Ana Marie Sandoval in Denver, where she teaches fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students at the dual language Montessori school. In a typical year, her students are already close to fully bilingual. Because of the school model, and being a magnet school, most students by fourth grade have been in the school since kindergarten.

But this year, because of the large numbers of migrant students in Denver, the school has had to accept new students. It means Prosch is now working with students who have just arrived in the country and speak no English.

“We don’t have any materials for students who don’t speak English,” she said.

In February, the district provided some materials used at newcomer centers, but Prosch wishes she had gotten those resources sooner. For at least 30 minutes a day, she pulls aside the new students to work with them on some English development.

“There’s essentially two classes in one,” Prosch said. “I cannot deliver the same instruction.”

Most of her students are usually analyzing text. She tries to have her new students do that too, but many are just trying to learn what a sentence is and “how to put their tongue between their teeth” to learn the sounds different letter combinations make.

Still, Prosch said, “they’re really awesome kids and I’m really glad to have them.” It’s a sentiment echoed by other teachers.

Lawmakers are discussing a plan that would give some school districts additional funding for the students new to the country who have enrolled after October count when school funding is set.

Mollman agrees that more resources would help.

Right now, he said, schools like his are making tough decisions, such as choosing between bringing in a second English language development teacher or another science teacher. At his school, this year, they added a new ELD teacher to relieve a class that had more than 40 students.

“It was a pretty easy decision this year, but that then impacted one of our teams more severely than others,” Mollman said.

But, even without funding, teachers say their roles have to adapt to meet the needs of students.

“The goal is to ensure all of our students are successful regardless if they’re language learners or not,” Mollman said.

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Colorado will allow some of this year’s new migrant students to skip state tests

2024-03-22T22:39:54+00:00

Some students who are new to the U.S. and enrolled in Colorado schools after the official October count will not have to take any standardized tests this spring.

That’s according to new guidance issued recently by the Colorado Department of Education.

The department changed the guidance as school districts are seeing unprecedented numbers of new students who are new to the country. Teachers have described various challenges they’ve faced trying to educate migrant students, and the students are unlikely to do well on standardized state tests given in English. As of February, the Denver, Aurora, Cherry Creek, Greeley, Adams 12, Jeffco, and Mapleton districts told Chalkbeat they had enrolled more than 5,600 newcomer students after October count.

Denver Public School leaders told their school board this week that in their case, the majority of students new to the country will fall into that category to be exempt from testing.

Colorado students who are identified as new to the country and have no or limited proficiency in English already are exempt from taking standardized English reading and writing tests for at least their first year of school. Before the new guidance, they were expected to take standardized math and science tests with accommodations.

This spring, if students are new to the country, have no or little English fluency, enrolled after October count, and had limited or interrupted schooling before arriving, they can also skip the math and science tests.

Limited or interrupted schooling includes not attending school for six consecutive school calendar months prior to Colorado enrollment or having two or more years of missed schooling compared to similarly aged students in the U.S. Students who had limited school options in their home country because of war, civil unrest, or needing to travel a long distance to an available school could also qualify for that designation.

Students who have not had interrupted schooling will still be expected to take math and science tests with accommodations. Their participation will count toward overall participation rates, but their scores will not be factored into school ratings for state or federal accountability systems.

Colorado tests students in third through 11th grades. CMAS English and math tests are given to students in third through eighth grade. Science tests are only given to students in fifth, eighth, and 11th grades. In high school, students take the PSAT in ninth and tenth grades, and the SAT in 11th grade.

Families can always opt students out of tests.

In Colorado, this year’s spring testing window begins April 8, after most districts come back from spring break.

Reporter Ann Schimke contributed to this report.

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

LISTEN: Migrant students navigate a new reality

2024-03-27T10:00:00+00:00

The first episode of P.S. Weekly focuses on one of the biggest education stories in New York City this year: the arrival of thousands of migrant students.

Officials estimate that more than 36,000 migrant students have enrolled in city schools over the past two years.

What challenges are these new students facing? And what are schools doing to support them? This student-reported episode explores these questions through conversations with students, educators, and a journalist who’s been covering the issue.

The first segment features an interview with Chalkbeat reporter Michael Elsen-Rooney, as he explains how schools have been supporting recently arrived students — and what the media has gotten wrong. With the city’s recent policy limiting migrant families to 60 days in shelters, it’s been hard on schools to figure out how to help. Elsen-Rooney said school officials are grappling with questions like: “Can we figure out transportation for them, or do they leave? And then they have to start over at a new school?”

Next, Marisol Martin, a senior at Claremont International High School in the Bronx, talks about her hurdles and triumphs since coming here from Mexico a few years ago. As she’s gotten more involved with her school’s Dream Squad — a program the Education Department started in 2020 to help immigrant students and undocumented youth and is now in more than 60 schools — Martin has felt more a part of the community.

A poster for the Dream Squad at Claremont International High School.

She’s paying it forward, now as a Dream Squad leader herself, and she shares her view on how schools should better help students feel connected to one another.

“What I would tell them is to socialize with other people,” Martin said in Spanish. “When you’re alone, you’re shy, and you don’t want to talk to anyone, you close yourself in your own world, and you don’t know more about what’s happening outside.”

Finally, Sunisa Nuonsy, a former high school teacher of 10 years at International High School at Prospect Heights in Brooklyn, talks about why she became a teacher specifically focused on immigrant students, the challenges she faced, and her advice to other teachers, especially those who are working with migrant students who may have experienced trauma. (Nuonsy is currently a doctoral student in urban education at the CUNY Graduate Center and a project researcher for the CUNY Initiative on Immigration and Education.)

Sunisa Nuonsy

“They can easily shut down and they can easily drop out,” Nuonsy said of migrant students. “So you have a very unique opportunity to be an adult in their life that is welcoming them and affirming them and showing them that they have value and that they should be here.”

P.S. Weekly is available on major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Be sure to drop a review in your app or shoot an email to PSWeekly@chalkbeat.org. Tell us what you learned today or what you’re still wondering. We just might read your comment on a future episode.

P.S. Weekly is a collaboration between Chalkbeat and The Bell. Listen for new episodes Wednesdays this spring.

Read the full episode transcript below

Dorothy: Welcome to P.S. Weekly… the sound of the New York City school system. I’m Dorothy Ha, a senior at Stuyvesant High School– and I’m super excited to be hosting the very first episode of P.S. Weekly. This show is a collaboration between Chalkbeat New York, a leading education news site– and The Bell, a leading provider of audio journalism training to high school students. It’s a pairing as natural as a bacon, egg, and cheese!

Dorothy: Each week this Spring, our team will dig into one issue affecting New York City schools, bringing you a mix of voices and perspectives that you won’t find anywhere else. Along the way, we want to hear from YOU, our lovely listeners– more on that later in the show. Right now… let’s get to it.

Dorothy: For our first episode, we chose what’s been arguably the biggest story in New York City this year.

News Clip: Parents and educators say several Manhattan public schools are overwhelmed with an influx of migrant students. CBS News’ Natalie Duddridge spoke with the Chancellor on his efforts to find solutions.

Dorothy: What challenges are these new migrant students facing? And what are schools doing to support them? We’ll hear experiences directly from students and teachers. But first! We have Mike Elsen-Rooney with us. Mike is a Chalkbeat reporter who’s been covering how schools are responding to thousands of newly arrived migrant students.

Dorothy: Hi Mike! Thanks for joining us.

Mike: Hey, Dorothy. It’s great to be here.

Dorothy: All right. So, Mike, when did the issue that some have called the “migrant crisis” hit your radar?

Mike: So I remember back in Summer 2022, when this was first hitting the headlines. I was watching a meeting, and a superintendent said, “We’re expecting a couple hundred new students to come in.” And I was like, “Whoa, that seems like a lot of kids.” And then here we are about two years later, and it’s a whole lot more than that.

Dorothy: Right, so now it’s 2024. And how many people are we talking about in total now?

Mike: So our best estimate is that about 36,000 new kids have enrolled over the past couple of years.

Dorothy: Wow. That’s a lot of students. So what can you tell us about where these new migrants are living and where they’re going to school?

Mike: Yeah. So where they’re living really depends on where the city has been able to set up shelters. We’ve seen shelters pop up in Long Island City in Queens, and Clinton Hill in Brooklyn, and lots of different parts of the city. And so where kids go to school really depends on two things. Number one is how close it is to their shelters. The second thing is what schools are really good and well-equipped to serve English language learners.

Dorothy: I can imagine that there are a lot of challenges in handling this big increase in migrant students.

Mike: Yeah, it can be really hard just getting tons and tons of new kids with a lot of challenges. And then the thing that’s been really hard recently is that there’s this new policy: families can only stay in shelters for 60 days. After that, they have to reapply, and they may end up in a shelter in a different part of the city. And so schools have to figure out, “Can we keep this kid? Can we figure out transportation for them, or do they leave? And then they have to start over at a new school?”

Dorothy: Recently, you wrote a really interesting story about how this immigration issue is impacting students and how they’re feeling at this moment. And you spoke to folks at Newcomers High School. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Mike: Yeah. So Newcomers High School is this really interesting place in Long Island City, Queens. It’s been around for 30 years, and they’re really good at accepting newcomer kids from around the world and teaching them English and helping them get acclimated to life in the U.S. And so that school is also near a bunch of shelters in Long Island City. And so when I saw a couple of kids from Newcomers High School speaking at a meeting for the Panel for Educational Policy recently, I was really surprised by what they said.

Meeting Clip: Our name stigmatizes us and condemns us to always be patronized and not having a choice because we are “new.” We are marked with the idea that we are here occupying a space that is not ours.

Mike: They said that the name Newcomers High School was, quote, putting a target on their backs.

Dorothy: And so what happened after the testimony?

Mike: After that testimony, they went through the whole process of getting their name changed, and we just actually found out that they got approved to have a new name. And the school is going to be called Atlas.

Dorothy: The situation with their name change kind of makes me think about the portrayal of migrants in the media. You know, not every journalist is as thorough as you are, Mike. So what’s been the broader media narrative?

Mike: So we’ve seen some examples where the media actually has really not captured what’s happening on the ground. And one really good example is, there was an incident recently where the city had set up basically an emergency tent shelter on Floyd Bennett Field at the Southern tip of Brooklyn. And there was a storm coming, and the city decided to evacuate them.

News Anchor 1: Mounting frustrations this afternoon in Brooklyn after the city temporarily placed asylum seekers into the gym of James Madison High School in Midwood.

News Anchor 2: While the move was to provide shelter for them from last night’s storm, but it was meant– it meant that no classes happened at the school today. And parents are really frustrated by all of it.

Mike: The city had them stay there overnight and then got them out early in the morning. But the school’s principal decided, they weren’t going to be able to get it cleaned up in time; let’s switch to remote learning for the day. When this hit the news. It turned into this huge story, especially in a lot of right-wing media. And the narrative was that New York City kids are getting pushed out by migrant families. But when a colleague of mine actually talked to students and parents there, you know, kids were saying, “Look, we sympathize with these families. We didn’t want them to be exposed to any danger of being out in the storm. And it was just a very different set of reactions than what came through if you only read the kind of media firestorm over this. And so, you know, it kind of drove home this point that what the media says doesn’t always reflect the reality on the ground.

Dorothy: Wow, fascinating. And on top of that, immigration has been a big issue in the presidential election so far. I can think of one presidential candidate who has been speaking about it a lot in particular. So how has that impacted New York City?

Mike: So Donald Trump just weighed in on this. He made some claims in a recent interview that New York City kids were getting pushed out by migrant students. And it just is incorrect. And the biggest reason for that is that there are actually a lot of empty seats in New York City schools. We lost enrollment during the pandemic, and so there’s plenty of space and no one’s getting pushed out.

Dorothy: So my last question for you is, for educators, and policymakers, and community members who want to better support these migrant students, what are some of the success stories that you’ve seen?

Mike: So many schools have been finding really creative and empathetic ways to support their new kids. You know, one big example we’ve seen is that a lot of schools have done coat drives because a lot of these newcomer kids have lived in the Southern Hemisphere their whole lives and have never really been through a New York winter. So it’s just those kinds of things at the community level, listening to what these families need and making it happen.

Dorothy: Mike, thank you so much for sitting down and having this conversation with us.

Mike: Thanks so much, Dorothy.

Dorothy: And now, we’re going to take a closer look at what the experience is really like after students arrive here. And how one program is helping them adjust. Our P.S. Weekly reporter Jose Santana has the story.

Marisol: Hola, mi nombre es Marisol Martin. Soy del grado 12, soy senior, mi país es México.

Jose: This is Marisol Martin, an 18-year-old high school senior.

Marisol: The biggest challenge I have is the language. I only knew how to say “thank you.” The teacher back in my country told us “thank you” in English, but beyond that I didn’t know anything.

Jose: She arrived in New York City from Mexico when NYC schools were still remote because of the pandemic.

Marisol: It was very difficult for me to learn; ninth grade was very difficult. The classes were online, and that made it more difficult for me to learn, and I didn’t understand anything. I just used a translator or something like that to see what to do.

Jose: And she’s not the only one who faces these kinds of hurdles. New York City is a city of immigrants, and its schools reflect that. Young people from all over the world come here for a multitude of reasons. Last school year, nearly one in five city students was learning English as a new language. Here’s Governor Kathy Hochul during a press conference last September.

Kathy (News Clip): We have real challenges. They’re coming in from West Africa, South and Central America. So it’s not just assuming that Spanish is going to cover everybody. It doesn’t come close. City officials…

Jose: When high school students like Marisol first arrive in New York City, the school system typically enrolls them in one of about 20 international high schools. These are schools like Newcomers– now called Atlas –that specialize in supporting recent immigrants. Marisol attends Claremont International High School in the Bronx. Nearly all of its students are low-income and English language learners. When Marisol first got there, language wasn’t the only barrier.

Marisol: Another challenge for me was to use technology that was very complicated for me because they gave me an iPad to work with my things. But it was in English, and I didn’t know where to enter, what to do, or where to paste.

Jose: Being in a new country also takes some cultural adjustment.

Marisol: When I arrived here in the United States, I entered Claremont and I kind of didn’t have much connection with the people. Different countries, different cultures.

Jose: But lucky for Marisol– and so many other immigrant students –there was help.

Marisol: Something that has helped me are some groups, like the Dream Squad. When I entered tenth grade, I was on the Dream Team. That also helped me a lot to communicate.

Jose: What is a Dream Squad? To answer that question, come with me to one of their meetings. It’s 12 p.m. on a Tuesday and I’m here at the Dream Squad’s weekly lunchtime meeting in the school’s library. The Dream Squad’s staff director Evelyn Reyes is leading the meeting with about 10 students, who are all seniors. They were discussing plans and ideas to recruit more Dream Squad members by sending emails out, flyers and directly inviting students to their meetings. Evelyn said the program started in 2019 to help immigrant students and undocumented youth.

Evelyn: Our then social worker was working around creating a space where students, regardless of immigration status, could find, you know, that empowerment where their stories were shared.

Jose: Claremont is one of more than two dozen schools around the city with a Dream Squad program. Dream Squads receive support from the non-profit ImmSchools and the DOE’s Division of Multilingual Learners. They provide notebooks, laptops, lanyards, and events for students and staff. But the most important aspect of the program is the community itself– and the knowledge that gets shared. Meeting topics vary from week to week.

Evelyn: So, mental health, we want to talk about also “know your rights.” So that our students are aware of what their rights are as immigrants. We want our students to also know that they have different options when it comes to post-secondary planning, whether that is college, whether that is trade school, whether that is a certificate program. We do try to do our best to share the information that we share with the students inside those meetings, across the school.

Jose: Dream Squad is tackling some big challenges, and it’s not without its difficulties. Language continues to be an issue.

Evelyn: Claremont is a very multilingual school, so we are a very diverse school community. And sometimes, just being able to produce or communicate a lot of the resources on students’ native language, that could be something that can be a little bit challenging.

Jose: But, despite these challenges, Evelyn makes sure to let the students know that–

Evelyn: Your background, your values, your culture, all of that is an asset. Like you have that, value that. So I do want them to feel like their story matters. Like I want them to, to feel like they’re at a community. That they’re welcome not only inside our school community, but also, you know, in this country.

Jose: And how does Dream Squad measure success?

Evelyn: Knowledge is success for me. Like, as long as we’re about to reach our students and we’re able to provide the resources, that they know how to use the resources, that they know how to access those resources. That’s how we measure success.

Jose: After benefiting from the program, Marisol became a Dream Squad leader– for 2 years now –to help other students like her. I ask Marisol how she’s adjusted since arriving in New York 3 years ago.

Jose (in Spanish): After 3 years of being here, how have you adjusted?

Marisol: I think that through time and things around me, I was able to connect more with the things in the United States. And also how the people that I met helped me too, like… like my classmates who are also migrants. So, we talk to each other and tell each other about this and this. I think that was something that helped me a lot to adapt here.

Jose: I ask her what advice she’d give to other students who have just arrived and gone through a similar experience.

Marisol: What I would tell them is to socialize with other people. That’s very good, because having a connection to more people, you can know more things versus when you’re alone, you’re shy and you don’t talk to anyone. You close yourself in your own world, and you don’t know more about what’s happening outside.

Jose: And what can the schools do to make the experience better?

Marisol: I think that giving them guidance, telling them, like, “here you can learn, here you can communicate.” The schools need to have more– like a connection with students, because many of the children don’t know what to do when they arrive the first day. They are very shy, and I think that they should have more priority with them when they immediately arrive.

Jose: There’s no doubt that the increase in new students to the city creates a difficult situation for both the city and the students. But as Marisol suggests, there are things that can be done to make the immigrant student experience better. And it all starts with a supportive community– grassroots efforts like the Dream Squad program that are making schools a safe and welcoming space for all.

Dorothy: Once again, that was Jose Santana, reporting from Claremont International High School. We’re going to take a short break, but when we return… a teacher’s perspective.

Sunisa: Sometimes, students are hopeless. Which I think to a teacher, to see a hopeless student is sad; it’s heartbreaking.

Dorothy: So stay tuned…

Salma: Hey, listeners! We hope you’re enjoying the first episode of P.S. Weekly. We’ve got an assignment for you—follow us on Instagram @bell.voices. And we want to hear from you! Reach out to P.S. Weekly at psweekly@chalkbeat.org with comments, questions, and suggestions. And… if you want more student-created content, listen up!

Student 1: On Our Minds is a podcast about the teenage experience. Made by teens, for teens.

Student 2: There’s a lot on our minds, and talking about it helps.

Student 1: On Our Minds: Season 4 is produced by PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs, in collaboration with KUOW’s RadioActive Youth Media.

Student 2: Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Dorothy: In the last segment, we heard about the immigrant student experience. When it comes to helping these students overcome language barriers and navigate a new environment, that job often falls to… you guessed it… teachers. Our producer Bernie Carmona spoke to one of them.

Bernie: As a child of immigrants, I’ve thought about the experiences of migrant students navigating through school life. But who takes on the responsibility for making sure students are fully prepared for their future? What do teachers go through while navigating classrooms with migrant students? I remember speaking to my older sister, Mariana, who moved from Mexico to South Carolina in 2002 when she was about 5 years old. She didn’t know English when she arrived and struggled to adjust to the new environment. She didn’t feel supported until she came to New York City, where she experienced the diverse culture and language in schools, things she couldn’t access in South Carolina.

Bernie: Her experience made me wonder: how does all of this look from a teacher’s perspective? I spoke to Sunisa Nuonsy, a former high school teacher of 10 years at International High School at Prospect Heights in Brooklyn.

Bernie: Thank you so much for being here, Sunisa.

Sunisa: Thank you so much for having me.

Bernie: Sunisa, why did you choose to become a teacher?

Sunisa: I became a teacher, particularly for immigrant students, because of my own experience. My family came to the U.S. as refugees from Laos. And sadly to say, some of my aunts and uncles, who were adolescents at the time of resettlement here, they were not equitably served in schools, and they dropped out of school. And so I always carried that with me. And when I became an adult, and I was thinking about my career path, I was very much drawn to language and to working with immigrants just because I felt like I could connect with them.

Bernie: Can you tell me a little more about how that experience was like for you?

Sunisa: The first time that I entered the school, I was interviewing as a student teacher, and I saw the students, and the different kinds of clothes they were wearing. Some kids were like, you know, dressed very Western, some kids were wearing more cultured clothes, hearing different languages. I thought it was the coolest place ever because I was like, “Look at these beautiful kids.” They come from everywhere. But we’re in Brooklyn. They’re so fly, they’re so fresh. It’s like where roots are– are like bursting through the ground, you know, because everything is just alive. Like the ways that language comes together, right?

Sunisa: I worked at a school, I would say was mostly Dominican. So every student learned Dominican Spanish, right? Whether you were from Yemen or Guinea, everybody was like, “Que lo que.” And just the way that our students were so open with their cultures and playing with one another’s cultures and really learning with it was just this beautiful hybrid space. And I don’t want to romanticize it, but I just imagine that that’s what our world could really be like is, you know, a place where people feel affirmed in who they are, but also aren’t scared to get to know other people. But we’re trying to make the world better, right? We’re trying to make people freer, more liberated. So I love that space. I love that liminal space.

Bernie: What would you say has been the biggest challenge you face with working with migrant students?

Sunisa: Well, I can say that although I identify as an immigrant myself, it’s such a tough situation to be in, and the larger administration is not aware of that. And they’re expecting you to be this robot that just has to do their job and perform their functions. But a lot of times I’ve seen it impossible to get a student to respond to classwork because they have so many other pressing and urgent issues that are just surrounding their brain and their souls. And that can be challenging to do when you have students who don’t see a pathway to college, they don’t even see a pathway to graduation. So to work with students, try to instill in them some sense of agency and empowerment, you know, even in the smallest ways, I think is really important because sometimes students are hopeless, which I think to a teacher, to see a student hopeless is sad. It’s heartbreaking, right, because you think that you’re there to really guide them to all of these opportunities when those opportunities are inequitably distributed. Like I think about college tuition, right, and financial aid and who can access financial aid and who can’t.

Bernie: What was a difficult moment you encountered?

Sunisa: I had two amazing students who were sisters, and they wanted to go to college. And their dad, culturally, didn’t think that college was for them. And so I had just so many conversations not only with them but with their guardians, with administrators at the schools, with other teachers. And oftentimes, I would just go back to my classroom and cry out of frustration because you could feel like you’re doing all of the hard things that you need to do to support these immigrant students. And there are still things that are just out of your control. So to see these students who had come all this way, had come from this village in Yemen to Brooklyn. And really learn how to believe in themselves and have some empowerment and still not be able to make that one crucial decision about whether they can continue their educations. It’s just, you know, I don’t know, even know how to troubleshoot that.

Bernie: Do you have any advice for teachers that are currently working with migrant students?

Sunisa: My recommendation for all teachers really is to know who your students are. Get to understand their context and their experiences before you label them as anything. Because, especially immigrant students, the ones who have experienced trauma along the way, they can easily shut down and they can easily drop out. So you have a very unique opportunity to be an adult in their life that is welcoming them and affirming them and showing them that they have value and that they should be here.

Bernie: Thank you so much for being a part of this interview, Sunisa.

Sunisa: Thank you so much for having me.

Bernie: I’m Bernie Carmona, reporting for P.S. Weekly.

Dorothy: That’s it for our first episode, but before you go, we have an extra credit assignment for you! Go to chalkbeat.org/newsletters, or click the link in our show notes, to sign up for the Chalkbeat New York morning newsletter. It’s the best way to stay informed on local schools coverage Monday through Friday. And if you really want to impress the teacher, drop a review in your podcast app or shoot an email to psweekly@chalkbeat.org. Tell us what you learned today or what you’re still wondering. We just might read your comment on a future episode.

Dorothy: P.S.: We’re back next Wednesday with an episode on how the national wave of Book Bans is impacting local schools.

Preview Clip: These groups are trying to erode the trust of educators in general by placing doubt in people’s minds about what a teacher is exposing kids to, is really just trying to attack the public school system.

Dorothy: Until then… [with entire cast] class dismissed!

CREDITS

Dorothy: P.S. Weekly is a collaboration between The Bell and Chalkbeat, made possible by generous support from The Pinkerton Foundation, The Summerfield Foundation, FJC, and Hindenburg Systems. This episode was hosted by me, Dorothy Ha. Producers for this episode were Sanaa Stokes, Jose Santana, and Bernie Carmona. With reporting help from Chalkbeat reporters Alex Zimmerman and Mike Elsen-Rooney. Engineering support was provided by Ava Stryker-Robbins. Our marketing lead this week was Santana Roach. Our executive producer for the show is Joann DeLuna. Executive editors are Amy Zimmer and Taylor McGraw.

Additional production and reporting support was provided by Sabrina DuQuesnay, Mira Gordon, and our friends at Chalkbeat. Special thanks to our interns Miriam Galicia and Makenna Turner. Music from Blue Dot Sessions and the jingle you heard at the beginning of this episode was created by the one and only: Erica Huang.

Thanks for tuning in! See you next time!

Correction: The Dream Squad, which started in 2020 is now in 60 schools, up from 25.

Migrant students in Philadelphia aren’t getting the support they need, advocacy group says

2024-03-28T18:46:11+00:00

Leer en español.

Sign up for Chalkbeat Philadelphia’s free newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system.

Zulma Guzman came to Philadelphia from El Salvador in 2019 and is a part of South Philadelphia’s Hispanic community. But she’s had a difficult time getting comfortable as the parent of three students in the city’s public schools.

She said through an interpreter that there’s been a lack of translation services in official school meetings that makes her feel unwelcome. When she and other Spanish-speaking parents have asked for interpreter services, Guzman said, they’ve often been told to “bring our students or children or another community member to interpret for us.”

In addition, she said she struggled to find people at her childrens’ schools to help make her aware of the resources available to her as a member of a newcomer family.

Guzman’s experience isn’t uncommon. In fact, it reflects complaints about significant shortcomings with how the district supports newly arrived migrants, refugees, and those seeking asylum, according to survey results collected by Juntos, an immigrant rights advocacy group, and shared with Chalkbeat.

In the 152 responses from teachers, administrators, and counselors at 56 schools, just 17% said there were sufficient Bilingual Counseling Assistants or bilingual staff members to meet students’ needs in every language they speak. Only 19% said they had received newcomer-specific training that covered more than just interactions with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And only 33% said they believe their schools are equipped to communicate with newcomers and their families.

Philadelphia schools’ inability to provide the kind of support that immigrant students and their families want has been a problem for years, and reflects challenges schools are facing nationwide with recent increases in newcomer and migrant students.

District spokespeople were not available for comment about Juntos’ survey on Thursday, and said they would not be available to respond to Chalkbeat’s requests for comment until next week.

Philadelphia does have two “newcomer” academies at Franklin Learning Center and Frankford High School that are supposed to help these students. Students in grades 9-12 who have arrived to the U.S. within the past year can enroll in these academies. They are supposed to receive “an accelerated course of study” and unique support “so that they are able and expected” to get up to speed with their peers.

But even these academies that are tailored to help newcomers acclimate may not be enough to serve students’ needs. According to data provided by the district, Juntos said in 2023 there were 1,032 newcomer students, but only 70 were enrolled in the two newcomer programs, and that there were 120 spaces remaining. And empty seats may not be the only issue.

Ashley Tellez is a senior at Franklin Learning Center and a junior organizer at Juntos. Her family is from Mexico, but she was born and raised in South Philadelphia and has had a front seat to her school’s newcomer academy. She said in practice, students in these programs are not getting the support they need.

She said newcomer students are kept separate from the general student population, and she’s only had a class with a newcomer student once in her high school career. Tellez said these barriers that keep newcomer students apart starve them of connections with their fellow students and hamper their ability to make friends, join clubs, and fully participate in the Philadelphia student community.

“There’s so many students who come to the schools for these programs who live an hour, 45 minutes away, and aren’t given the right access to education that they are supposed to be getting,” Tellez said.

‘These systems don’t look out for them’

In 2021, the city school board unanimously approved a “welcoming sanctuary schools” resolution promising to provide training to staff on how to respond if ICE officers were to show up on school grounds, and generally how to engage with families and provide and protect newcomer students in their schools.

Guadalupe Mendez, a youth organizer with Juntos, said the group sent out the survey to follow up on that mandatory training teachers were supposed to be getting.

She said the survey results, as well as conversations she and other Juntos members have had with youth and teachers across the city, shows that training is not as robust as was promised. Juntos had spoken with some people who received the training “and they don’t take more than 20 minutes to go over it,” Mendez said.

Mendez grew up in South Philly — like Tellez, her family is from Mexico. Although she’s older than the students she works with at Juntos, not much has changed for Spanish-speaking students in the public school system, despite the “good teachers that had good intentions” who taught her.

Mendez said that, according to district data, for the nearly 23,000 English learner students in Philly schools, there are only 131 bilingual counseling assistants. These assistants provide translation services, help families get connected with resources in the city, and help non-English speaking families build relationships with their school leaders, teachers, and community.

But the relatively small number of these assistants restricts how much they can help families, Mendez said.

The students she’s talked to who’ve come to the district while still learning English “can’t believe that there are no supports. They can’t believe that these systems don’t look out for them.”

Mendez said the district defines students who have “recently arrived” as those who have come to the country within the past year. But that’s often far from enough time to learn a new language, get caught up on classwork, and feel integrated into their schools, she said.

Juntos has told the school district it should expand the newcomer definition to “any students who have recently arrived (within the last three years) to the United States, and may include but are not limited to: asylees, refugees, unaccompanied youth, undocumented youth, migratory students, and other immigrant children and youth.”

The group also wants the district to set up newcomer programs in middle schools and add at least one new high school program in South Philly, where many newcomer students live.

Students act as interpreters for newcomer students

Felipe Mejia-Cuba, a Philadelphia student and volunteer with Juntos, remembers working in a restaurant two years ago with a newcomer student when one day, in the middle of a shift the student insisted that Mejia-Cuba call a hospital to help him navigate the health care system.

Mejia-Cuba said the student, who attended Horace Howard Furness High School, told him his school wasn’t able to help, and that he needed forms and vaccinations to help him stay in school.

That’s a common experience for many bilingual young people, who are tasked with translating meetings and documents for friends and family.

“That was the first red flag that I encountered,” Mejia-Cuba said. “I found out about all the disadvantages and all the neglect that the newcomer students are facing.”

Mejia-Cuba said being a mentor for other kids his age has helped him better understand the resources available to Spanish-speaking Philadelphians and find his place in his community.

“The me that I am now would be able to help that kid in the basement of that restaurant,” Mejia-Cuba said.

He doesn’t want his newborn cousins and relatives in the public school system to have the same struggles that he did: “It’s not just a battle for who is in the schools now, it’s a battle for generations to come.

Tellez, the senior at Franklin Learning Center, said she feels lucky because she’s able to speak out when some of her fellow students may not be able to because they are undocumented or have family members who are undocumented and fear federal immigration authorities.

She and Mejia-Cuba both said though they are graduating, they want the school district to improve for those coming up behind them.

“I really grew up with these ideas of what schools can look like and what power I have as a student to achieve that,” Tellez said. “I learned that I have a voice and I can use my voice to create change.”

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

How a Humboldt Park school is helping parents learn English and gain confidence

2024-04-03T17:00:00+00:00

This story was originally published in Block Club Chicago.

All is quiet inside a Humboldt Park elementary school filled with student artwork, class pictures and flags — except for one classroom, where there’s soft chatter in English and Spanish.

It is home to Lowell Elementary School’s first English as a Second Language class, where about 15 parents and relatives of the school community meet Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

The group is a mix of new arrivals from Latin America, mothers, and relatives from other countries who wanted more opportunities to practice English, help their children with homework, and integrate into the neighborhood.

For some, learning English is also their ticket to getting a job and enrolling in college classes to further enrich their lives in Chicago, they said.

“I want to learn English so I can go to school and get a degree and acclimate here,” said Francelys Tineo, who arrived from Venezuela a few months ago and whose daughter attends Lowell. “My husband is trying to get work while I am in class, but we can’t work here yet. But I want to better communicate with people when I can get a job.”

María Taylor shows off her homework as she takes an English as a Second Language class at Lowell Elementary School.

Like many Chicago Public Schools, Lowell, 3320 W. Hirsch St., has seen an influx of migrant children enroll over the past year, growing its already high Latino student population, according to school data. The school has 304 students, 95% of whom are low-income students and 38% of whom are English learners, data shows.

Data on how many new arrivals have settled into Lowell since last year was not available, but the district has welcomed about 5,700 newcomers in collaboration with the city’s family services department, a CPS spokesperson said.

Noelia Llamas, who has lived in Humboldt Park for 18 years and is from Mexico, is on Lowell’s bilingual board and is a member of the school’s parent advisory council. She was one of the mothers who pushed the school to offer the program, she said.

As the Spanish-speaking parent group grew, they kept asking school officials what could be done to have more opportunities to learn English that fit their schedules, she said.

School liaison Maya Bral reached out to Literacy Chicago — a volunteer group that offers free English classes, digital literacy and workforce skills to adults — to see if it could send a teacher to the school.

The school began a partnership with the nonprofit in November, making Lowell one of the first CPS schools to offer the free class after the pandemic, Bral said.

“We need parents to learn and get practice writing and speaking in English so we can get more confidence, help our kids with homework and get more involved with the community,” Llamas said.

The attendance and level of engagement from parents has greatly benefited the school community, Bral said.

“Teachers are reliant on the teachers as much as the teachers are reliant on the parents, so I think (the class) has helped foster that sense of community even more and a sense of agency for the parents,” Bral said.

Wendy Hernandez and Carmelina Martinez work on their classwork.

Many who attend the class told Block Club it has helped them boost their confidence, let go of fears in pronouncing words incorrectly, and create lasting friendships and a greater sense of community.

Progressing from basic skills such as directions and letter pronunciation to more complex skills like reading and writing in English has given parents a valuable opportunity — and it’s free and accessible, parents said.

Carmen Tello, who is from Ecuador and has lived in the neighborhood for eight years, said the class has helped her come out of her shell and strengthen communication with her son.

“I need to communicate with my son and my community and with people from the school who help him, even doctors, so it’s very important to have this skill and train my English,” Tello said. “In all the jobs I have had, everyone speaks Spanish, so there has been no need to learn English, but now I want to. … I am still scared, but I try anyway. Now I have more confidence in speaking and pronouncing words correctly.”

From the other side of the classroom, teacher Marisol Guzman has seen the women blossom and feel more powerful in their language skills, she said.

Marisol Guzman (left) helps a student with a lesson on pronouns.

Through Literacy Chicago, Guzman has taught English literacy classes for three years around the city, and she has seen how the classes can empower attendees.

“There is something really powerful of just saying the words, even if it doesn’t sound right, just moving your tongue,” she said. “It’s a blessing to see them try, and putting themselves out there is powerful and very beneficial to them, as well.”

Guzman teaches all of her classes in English for a full immersion and only switches to Spanish as a last resort, she said.

“I like to challenge them and get them to work together, because I won’t always be here,” Guzman said. “If we have a new student, they may feel lost and need help, but others have been here a long time and can help, which is a good lesson and good to have a mix of learning.”

Llamas, who works with the school’s parent council to organize events at the school and the park, said the class has broadened her horizons. She hopes the class can help more parents looking to get more involved with the community and assimilate.

“I’ve been here 18 years, and it’s never too late to learn,” she said. “I know English, but this has helped with my pronunciation and confidence a lot. I am grateful.”

Welcoming migrant students is more than a generational challenge. It’s a moral obligation.

2024-04-05T16:00:00+00:00

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There’s no denying the challenges that the influx of newcomer students presents. There are testing requirements, transportation needs, and requisite Spanish-language academic and mental health supports, to name a few. As a child of immigrant parents and the leader of Colorado’s largest school district, I am confident that Denver Public Schools is meeting the moment.

Denver has the highest intake of new-to-country students per capita among all large U.S. cities not situated along the southern border. Since July 2023, Denver Public Schools has welcomed more than 3,500 migrant students.

Dr. Alex Marrero

In the past few months, I’ve walked the halls of more than 100 Denver schools and met with many of our new-to-country students, their families, and the educators dedicated to serving them. I’ve seen fear and sadness in these students’ eyes transform into sparkle and joy. I’ve watched thousands of teachers and school employees level up supports and services — hosting winter clothing drives and information sessions about the American school system. In the process, our leaders have grown, and our district has been enriched.

My own upbringing, as the child of a Cuban refugee and a Dominican immigrant, offered profound lessons in how public schools can help newcomer families thrive. Decades on, I’m proud to lead Denver Public Schools’ work to support our new-to-country scholars.

Amid teacher shortages in the area, Denver Public Schools created an International Educator Institute to recruit highly qualified international candidates who can fill critical vacancies, including for multilingual educators. To date, we’ve successfully hired 98% of budgeted teaching positions, with a focus on diverse candidates to meet our students’ varied needs.

The district’s six community hubs have been key to supporting the newcomer families as they build their lives in Denver. Launched in 2022, these hubs offer help with everything from food assistance to medical services to workforce training. While they are costly to maintain, they help ensure our students have what they need to thrive. The district is also committed to providing reliable transportation, nutritious meals, mental health support, and access to technology.

The district’s six community hubs have been key to supporting the newcomer families as they build their lives in Denver.

Recognizing this as a statewide and nationwide challenge, we are grateful for all of the school districts and leaders advocating for state and federal funding support. These efforts underscore the importance of unity and shared responsibility in addressing the educational needs of our newest community members. It is more than a responsibility; it is our moral obligation as educators.

I want to assure Denver’s new-to-country families that despite the circumstances that brought them here, every child who walks through our doors will have access to the highest-quality education. While accommodating an influx of newcomer students has presented challenges in staffing, services, and a budget impact that now totals in the tens of millions of dollars, it has also proved our resolve to uphold our mission of educational equity and inclusivity for all learners.

As long as I am Superintendent, Denver Public Schools will continue to champion this cause and uplift every child. We are committed to honoring the legacy of those who have paved the way for equity and justice, positioning our schools as drivers of opportunity and advancement for all.

Dr. Alex Marrero is the Superintendent of Denver Public Schools.

Think tank with ties to Trump lays out plan to deny free education to undocumented students

2024-04-09T19:33:42+00:00

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An influential conservative think tank has laid out a strategy to challenge a landmark Supreme Court decision that protects the right of undocumented children to attend public school.

The Heritage Foundation, which is spending tens of millions of dollars to craft a policy playbook for a second Trump presidential term, recently released a brief calling on states to require public schools to charge unaccompanied migrant children and children with undocumented parents tuition to enroll.

Such a move “would draw a lawsuit from the Left,” the brief states, “which would likely lead the Supreme Court to reconsider its ill-considered Plyler v. Doe decision” — referring to the 1982 ruling that held it was unconstitutional to deny children a public education based on their immigration status.

Plyler has survived challenges for more than 40 years. But some legal experts and advocates for immigrant children say the newest proposal to undermine it should be taken seriously, given Trump’s extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric, a steady drumbeat of headlines about the “migrant crisis,” and the conservative-led Supreme Court’s recent willingness to overturn established legal precedent.

“The politics right now of illegal immigration and the picture that conservatives, and even some liberals, have painted of stressing the resources of states and localities, I think that that’s a huge factor,” said Brett Geier, a professor at Western Michigan University who wrote a book about K-12 schools and the Supreme Court. “I do think that this court has the chutzpah to say: We’re going to take it on and overturn it.”

But others say the real intent is to rile up voters in an election year, and that Plyler v. Doe isn’t truly at risk.

“Every time there’s an election, all of a sudden immigration becomes a big problem, and [we hear]: ‘We have to do something about these immigrants, and get rid of them, and not pay for their schooling,’” said Patricia Gándara, a research professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education who’s written extensively about how immigration enforcement affects children and schools. “Then after the election is over, it dies away.”

Charging school tuition in Texas led to Plyler ruling

A growing share of Americans, and Republicans in particular, say immigration policy is a top concern right now. And immigration issues are getting a lot of attention in this year’s presidential race.

Trump has campaigned on a series of hardline, restrictive immigration policies, including the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and the end of refugee resettlement. He’s also falsely claimed that migrant children have displaced other kids in New York City’s public schools.

The focus on immigration comes as the country is seeing a significant increase in migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. Federal officials counted nearly 2.5 million people who reached the southern border last year. That was a 43% increase from two years earlier, though not all were admitted. A rising share are families with children.

More than three-quarters of Americans view what’s happening at the border as a major problem or a crisis, a recent poll by the Pew Research Center found. Just under a quarter of U.S. adults said they were concerned that the rise in migrants would be an economic burden on the country.

The Heritage Foundation taps into those concerns with its recent brief, titled “The Consequences of Unchecked Illegal Immigration on America’s Public Schools.” In it, the organization criticizes President Biden’s approach to immigration policy, saying it’s led to “large influxes of non-English-speaking children” enrolling in public schools.

The document cites examples of Texas schools holding lessons in hallways, and a Brooklyn high school that had students learn virtually for a day after the school housed migrant families overnight during a rainstorm.

In response, the Heritage Foundation is calling on states to prohibit schools from housing undocumented immigrants and to require schools to collect student enrollment data by immigration status “so that accurate cost analyses can be done.” States should require school districts to charge undocumented children tuition to attend public school, the brief states.

It was this exact practice nearly half a century ago — in the same state that’s defying the federal government by handling its own immigration enforcement — that led to the Plyler v. Doe ruling.

Texas passed a law in 1975 saying that public schools would not receive state funding for the education of undocumented children and that districts could bar these students from attending public school for free.

Two years later, the Tyler Independent School District started charging undocumented children $1,000 a year to attend school — a sum district officials knew would be unaffordable for the area’s immigrant families, who often worked in Tyler’s famous rose industry, along with meat-packing plants and farms.

Twenty-one years after the Supreme Court's Plyler v. Doe ruling, the Tyler Independent School District in Texas offered a Spanish-English dual language program for kindergartners and first graders.

“I don’t think any family could have paid that,” James Plyler, the district’s superintendent, told an Education Week reporter in 2007. “One thousand dollars back in 1977 was lots and lots of money, and most of those families who came in were working for minimum wage.”

Four families whose children were blocked from attending school sued Plyler and the school district, and eventually won at the Supreme Court. In the 5-4 opinion for the majority, Justice William Brennan wrote that denying undocumented children the ability to learn how to read and write would take an “inestimable toll” on their “social, economic, intellectual, and psychological well-being.” (The dissenting justices agreed it was wrong to deny undocumented kids an education, but argued it wasn’t a constitutional violation.)

Now, the Heritage Foundation says those education costs have grown too high, and states and schools should be able to recoup them. The federal government could help, said Madison Marino, a senior research associate who co-authored the Heritage Foundation brief, or parents or sponsors of undocumented students could pay.

“We really aren’t looking to deprive these kids of their education,” Marino said. “We’re calling for everyone to contribute.”

Most undocumented families today would likely struggle to pay school tuition, as they did in 1977. And federal aid seems unlikely. Congress is bitterly divided over how to fund immigration policy and whether schools need more funding in the wake of the pandemic, and the U.S. Department of Education has historically devoted a tiny fraction of its budget to educating English learners and immigrant students.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment about the Heritage Foundation’s proposals to challenge Plyler, but observers widely believe the think tank would play a crucial role in a second Trump administration. Elsewhere, the campaign has said that external groups do not speak for Trump or his campaign, and that policy recommendations are just that.

Migrants bused to cities spur calls for federal help

Who bears the financial responsibility for educating undocumented children has been a heated topic of debate, especially over the last two years.

In May 2022, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he wanted to challenge Plyler v. Doe “because the expenses are extraordinary and the times are different” than in 1982. He called on the federal government to cover the educational costs for undocumented students.

Since then, Abbott has bused more than 75,000 migrants to six cities led by Democrats that have certain “sanctuary” policies protecting immigrants.

Newcomer students can bring many assets, from linguistic diversity to knowledge about life elsewhere in the world, educators say, and some schools have successfully adapted to meet newcomers’ needs.

But many schools have struggled to do so. Newcomer students often do not speak English and sometimes have missed months or even years of schooling. Many experienced trauma on their journey to the U.S. or in their home country that can affect their schooling. Schools often lack bilingual teachers and mental health staff to help. And when lots of students arrive in the middle of the year, state funding doesn’t always follow right away, leaving schools to make do with the resources they have.

Many educators and local officials have called on their states and the federal government to provide additional funding to help — with limited success. Extra money for migrant students was left out of the Illinois governor’s budget proposal, and extra funding allotted in Colorado breaks down to less than half of what the state would typically spend per student.

Plyler challenge could hinge on cost questions

Challenging Plyler would be difficult, said Thomas A. Saenz, the president and general counsel at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represented the families in the original Plyler case. The ruling is now tied up with other federal law, as well as privacy protections for K-12 students.

“It’s not like: ‘Oh, let’s just tee up Plyler, and pass a law, and immediately this more conservative Supreme Court will overturn the ‘82 decision,’” he said. “That analysis is way too facile.”

But there are ways Plyler could be vulnerable, said Amanda Warner, a doctoral candidate at George Mason University who analyzed past challenges to the ruling. The current Supreme Court has favored states’ rights and an originalist reading of the constitution. And in 1973, the Supreme Court held that there is no constitutional right to an education.

That is a “glaring hole” that could be exploited, Warner said.

Another avenue to challenge the ruling could center on educational conditions and costs, and whether those have changed enough to warrant denying undocumented children a free public education.

Back in 1982, Texas argued it needed to do that to preserve resources for educating its “lawful residents.” But the Supreme Court rejected that argument. Brennan wrote that undocumented students did not impose “special burdens” on Texas’ education system, and that excluding them from school would be unlikely to improve the overall quality of education.

The Heritage Foundation brief says that unauthorized immigration, particularly among children arriving without their parents, has reached a point where a “reconsideration is warranted.”

The original ruling seems to imply “there is a bar” for a state to show that educating undocumented students is too much of a financial burden, Warner said. But it wouldn’t be enough to simply show the cost of education is higher.

Any money saved by excluding undocumented children from school would have to be weighed against the ripple effects on housing, social services, and the criminal justice system. “Costs can be borne in a lot of ways,” Warner said. “What are the costs of having all these uneducated persons in the United States?”

Whether a serious challenge will emerge remains to be seen. Marino said no state official has reached out about making the Heritage Foundation’s proposal a reality.

After Abbott raised the possibility of challenging Plyler two years ago, a Texas lawmaker introduced a bill that would have denied undocumented students a free public education, unless the federal government paid for it. But unlike in 1975, the proposal didn’t go anywhere.

Nicholas Espíritu, the deputy legal director for the National Immigration Law Center, said if such a proposal couldn’t advance in Texas, that should deter other states from trying.

“It’s our hope that even though there might be some rumblings from the Heritage Foundation and states like Texas,” he said, “that eventually politicians will come to the same conclusion and realize that this is not a position that is ultimately supported.”

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

More than academics: Aurora’s community schools are an example as interest in the model grows

2024-04-23T23:45:27+00:00

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When Bishnu Rai’s children started school at Aurora’s Crawford Elementary five years ago, she initially felt lost. She wasn’t very social and she struggled to help her children, she says.

But thanks to Crawford’s community school model, she’s been getting more involved, learning English, and now feels confident enough she’s helping come up with a plan for empowering other immigrant parents.

Crawford Elementary is one of six schools in Aurora that are using the community schools model. Five of them are part of the ACTION Zone, a group of schools near Denver’s border that have high levels of poverty and large numbers of language learners. The district grouped the schools years ago as part of a plan to better support the schools with similar needs.

At Crawford, some of the work has gone on for almost 10 years, but evolved as the zone schools committed to a “community schools” model in the past five years. The approach focuses on using community partners to address whole family needs, with the end goal of ensuring that children have fewer social and emotional barriers to learning.

In Colorado, nonprofit organizations and the state education department are increasing their focus on how they support schools that want to use the community schools model. Some of these leaders say they see an untapped potential for improving communities.

At Crawford, 97% of the school’s 540 students qualify for subsidized meals, a measure of poverty, and students come from 40 different countries speaking about 25 different languages.

Through the community schools model, Crawford works with organizations to test students’ eyesight at school, helps parents learn how they can continue lessons at home, and brings families together to share about their various cultures. Rai also has taken advantage of English classes, health classes, and parent leadership classes.

Parents are involved in big school decisions. For instance, parents helped pick this year’s new principal by participating in interviews and hosting a forum where parents could ask questions of the applicants and fill out scorecards.

“If we empower our parents, this helps our kids,” Rai said. “They teach me how to raise my voice, how to speak up.”

At Crawford Elementary, students come from 40 different countries and speak about 25 different languages. The school celebrates its diversity.

Supporting the model takes resources

Colorado Department of Education officials recently visited Crawford and Boston K-8, two of Aurora’s zone schools, as part of the state’s work to better understand how the community schools model is implemented and what resources can be shared with other schools looking to try the same model.

State lawmakers in 2022 added adopting the model to the menu of improvement options for schools on the state’s watchlist for low performance. The state education department had some support for the model spread across various departments but now is creating a team focused just on supporting the community schools model.

“We’re happy to connect schools with resources,” said Dana Scott, director of the office of student supports for the state Department of Education. “We want to be a place where we can really create some good connections for them so schools don’t have to start from scratch.”

The state doesn’t track how many districts are using the model, but nationwide, some experts believe the model has had growing interest, and more so since the start of the pandemic. Even as schools shut down, they served as hubs for various help to families in the community, providing meals, internet, COVID tests, shots, and more.

Katie Wilberding Cross, senior director for youth initiatives and education for Mile High United Way, helps lead a coalition of organizations that want to support community schools. The coalition just started meeting in the fall.

She says the idea behind community schools is that students have needs that can be a barrier to learning, but schools should not be expected to be everything for everybody.

“There are partners that provide these different needs,” Wilberding Cross said. “United Ways are uniquely positioned to convene folks, to bring these various organizations and sectors together.”

She said part of the work is getting more districts to learn about the model. It’s hard to say how much interest is in Colorado.

“What I keep hearing is there’s a lot of percolating interest, but it’s something that hasn’t been fully tapped into,” Wilberding Cross said.

In the metro area, Adams 14 has had national support in trying to start using the model at Central Elementary, one of the district’s lowest-performing schools, which is under a state-ordered improvement plan of its own. The hope is that the model will eventually help improve student achievement.

The Harrison school district of Colorado Springs also uses the model at one of its schools, and Pueblo 60 uses it at two of its schools.

Chicago Mayor visits high school to advocate for more Sustainable Community Schools

Many more schools are likely doing much of the same work community schools focus on, such as starting a food pantry for families, or partnering with community organizations to provide another service for students or families, but they don’t have the community schools label or a plan with the intentionality that the model would provide.

Having a community schools coordinator on staff ensures that the partnerships belong to the schools and not an individual teacher or principal who might leave, that those partnerships are responsive to the needs in the community, and that they are providing something for the families. With those elements in place,the work is more likely to be successful and to continue beyond just a year or two, experts said.

Schools trying to use the community schools approach generally hire a community schools coordinator. At Crawford, Maggie Lautzenheiser-Page, the community schools coordinator, helps plan and run the various programs offered for that school’s needs, which are different than the programs offered at the next school using the model.

Family liaisons at Crawford speak multiple languages and meet with parents regularly.

“Then it’s not burdening or putting more weight on educators,” said Christa Rowland, Western regional deputy director for the Coalition for Community Schools from the Institute for Educational Leadership, a national nonprofit group based in Washington D.C. “Rather it should lift it.”

The community school coordinator is key, leaders agree. The person should have some decision-making authority at the school level to help drive the work, Wilberding Cross said. There should be district buy-in. And the plans need to be designed with the community, evaluating needs and existing assets, experts said.

If schools are following Colorado’s definition of community schools as laid out in Colorado statute, then they have to assess the community’s needs every year.

Hiring that community school coordinator to implement this model does require an investment. Experts say research has shown the investment can pay off with more resources coming to the school, and improved measures of attendance, parent engagement, and eventually, other student outcomes.

Aurora has made some of that investment. The community school coordinators, one at each of the zone schools, are district-funded. The district is working to find permanent funding for some of the other positions, including community health coordinators and family liaisons for special populations that speak different languages.

The model has helped improve family and community engagement and enabled parents such as Rai to feel empowered to help their children’s learning. But, based on state ratings, the schools in the zone haven’t seen much improvement in students’ academic achievement. Aurora Central High School, the district’s longest-struggling school is part of the zone and has continued to have low state ratings.

Leaders celebrate other measures of community school success

Crawford Principal Aubri Dunkin, who is new this year, said most school leaders want their schools to be hubs for the community.

“But this truly is a hub,” Dunkin said, noting that the community school model allows the school to support parents and help them navigate potential barriers so students come to school more regularly and “ready to learn.”

In Aurora, the district's six community schools have two food clinics where families can access free food and other help. A Crawford parent is one of the coordinators who helps set parents up with the help.

At Crawford, 50 parents, including Rai, regularly attend leadership meetings. The zone’s two food clinics, which provide food and connect parents to other resources, host regular events to give out local food. Last school year, they served more than 4,700 individuals in the events. Within the district, leaders say students whose families are engaged are showing better outcomes than those who aren’t.

And across the zone, “definitely more than half of our families are attending and participating in events on a regular basis,” said Elizabeth Lewis, the district’s community schools impact manager.

At Crawford, which recently received a large number of new migrant students, parent leaders want to pass on what they’ve learned to help the new migrant parents be involved for their children, Rai said.

She’s also hoping to raise another issue beyond her school: pedestrian safety. She said families who walk to the school want a new stop sign at one of the busy intersections. Parents years ago successfully lobbied the city to install one outside the school, but now there’s a need for another, she said.

Experts say it’s that kind of drive by parents that really creates sustainability, and a model that is responsive to the evolving needs of the community.

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Public Schools estimates between 9,000 and 17,000 migrant students are enrolled, depending on who is counted

2024-04-18T00:03:39+00:00

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How many migrant students are enrolled in Chicago Public Schools? The exact number is hard to pin down.

The district says about 8,900 migrant students are currently attending local schools, according to CPS data. But that number climbs to more than 17,000 when using the Illinois State Board of Education’s definition for students eligible for the Immigrant Education Program — students born outside the U.S. who started attending school in this country in the past three years are categorized in this group.

An accurate picture of how many immigrant students are arriving and enrolling in local public schools is becoming more important as schools work to support newcomers from Latin America, as well as other countries around the world. A proposal in the Illinois legislature would provide money to districts faster to help new students.

But the size of the enrollment increase — and the existing resources — depends on which agency is counting students. In response to an information request from Chalkbeat for migrant student enrollment numbers, Chicago Public Schools and the Illinois State Board of Education produced different numbers, based on different definitions and methods of categorizing newly arrived students:

Chicago Public Schools says the district is currently serving 8,900 students who arrived since August 2022, including those who passed through the southern border and were bused to Chicago from Texas. The district uses five criteria to identify this cohort: students who speak languages other than English at home, have been identified as students in temporary living situations, are new to the district arriving after August 2022, were born outside of the country, or are listed on the city’s Department of Family and Support Services shelter roster.
The Illinois State Board of Education, on the other hand, says any student not born in the U.S. or Puerto Rico who has been attending school in this country for less than three years is eligible for the Immigrant Education Program. Chicago estimates roughly 17,000 students fit this definition. Chicago just started to collect this data in November 2023 and school staff are collecting the birth country and enrollment date of students.

Between 2019 and November 2023, Chicago Public Schools officials said, the district stopped gathering information on students’ birth country and the date of first enrollment in the U.S. in response to threats against immigrants and their citizenship status and as part of the implementation of sanctuary provision in the collective bargaining agreement with the Chicago Teachers Union. However, the district resumed the practice after being pushed by the state board of education.

In addition, the numbers continue to fluctuate. Last month, CPS CEO Pedro Martinez told reporters that the district has welcomed more than 6,000 new arrival students into schools this year.

Chicago Public Schools also estimates that its population of English learners – students whose first language is not English and are in need of bilingual programs and support – has increased by 12,000 students, jumping from 76,000 to 88,000 over the last year students as of April 12. English learners may include students born in the U.S.

A Chalkbeat analysis in February found that the number of English language learners in CPS grew since the end of September, with an additional 7,000 English learners enrolled in schools around the district.

Even as state and local school districts have different definitions on how to categorize students who recently immigrated to the United States, lawmakers, advocates, educators, and the Chicago Teachers Union continue to raise concerns that there are not enough bilingual staff and resources available to support students.

State Rep. Fred Crespo, a Democrat representing suburbs northwest of Chicago, has filed a pair of bills — House Bill 2822 and House Bill 3991 — that would allow the Illinois State Board of Education to create a New Arrivals Grant program to distribute funding to school districts who need more support for new arrival students.

When Crespo first filed the bill last year, he asked the general assembly to approve $35 million. Now, he is asking for $188 million because the number of students has increased.

In February, Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s proposed budget did not include money for newcomers requested by the Illinois State Board of Education. A spokesperson for Pritzker’s office previously told Chalkbeat that schools can access federal funding through the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act and the governor’s proposed $350 million increase for K-12 schools will help.

Local education advocates say families who have migrated from Latin America countries are transient, often moving from community to community as they look for a home to settle in. As students continue to transfer between districts, advocates say the state’s evidence-based funding formula is unable to capture the growing need of schools.

The state distributes resources to districts based on enrollment and adds additional funding based on the number of low-income students, English language learners, and students with disabilities. The state formula looks at enrollment from two points in time during the school year. With families moving between communities, the number may not capture the number of immigrant students a district has served.

Bridget Peach, executive director of Ed-Red — an organization that advocates for suburban school districts — and a supporter of Crespo’s bill, says students migrating from the southern border often leave school districts quickly.

“At the beginning of the year, the enrollment snapshot is taken,” Peach said. “Some of those students are leaving the next week, some are staying until the end of the school year, but they aren’t re-enrolling in the district.”

State lawmakers are debating whether to include Crespo’s New Arrivals Grant program in the budget. They must pass a budget at the end of the legislative session, which is scheduled for the end of May.

In need of more bilingual teachers, Denver looks to recruit and support international candidates

2024-05-06T17:06:32+00:00

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When Denver Superintendent Alex Marrero was invited to a panel by the government of the Dominican Republic last year to showcase the school district’s approach to bilingual education, he said dozens of teachers there asked him how they could work for him.

Marrero said he came back to Denver excited that he may have helped recruit 30 new teachers to fill bilingual teaching vacancies. But despite their enthusiasm, only a handful of those teachers are now working in Denver Public Schools, he said.

Marrero asked the district’s human resources team to look into why. Many teachers said they felt making the switch was a big risk and they didn’t have enough support, Marrero said.

So this school year, Denver Public Schools launched the International Educators Institute to provide not only professional, but also personal support to new international teachers. The institute will help teachers from other countries figure out where to live, understand finances and credit, and provide other social or emotional support. It will also train teachers to help them earn more credentials and to understand how Denver’s school system works.

Denver Public Schools has enrolled thousands of new students who have recently immigrated from South America. Although the International Educators Institute wasn’t created because of that influx of students, it makes the work more important, Marrero said. In addition, the district is under a court order guiding how it teaches students who aren’t yet fluent in English. Meeting that order requires a large number of bilingual teachers, but there are always vacancies.

Marrero said the work of the institute is to help fill teacher vacancies without replacing existing efforts to fill those jobs.

Denver Public Schools serves 88,200 students, 75% of whom are students of color. But among the more than 6,000 teachers, just about a third are teachers of color. If the institute is successful, he envisions a system where students have more teachers of color, and teachers can expand their careers and better their lives.

If they have to go back to their home countries, they can better help more children around the world too, he said.

“That’s what hasn’t existed ever,” Marrero said of the institute. “Just like we say we have to educate the whole student, it’s the same approach. The parallel is that we have to support the whole educator.”

To get the institute started, Marrero said DPS used $500,000 from federal COVID relief money. But the district will also invest at least $1 million from its general fund.

“We would waste way more in guest teachers, substitute coverage throughout the year, so the way I see it, that’s an investment,” Marrero said.

International teachers struggle without support

Maria Moncada Rodriguez, an international teacher from Honduras, has been in Colorado for four years, but is working in Denver schools for the first time this school year.

She said she has loved the support from her colleagues and from the institute and wished she had more of it when she initially arrived in the U.S. to work in a different school district.

Moncada Rodriguez and her husband were teachers in Honduras who ran a Montessori school for more than 20 years. But as violence in the country increased, she sought a way out. Then she won a contest that allowed her the opportunity to come teach in Colorado.

She and her husband were both supposed to get jobs, and her two children would be able to come along. But at the last minute, a new principal took over the Colorado school where she was supposed to teach and rescinded her husband’s job offer.

Maria Moncada Rodriguez, a teacher from Honduras now teaching in Denver Public Schools, in her classroom.

While her family still joined her in Colorado, it took her husband more than a year and a half to get a work permit. And during that time, Moncada Rodriguez said the family struggled financially with just her income.

“We cried almost every day,” she recalled. But she said she and her husband still gave thanks that their children were in a safe home.

But now that she’s working in Denver Public Schools, she’s been able to connect to other international teachers from various countries, through the institute, and also through the teachers union.

Recently, she said she and the other international teachers she’s met decided to start a guide for newly arrived teachers. Ideally, she said it would include information on clothing drives, financial literacy classes, help with buying a home, immigration lawyers, and more.

“We need all types of information,” she said.

It’s the same kind of help the district’s institute wants to provide.

Denver’s goal: 120 new international teachers next year

As the district has rolled out the supports and launched the institute this year, it’s also hired 64 new visa sponsored teachers for the current school year. That’s brought the total of international teachers with work visas in DPS to 234. For next school year, the district’s goal is to hire 120 new international teachers.

The district plans to use some of the institute’s $1.5 million budget on visits to other countries to help recruit and connect with teachers, but also to help staff to spend time finding resources and helping new teachers.

Finding affordable housing for teachers is a particularly important issue, but Marrero said he’s not interested in being a landlord or managing property.

“There is a healthy way to engage, but there’s also a lot to be said when you have a little bit of separation,” Marrero said. Teachers, he said, “don’t want to be under the DPS thumb.”

Still, the district is exploring relationships with developers, landlords, and city officials. This year, for example, the district was able to negotiate a lower price on a long-term lease for some teachers from the Dominican Republic.

“That’s going to be us leveraging our existing relationships and leveraging also our position,” Marrero said. “Even if it’s just a building. Saying: ‘Can we have X amount of units that we have first dibs on?’ That’s what I’m looking to explore.”

Moncada Rodriguez continues to look for resources on her own. One issue she hasn’t figured out is how to help her oldest child, who’s graduating this year, pay for college. Since her children are her dependents and she is on a sponsored visa, they can’t get work permits, and they don’t qualify for any of the financial assistance for higher education she’s learned about so far.

“Of course we aren’t asking for everything to come easy or handed to us,” Moncada Rodriguez said. “We love to work and study. But coming here and knowing our kids can’t go to university because of a lack of resources is overwhelming.”

Still, she wants other teachers considering coming to the United States to know that things can get better if they can persist. And she hopes local leaders can learn to be more supportive too.

At her school, Academia Ana Marie Sandoval, she loves that she gets to use her experience as a Montessori teacher working with students from low-income families, and that she’s valued for her Spanish language skills.

She said her fellow teachers have been helpful and supportive, and her connection to the institute means there’s always someone to answer her questions.

Moncada Rodriguez said she’s taken many Denver Public Schools training courses, including one that’s taught her how to do home visits with families of newly arriving migrant students.

“Now the only thing missing is how to get a masters degree,” she said. “I’m working on that next.”

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Colorado approved $24 million for migrant students. Here’s how much each school district will get.

2024-05-03T21:44:21+00:00

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A surge of one-time money will reach 85 Colorado school districts — almost half of all districts in the state — this month to help offset costs of an unprecedented number of new students arriving midyear, mainly from South America.

Between October and Feb. 29, Colorado school districts received 8,085 newcomer students spread throughout the state, according to data submitted by the districts to the state.

Colorado lawmakers last month approved the use of $24 million in state funding to help school districts experiencing an influx of new migrant students this year. Colorado funds schools based on enrollment counts from October. Every year there are some students who leave or enroll in schools after October, and the district’s funding doesn’t get adjusted.

But this school year, district leaders, especially in large districts such as Denver and Aurora, said the number of new students they were receiving after October was much larger than in typical years.

To be eligible for the money, districts had to submit their request, along with a record of their enrollment counts, to the Colorado Department of Education. The department used a formula approved by state lawmakers to figure out how much each district will receive. Nine districts that applied were not eligible for any of the money.

Search for your district’s allocation, net enrollment change, and total new arrivals in the following table:

Districts got money in two ways. First, there was a tiered system that gave certain set amounts of money to districts based on how many new arrivals they’ve enrolled between October and Feb. 29. Then, districts could also qualify for additional money, on a per student basis — if those new arrivals resulted in net increases in district enrollment.

Of the 85 districts getting money, 39 qualified for per-student dollars: $4,672.03 for each student, which is less than districts got for students enrolled in October.

In other cases, districts received many new arrivals, but because of overall declining enrollment, their total student count by February was still lower than it was in October.

The Adams 12 school district, for example, enrolled 374 new arrivals, but because of overall enrollment declines, their total enrollment is down 58 students compared to October. That meant Adams 12 qualified for $550,000 from the tiered system, but did not receive any per-student amount in addition to that.

Districts will receive their funding allocations this month, though for most, it will serve to reimburse them for money they’ve already spent on hiring extra staff earlier this year.

School district leaders talked about having to add new classrooms in some schools, requiring more teachers and other support staff.

The Westminster school district is planning to offer some summer programming for newly arrived students. In the Harrison school district in Colorado Springs, a “newcomer committee” is developing a “toolkit for teachers to use.”

“Even though they are just one-time funds, every little bit helps us provide our newcomer students with the support, resources, and instruction they need,” Rachel Laufer, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning for the Harrison district, said in an email about the funding.

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

They thought graduation was near. Instead, several immigrant students were pressured to transfer.

2024-05-20T14:33:24+00:00

Genesis Callero thought she was nearing the finish line.

The 18-year-old senior had made quick academic progress since arriving at the Cyberarts Studio Academy in Park Slope, Brooklyn — CASA, for short — from Ecuador last year knowing no English. She had passed four of her five required Regents exams and earned more than enough credits to graduate, according to Genesis and a school staffer familiar with her transcript.

All that remained was the English Language Arts Regents exam, the only Regents test newly arrived immigrants aren’t eligible to take in their home language. Students learning English as a new language often need extra time and support to pass, according to educators. Still, Genesis was optimistic that she would get her diploma this school year and had even taken a professional graduation portrait.

High school graduation photos of Genesis and Karen Callero.

So the teen was blindsided when school officials, including principal Valrie Wauchope, summoned her to a meeting just over two months ago and delivered devastating news.

Neither Genesis nor her sister Karen, 17 and also a senior, would be able to graduate from CASA, Genesis recalled the school officials saying. They told the girls they would need to transfer and recommended New Dawn Charter High School, a transfer school geared toward older students at risk of not graduating.

“They told me no, they can’t help me in this high school,” Genesis said in Spanish, recalling her meeting with CASA officials. “It seemed to me like something unfair.”

The family felt they had no choice but to transfer. Within days, Genesis and Karen left CASA.

The teens were not alone. According to interviews with the families of six immigrant students from CASA — all seniors who had recently failed the ELA Regents exam, according to families and staffers — Wauchope recently told their children they would not graduate if they remained at CASA and counseled them to transfer immediately.

“If he stays, he won’t graduate,” the mom of another 17-year-old senior at CASA told Chalkbeat in Spanish, recalling what the principal told her. The mom asked to remain anonymous because she fears jeopardizing an active immigration case.

Genesis Callero, 18, on Friday, May 17, 2024, in Brooklyn, New York.

All of the families have since taken their children out of CASA, according to interviews and school records obtained by Chalkbeat.

Wauchope, who is in her first year as principal at CASA, didn’t respond to phone calls or an email seeking comment. Education Department spokesperson Chyann Tull said, “We take allegations of students being pushed out of their school very seriously and investigate all formal complaints when they arise. Every student has the right to remain in their school through graduation and be immersed in a supportive learning environment.” Tull didn’t immediately say whether the department has received complaints about CASA.

Three staffers at the school, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, contend the students would have been able to graduate from CASA with more time. Immigrant students often fail the ELA Regents exam on their first attempt but can pass with extra time and support. Just 27% of city English language learners passed the ELA Regents in 2023, according to state data. Under New York law, students can remain in school through the academic year they start at age 21.

The staffers suspect students were pressured to transfer because if they did not graduate this school year, it would harm the school’s four-year graduation rate — a key performance measure for city principals. CASA’s four-year June graduation rate in 2023 was 75% last year, lower than the 81% citywide average.

Karen Callero, 17, on Friday, May 17, 2024, in Brooklyn, New York.

“They’re our best students. They come to school every single day, pass their other Regents exams,” said one staffer, adding that some students are homeless and haven’t been in the country long. “This is all because they can’t pass their English Regents on time. To push them out … it’s disgraceful.”

The staffers said they worry the situation will continue with future students learning English as a new language.

Annette Renaud, a longtime parent activist and former CASA Parent Association president who remains involved at the school supporting several relatives enrolled there, said she reached out to some of the families of immigrant students after learning about the situation from staff. She’s hoping the students can be reenrolled at CASA.

“I don’t know how many doctors, lawyers, sanitation supervisors, home attendants … we pushed out the door.”

Graduation pressures weigh on administrators

Several school administrators from across New York City told Chalkbeat that high school principals often face intense pressure to improve their four-year graduation rates. That pressure can be particularly acute for schools like CASA that have absorbed large numbers of newly arrived immigrant students amid the influx of roughly 36,000 migrant students over the past two school years.

CASA’s population of English Language Learners surged from below 40 in 2018 to nearly 100 out of its 300 students last year, according to city data. English Language Learners often take longer to graduate and finish high school at lower rates than their peers.

For English Language Learners who began high school in 2017, roughly 56% graduated in four years, jumping to 67% in six years.

That’s compared to 80% of all students in the 2017 cohort who graduated within four years and 87% within six years.

In recent years, “schools that have never really seen a high population of immigrant students were suddenly seeing these populations, and there were some growing pains there,” said Liza Schwartzwald, Director of Economic Justice and Family Empowerment at the New York Immigration Coalition, an advocacy organization.

But she stressed that “it is still incumbent on the school” to seek out some of the many resources available to better support newcomer students.

The allegations at CASA represent an “egregious example of the wrong way to go about doing this work,” she said.

The facade of John Jay High School campus in Park Slope, the building that houses Cyberarts Studio Academy.

Schools have alternatives to help immigrant students

To be sure, some older teenagers still learning English may benefit from a school more specifically tailored toward serving older newcomer students, particularly if they are in danger of aging out of the system and severely behind on credits, educators and advocates said.

But that wasn’t the situation for students counseled to transfer out of CASA, all of whom were 19 or younger, had passed at least some of their other Regents exams, and had accumulated all or close to all the credits they needed to graduate, according to staff and families.

Educators said that the school, which has hired several English as a new language teachers in recent years, was more than capable of shepherding the students to passing the ELA exam. They just needed a little more time.

“We would be able to get them to that passing rate within that time 100%,” said one CASA staffer. “No doubt in my mind.”

Schools have other avenues for supporting immigrant students struggling with the ELA Regents that don’t involve forcing them to transfer, said Rita Rodriguez-Engberg, the Immigrant Students Rights Project Director at Advocates for Children, a nonprofit that works on behalf of vulnerable kids.

They can refer students to extra night classes at Young Adult Borough Centers without un-enrolling them, and there is an appeals process specifically for the ELA Regents test for English Language Learners who fail the exam but score close enough to the cutoff.

“There are several options,” Rodriguez-Engberg said. “You don’t just ask a student to leave.”

Families struggle with fallout of being pushed out

The immigrant students who left CASA had different backgrounds and academic profiles, but all of them were making progress at the school and none wanted to abruptly leave in the spring of their senior year, according to interviews with the students and their families and records reviewed by Chalkbeat.

Sisters Genesis Callero, 18, and Karen Callero, 17, talk to each other while at a park near where they stay on Friday, May 17, 2024, in Brooklyn, New York.

One student, a 17-year-old recent arrival from Venezuela, quickly won admiration from staff and students since enrolling last fall for his gregarious demeanor and inspiring story, according to his family and staffers. The boy’s mom asked not to use his name because the family has an open immigration case.

On his most recent report card, issued around the time he left the school in March, he earned an 85% average and comments from teachers praising his “excellent progress,” “consistent participat[ion]” and “initiative,” according to a copy reviewed by Chalkbeat.

The teen recounted his grueling immigration journey in a student-produced film that played on TVs in the school’s main office and hallways, according to a video reviewed by Chalkbeat.

The family was devastated by the news he couldn’t remain at the school.

The boy’s mom said she asked Wauchope about alternatives that would allow her son to remain at CASA, like enrolling him in night classes for English or taking longer to graduate. Wauchope didn’t budge, and the mom agreed to withdraw her son.

“I felt it was something bad they did to him,” she said. But in the moment, she felt powerless. “Sometimes out of fear, we’re migrants, we don’t say no, we do what they say.”

That didn’t stop the woman from continuing to advocate for her son. She went back for a second meeting with Wauchope, telling the principal she thought the decision was unfair, she said.

She also visited an enrollment center and asked them to reenroll her son at CASA. She was told the school was now full and could not accept any more students, the mom said.

The boy was crushed but told his mom, “If it’s to graduate, it’s okay.”

He has since enrolled at New Dawn, but frequently drops by CASA to say hi to classmates and teachers.

“It hurt me very much because I see him now, he doesn’t want to go to class,” his mom said. “It destabilized him totally. It flipped his world upside down.”

The news landed just as hard for Carolina, a 19-year-old senior from Guatemala. Since arriving at CASA three years ago, she had made significant academic, social, and linguistic strides.

The teen, who asked to use only her middle name for fear of immigration consequences, struggled at first to acclimate to her new school and country.

“But after some time passed, I adapted. I understand and speak English,” she said.

Carolina’s attendance had faltered this year, and she still needed to pass two Regents exams, according to transcript information shared with Chalkbeat. But she was hopeful she would soon graduate and planned to apply to college or join the Army.

When Wauchope told Carolina she wouldn’t be able to graduate from CASA and counseled her to transfer in late February, the teen was crestfallen over the idea of leaving her home of three years.

“I couldn’t adapt to a new school or new people,” she recalled pleading in the meeting.

She and her mother begged for the chance to stay at the school, promising to redouble the teen’s efforts to pass the exam. But Wauchope held firm, according to the family. (One CASA staffer noted the teen is technically still on CASA’s roster, likely because she was never officially unenrolled. But Carolina’s mother said she wasn’t aware of that.)

Despite her misgivings, Carolina eventually decided to give New Dawn a try.

She set out for the school, which is a farther commute than she’s used to, on a Friday morning last month, and arrived after classes had begun, according to the teen and her mom. While Sara Asmussen, New Dawn’s founder and executive director, said the school “accepts students year-round with no intake requirements at all,” Carolina said staff at the school asked her, in English, to come back on Monday.

Carolina never went back. She hasn’t returned to that school, or any other, since.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

The FAFSA woes complicating federal college aid are especially acute for some Detroit students

2024-05-20T17:10:06+00:00

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It was College Decision Day at Martin Luther King Jr. Senior High School, and Perriel Pace was walking through the halls wearing a sparkly shirt with a Michigan State emblem.

Pace had been excited to find the shirt at a church rummage sale. But on that day, it was a “bittersweet” choice of attire.

The Detroit high school senior was accepted to MSU months ago. She wants to become the first person in her family to go to college. But that hinges on federal financial aid. And with just a few months before the college semester begins, she still doesn’t have an answer about that funding.

Pace is among many students in limbo across the country due to the rocky rollout of a new version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. The process this year has been mired in confusion — the revamped form was released at the end of last year and has come with no shortage of technical issues. Some students are still shut out of the system. Others, like Pace, managed to fill out and submit the form — but still, they wait.

In Detroit, these problems have tested the resilience of vulnerable young people already facing barriers to higher education. It is a roadblock that looms large in a city where just 17% of residents hold a college degree.

Pace has had issues finding stable housing and receives support under the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act. She lives with her cousin now. Last year she stayed in a shelter. Despite those challenges, she is highly engaged academically and civically. Pace has participated in student government, performed in school plays, and is involved in a number of youth organizations across the city that advocate for social justice.

She wants to convert that advocacy into a career and either become a lawyer for incarcerated people, or get her doctorate in education and sit on the Michigan State Board of Education.

She feels a sense of responsibility to carve a path into higher education — if she can get the money to go.

“Everybody, all my family, is looking to me. No one ever got the opportunity. And that’s what held them back as well — funding,” Pace said.

Students seeking college aid should ‘not despair’

The situation has had a clear impact on the state’s students who are planning to go to college.

According to recent data, 38% of high school seniors in Michigan have completed the FAFSA, a 21% decrease compared to this time last year.

These delays also have many schools on edge and have led them to rework their own timelines. The Michigan Association of State Universities’ Mia Murphy said that many public universities have moved back enrollment and deposit deadlines to accommodate students and their families.

“We want students and their families to know that they’ve done nothing wrong, that this is unprecedented, and it should never be like this again,” Murphy wrote in an email to Chalkbeat.

At Wayne State University, school staff has been working “around the clock” to help students with lingering FAFSA stress, said Ahmad Ezzedine, vice president for academic student affairs and global engagement.

Last year, 54% of the university’s incoming freshman class attended tuition-free thanks to a university program that utilizes a mix of state and federal aid, Wayne State scholarships, and grants to help students from low-income households attend.

“So we are confident that students will have very generous offers if their tuition is not fully covered based on their family situation,” Ezzedine said.

His message to students mirrored what admissions officers at local institutions of higher education like Michigan State and the University of Michigan-Dearborn told Chalkbeat: “What we want is that students don’t despair and don’t let something like this stop them.”

Still, for many vulnerable students, getting the necessary college aid is just one piece of their higher education puzzle.

College roadblocks persist, but so do Detroit students

The FAFSA rigmarole this year is particularly hard on Detroit students who face additional barriers to college, like finances, family responsibilities, an

d a lack of transportation, said Stacey Brockman, a Wayne State professor of educational leadership and policy who studies the pathways to and through college for Detroit students.

The latter is especially pronounced in a city ruled by automobiles and lacking robust public transportation.

In a forthcoming study looking at transit barriers and costs that students attending Detroit area institutions face, Brockman found that students using public transit to commute to community colleges spent upwards of an hour getting to class.

“Just objectively, that’s a really long commute,” she said.

More than half of students Brockman surveyed who had stopped going to college said finding reliable transportation was a top reason. Another 40% said they struggled to pay for it.

For some students, that problem begins well before they are thinking about college. In a recent survey, parents with children attending Detroit schools reported frequent challenges in accessing a vehicle.

Brockman’s work also highlights that many students don’t give up.

She found that one in five community college students in the Detroit area were still enrolled and making progress towards a degree in their fifth year. Many are working and supporting themselves. Slowly and steadily, they make it through.

Something similar could be said about the level of perseverance necessary to complete the FAFSA this year.

Trying to create a college-going culture

Katey, a senior at Detroit Cristo Rey High School, started filling out the FAFSA form back in January, a few weeks after it became available. (Chalkbeat is only using her first name to protect her privacy.)

She’s on track to be a first-generation college student. Her parents are from Guadalajara, Mexico, and her household is of mixed immigration status. The federal government’s changes to this year’s FAFSA precluded her from completing the form. The revamped iteration asks for a parent’s Social Security number, something her parents do not have.

So Katey filled out a different form to confirm her father’s identity. The system rejected that form too, “but I never gave up,” she said.

Katey attended a FAFSA event through her school where she met Tanya Aho of Urban Neighborhood Initiatives, one of several community organizations helping people carve a path to college.

For months, Aho and Katey met and tinkered with the form and experimented with different strategies. Ultimately they figured out a workaround. Students around the country faced similar issues.

Aho said the glitch Katey experienced affected many students from backgrounds like hers up until the spring. Meanwhile, getting help in Spanish from FAFSA staff has been nearly impossible.

These layers of red tape are sending a message to students, she said.

“My kids are like, ‘You know, it doesn’t feel like they want us to get this money.’ And I really can’t argue … it doesn’t feel like this population has been a priority,” Aho said.

Katey spent difficult hours researching how to even apply for college. But it was the only way to get closer to her childhood dream of becoming a veterinarian. In the fall, Katey will attend Michigan State. It was her pick given the school’s veterinary program.

At Western International High School in Southwest Detroit, where nearly three quarters of students are Hispanic or Latino, there are two bilingual college transition advisers for 400 seniors, Alicia Alvarez and Gina Dossantos. That’s nowhere near enough, Alvarez said.

Many college advisers were eliminated from several Detroit schools last year after the district made budget cuts, including at Martin Luther King Jr. Senior High School, which Perriel Pace attends. At Western, Alvarez turned down a buyout last year but the school was ultimately able to retain her given its high enrollment numbers — more than 1,900 students attend the high school. Dossantos, meanwhile, works at the school through a partnership with the University of Michigan.

Many of the students Alvarez and Dossantos help come from vulnerable households. And they estimate roughly 20% of the students they have been working with are newcomers, often from Central American countries where they and their families escaped violence and death.

“They have to leave everything and come to this country — and then we can’t even help them get into college,” Alvarez said.

The FAFSA debacle has hampered the two advisers’ efforts to nurture a college-going culture at Western, and students are getting discouraged. “They are just like, you know what, maybe this isn’t for me,” Alvarez said.

Still, there are signs these advisers are making a dent. Alvarez is a graduate of Western herself. During her time at the school, there was much less emphasis on going to college, and there were no College Decision Day celebrations. But the contrast between then and now became clearer to her this year, when a Western student got into Harvard.

“It’s nice to see that the school is making progress in that way and to be part of that change” she said. “That feels really good.”

Robyn Vincent is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit, covering Detroit schools and Michigan education policy. You can reach her at rvincent@chalkbeat.org.

What’s going on with Chicago’s Near South Side High School plan?

2024-05-20T17:35:24+00:00

This story was originally published by Block Club Chicago.

A controversial plan for a new Near South Side high school appears to have stalled.

Families on the Near South Side and Chinatown have been asking for a dedicated community high school for years, as many families say students are forced to travel across the city to attend selective-enrollment schools that offer classes and extracurriculars nearby high schools lack.

In 2018, plans to convert National Teacher’s Academy, 55 W. Cermak Road, into a high school were scrapped after outcry from families and NTA staff. Instead, a $150 million school was proposed for the former Harold Ickes Homes site near 24th and State streets on the Near South Side.

That plan was met with criticism from Bronzeville and Chinatown neighbors who opposed building the school on public housing land. It has also drawn accusations of backroom deals and prompted backlash toward Chicago Public Schools, the Chicago Housing Authority, and City Hall leaders.

Now, officials are being quiet about the status of the school, and a website that served as an information hub for the proposed high school has been taken down.

“We’ve been given no update yet, but as far as I know, everything is pretty much still status quo. I’m still committed to making this happen,” Ald. Nicole Lee (11th) told Block Club.

A Board of Education vote to approve a capital budget for the project was originally set for June 2023 but was pulled pending further review, sources said at the time. It’s unclear what the next steps are.

In a statement, a CPS spokesperson said the website was “currently paused,” but more information would eventually be shared.

“The Near South High School proposal is still under review as the District develops long-term strategies and objectives through work on the CPS Educational Facilities Master Plan and Five-Year Strategic Plan,” district officials said in a statement.

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office did not respond to requests for comment. During his campaign, Johnson pledged to enforce a moratorium on building anything on public housing land, but it is unclear whether he supports the school proposal.

A month after the stalled school board vote, Johnson replaced all but one board member and named Jianan Shi school board president. Shi, previously with parent advocacy group Raise Your Hand, was part of a coalition of residents calling for the high school to be built elsewhere.

The proposed site for a new CPS high school is a vacant lot at 24th and State Streets, where the former Harold L. Ickes Homes sat.

The story so far

Near South Side neighbors and elected officials have long fought for a community high school in the area, saying the lack of options for the growing population has forced students to travel up to two hours to other neighborhoods.

But many of those proponents have pushed CPS to consider other sites for the school. They suggested The 78 megadevelopment, or a plot between 17th and 18th and Canal and Stewart Avenues. They also suggested repurposing Jones College Prep into a neighborhood school.

The Illinois Answers Project reported last year that CHA, CPS, and city officials had homed in on the Harold Ickes Homes site by July 2021, maintaining to the public there were no other viable locations for the school.

School board members narrowly voted in September 2022 to buy the land at 23rd Street and Wabash Avenue for $10.3 million for the school. They also approved a land swap deal with the CHA: The district would lease land at 24th and State for the high school, and the housing agency would get the deed for the Wabash land to complete the Southbridge residential development, allowing some of the families displaced by the demolition of the Ickes Homes to return.

The school would accommodate 1,200 students from the community, 30% of them Black. It would be a feeder school for nine surrounding elementary schools: Armour, National Teachers Academy, Drake, Healy, Ward J, Holden, Smyth, Haines, and South Loop.

An ad hoc committee consisting of parents, community leaders, and district staff was formed in November 2022 to guide CPS families through the process. The following month, the City Council approved $8 million in tax-increment financing dollars to buy some of the land involved in the swap. The ad hoc committee launched a series of virtual meetings in January 2023 to get community input and was to meet twice a month ahead of the scheduled board vote.

People Matter co-founder Angela Lin talks ahead of a 2022 protest opposing the controversial proposal to build a new $150 million high school on Chicago's Near South Side.

Following the land swap, Rep. Theresa Mah vowed to withdraw the $50 million in state funding she helped secure because of the city’s refusal to compromise with neighbors who wanted to explore alternate sites.

Mah told Block Club earlier this month she hasn’t had a chance to speak with Johnson’s administration on the issue, but she remains firm on finding a compromise that doesn’t involve using public housing land.

“I want to revisit it, and I still believe we should consider another site because it doesn’t make sense to stick with a site so many are opposed to,” Mah said. The funding for the school will be reappropriated in the meantime, she said.

Other opponents were concerned about the siphoning of resources from other nearby high schools, including Wendell Phillips and Dunbar Vocational Academy — two predominantly Black schools that have suffered budget cuts in recent years.

Organizers from the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization, Lugenia Burns Hope Center, People Matter, and the Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community held a series of City Hall protests and town halls after the land swap agreement, some of them calling on former Mayor Lori Lightfoot to do away with the plan altogether.

“We have not heard any news,” said Grace Chan McKibben, executive director of Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community. “We are in the process of trying to figure out who in CPS we should talk to about this. It is unclear who is leading the planning of the Near South high school, or if anyone is.”

Antisemitism, Israel-Hamas war expose fractures in proudly diverse school district

2024-05-20T12:13:00+00:00

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Residents of Montgomery County are grappling with the frequency and vulgarity of antisemitism in their reputedly welcoming public schools.

Kobie Talmoud has been the target of taunts from fellow students who have said things like “Shut up, you Jewish f---” and “Heil Hitler” since he started public school in seventh grade.

Jewish parents also report uncomfortable interactions, which Mara Greengrass prefers to describe as “misunderstandings.”

Greengrass raised concerns after a teacher handed out an anti-Jewish flier from Nazi Germany with no additional context during a lesson on propaganda. But school leaders didn’t seem to understand how a Jewish student might feel if they came across the flier on the school bus, for example. In fact, they seemed defensive rather than apologetic, Greengrass said.

Montgomery County, Maryland, is a diverse, overwhelmingly Democratic and liberal community bordering Washington, D.C. The Jewish population in the region is four times the national average. The county has many Jewish leaders, including the county executive. Synagogues, Jewish day schools, and kosher groceries dot the area.

Yet even before Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, the school district had been wrestling with a disturbing rise in antisemitic incidents that Jewish residents say is unprecedented. And the latest Israel-Gaza conflict has acted like fuel to a fire, with even some elementary-age children reporting that friends won’t play with them because they are Jewish. The challenges the district faces, and its response to them, reflect the difficulties confronting schools nationwide that have grown since the start of the war.

Kobie Talmoud, an 11th grader in Montgomery County, Maryland, says he tries to respond to antisemitism by educating other students. But some days the taunts get to him.

“I’ve never seen a more disturbing time for American Jews than the time we are living in right now,” said Guila Franklin Siegel, associate director at the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, a local advocacy organization that works with the school district.

Echoing Greengrass’ sentiments, Siegel says the district initially reacted defensively when approached years ago about the rise in antisemitism. However, today Siegel acknowledges that the district has become more proactive in its response to such incidents.

With the district’s support, Siegel’s group and the Anti-Defamation League, another national Jewish advocacy organization, have entered schools and trained about 1,500 county educators on Jewish identity, antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and recognizing and correctly responding to implicit and explicit bias against Jews.

The district has also revised the elementary and middle school social studies curriculums to expose students to the Jewish experience, the Holocaust, and antisemitism earlier. It has introduced clearer reporting processes and disciplinary responses, leading to consequences such as suspensions for students committing antisemitic acts. And this summer, officials say they plan to run hate-bias trainings for all staff.

But in the process of addressing the concerns of Jewish constituents, the school district has drawn criticism from other groups within the community. Teachers who were initially placed on leave by the district for allegedly expressing antisemitism in 2023 have been reinstated. Three of them are suing the district for ethnicity, religion and viewpoint discrimination, claiming they shared pro-Palestinian and pro-peace messages that were not antisemitic.

Even the Jewish community is split. Some Jewish parents are uncomfortable with the district’s approach, calling for a clear distinction between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel, and rejecting any move toward censorship. Meanwhile, other parents say the district’s measures against antisemitism have not adequately protected their children.

And it’s not just parents and teachers confronting school district officials. Earlier this month, alongside school leaders from New York and California, Montgomery County Board of Education President Karla Silvestre faced hours of questioning from congressional Republicans regarding the district’s response to antisemitism. The focus of many questions was on the district’s decision not to fire teachers who made pro-Palestinian statements perceived by some as antisemitic.

After she finished testifying, Silvestre was confronted with more questions from Kobie, who was present during the hearing. He and other Jewish residents from the school district met with lawmakers to share their experiences with antisemitism and to press district officials on safety concerns.

Some Democrats criticized the premise of the hearing, accusing Republican lawmakers of attempting to score political points and overlooking antisemitic actions within their own party.

Still, the hearing concluded with a prevailing sense that district officials have lots of work to do.

Antisemitic hate at school rises in diverse county

Jews make up about 2.4% of the U.S. population, but they make up roughly 10% of Montgomery County. Despite their substantial presence — or perhaps because of it — the number of antisemitic incidents in the community has risen recently.

In 2022 and 2023, before the most recent war, police reports describe several school-related antisemitic incidents. Someone spray-painted the phrase “Jews Not Welcome” onto a sign outside Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland. There were also multiple incidents involving swastikas drawn on school property.

Rabbi Noah Diamondstein speaks to students who walked out of class at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland, in 2022 in response to antisemitic graffiti. Advocates say the school district has made progress in its response to antisemitism but more needs to be done.

Data from the county police department shows that reports of hate incidents for all groups in schools spiked over the last two years, but most of the growth was driven by anti-Jewish and anti-Black incidents. Montgomery County Public Schools experienced a 383% increase in school-based hate incidents from 2021 to 2022. And that only increased again in 2023, with anti-Jewish and anti-Black incidents occurring most frequently.

This trend aligns with recent national data from the FBI showing that antisemitism “drove 63% of reported religiously motivated hate crimes.”

Siegel from the JCRC said the Jewish students her organization is in contact with feel ostracized, exhausted from trying to navigate the war with friends, and fearful for their futures. And she finds herself working with younger and younger students each year.

“Before the last two years, we had not really engaged with elementary school principals and teachers,” Siegel said. “But now we have.”

Student refuses to be his community’s ‘quiet Jew’

Kobie is engaged on his own mission to educate people in the district.

An 11th grader, Kobie describes himself as an “openly Jewish” and Orthodox. With tzitzit visible at his waist, a yarmulke on his head, and his grandfather’s military dog tags identifying him as Jewish always in his pocket, he has chosen to assert his identity in school.

He’s been greeted in the hallways with shouts of “Jew boy” and the Nazi salute. He’s been called a “Jewish f---” so casually it sounds like a mere descriptor to his classmates. He refers to his peers as “kids” who may be brainwashed by TikTok.

“I feel like you don’t know what you’re saying or doing. They just seemed like idiots,” he said, shaking his head like a disappointed father.

He sees himself as a source of information about Jewish culture and identity for his peers. He volunteers to give presentations on the Holocaust in class, with permission from instructors. He says classmates respond with positive curiosity, asking clarifying questions. He hopes these efforts will help reduce the antisemitism he and other Jewish kids experience.

However, he also has days where antisemitism in his high school makes him want to punch a hole in the wall. And the lack of response from teachers is the salt in the wound, leaving him isolated and disappointed.

What’s taken on additional importance since Oct. 7 is that Kobie is a strong supporter of Israel who thinks criticism of the country often stems from antisemitism.

A military dog tag that once belonged to Kobie Talmoud's grandfather and identifies him as Jewish.

He speaks up when he thinks teachers are taking sides in the conflict, including reporting a teacher for wearing a keffiyeh, the checkered scarf is considered a symbol of Palestinian identity and resistance.

Kobie associates it with terrorism.

Kobie said that when he challenged the teacher about wearing the scarf, the teacher said: “‘I am representing peace.” Kobie said he responded: “No, you are not.”

“Why should I be the quiet Jew? … If not for me, who? If not now, when?” he said, paraphrasing Hillel, a Jewish scholar from two millennia ago.

Pro-Palestinian messages spur punishments for teachers

Kobie isn’t the only person in the district who refuses to be quiet.

Montgomery County educators frequently take clear political and social stances — openly supporting movements like Black Lives Matter or LGBTQIA+ rights. And alongside the rise in antisemitism, teachers and students who support the Palestinian cause have become more vocal about their views as the civilian death toll in Gaza rises.

However, the district cracked down on this particular wave of educator activism.

Last year, four teachers were placed on leave, then reinstated and assigned to different schools, after sharing pro-Palestinian messages that some interpreted as antisemitic.

One teacher wore homemade pins and buttons that included slogans like “Free Palestine.” She also updated her email signature to include the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Many Jews interpret this expression as a call for the destruction of Israel and the expulsion or murder of Jews. The teachers said it stands for freedom for all people living in Israel and Palestine, an interpretation shared by many Muslims, according to polling.

“Our teachers did not say anything that was harmful. They did not say anything that was hateful,” said Rawda Fawaz, an attorney representing three of the teachers, who sued the district for monetary damages and to stop them from enforcing policies on the basis of viewpoint, subject matter, ethnicity, and religion, in addition to other requests. “They expressed support for the Palestinian people and they expressed criticism and disappointment in both the Israeli and U.S. government in how they were approaching the situation in Gaza.”

Related: Meet the students who support — and oppose — the pro-Palestinian encampment on Denver’s Auraria campus

Fawaz calls what the district has done “content discrimination,” saying other teachers have made politically charged posts on other topics without repercussions. She also says one of her clients was targeted because she is a Muslim, Arab woman.

A fourth teacher, who is not involved in the lawsuit, was accused of sharing conspiracy theories on social media and denying that atrocities took place on Oct. 7.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights recently issued updated guidance to schools about protecting Jewish, Israeli, Arab, and Muslim students from harassment and discrimination based on nationality or shared ancestry.

The guidance provides examples of when political speech could contribute to a hostile environment at school, such as screaming “terrorist” at pro-Palestinian protesters or yelling slurs at Jewish students during a protest of the screening of an Israeli film. But criticism of Israel or its policies would be protected under the First Amendment — unless it was accompanied by discriminatory comments or harassing behavior, the guidance said.

Explaining the district’s justification for disciplining but ultimately not firing the teachers, Silvestre told lawmakers during the congressional hearing the teachers in question know that if they engage in such conduct again, “there will be deeper consequences, up to and including termination.”

Silvestre also said district officials would be the first to admit they haven’t “gotten it right every time” when it comes to responding to antisemitism, or making Jewish students feel safe at school. But she also said they have made significant changes and intend to continue working with parents and other interest groups to do more.

Balancing support for Israel with backing free speech

But some Jewish parents are wary about the pressures the district is under with respect to antisemitism.

Greengrass, the parent of a recent graduate and a high school freshman, was one of more than 150 former students, parents, teachers, and staff who signed a letter urging the Montgomery County school district to recognize that some Jews welcome criticism of Israel and Zionism, while also fighting antisemitism.

“All Jewish students, no matter their views on Jewishness and the question of Palestine, are entitled to inclusion and respect. Indeed, all students are entitled to such inclusion and respect. This includes Muslim and Palestinian students,” the people said in the letter, which they released before Silvestre’s appearance on Capitol Hill. “We must reject the notion that the safety or comfort of any particular set of students can come at the expense of that of other groups.”

Greengrass knows her views puts her at odds with many members of her community — even sometimes her own husband.

Mara Greengrass, the Jewish mother of a recent graduate and a freshman in Montgomery County Public Schools, worries about conflating criticisms of Israel and antisemitism.

Greengrass has a Black Lives Matter sign in her yard and celebrates Shabbat every Friday night. She does not consider herself religious. She considers herself culturally Jewish and progressive.

She has a strong emotional attachment to Israel and sees it as a refuge for Jews. But she balks at the idea that criticizing Israel or questioning Zionism is antisemitic.

“The problem is that it conflates Jews and Israel, which is exactly what we have been saying everybody shouldn’t do,” Greengrass said.

She also does not believe that expressions of support for Palestinians, like what some teachers have expressed in Montgomery County schools, are inherently antisemitic.

“Statements like ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ can mean different things to different people,” she said.

Falling out with friends over the Israel-Hamas war

With discussions, walkouts, and passionate expressions about the war, both Jewish and Muslim students across the country say they are exhausted but hope their schools can still be safe places for them to learn.

That aspiration doesn’t mean all their relationships have survived unscathed.

Kobie, like nearly half of all young adult Jews, says he has cut ties with friends over comments he deems antisemitic about the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Referring to one friend he fell out with, Kobie said: “I blocked her on everything I had with her. … She’s graduating early so, um, bye.” He then dismissively swatted away the thought of his former friend with his hand.

But even with all his resolve, Kobie is also planning to take a break. After graduation, he plans to take a gap year and live in Israel. He then wants to go to college and major in political science.

After the protests at Ivy League institutions like Columbia University, he is not even considering applying to those schools.

Greengrass, meanwhile, remains unsettled about the district’s direction. Two of the teachers placed on leave over allegations of antisemitism taught her son a few years back. She chose not to tell him to spare him from being upset.

She doesn’t feel students, teachers, and the district should approach the issue of the Oct. 7 attacks, Palestinians, and antisemitism with the same reticence.

“You need to be able to say, ‘I disagree with this, but I understand why you feel that way,’” Greengrass said. “That’s how I feel about the teachers.”

Rooted School Indianapolis celebrates first graduating class

2024-05-20T11:00:00+00:00

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When Montgomery Brooks walks through the halls of Rooted School Indianapolis nowadays, it feels crowded.

Crowded, at least, to him and his fellow seniors who started at the charter school as the first freshman class of about 60 students. While some of the original students have left, Montgomery and his classmates have grown alongside the school, which launched in the fall of 2020 during the pandemic in a building shared with Eastern Star Church on the Far Eastside.

Now, they walk the halls as older siblings to a family of about 160 students in grades 7-12 — and will celebrate as Rooted School’s first graduating class on May 28. The 31 seniors are part of a wave of high school graduates celebrating over the next three weeks as students who entered high school during the pandemic’s early days.

“There will never be another first,” Ma’at Lands, the school’s founder, said of the graduating seniors. “We’re just appreciative that the parents and the students took a chance on us and stayed with us. It’s their school, they helped build this school.”

The Class of 2024 pioneered the school’s main focus on technology education and dual college credit.

The school serves a majority-Black student body with a mission to provide pathways to financial freedom by educating students ready to compete in high-wage industries such as technology, Lands said.

Launching in 2020 meant making tough decisions on how to open the school at a time when some were remote. Rooted alternated teaching its first class with virtual and in-person days. Those in-person days made a difference, seniors say, in their will to continue school post-pandemic.

Plus, the schools’ small size made it easier for staff to track down students skipping virtual class.

Graduating senior Aniyah Grant had a wake up call one day freshman year when her mother scolded her for not attending class virtually. That’s when she realized she needed to return to the self-disciplined student she had been before the pandemic.

“It hit me — I was like, ok, I need to stop slacking,” said Aniyah, who has been accepted to Central State University and plans to study criminal justice to become a prosecutor. “I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do. And ever since I’ve been good.”

As the first graduating class, seniors had access to classes on building websites, computer programming, and Adobe Photoshop.

“Not only did they make sure that we had teachers who actually cared about our success and whatnot, but they also had a tech industry oriented curriculum that I was focused on,” Montgomery said.

Montgomery’s class paved the way for younger students. Now, the school’s seventh graders take technology classes for high school credit. And in high school, the dual credit courses Montgomery and his peers took their junior year are now available to freshmen.

Parents, too, appreciate the fact that the school has a majority of Black educators.

“He gets to see people who look like him and care about him,” Susan Sargeant said of her graduating son Dwayne Sullivan, who will start at Indiana University-Bloomington in the fall to study computer science and business. “Not that they wouldn’t in other schools, but they actually get to know the kids — like they know their names, they know their parents, and that’s a big deal.”

The senior class selected Scottish Rite Cathedral as the site of their graduation, which Aniyah considers a bittersweet moment.

“It’s like, ‘I don’t want to leave,’ but then it’s like, ‘I’m out of here,’” she said. “I get to finally be who I want to be and go off and see how my future, and the rest of my life, is going to be like.”

Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Lawrence Township schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.

In some Chicago neighborhoods, almost half of all teens and young adults are not going to school or working

2024-05-20T01:38:16+00:00

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The portion of young Chicagoans neither going to school nor working is returning to pre-COVID levels — but it’s an uneven recovery that has left behind Black teens as well as adolescents in the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Overall, about 45,000 16- to 24-year-olds in the city are disconnected from both school and work, accounting for roughly 12% of the city’s residents in that age group — a rate just slightly higher than pre-COVID.

“In the aftermath of the pandemic when things looked really shaky, these overall numbers are very encouraging,” said Matthew Wilson, associate director at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Great Cities Institute and one of the authors of a new study on youth disconnection.

That was until researchers zeroed in on Black teens, he added: “When I saw these numbers, I thought, ‘Wait a minute.’”

The new report found the number of Black 16- to 19-year-olds who are not in school, college, or the workforce more than doubled from 2021 to 2022, the most recent year for which U.S. Census data is available.

Statewide, roughly 163,000 teens and young adults are not in school or working — a number that would make it Illinois’ third-largest city, the report’s authors note.

Chicago continues to lag behind the state and the country in getting young people reconnected to school and work since the height of the pandemic.

The Chicago-based nonprofit Alternative Schools Network commissioned the report for the second year as part of a push to ask Illinois lawmakers to allocate $300 million to a new youth employment program statewide. In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson has also championed youth jobs, vowing to double the number of opportunities open to teens and young adults, though his administration made more limited headway in boosting that number by 20% last summer, his first in office.

Experts believe that re-engaging young people who are neither working nor going to school is key to addressing poverty, racial disparities, and gun violence. Even short stints of disconnection can have a lasting effect on a person’s earning potential, health, relationships, and odds of becoming incarcerated, research has shown.

The disconnection rate dipped for Black and Latino 16- to 24-year-olds overall in 2022 while continuing to rise for their white counterparts. Nevertheless, that rate still remains much higher for young people of color. Almost a quarter of Black youth that age were out of school and out of work compared with 11% for Latinos and about 7% for whites.

The disconnection rate for Black 20- to 24-year-olds declined markedly. But the rate for 16- to 19-year-olds shot up from about 9% to more than 17%.

Wilson believes Black teens might still grapple with disconnection at a higher rate because that age group bore the brunt of the pandemic’s learning disruption and social-emotional toll during their all-important high school years.

“Being a high school student during COVID times was just a really bad place to be,” he said. “Your chance of having a meaningful attachment to school and being on a good trajectory after high school was diminished.”

The report also highlights dramatic differences in the rate of youth disconnection among Chicago neighborhoods and between the city and its north suburbs. That rate is less than 2% in some Cook County communities — and more than 48% in the West Side neighborhoods of Austin, North Lawndale, and Garfield Park.

“If every other young person is not working and not in school, that’s a crisis,” Wilson said.

The Alternative Schools Network helped craft legislation to launch a $300 million program to hire some 80,000 young people statewide and enlist the network and other nonprofits to prepare them and support them in those jobs.

“Lower-income kids just don’t have the connections to the labor market and to jobs that middle-income and upper-class kids have,” said Jack Wuest, the network’s executive director.

“It’s a terrible loss of potential.”

Damon Revels stopped going to high school as a junior and spent much of last year jobless, navigating a lot of family instability and a sense that his life had gotten irrevocably off track. “I was failing badly,” he said.

But after re-enrolling at Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School, an alternative campus in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, he got to participate in the Illinois Youth Investment Program, a state initiative that connects 16- to 24-year-olds with internships, career training and other opportunities. He worked overseeing activities at a Boys & Girls Club and laying tile on home renovation projects.

He said the opportunities gave him practical skills and helped him land a summer job at the YMCA after he graduates this June.

But also, Revels said, “I learned to trust people more and have a lot more confidence in myself rather than just feeling sorry for myself.”

Correction: A previous version of this article used the incorrect figure for the number of out-of-work and out-of-school teens and young adults in Illinois. There are roughly 163,000, not 136,000.

Becky Vevea contributed reporting.

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

LISTEN: Students grade cafeteria food at NYC schools’ test kitchen — and in real cafeterias, too

2024-05-15T10:00:00+00:00

Welcome to P.S. Weekly’s food episode, where students are the critics.

High schoolers in the Bronx sound off on the “soggy” grilled cheese sandwiches served in their cafeteria (on “Vegan Friday,” no less). Students discuss having microwave access during lunch. And we join Manhattan fourth graders as they trek to Queens to visit the test kitchen for NYC school cafeterias — winning the invite after one of their classmates wrote a letter complaining when the roasted chicken was removed from the menu because of budget cuts.

P.S. Weekly is a collaboration between Chalkbeat and The Bell. Listen for new episodes Wednesdays this spring.

Read the full episode transcript below

HOST (Sanaa): Welcome to PS Weekly… The sound of the New York City School System. P.S. Weekly is a collaboration between The Bell and Chalkbeat New York.

I’m your host this week, Sanaa Stokes. I’m an 11th grader at The Professional Performing Arts School in Midtown Manhattan, where some of New York’s best eats are located… And speaking of eats, in just a moment, we’ll hear a lot more about food in New York City schools.

HOST (Sanaa): But first, the Chalkbeat Bulletin….

Julian: I’m Julian Shen-Berro, a reporter from Chalkbeat. Here’s a recap of the week’s biggest education stories:

Schools Chancellor David Banks testified at a Congressional hearing focused on antisemitism in K-12 schools. It was the same committee that grilled several college presidents. Banks told members of Congress that New York City schools have seen “unacceptable incidents of antisemitism,” but that schools have responded to troubling incidents with both education and discipline.

NYC officials are looking to virtual learning to help meet a new mandate limiting class size to no more than 25 students. Virtual learning could potentially help campuses that are tight on space, as students could learn from home–AFTER school and on weekends. Schools have until 2028 to meet the new classroom caps.

And as childhood hunger rises, New York City is launching a program for schools to donate leftover food directly to families in need or to food pantries, shelters, and soup kitchens.

To stay up to date on local education news throughout the week, go to chalkbeat.org/newsletters and sign up for the New York Daily Roundup.

HOST (Sanaa): Thanks, Chalkbeat! Now, LETTUCE get into it!

HOST (Sanaa): When kids are hungry, it’s hard to do well in school. For years, New York City schools had a program providing free meals to students who qualified based on financial need, but that gave school food a stigma. Some kids who needed it most, didn’t want to eat it. And there were tens of thousands of kids whose families earned just above the cutoff — but paying full price for school lunch was still a hardship.

All of that changed in 2017, when the city made school meals COMPLETELY free for the million children in public schools. And while that was essential in making sure that all students can eat during the school day, the challenge of food inequity didn’t end there…

Today’s episode is all about FOOD. With our first story, here’s P.S. Weekly reporter Ava Stryker-Robbins.

Segment A1: Test Kitchen

NARR (Ava): Fourth grader Elsa Hammerman is a big fan of the food in the cafeteria of her Washington Heights, Manhattan, school. So when her favorite chicken dish disappeared earlier this spring — a result of budget cuts — Elsa … wrote a letter.

Elsa: Dear Mr. Tricarico, I’m a fourth grader who goes to P.S. I 187.

NARR (Ava): Christopher Tricarico is the senior executive director of Food and Nutrition Services, responsible for all New York City school cafeterias.

Elsa: Me and my friends’ favorite school lunch is the roasted chicken. We hate to see it leave the menu so we were hoping maybe to bring it back next month. It’s okay if not . I understand you may lose money, but please consider it. Sincerely, Elsa Hammerman

NARR (Ava): She sent the letter. Life went on. Then…

Elsa: One day my principal came into our classroom and she asked to talk to me in the hall. At first I was scared because I thought I was in trouble. But then she told me that he wanted to speak to me and my class. So he came to our school with his team and we got to tell him what we like about the foods and what we don’t like

NARR (Ava): And…

Elsa: A few days after we did get the chicken back and it was never better. I was super happy and I was like bouncing off of my friend’s shoulders and she was like, ‘calm down, calm down.’ But everyone was super excited to see that it was back.

NARR (Ava): Elsa wasn’t the only one who complained about the cuts. After outcry from students across the five boroughs, city officials agreed to reinstate popular menu items like French toast sticks, bean and cheese burritos, and chicken dumplings. Schools Chancellor David Banks said feedback from students like Elsa was a key reason for the reversal.

Chancellor David C. Banks NEWS CLIP:: “Once we made some adjustments and pulled back on some menu items, we heard from the kids loud and clear. They were not happy about that …. And I encourage every young person to continue to speak up about the changes that they hope to see in their schools "

NARR (Ava): But that wasn’t the end of the story for Elsa and her classmates.

Christopher Tricarico: We visited the school to meet with her and her class and they had such a great way of explaining what they saw on the menu, what was taken from the menu, and what was being added back to the menu.

NARR (Ava): Christopher Tricarico, the guy in charge of food.

Christopher Tricarico: So we were able to fit her in here so her whole class could see that their voice, their concern, and their advocacy for school food, was really important.

NARR (Ava): Here — The DOE’s School. Food. Test Kitchen.

Alex: Yeah, so what are we, what are we doing here today?

Ava: So we’re going to a DOE test kitchen facility

NARR (Ava): A few weeks ago, Chalkbeat reporter Alex Zimmerman and I got to tag along with Elsa and her classmates on their visit.

Alex: And we’re in Hunter’s Point, Queens. We’re in a giant building that looks kind of like a warehouse that has, like, these huge loading dock doors out front.

NARR (Ava): This is where dishes become official menu items for the city’s hundreds of cafeterias. They have to win approval from the only critics who matter… STUDENTS.

AMBIENT: Sound of students

NARR (Ava): When we arrive, about two dozen 4th graders are settling into rows of desks. In what looks like a classroom, complete with a Smartboard at the front. But behind an inconspicuous door that could easily be mistaken for a closet is an industrial kitchen humming with the same equipment school cafeterias have on hand. The food staff have been busy assembling trays of new menu items that are ready to be shuttled out to the student testers. It kind of feels like the set of a television show.

Chantal: Welcome to taste testing, all right? So, today, it’s your turn, however, before we actually start taste testing, I want to play a game, just to see if you guys…

NARR (Ava): This is Chantal Hewlett, the Student Taste Testing Supervisor. ChantalChantelle got her start in school food 20 years ago as a cafeteria manager and now hosts student groups at the test kitchen. She looks for feedback on everything from flavor to how hard it is to open the packaging.

Chantal: Right, and like I said before, today it’s all about you. If you don’t like something, it’s okay. Let us know now. So we can fix it. Because again, we take your comments and we share them with the company. Okay? They don’t want to hear what the adults have to say.

MUSIC

NARR (Ava): Today’s task: students will taste and rate four food items: an egg and cheese sandwich, a cheesy pasta dish called manicotti, hummus, and a barbecue chicken slider.

NARR (Ava): Here’s the process. Students eat the dish in silence. Once they develop an opinion, they hold up a card called a plicker — basically a fancy bar code. If they hold the card rightside up, it means they liked the dish. Holding it sidewise means they didn’t like it. Then, ChantalChantelle stands at the front of the room and scans all of the codes at once with her phone, which generates an instant tally of how many children approve of what they just ate.

NARR (Ava): Then, on worksheets, students write down what they do or don’t like about the dish.

NARR (Ava): First up: Egg and cheese sandwich.

Chantal: So we’re going to get started with number one, right? We also have ketchup. If anyone wants ketchup with their eggs, that’s fine. All right. And I’m going to tell the adults, please don’t tell the students what to write at all. I’ll be leading the comments later….

NARR (Ava): It looks like a dinner roll stuffed with scrambled egg and melted cheese inside. Alex watches kids in the front of the room while I’m in the back as they chew and ponder and hold up their cards and write their comments. They’re taking their jobs VERY seriously. Then, eventually, they’re allowed to talk.

Student 1: So I thought the egg, like after you taste it, I have to say it’s a little unflavorful, but it felt a little dry for some reason. And also the packet was really wet. So like when I first took out, like I had to like, dry off because I don’t like eating wet food

Student 3: So I really like the meal. Usually eggs give me headaches, so the way that the egg was cooked, didn’t like give me a headache. I did recommend maybe like the size be a bit bigger, but because I know you guys get like other things too, but like for a bit more protein in the morning, maybe just like a bigger size.

Chantal: These are great comments. This is why we do the taste testing…

NARR (Ava): Despite the student critiques, the egg sandwich is an overall hit. Out of 22 student votes, only four said they didn’t like it.

NARR (Ava): In a given year, between 1,500 and 2,000 students from different grade levels and neighborhoods cycle through the test kitchen. School principals typically volunteer their schools — and visits to the test kitchen are so popular that there’s a waiting list to get in.

NARR (Ava): But at the test kitchen, not every item is a hit.

Chantal: We’ve had a burger, a veggie burger. Actually, this is a perfect one that the students didn’t like.

NARR (Ava): Chantal again.

Chantal: When we got it, It was falling apart. It wasn’t shaped properly. You know, the cooking method wasn’t correct. The students thought it needed more flavor. And so we told the company, these are their comments and actually the company just sent us back the reformulated products. So they fixed it.

NARR (Ava): The negative feedback from students can be just as important as the rave reviews.

Chantal: They want to make sure that whatever they cook and serve, the kids actually eat it as opposed to putting it in the garbage.

NARR (Ava): Taste testing is crucial these days as schools implement big menu changes. Christopher Tricarico explains.

Christopher: I think the move now is to continue to expose children to more culturally diverse meals, but also healthier meals coming up with plant powered Fridays and Meatless Mondays, these are examples of providing options for students. We need to be able to meet them where they want to be but we also want to make sure we’re serving healthy and nutritious and delicious meals.

NARR (Ava): And have you been receiving positive feedback from students in schools based off of these shows?

Christopher: We get all kinds of feedback. But it’s my team’s job to take that feedback and really address things at the school level. One of the things I love is that when kids are in school and they like or dislike something that they’re eating, they talk to the kitchen staff. That’s some of the best feedback we get at the school level.

NARR (Ava): About 150 to 200 students from schools across the city typically try each item. And before the Education Department greenlights it for school menus, roughly 75% of those who try it have to like it.

NARR (Ava): On the day we visit, the school food staff have a feeling one item in particular is going to be a tough sell: The manicotti — basically tubes of pasta stuffed with ricotta cheese and topped with tomato sauce and a dusting of parmesan.

Chantal: So try new things. Don’t just say, ‘you know what, oh, the white thing in the middle, I don’t like it…

NARR (Ava): With 11 students voting against, the manicotti is the only item that a majority of these fourth graders do not approve.

NARR (Ava): Some students refuse to even try it. It turns out that these fourth graders really do not like ricotta.

Instructor: Cheese in the middle with the cheese on top?

STUDENT 3: The cheese in the middle. Parmesan is the best but that cheese in the middle… [laughter]

Instructor: Didn’t do it for you… OK what about you right here?

NARR (Ava): The student testers are tough critics —the chicken sliders and hummus don’t fare much better.

Luke: The un-breaded chicken slider, it got a 53%.

NARR (Ava): That’s Luke McGeown, senior menu specialist.

Luke: And then the hummus got a 63%. So in our standard, that’s usually failing.

Luke: But again, each class is different, each child is different. So tomorrow, when we have a school from the Bronx, they could pass these products with flying colors. It just depends.

Luke: This was a pretty great group. Actually, sometimes kids don’t listen so much. And sometimes they’re not very responsive and wanting to give us results back and their thoughts on it … so they were a very lively bunch so they were helpful with that kind of stuff so I thought it was really good day.

NARR (Ava): After the taste testing, students have the option of eating chicken tenders for lunch if they’re still hungry. As students munch on them, I’m curious to hear what they have to say about the whole experience.

NARR (Ava): What do you like most about being here?

Sadie (student): That you get to try new things that you haven’t had before and some of the things you’ve had before just in a different way. I feel really nice that they’re thinking about us. I just want to say thank you to them for letting us go here

Athena (student): Right now, I think it’s wonderful seeing the back story and how it was. I didn’t really like school lunch before. I always wanted home lunch, but now I think school lunch is better.

NARR (Ava): Some students are grateful to Elsa.

Athena: I just want to again thank Elsa for bringing us here because she’s the cause of this whole trip

Benson (student): This is a very good experience to be tasting foods for the New York City public schools. And I really appreciate the letter that she made. And maybe I’ll make a letter, too.

Alex: What would your letter say?

Benson 2: To bring fried chicken to the menu.

NARR (Ava): Before reporting this story, I had no idea that there was a process where the DOE listened to students’ voices and opinions about food. I find it exciting that officials are really listening to what students have to say on a micro and macro level — and it’s sweet to know that 4th graders still write letters.

HOST (Sanaa): That was PS Weekly Reporter, Ava Stryker-Robbins … Next up, we leave the school food test kitchen and head to a real one… after a short break.

MIDROLL: We hope you’re enjoying listening to P.S. Weekly as much as we enjoy making it! We spend a lot of time after school planning each episode, setting up, and conducting interviews, cutting the tape, writing scripts. It’s a long process, and totally worth it. But here’s the thing: We don’t have a bunch of money or millions of followers. So we’re counting on you, loyal listener, to help us get the word out! So take a few seconds, and send this link wherever you’re listening to three friends so they, too, can enjoy P.S. weekly. Thanks for your support!

Segment A2: Food

HOST (Sanaa): So: what do students think about the school lunches these days in a real cafeteria? Our reporter Jose Santana has the story.

NARR (Jose): It’s Plant Powered Friday Friday and I’m at the Bronx Latin High School cafeteria during their lunch period. The menu posted in the cafeteria says there should be a vegan kidney bean rajma, vegan cucumber salad, and vegan flatbread. But today, I see only one option on student trays and it’s not vegan: grilled cheese. And the students were not happy about the lunch that was served…

Justin (student): I’m not gonna lie, they’re kinda bad, and particularly the grilled cheese, uh, the cheese isn’t really that melted, I’ll just say that. It isn’t really grilled, you know.

Lambryann (student): Yeah, um, it’s very nasty. Like, it’s so soggy. The quality is not qualiting.

Joseph (student): We got a grilled cheese joint. Feel me? Um, it’s not the best, but it ain’t the worst. Give it a 5.7 out of 10.

Marcus (student): I say this is like a good 6 out of 10. 6 out of 10? Yeah, that’s solid.

NARR (Jose): So typically, do they only have one option? Like in terms of variety?

Justin: Yeah, I mean sometimes they’ll have two at most but mostly it’s pretty bad and we don’t really have a lot of options like they’ve been literally having mozzarella sticks for like two weeks straight. Like we only been having mozzarella sticks. We haven’t had a variety of choices. So it’s been kind of bad.

Jose: Like mozzarella sticks every day?

Justin: Every single day.

Jose: That’s crazy.

Franklin: I’m not gonna lie to you. It’s been the same thing every day, every week. I haven’t seen no change. I know there’s a chart over there, but that chart, The chart is not relating to what’s being given out. Cause they be giving the same thing every day, every week, the same food. I’m tired of the mozzarella sticks and the dumplings. It’s the same thing.

Lambryann: We just been getting mozzarella sticks with that nasty (expletive) marinara sauce and cold, hard peanut butter and jelly.

Jose: Okay, so I don’t know if you guys know but the mayor is forcing schools to make every Friday vegan food. What do you guys think about that?

Ethan (student): Me personally, I don’t like vegan food. feel like they should give us a option of like, like different like, like stations of vegan and then non vegan.

Justin: My thoughts about it is, if you want to promote health, that’s cool, but also give the kids what they like as well, you know?

Joseph: I love my vegans, but come on now, get some meat on the menu.

Jose: Have you noticed like any other students react certain ways with like the food or any, like, stories or experiences?

Justin: I mean, absolutely. I’ve seen, uh, I’ve seen people literally complain and ask the lunch ladies here, like, what’s the problem? I’ve seen people, um, literally just grab a tray, maybe take an apple or something, and then just throw the food out cause they only want one thing and you can’t get one thing without getting the other. So, it’s just a total waste of food.

Joseph: Yeah. I ain’t gonna lie. They’d be picking up the food and throwing it out cause that [expletive] is [expletive]. They be like, playing around with it, turning it into a piece of, throwing it at each other.

Lambryann: I done witnessed people go on line and then like come like literally to the end of the line, open their food, see what it is, and just go straight to the garbage because it looks so unappetizing.

Jose: So how does that affect you, like, coming to school, you’re expecting lunch, and then you’re disappointed?

Lambryann: It affects me because, when you’re really hungry, like, you know, you can feel physical pain or like a headache, especially that you’re in school all day. You need energy, and like, food, which is fuel for your body. And like, when you come here, you think, oh, at least a decent breakfast or a decent lunch. No, everybody’s just starving.

Franklin: And I feel like it’s really affecting us and how we do in class for real. Cause, you know what you eat really makes you what you are.

Joseph: School on an empty stomach is not valid, bro, at all. Feel me?

Jose: So what do you think could be improved, if anything?

Justin: I think what could be improved is maybe give like more of like an option type choice like maybe um, not only grilled cheese, but there’s so many other things you could do like maybe rice and like just other options. You don’t have to just have things that people don’t really like and enjoy.

Danny: Everything could be improved, you know, like nothing’s perfect, you know. The food is just like straight like mid, you know. Could be worse, could be better.

Lambryann: If they just, like, spent more time cooking the food, than just warming it up, and put more effort into making the food, it would actually be good. Like, it’d just be looking like they just slapped a piece of bread on a plate and called it a day, you know?

NARR (Jose): We reached out to an Assistant Principal of the Bronx Latin High School, Ms. Anna Nelson, to ask why the menu didn’t match what the students are actually offered for lunch. And she had this to say…

Ms. Nelson: So, what I have learned from the past is that the DOE has a menu, and that when schools are ordering, some of the menu options might not be available, and they’re given alternative options to order. And so even if it’s on the DOE menu, when they go into place to order, it might basically be like, we’re all out of this item, like, they have a limited number of whatever the item is. And so our school has to substitute it with another item.

NARR (Jose): Thank you to Lambryann Acevedo, Joseph Cruz, Ethan Leon, Franklyn Lora, Marcus Maisonet, Danny Martinez, and Justin Rivera for speaking with P.S. Weekly.

HOST (Sanaa): Once again, that was Jose Santana.

HOST (Sanaa): So far, we’ve focused on school cafeteria food, but a lot of students across the city bring their lunch to school. For our final story today, reporter Santana Roach looks into an equity issue that impacts those students: Microwaves.

Segment B: Microwaves

HOST (Sanaa): Heating things up for P.S. Weekly, here’s Santana…

NARR Santana: Do you have access to a microwave at your school?

Student 1: Well, not really…

Adjanae (Student): When I bring my cup of noodles and I’m not allowed to use a microwave, it aggravates me.

STUDENT 1: You can maybe ask a teacher permission for it and they might be like, yeah, you can use it like, because it’s really close to them.

NARR Santana: So what is it like to not have access to a microwave?

STUDENT 2: It was not too long ago, and I brung noodles. And I asked like 3 teachers and they wouldn’t let me use it. And I started crying and I called my mom.

NARR (Santana): I’m here at my school Frederick Douglass Academy II, talking to students about a very specific dilemma that I can relate to… See, I don’t always want to eat the school lunch and not to scrutinize it, but the combinations are sometimes–questionable… I started to think about having my mom’s home-cooked meals for lunch.

NARR (Santana): But to do that, I need a microwave. And many schools in the city don’t have a microwave available for student use.

NARR (Santana): So, this may come as a surprise to some of you listening to this show, but we students often resort to asking our teachers or counselors to heat our food. We have to go to their office and bother them while they’re working to make the request. And some students are more comfortable doing that than others.

NARR (Santana): It’s a nuisance for both teachers, and for students.

Mr. Afriyie: I know many students. Have come to me during lunchtime, or found others looking to heat food up. And they find their way. I think there, there’s access definitely in the building to microwaves.

NARR (Santana): This is my principal, Osei Owusu-Afriyie. Even HE has had to experience this annoying dance.

NARR (Santana): A simple solution would be to give the students access to their own microwave.

NARR (Santana): So, why don’t students have access to a communal microwave?

Mr. Afriyie: Having a microwave down in the cafeteria has never been an official request from students. Um, so I think possibly that it’s not something that we have like deeply explored about how to make that work.

NARR (Santana): So, perhaps this issue of microwave access is simply an issue students haven’t brought up.

NARR (Santana): Students at Beacon High School also had a similar problem… And guess what… their PTA donated their students a microwave a few years ago.

Kelli: Yes, the Beacon PTA purchased a microwave for students -- maybe 2 years ago. It was placed in the cafeteria for student use.

NARR (Santana): This is Kelli Henry, Beacon’s PTA Co-Vice President.

NARR (Santana): I spoke with my fellow PS Weekly producer Bernie Carmona, who happens to be a student at Beacon–and occasionally in need of a microwave.

Santana: A couple of weeks ago I asked you to investigate to see whether or not there was a microwave in your cafeteria.

Bernie: I went to the cafeteria all the way in the back all the way in the corner, that’s where the microwave is.

Santana: So Bernie, how great is it to have a microwave? Because you know, my school doesn’t have free access to a microwave.

Bernie: Yeah, I know that like kids from other schools don’t have access to these microwaves. I think it’s very convenient for me. Mainly because I have left overs from home sometimes. And I think just bringing that to school and having the access to go to the cafeteria and it being there for me to use whenever I want. Having free access to a microwave will definitely come with managing and creating new rules for students that want to use the microwave.

NARR (Santana): I went back to Mr. Afriyie, to tell him about the Beacon students and their PTA-bought microwave, to see what he thought and whether he would consider providing one for our school.

Mr. Afriyie: So we would have to figure out like, how we would actually acquire one. And then we’d also have to discuss some of the safety protocols. Right? If it’s not used properly, it can cause some significant damage or injury or whatnot. So we have to have to look into all of that as well as protocols around how to clean it, and maintain it? Who brings it out? That it’s being used and maintained in a way that everyone can have a consistent and quality access to it. If that is something that our student council wants us to pursue, then we would look into see how we could make that work.

NARR (Santana): Huh, it’s interesting that the only reason why we haven’t had a microwave–is because we haven’t thought to officially ask– even though we have been directly asking teachers to use theirs.

NARR (Santana): Perhaps this sounds like a trivial issue. But students–especially students with dietary needs–might need access to a working microwave.

NARR (Santana): I plan to continue advocating for a microwave to be placed in my school, and I hope some of you who face similar issues take action and speak up about them too …it might be easier than you thought.

HOST (Sanaa): Thanks for listening to this episode. I’d say my fellow reporters ate. Students: we’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences related to school food. Have a story to share? Email us at pseekly@chalkbeat.org.

And P.S.: We’re back next Wednesday with an episode about mental health that you don’t want to miss.

Preview P.S Weekly episode 8 CLIP:

Derry: “It was like because of her like fear or anxiety, or like her trauma, like because of it, it’s holding me back from having possibly a better experience, and so she never allowed us to take that leap of faith, for that reason, it just made me very angry throughout the years where I wasn’t able to properly get help.”

HOST: Until then… class dismissed!

CREDITS

HOST (Sanaa): PS Weekly is a collaboration between The Bell and Chalkbeat, made possible by generous support from The Pinkerton Foundation, The Summerfield Foundation, FJC, and Hindenburg Systems.

This episode was hosted by me, Sanaa Stokes.

Producers for this episode were: Ava Stryker-Robbins, Jose Santana, AND Santana Roach, with reporting help from Chalkbeat reporter Alex Zimmerman.

Our marketing lead this week was Sabrina DuQuesnay.

Our executive producer for the show is JoAnn DeLuna.

Santana: Executive editors include Amy Zimmer AND Taylor McGraw.

Additional production and reporting support was provided by Sabrina DuQuesnay, Mira Gordon, and our friends at Chalkbeat.

Special thanks to our interns Miriam Galicia and Makenna Turner and our friends at chalkbeat.

A big shout out to our mentors!

Music from Blue Dot Sessions.

And the jingle you heard at the beginning of this episode was created by the one and only: Erica Huang.

Thanks for tuning in! See you next time!

A court order forced Fayette County schools to integrate. Will progress continue without it?

2024-05-17T21:17:49+00:00

Read more of Chalkbeat's coverage of the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

Sign up for Chalkbeat Tennessee’s free daily newsletter to keep up with statewide education policy and Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

As in many school districts across the South, where segregation was once the law, it took protests and a court order to desegregate public schools in Fayette County, Tennessee.

That order came nearly a dozen years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which declared legally mandated racial segregation in schools unconstitutional.

Fayette County, a place where new homes are sprouting like spring grass in towns on its outskirts, is still operating under the 1965 order. The order has led to racially integrated schools, with Black and white students proportionally represented in most of the four elementary schools, two middle schools, and one high school. Growing numbers of Hispanic students are also enrolling, and the current superintendent, Versie Ray Hamlett, is Black.

That’s a vast change from what 78-year-old Myles Wilson, a former Fayette County school superintendent and now a school board member, faced in 1963, when he was reading hand-me-down books at all-Black Fayette County Training School.

“The textbooks were terrible,” Wilson recalled. “Sometimes, entire pages would be destroyed. I guess they were tearing pages out because they knew they would be passed down to us.”

But, Wilson added, “We’ve made some great strides. We’ve had seven Black superintendents since 1984.”

Yet Wilson said he and other members of the community are worried that progress, so hard won, could erode once a new consent decree that the Justice Department issued in 2023 is satisfied – and the 1965 court order is lifted.

“A lot of Blacks feel like we shouldn’t be released from the consent decree, because they’ll go back to the old way, because that’s what’s happened in the rest of the country,” he said.

Many school districts across the country still have racially segregated schools, and school segregation has increased in the last three decades.

Sean Reardon, a professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford University and Ann Owens, a University of Southern California sociologist, released a study this month showing how an increase in school segregation has been driven by two factors: school districts being released from court oversight and an expansion in school choice policies, particularly the spread of charter schools.

That follows what Reardon and researchers at Stanford found in a 2012 study. According to their analysis, school districts released from desegregation orders in the two decades after 1990 began to resegregate. Ones that continued to be under judicial oversight did not.

“These results suggest that court-ordered desegregation plans are effective in reducing racial school segregation, but that their effects fade over time in the absence of continued court oversight,” the abstract said.

Fayette County’s long fight for civil rights

In Fayette County, the original court order to desegregate the schools was part of a protracted battle for civil rights, one that the New York Times described in 1969 as the “longest sustained civil rights protest in the nation.”

It began in 1959, when John McFerren and Harpman Jameson, both farmers and World War II veterans, attended the trial of Burton Dodson, a Black man who was accused of murder and had escaped a lynch mob.

McFerren and Jameson learned that because few Blacks were registered to vote, it would be impossible for Dodson to get a jury that wasn’t all-white. At the urging of Dodson’s lawyer, James Estes, McFerren and Jameson began to register Black sharecroppers to vote – a move that resulted in many of them being evicted by their white landlords.

Evicted families pitched tents on the outskirts of Somerville, the Fayette County seat, and activists from around the nation joined them.

The tent city disbanded in 1962 after the Justice Department sued the landowners, and the courts ordered them to stop interfering in the rights of Black people to vote or run for office. But the fight for racial justice was far from over – as Wilson would learn.

Myles Wilson poses for a portrait outside the Somerville Elementary School on Thurs., May 16, 2024 in Fayette County, Tennessee.

After graduating from Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1967, Wilson was hired as a teacher at Fayette County Training School, arriving two years after the court order. He later sued the school system when he and all the single, Black male teachers were fired to prevent them from teaching white girls, he said.

The teachers were reinstated, and Wilson would file other lawsuits over the years to fight racial injustice in the system.

With his own battles for racial justice and desegregation behind him, Wilson fears that without the court order, Fayette County could backslide.

While the school district has satisfied many of the requirements of the court order, the new consent decree requires, among other things, that school officials work with the Justice Department and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to “develop an effective and sustainable student assignment policy to further desegregation in its schools.”

More white families are moving from Memphis to Oakland, a town in Fayette County, and demands are growing for a new high school there – even though the county’s only high school, Fayette-Ware High School, is under capacity, he said.

The school can accommodate 1,300 students, Wilson said, but currently enrolls about 833. Of those, 61% are Black, and 30% are white. He fears that the addition of a new high school could drive segregation.

Wilson also fears that the recent push for universal vouchers by Republican lawmakers – a battle that Gov. Bill Lee has vowed to revive next year – could also erode desegregation progress in Fayette County by giving families public dollars to enroll children in private schools.

One private school in the county, Fayette Academy, was established as an all-white school in 1965, as the desegregation order was handed down. In 1971, U.S. District Judge Robert McRae, whose orders led to school desegregation in Memphis and later upheld busing, called the school “a beautiful building sitting on top of a hill as a monument against the black people.”

The private Christian school remains predominantly white.

Daphene McFerren, daughter of John McFerren and whose brother John McFerren Jr. was one of the original plaintiffs in the desegregation lawsuit, said that if the order is lifted, it doesn’t have to mean the end of progress.

“I don’t want to speculate on where this can end up, because who knows?” said McFerren, who is the executive director of the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis.

But, McFerren said, the fact that the school district is abiding by the consent decree means they are cooperating.

“That should be acknowledged,” she said. “But we should be vigilant in that the goal of this is to eradicate any form of discrimination where it exists in the education of our children.”

McFerren, however, described it as a “Catch-22″ situation. Satisfying the consent decree should mean that the district has met its desegregation goals. But will the district continue to maintain those goals once the mechanism forcing it to do so is gone?

“Well, as I always say, a case can always be reopened,” McFerren said.

Bureau Chief Tonyaa Weathersbee oversees Chalkbeat Tennessee’s education coverage. Reach her at tweathersbee@chalkbeat.org.

After a letter protesting school food cuts, this fourth grader scored a trip to NYC’s test kitchen

2024-05-17T20:14:06+00:00

This story is part of the P.S. Weekly podcast, a collaboration between Chalkbeat and The Bell. To hear the full audio version of this story, listen to our most recent episode.

When fourth grader Elsa Hammerman’s favorite dish disappeared earlier this spring from her school’s lunch menu — the result of budget cuts — she dashed off a letter to the head of New York City’s school food office.

Her plea, adorned with 13 hand-drawn chicken drumsticks, was polite but direct: Bring back the roasted chicken to P.S./I.S. 187 in Washington Heights. It didn’t take long for her advocacy to pay off. Within a few weeks, the dish reappeared in her school’s cafeteria.

“I was super happy, and I was like bouncing off of my friend’s shoulders, and she was like, ‘calm down, calm down,’” Elsa recalled. “Everyone was super excited to see that it was back.”

Elsa wasn’t the only student to complain about the cuts. Schools Chancellor David Banks pointed to the student outcry as a major reason officials ultimately restored many of the menu items after a $60 million cut forced the city to remove some of the most popular food from cafeterias. But Elsa’s letter also won her school a chance to weigh in on future dishes that could appear in hundreds of school cafeterias across the city.

Chris Tricarico, the senior executive director of food and nutrition services who received Elsa’s letter, invited her class to the Education Department’s school food test kitchen. About 1,500 to 2,000 students across the city visit every year to offer feedback on new menu items the city is considering for school cafeterias — and the visits are so popular that there’s a waitlist for principals to sign up.

“We were able to fit her in,” Tricarico said, “so her whole class could see that their voice, their concern, and their advocacy for school food was really important.”

Elsa Hammerman, a fourth grader at P.S./I.S. 187 in Washington Heights poses with a letter she wrote requesting that city officials reverse school food cuts.

Last month, Elsa and about two dozen of her fourth-grade classmates trekked to the department’s test kitchen in Long Island City, Queens, to try out four menu contenders: an egg and cheese sandwich, a cheesy pasta dish called manicotti, hummus, and a barbecue chicken slider.

The students, assembled in a mock classroom inside the warehouse-style building, sat at rows of desks while sampling each item. They tried the dishes without talking so they could develop opinions without influencing each other. Using a card called a plicker, which looks like a fancy barcode, they signaled their overall rating. If they held the card right side up, it meant they approved of what they just ate.

Roughly 200 students typically try each food item and about 75% have to approve before they’re added to school cafeterias.

Chantal Hewlett, the taste testing supervisor, stood at the front of the room to scan all the codes at once with her phone, which generated an instant tally of how many students liked the dish. Afterward, students shared more detailed feedback on worksheets and verbally during a group discussion.

“If you don’t like something, it’s okay, let us know now so we can fix it,” Hewlett explained to the fourth graders. “We take your comments and we share them with the company.”

Elsa and her classmates weren’t afraid to share their frank opinions of the food. The first dish, which looked like a dinner roll stuffed with eggs and melted cheese, was largely a winner.

“I really like the meal,” one student chimed in. “Usually eggs give me headaches, so the way that the egg was cooked, [it] didn’t like give me a headache.”

Eighteen of the 22 student testers gave the eggs a favorable rating.

The manicotti — tubes of pasta stuffed with ricotta cheese and topped with tomato sauce and a dusting of parmesan — was a different story. Eleven of the 21 students who tasted it shifted their barcodes sideways to give it a thumbs down.

“I didn’t like it, because there’s too much cheese, and it got stuck to the plate when I tried to eat it,” one student said. The ricotta cheese was a big drawback for many of the student critics.

School food officials emphasized that even the harshest student criticism is crucial. After all, if food that students don’t like ends up on cafeteria trays, they’ll toss it in the garbage. And student feedback is even more crucial as city officials experiment with more culturally diverse menu items and a wide array of vegetarian options on “meatless Mondays” and “plant-powered Fridays.”

As the test kitchen visit wound down, the fourth graders reflected on their experience. One student, Athena, said she typically relies on food sent from home.

“Now I think school lunch is better,” she said.

Another classmate, Benson, said Elsa’s letter might inspire him to push for his own favorite dishes.

“I really appreciate the letter that she made. And maybe I’ll make a letter, too,” Benson said.

What would it say?

“To bring fried chicken to the menu,” Benson replied.

To hear the full story of Elsa’s visit to the school food test kitchen, listen to the latest episode of P.S. Weekly.

Ava Stryker-Robbins is a senior at Beacon High School in Manhattan and an intern at The Bell.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Newark Board of Education election 2024 winners raised $63,500 in contributions, campaign reports show

2024-05-17T20:14:30+00:00

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The Moving Newark Schools Forward slate, winners of the city’s school board election last month, raised roughly $63,500 from a mixed bag of donors, including local party committees, unions, and businesses benefitting from district contracts, recent disclosure reports with the state’s election watchdog show.

Those disclosure reports, which had to be filed with the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission by the May 6 post-election deadline, are required for campaign donations of $200 or more and spending of at least $5,800.

Campaign fundraising in this election cycle came solely from that politically-backed slate of four candidates, which has won every election since 2016. Meanwhile, no contributions were reported this year by any of the other six rival candidates, according to the ELEC website.

“When it comes down to it, experience matters — the experience of the people who are backing this slate,” said Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “They’re not starting from scratch and they’re not starting from the position of: How do you do this?”

Even though fundraising this year took a slight dip for that dominating slate, which has typically garnered closer to $100,000 or more in recent past elections, it did not result in setting back those candidates who had the advantage of support from well-established politicians.

Newcomer candidates on the slate, Kanileah Anderson and Helena Vinhas, who were appointed in January and secured their seats at the polls on April 16, were the top fundraisers in the race, an analysis of the disclosure documents showed. Vinhas reeled in $29,600 and Anderson received $13,046. Board co-vice president Vereliz Santana, who’s been on the board since 2021, raised $11,650 and board member Dawn Haynes, who secured her third term, raised $9,194.

The roster of elected officials who contributed to the Moving Newark Schools Forward slate are all top-ranking politicians in the state and city.

Those elected leaders, including Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, state Senate Majority Leader M. Teresa Ruiz, state Assemblywoman Eliana Pintor Marin, city Council President LaMonica McIver, and Councilman Michael Silva, among others, gave a collective $13,000 to the slate candidates.

Local businesses with district contracts add money to the race

More than $10,000 in support for the winning slate came from various businesses throughout the state and city, including about $1,500 from businesses that have either current or past contracts with the Newark Board of Education.

Funding to campaigns from public contractors rose last year after a new law, the Elections Transparency Act, increased contribution limits for all reporting entities, a recent analysis from ELEC found.

Public contractors helping to fuel this year’s school board race included JCT Solutions, a security and communications contractor that donated $250 to Santana’s campaign. Since 2018, JCT Solutions has had $609,119 worth of contracts with the Newark Board of Education for services related to “telephone, cameras, door security, [and] network,” according to disclosure documents.

Antonelli Kantor Rivera, who runs a law firm in his name in Livingston, also contributed $500 to Santana’s campaign. Rivera had $3 million in contracts statewide in 2023, including one with city schools for $133,000 for legal services, the reports showed.

Alamo Insurance Group, a North Bergen firm, gave Vinhas $250. The firm had a contract with the district in 2022 for $306,000 to do health benefits consulting.

Another law firm, Souder, Shabazz, and Woolridge Law Group, gave $500 to Haynes. That firm is representing two school board members who are facing ethics complaint charges from last year.

Unions also gave the winning slate financial support, which included $2,500 from the Newark Teachers Union and $1,000 from the Heavy and General Construction Laborers Union Local 472.

There was also $3,250 in total contributions from employees who work in various roles throughout the district.

On the spending side, the winning slate spent a total of about $36,600, the disclosure reports outlined, with payments going mostly toward printing campaign flyers and other promotional materials and consulting services.

Rasmussen, an adjunct professor of political science at Rider, said mailers and other promotional activities ahead of election day drum up momentum from supporters to head to the polls. Turnout remained low in this year’s election at under 3% for the third year in a row, but those who did set out to vote overwhelmingly supported the slate.

“Campaign spending gets a bad name, but voter contact and voter education are really important,” Rasmussen said.

Why was there a dip in fundraising?

One possible explanation for the modest dip in coffers is the absence of the Great Schools for All political action committee, which had fueled campaign fundraising for the slate for years.

A search on the state election watchdog site didn’t find contributions from that PAC in this year’s race. However, Barbara Martinez, who now leads that organization after a departure from the former chief, said in an email on Thursday that Great Schools continued showing its support in this year’s race.

“Great Schools for All was very pleased to support the slate of Moving Newark Schools Forward,” Martinez said in an emailed statement. A follow-up request for clarification on funding disclosure documents was not immediately answered as of publication.

Here’s a rundown of how much candidates reported raising and spending in the race, according to disclosure reports.

Kanileah Anderson

Total raised: $13,046

Total spent: $9,925

Notable donors: Team Baraka, $2,500; Newark Council President LaMonica McIver, $1,000; retired educator Kathleen Witcher, $1,200; Active PAC, $500; the South Ward Democratic Committee, $300; and two Newark school board employees, $500.

Dawn Haynes

Total raised: $9,194

Total spent: $0

Notable donors: Team Baraka, $2,500; city council members Dupre Kelly, C. Lawrence Crump, and Louise Scott Rountree, a total of $700; Active PAC, $500; International Union of Operating Engineers Local 68, $500; the Newark Teachers Union, $500; committee to reelect Wayne Richardson, $500; the South Ward Democratic Committee, $300; two Newark Board of Education employees gave $500 total; the Souder, Shabazz, and Woolridge Law Group, $500.

Vereliz Santana

Total raised: $11,650

Total spent: $0

Notable donors: Nine district employees gave a total of $2,250. Committee to reelect M. Teresa Ruiz, $1,000; the Newark Teachers Union, $1,000; the Hispanic Law Enforcement Society of Essex County, $1,000; the committee supporting Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo’s reelection, $500; the Newark East Ward Democratic Committee, $250; and Allied Risk Management Services, a security and technology company, $1,000.

Helena Vinhas

Total raised: $29,600

Total spent: $26,684

Notable donors: Committee to reelect Eliana Pintor Marin, $1,000; committee to reelect Michael J. Silva, $1,000; the East Ward Democratic Committee, $250; The Newark Teachers Union, $1,000; the Heavy and General Construction Laborers Union Local 472, $1,000; the Newark Firefighters Union, $500; and Citi Bay Builders, $1,000.

Catherine Carrera is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Newark. Contact Catherine at ccarrera@chalkbeat.org.

A new curriculum on desegregation teaches elementary students the legacy of the ‘Memphis 13’

2024-05-17T10:00:00+00:00

Read more of Chalkbeat's coverage of the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

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When elementary schoolers learn about Dwania Kyles, they’re struck by her bravery. When Kyles was in first grade, she and 12 others became the first Black students to walk into all-white classrooms in Memphis to begin desegregating the city’s school system.

Another thing the elementary students marvel at about those pioneers, Kyles says: “They’re still alive!”

The milestones of the Civil Rights Movement may seem like part of a long-ago history — it was 70 years ago this month that the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education against forced segregation. But it took years of battles before the so-called Memphis 13 made it into the all-white schools, with all-Black schools persisting long after the ruling. And the battles didn’t end there.

Kyles, for her part, has been working to make sure that complete history is better understood, spearheading a new curriculum to teach the city’s story of school desegregation.

Taught in public elementary school classrooms in Memphis — including the very ones the Memphis 13 desegregated — the curriculum’s lessons localize themes of the Civil Rights Movement by encouraging students to make a difference in their own communities and learn from their elders.

The goal is for students and teachers to develop a richer understanding of Memphis’ pivotal role in American history, at a time when most Memphis schools have become segregated again, and state laws can make teachers feel uncomfortable helping students investigate racial issues.

Every state, every district, every school, every classroom has its own school desegregation story. And school desegregation impacted everyone differently.
Gina Tillis, creator of 'Memphis 13' curriculum

Curriculum architects Gina Tillis and Anna Falkner developed the community-focused lessons alongside surviving members of the Memphis 13 and other educators, with initial support of a grant from the Library of Congress. The curriculum is a product of the newly created Memphis 13 Foundation, which supports the first graders’ legacies in other ways — including in towering murals of the students at the schools they desegregated.

Another important aspect of the curriculum: Children get to learn about other important children, not just important adults, Tillis said.

“How often do children see themselves?” Tillis asked. “... And children in your neighborhood, that went to your schools, that had a profound impact on society? Isn’t that powerful?”

Curriculum connects students to neighborhood, family stories of desegregation

Tillis said the professional development courses she leads on the curriculum leave teachers invigorated and eager to take the lessons back to their students and make them their own. One teacher who helped develop the curriculum wrote a play for her students to perform. Another who attended the training created a bulletin board that mixed historical photos and newspaper clippings with student responses.

The second grade curriculum includes a picture book project. For fifth graders, students conduct oral-history interviews. As part of the lesson, students learn to develop interview questions, conduct their interviews, and then evaluate what they learned as a class.

To create the Memphis 13 curriculum, some of the first graders who desegregated Memphis' public schools weighed in on how their legacy should be remembered.

Students have returned to their Memphis-Shelby County Schools classrooms with stories from their own elders about school desegregation in Memphis and other American cities, as well as international ones, Tillis and Kyles said.

“If you are not connected to the Memphis 13, then you probably are connected to another elder that desegregated a school,” Tillis said. “Because every state, every district, every school, every classroom has its own school desegregation story. And school desegregation impacted everyone differently.”

Tillis has plans to eventually expand the curriculum to include older students.

For Kyles, it is important that students learn how to listen well, and with compassion. What if, she wonders, there had been town halls and public-service ads after the Brown v. Board decision, to help society navigate the change?

“We can change all the laws. We can come up with all the policies in the world that we want to,” Kyles said. “We’ve now got to really focus on: How do we change people’s hearts and their belief systems?”

How Tennessee ‘prohibited concepts’ law affects discussions

The Memphis curriculum is aligned with Tennessee social studies standards and focuses on the role of primary sources, like newspaper articles, interviews, and other original documents.

The Memphis 13 Foundation has received funding from the state for its curriculum and other programming, which includes other community events.

But race is still a sensitive topic for many Tennessee teachers, now that lawmakers have placed restrictions on what they can say. Tillis includes a discussion of the 2021 “prohibited concepts” law — which Tennessee teachers are challenging in court — in training teachers to use the new curriculum.

The law restricts teachers from discussing 14 concepts that the Republican-controlled legislature deemed cynical or divisive, and the punishments can include stripping teachers of their licenses and cutting off funding to school districts.

The ‘Tennessee 3’ created a historic teachable moment. Will schools be allowed to teach it?

In practice, the law has made teachers more conscious about how they approach the material, Tillis said. And concerns about compliance have led to more scrutiny of reading lists associated with the curriculum as it has been implemented at MSCS, she said.

MSCS declined to make its staff available for an interview in time for the publication of this story.

While the curriculum falls within the law, student questions could push the boundaries. For instance, one of the prohibited concepts is inherent privilege based on race. Elementary school students who are just beginning to understand history may ask: “Why couldn’t they all go to school together?”

“We don’t have to say we’re talking about privilege,” Tillis said, “but it’s going to come up.”

Tillis has encouraged teachers to explain the law itself when prohibited concepts come up in classrooms. The students are “so smart. They know when something is not fair,” Tillis said. And they’re picking up on inequities in their own schools — even small, simple things — just like the Memphis 13 did when they began desegregating Memphis schools nearly 70 years ago.

It reminded Kyles of Memphis 13 student Alvin Freeman, who desegregated the white Gordon Elementary in North Memphis.

“Ice cream at Gordon wasn’t different from ice cream at Klondike,” the neighborhood’s Black school, an adult Freeman said in “The Memphis 13,” a documentary film that’s part of the curriculum. “Klondike didn’t have ice cream.”

Laura Testino covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach Laura at LTestino@chalkbeat.org.

In her own words: Remembering Linda Brown, who was at the center of America’s school segregation battles

2018-03-27T17:10:18+00:00

Linda Brown, whose name became part of American history through the Brown v. Board of Education case, died Sunday.

She became the center of the legal and political battle to integrate U.S. schools after she was denied access to an all-white school down the street in Topeka, Kansas in 1950. Her father and several other parents sued with the help of the NAACP, and their case made it to the Supreme Court.

When they won, it set a lasting legal precedent. Brown was attending an integrated junior high school by then, and she later recalled the initial desegregation of local elementary schools going smoothly. But over the course of her life, she saw the reality of school integration fall short, locally and nationally.

In Topeka, where Brown would send her own children to public school, some elementary schools remained disproportionately black. In 1979, Brown was part of a lawsuit to re-open the case, which eventually resulted in a 1993 desegregation order for the city’s school district. Across the country, schools remain highly stratified by class and race; in many districts, court orders have ended and schools have quickly resegregated.

Brown seemed ambivalent about the spotlight that came with her name, and some news articles recount failed attempts to reach her. But she often spoke at anniversaries of the 1954 ruling — and while she called it a victory, she wasn’t shy about expressing disappointment at just how much the Brown case itself didn’t achieve.

Here she is, telling her own story over the course of a lifetime.

“I was kind of afraid at first. I didn’t talk about it very much, I guess, because I was afraid it would get back to someone who would make trouble.”

“Last year in American history class we were talking about segregation and the Supreme Court decisions, and I thought, ‘Gee, some day I might be in the history books!’”

— 1961 interview with the New York Times, when Brown was 17

“It was not the quick fix we thought it would be.”

— 1984 New York Times interview marking the 30th anniversary of the ruling

“Brown was a very necessary victory. It opened up doors to entertainment, housing, education, employment. All facets of black life was affected by Brown. After 30 years, yes, you do feel that Brown is still not fulfilled. Which is very disheartening to me. I find that after 30 years, desegregation of schools is still very much the issue of today.”

— May 1984 interview with ABC News, marking the 30th anniversary

“I was a very young child when I started walking to school. I remember the walk as being very long at that time. In fact, it was several blocks up through railroad yards, and crossing a busy avenue, and standing on the corner, and waiting for the school bus to carry me two miles across town to an all black school. Being a young child, when I first started the walk it was very frightening to me um, and then when wintertime came, it was a very cold walk. I remember that. I remember walking, tears freezing up on my face, because I began to cry because it was so cold, and many times I had to turn around and run back home.”

— 1985 interview for “Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years”

“It is very disheartening. We are still going through the old arguments.”

— 1989 interview, again in the New York Times, at age 46

“We feel disheartened that 40 years later we’re still talking about desegregation. But the struggle has to continue.”

— 1994 Washington Post story, “Ruling’s Promise Unkept In Topeka,” on the ruling’s 40th anniversary

“It’s disheartening that we are still fighting. But we are dealing with human beings. As long as we are, there will always be those who feel the races should be separate.”

— 1994 New York Times story, “Aftermath of ’54 Ruling Disheartens the Browns”

“To me, the impact of Brown is best seen in the increasing numbers of black professionals today. These are the people that, after 1954, were able to have some degree of choice. This surely made a difference in their aspirations and their achievements.”

“I ran across a quote, in a new book by one of our black women authors — her name is Mildred Pitts Walter — that I believe says it all. ‘It is not the treatment of a people that degrades them, but their acceptance of it.’”

— 2004 speech at the Chautauqua Institution, near the ruling’s 50th anniversary

It took this Texas school district 48 years to desegregate. Now, some fear a return to the past.

2018-11-29T06:01:37+00:00

This story about school segregation was produced by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that provides free news, data, and events on Texas public policy, politics, government, and statewide issues.

LONGVIEW — At the first Friday football game in the first school year since the school district in this East Texas town had been declared racially integrated — nearly 50 years after a federal court order — thousands of spectators dressed in forest-green Lobos gear filled the stadium.

Enduring the late-August heat, fans filed into creaky fold-down seats they’d reserved for years. Some who had attended segregated white or black schools in Longview decades ago now shared the same rows. When the marching band played the school’s fight song, most of the crowd formed an “L” with their fingers and rocked them back and forth in unison.

Ted Beard, a longtime Longview Independent School District board member, watched the football players race across the field and wondered how long the commitment to integration would last.

The district is at a pivotal moment now that a federal court has released it from decades-long supervision of its policies for educating students of color. It has made progress to topple the barriers still holding black and Hispanic students back from the same academic success as white students.Whether it continues a commitment to student equity now depends solely on the collective will of a school board that could change with a single election cycle. And that worries Beard, whose father was part of the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965 and faced threats and violence along the way. Beard is black and had two kids go through Longview schools.

“The board could change and then the direction could change, and those that are ultimately affected are going to be the students,” Beard said.

Ted Beard, pictured at an August board meeting, has served on the Longview ISD school board since 1998.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision declared school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, but Longview ISD — along with hundreds of other Texas school districts — resisted until federal judges intervened and imposed detailed desegregation plans across large swaths of the state.

In 1970, an East Texas-based federal court mandated Longview ISD tackle a long list of tasks designed to make sure its black students were learning and playing in the same classrooms and playgrounds as their white peers — including closing four all-black schools and busing black students to formerly all-white schools throughout the district.

Forty-seven years later, Longview was one of only three Texas districts that remained under a federal court order, along with San Angelo and Garland.

A federal judge fully released the district from that order in June, and just weeks before the school year started, Beard and the rest of the board unanimously approved a voluntary plan to keep the district’s schools desegregated and ensure that students of color have equal opportunities to graduate and succeed beyond high school.

But Beard and others know the district has yet to overcome the deep disparities that have defined so much of its history. In Longview ISD, white students — who make up a fraction of the district’s enrollment — still outpace their black and Hispanic peers in many ways. They are roughly half of the students enrolled at Longview’s specialized elementary school, which has higher academic standards. And they are more likely to take classes and tests meant to prepare them for college.

And district leaders also have struggled with a new education challenge that federal judges couldn’t have foreseen in 1970 — adequately providing a burgeoning group of Hispanic students with crucial services they need to learn English.

Order from the court

Sixteen years after the Brown ruling, the federal government sued the state of Texas for refusing to integrate most of its schools. In 1970, a federal judge almost 40 miles from Longview placed nearly the entire state under court order and threatened sanctions against defiant school districts — resulting in one of the largest series of desegregation orders in the nation’s history.

Longview ISD Superintendent James Wilcox said the desegregation order was in many ways outdated by the time he started in 2007.

The same court ordered Longview to integrate both its faculty and students. That meant busing more than 600 black students to white schools and the consolidation or closure of several all-black schools. If white students tried to transfer, the court order mandated that they could only be reassigned to schools in which they would be in the minority.

Longview ISD was unlikely to have integrated without a court order. Like people in much of the state, folks in Longview saw the federal push for integration as a threat to their autonomy.

The effort to improve facilities across the district was slow. Board members began pushing to renovate some of the old school buildings in the late 90s. Since the integration order, white families — who still made up the majority of Longview’s population — had left the school district in droves for private schools, and white voters actively resisted paying to renovate the district’s schools.

“If you’re an Anglo family and you’re taking your kid out of school, why would you vote yes to float a bond?” said Chris Mack, a white board member first elected in 1993 who was a middle school student in Longview ISD when it was forced to integrate.

By many accounts, the turning point came when James Wilcox was hired as superintendent in 2007.

With Wilcox at the helm, the community approved — in a measure that passed in 2008 by fewer than 20 votes — a $266.9 million bond to finance a massive overhaul of the district’s schools. Longview ISD built eight schools, renovated three others and upgraded technology across the district.

The district made more progress integrating black students after 2008 than it had in the previous 15 years, according to an analysis of school segregation data by Meredith Richards, an assistant professor of education policy and leadership at Southern Methodist University.

While overhauling schools, the district went back to the federal court to argue that it no longer needed an extensive busing system, which district leaders argued had become tedious.

“We did what was best for our students while meeting the requirements of the desegregation order,” Wilcox said from his office earlier this year. “But it was a dinosaur, a pyramid, or whatever you want to say — something that in our mind has lost its function because it’s a totally different district.”

In 2014, the courts released the district from some of the restrictions of the original 1970 court order. In exchange, the district’s leaders promised to spend the next three years working to improve in areas where Longview still needed to make progress after more than four decades: monitoring racial disparities in student discipline, preventing students from transferring to schools where their race was the majority, hiring a more diverse staff and ensuring students of color had equal opportunity to take advanced classes.

A strategy with a Montessori in mind

Since 2017, most pre-K and kindergarten students in Longview have begun their education at East Texas Montessori Prep, a $31 million, 150,000-square-foot building in the middle of the district.

“We have the same exact expectations for every student,” Wilcox said.

Widely considered an exclusive educational program more common in private schools, Montessori prioritizes self-directed, hands-on student learning.

Troy Simmons, who became Longview ISD’s second black board member in 1985, saw East Texas Montessori Prep as a way to give students of color a competitive advantage early in their lives. Community members often responded to the district’s pitch to create the Montessori school by complaining about how much it would cost, he said.

“People don’t believe in educating all children. They believe in educating their kids, not your kid,” Simmons said.

Troy Simmons, a Longview ISD school board member, has long pushed for equity for students of color and faced backlash from a majority white community.

Among the strongest objections to a district-wide Montessori school came from parents at Johnston-McQueen Elementary School, located in the whitest part of the school district, where parents successfully advocated to keep a traditional pre-K and kindergarten program for students zoned there.

To Simmons, the separate program is a figurative foot in the door, impeding the district’s plan for a cohesive education system.

If the decision had been left up to Beard, Longview ISD would not have given up court supervision at all.

His opposition is recorded in a few lines in the minutes from the November 2017 board meeting: “Knowing that at a drop of a dime the board could change and take…its sight off what is best for ALL students, he will not support this motion.”

Beard voted no, joined by Shan Bauer, who is also black.

Longview ISD leaders consider the East Texas Montessori Prep campus a pillar of progress, starting all students in the same place.

Simmons, joined the majority in the 5-2 vote to ask the court to fully release the district — a decision he later regretted.

In June 2018, Judge Robert Schroeder lifted Longview ISD’s court order.

Another challenge emerges

The district was also confronting a new challenge that the courts in 1970 had never anticipated: Providing an equal education to an exploding population of Hispanic students — many of them immigrants or first-generation citizens, and many of them Spanish speakers.

Without a court order hanging over them, the district’s leaders, by their own admission, have struggled to lift Hispanic students like they did, belatedly, for black students.

Hispanic enrollment in Longview schools has almost doubled in the last 13 years alone. The district has included them in many of its desegregation measures, particularly in its efforts to recruit students for advanced classes, said Jody Clements, an assistant superintendent at Longview ISD.

But in Longview, most Hispanic students need bilingual or English as a second language instruction — hundreds more students enrolled in those programs between 2009 and 2017, state data shows.

The number of teachers for those programs only increased by about five.

“We haven’t cracked that nut yet,” Mack said after an August school board meeting during which the issue was discussed in executive session.

Chris Mack, a Longview ISD board member, said many white residents resisted paying for school renovations because their children were not enrolled in the district.

The new reality

In August, Longview’s school board unanimously approved a seven-page voluntary desegregation plan that it plans to implement with the help of a $15 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Starting this year, five predominately black and Hispanic schools will offer special programs, such as advanced engineering or college preparatory courses, to attract higher-income students and white students living in the district but attending private school or homeschool.

The plan is self-enforced, with no federal judge serving as referee.

Longview ISD leaders will no longer limit student transfers to certain schools based on race or set goals for the percentage of white, black or Hispanic students for each school. Instead, if they notice a school is becoming more segregated, they will correct the problem using “race-neutral” strategies, such as recruiting students from low-income neighborhoods — which some experts say is not as effective in achieving racial integration.

About 56.2 percent of white students graduated ready for college English and math in 2016, according to state data, compared with a dismal 23 percent of Hispanic students and 16 percent of black students. That disparity is similar among students who take Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes in high school.

Will the momentum continue?

The community’s commitment to equity could soon be tested. Though Mack was just re-elected to another three-year term, he will likely step down after handing his daughter her diploma at graduation this spring, after nearly 20 years on the board.

Longview ISD was recently declared desegregated, but still hasn’t toppled the barriers keeping black and Hispanic students from success.

Simmons, who now has the longest tenure on the board, regularly considers whether it’s time to retire. He’s tired, he says, but leaving is not a decision he can make without considering the impact on Longview’s progress.

“I have a lot of faith in our superintendent. I have a lot of faith in the core of our board, the way it operates, but I also know that one change, one blip, one glitch can turn the board into something completely different and basically destroy everything that we’ve built in these past years in doing this,” Simmons said solemnly at the start of the year. “And so that makes me hesitant about not seeking re-election, but at the same time I am tired of fighting this the way I have to.”

Four months later, Simmons ran for — and secured — another three-year term.

Ryan Murphy contributed to this report.

Disclosure: Southern Methodist University has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Brown v. Board of Education turns 65 today. These students are still fighting for integration in NYC schools.

2019-05-17T11:00:09+00:00

A full 65 years after Brown v. Board of Education was unanimously decided, New York City schools remain among the most segregated in the country.

To mark the Friday anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision, those most affected by its unfulfilled promise — students — are demanding action.

Teens in every borough are taking to the streets to spread the stories of their own experiences with segregation. At City Hall, teens will sit down midday with top decision makers to push for changes to the high school admissions process.

“We can’t just ignore it,” said Joaquin Soto, a high school junior in Brooklyn and advocate with IntegrateNYC. “Real action needs to take place and it’s in the hands of the higher officials in this city.”

Young people in New York City have been a leading voice in a budding grassroots fight for schools that are more diverse and inclusive. Friday’s actions turn up pressure on Mayor Bill de Blasio to take more decisive steps toward integration just as he jumps into the 2020 race for the White House, touting his progressive credentials.

One persistent criticism, however, has been his reluctance to take on deeply rooted segregation in the country’s largest school system. His most high profile proposal — to help integrate the city’s prestigious specialized high schools by scrapping the exam that currently is the sole admissions factor — relies on the state legislature to act and has been mired in a legal challenge.

De Blasio also declined an invitation to meet on Friday with the students of Teens Take Charge, who will sit down with some of City Hall and the education department’s most senior officials to lobby for changes in how students are assigned to high schools. The mayor is scheduled to be in Iowa — his first campaign stop after officially announcing his presidential bid on Thursday.

Among the teens’ demands are for the city to provide more access to information for students navigating the sometimes byzantine high school admissions process, tweaking the city’s school assignment algorithm to encourage academic diversity, and making the city’s specialized high schools plan a reality.

“We find that diversity has been discussed and integration has been discussed, but generally that’s the only thing that has happened,” said Tiffani Torres, a high school junior and a member of Teens Take Charge. “We want action.”

While some teens lobby City Hall for changes, others will be hitting the pavement. Advocates with IntegrateNYC are handing out copies of a student-written newspaper during Friday’s commute that chronicles the need for integration from their own classroom perspectives.

They were inspired by an iconic photograph of Nettie Hunt, a black mother explaining the meaning of the Brown v. Board decision to her daughter while sitting on the steps of the Supreme Court in May 1954. In the photo, one arm is wrapped around her young daughter while she holds up a newspaper with the block-type headline: “High Court bans segregation in public schools.”

Sarah Zapiler, the group’s adult advisor, said students were struck by the hope portrayed in the photograph, given that decades later, the headlines aren’t as encouraging. They also felt like their own stories aren’t being told.

“So they were like, let’s make the news,” she said. “Something that’s really important to us is creating and shaping the narrative.”

After fanning out at transit hubs across the city to distribute 25,000 copies of the paper, students will head to the Red Steps at Times Square where they’ll throw a “retirement” party to say goodbye to school segregation.

Leanne Nunes, a high school junior in the Bronx who helped plan the event, says it’s also a way to highlight the progress already being made, even if it’s insufficient. She pointed to community-driven changes to middle school admissions in places like Brooklyn’s District 15 as something to be celebrated.

“This is a way for us to see a more hopeful future,” she said.

Newark area has some of the country’s most segregated schools, study finds

2022-05-18T17:37:08+00:00

The schools in Newark and nearby communities are among the most severely segregated in the nation, according to a new nationwide analysis.

The Newark area ranks first in economic segregation and second in Black-white segregation, according to the analysis of public and private schools in all 403 metropolitan areas in the United States. The rate of segregation between Black and white students in Newark’s region is nearly three times the national average.

The Newark metropolitan area includes 118 school districts spread across six counties in northern New Jersey and one county in Pennsylvania. The vast majority of racial and economic segregation in that area occurs between school districts, not within them, according to the analysis, which also found that school segregation is more extreme in the Northeast than in other regions of the country.

The new report was published Tuesday, exactly 68 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools are inherently unequal. On the same day four years ago, a coalition of families and advocacy groups filed a lawsuit claiming that New Jersey’s widespread school segregation violates the state constitution and harms students.

“Almost seven decades after Brown v. Board, we still see intense levels of segregation across the country,” said Halley Potter, author of the report and a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a liberal think tank.

The Newark area “stands out as one of the most segregated metro areas,” Potter added, though the legal challenge, which a state Superior Court judge is expected to rule on in the coming weeks, has the potential to change that. “It also stands out to me as one of the places where I do see some hope.”

Potter partnered with the Segregation Index, a project led by researchers Ann Owens and Sean Reardon. Their analysis, including an interactive map, is based on data from the 2017-18 school year across all metropolitan areas, which are home to about 85% of the U.S. population.

The analysis uses a 0-1 index to measure segregation, where 0 indicates that students in different racial or economic groups are evenly spread across schools and 1 means the groups are fully separated. In this model, a value above 0.5 is considered “very severe” segregation.

Among all metro areas in the U.S., the average level of Black-white student segregation is 0.24, the analysis found. But in the Newark metro area, the segregation level is a staggering 0.71 — second only to the Milwaukee area, whose level is 0.73.

The segregation level shows the average demographic gap, measured in percentage points, between schools in a given area. The way the analysis explains it: If the average Black student in the Newark region attends a school where only 10% of students are white, then the average white student goes to a school that is 81% white — a 71-point gap.

While the analysis combines seven counties in the Newark area, vast racial disparities also can be found within individual counties. For example, in Essex County where Newark is located, 75% of students in the Glen Ridge school district are white. Just three miles away in the East Orange district, only 1% of students are white.

“One of the top-line findings continues to be that Black-white segregation is the most extreme form of racial segregation in our schools,” Potter said.

Schools are also divided by family income. Across all metro areas, the average economic segregation level is 0.19, according to the analysis, which used students’ eligibility for free or reduced-priced lunch as a proxy for low family income.

But the Newark area’s rate, 0.49, is more than double the national average and higher than in any other metro area. In other words, the analysis says, if the average poor student in the Newark metro area attends a school where 75% of students are also poor, the average non-poor student goes to a school where only 26% of students are poor.

The analysis also sought to pinpoint the sources of this segregation. It looked at how students are sorted between public and private schools, within and across school districts, and between different types of public schools, such as traditional and charter schools.

It found that, nationwide, private schools and charter schools account for a small portion of racial school segregation — just 12% and 4%, respectively. By contrast, 35% of the segregation between white and non-white students happens among traditional public schools in the same districts.

But the bulk of racial segregation — 54% — is caused by the differences between districts, not within them. In other words, white students and students of color are more likely to be enrolled in separate districts than to attend different schools in the same district.

A table in the report shows the main drivers of racial school segregation in each region and among all metropolitan areas.

Many districts are “wildly different from each other,” Potter said, “even though the schools within each district might not have that many demographic differences.”

The story is somewhat different for economic segregation. The analysis found that nationwide, 57% of the sorting of poor and non-poor students happens within school districts, while 43% occurs between districts.

However, that is not the case in the Northeast, where 73% of economic school segregation and 76% of racial segregation happens across district lines. The reason: States like New Jersey are home to hundreds of small school districts that map onto segregated communities, all but ensuring that schools will reflect the localities’ divided demographics. By contrast, Southern states, many of which faced federal desegregation orders in the past, tend to have countywide school districts that each encompass a range of communities.

The Newark area offers an extreme example of how fragmented districts can drive segregation. A whopping 96% of economic segregation and 88% of racial segregation occurs between the area’s small, demographically divided districts, according to the analysis. Only a fraction of the segregation happens within those districts.

Segregation between districts presents a special challenge.

“That’s not a problem that school district leaders — superintendents or school boards — can solve on their own,” said Potter, noting that those officials control the enrollment policies and attendance boundaries only inside their own districts. “It really requires having some state or federal involvement.”

In the decades since the Brown decision, conservative majorities on the Supreme Court have struck down or curtailed school desegregation plans. Meanwhile, many federal desegregation orders have been lifted or gone unenforced.

But advocates in New Jersey believe they can circumvent those legal obstacles by turning to the state’s own constitution, which explicitly bans school segregation. In their lawsuit, they propose possible remedies, such as creating magnet schools that enroll students from multiple districts, allowing students to attend schools in different districts, or consolidating districts.

On Tuesday, three racial justice groups in New Jersey released a statement lamenting the persistence of school segregation in the state so long after the 1954 Brown decision. The groups — Salvation and Social Justice; the Inclusion Project; and the Latino Action Network, which is a plaintiff in the lawsuit — said they hope New Jersey’s high court will force the state to live up to its ideals.

“Now, thanks to a lawsuit filed four years ago today,” they wrote, “New Jersey students have a path toward a fairer, more diverse education.”

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city and across New Jersey. Contact Patrick at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

Study finds segregation increasing in large districts — and school choice is a factor

2024-05-06T07:00:00+00:00

Read more of Chalkbeat's coverage of the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

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Over the last three decades, school segregation has been increasing — and it has increased the most within the large school districts that enroll many of the nation’s students of color.

Schools have become more segregated in these communities even as neighborhoods have become more racially mixed and as economic inequality between racial groups has declined.

Two main factors are driving the increase: the end of most court oversight that required school districts to create integrated schools, and policies that favor school choice and parental preference.

Those are the findings of new research on school segregation from Sean Reardon of Stanford University and Ann Owens of the University of Southern California. Their analysis coincides with the 70th anniversary this month of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ended legally mandated racial segregation in public schools and overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal.” They said the findings should “sound an alarm for educators and policymakers.”

“Although school segregation is much lower than 60 years ago, both racial and economic segregation are increasing,” the authors wrote. “Those increases appear to be the direct result of educational policy and legal decisions. They are not the inevitable result of demographic changes — and can be changed by alternative policy choices.”

The analysis includes an interactive map that allows users to see school integration and segregation trends in their communities.

Reardon and Owens looked at national school enrollment data, including going back to 1967 for communities where older data was available. School segregation fell sharply after the Supreme Court’s Green v. New Kent County decision in 1968. The decision banned “freedom of choice” plans that states had used to undermine integration efforts and mandated desegregation plans in many districts.

The study measures segregation using a normalized exposure index, which compares the demographic makeup of schools attended by students of a particular racial group. The number 1 represents complete segregation and 0 represents fully integrated schools.

Overall, schools remain far more integrated today than they were before 1973, the analysis found. The 1970s saw widespread busing programs to create racially balanced schools, programs that continued into the 1990s in some communities.

Between 1991 and 2019, Black-white segregation increased by 3.5 percentage points in the 533 districts that serve at least 2,500 Black students, an increase of 25% from historically low levels. But in the 100 largest school districts, which serve about 38% of all Black students, the analysis found segregation increased by 8 percentage points — a 64% increase.

Hispanic and Asian American students attend more integrated schools on average than Black students, but rates of white-Hispanic and white-Asian American segregation have nearly doubled since the 1980s, the analysis found.

In Denver, advocates found that Latino students and English learners are especially likely to attend very segregated schools. A study last year that looked at wealthy California school districts found that white families move away as more Asian American families move in — and fear of academic competition may be a factor.

Economic segregation increased considerably in that same time period, Reardon and Owens found. In 2019, the average Black student attended a school where the rate of students receiving free- or reduced-price lunch was 18 percentage points higher than in schools attended by white students in the same district.

Segregated schools affect student opportunities

The high rates of poverty in predominantly Black and Hispanic schools contribute to the test score gaps and opportunity gaps associated with segregation, Owens said.

“It’s not that sitting next to a student of a certain race makes the school good or bad,” she said. “But we’ve never done ‘separate but equal.’ Until we eliminate broader systemic underlying inequalities in our society, we haven’t shown an ability to actually serve kids equitably.”

Owens said previous research on contemporary school segregation has focused more on metropolitan areas, finding more segregation between school districts than within them. That continues to be the case. But those analyses obscured how much segregation was increasing in large school districts where most Black and brown students attend school, she said.

Smaller school districts tend to have fewer schools overall and serve relatively fewer students of color. The result is that those schools are more racially integrated.

In larger school districts, neighborhood segregation contributes to school segregation — but it hasn’t driven the increases in school segregation over the last few decades, Reardon and Owens said, because neighborhood segregation has been declining during the same time period.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, their analysis found that the end of widespread court-ordered integration efforts, along with other voluntary school integration policies, has played a major role in schools becoming less integrated. School re-segregation accelerated starting in 2000, after court oversight ended in the 1990s. They estimate that school segregation would be less by about 20% if court orders had remained in place.

The researchers also found that charter school expansion was strongly associated with less integrated schools. The study did not look at the impact of private school choice programs, such as school vouchers, or district open enrollment policies. Instead, the authors treated charter expansion as a proxy for a robust school choice system, as those policies often go hand in hand.

Studies have found that school choice policies can accelerate gentrification, allowing affluent families to buy homes in low-income communities while opting out of the local schools — one reason racially integrated neighborhoods don’t always lead to racially integrated schools.

Reardon said they didn’t look at whether charter schools themselves are more segregated than district-run schools. That type of analysis can be misleading if, for example, a school district closed schools that mostly served Black and Hispanic children and replaced them with charters. Instead, they looked at the growth of charter schools over time within a school district and whether the district as a whole became more segregated. They found a strong association between the two.

The analysis estimates that school segregation would be less by about 14% without charter expansion.

Previous research by Brian Kisida of the University of Missouri and Tomas Monarrez and Matt Chingos of the Urban Institute also found that charter schools contribute to segregation. However, the effect was more modest, accounting for about 5% to 7% of school segregation. Students crossing district lines to attend charter schools offset some of the segregating effects.

In a separate paper, the same authors found that in neighborhoods with more Black and Hispanic representation, charter, private, and district schools contribute equally to school segregation, while in neighborhoods with less Black and Hispanic representation, private schools contribute the most to school segregation, though charters also play a role.

Brian Gill, a policy fellow at Mathematica who has studied charter schools, said people should not make a leap between charter schools contributing to less integrated schools and charter schools contributing to achievement gaps between students of color and their white peers. Many parents of color choose charter schools because they believe they will better serve their children. The better outcomes urban charter schools produce for Black, Hispanic, and low-income students should be considered alongside the potential harms of less integrated schools, he said.

“Whatever we have now is nothing like the legally imposed separation that existed before Brown,” he said.

Reardon said he’s not arguing that charter schools are bad or that parents having choices is bad.

“We’re saying that one consequence, empirically, of the expansion of this kind of choice regime is that it leads to more segregation,” he said. “And that should be taken into account in policy thinking about how we design school systems.”

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Why did so many Black teachers lose their jobs after the Brown v. Board ruling?

2024-05-10T13:00:00+00:00

I have no vivid recollections of attending a segregated school, but I am aware that my educational journey commenced in Head Start at what was then Lincoln Consolidated School for Black students.

I was born in 1964 — my middle daughter playfully labels me a “Baby Boomer” — and my life aligns with my county’s momentous period of school desegregation.

Valencia Ann Abbott, right, with one of her first grade teachers, Cornelia Price, in 2019.

My earliest educational memory is going to first grade at Happy Home School, a couple of miles from my home on the outskirts of Rockingham County, North Carolina. There, I was under the tutelage of Mrs. Neal and Mrs. Price, two impeccably dressed Black women. They were the only women I saw outside of church who dressed so elegantly. My journey continued with Mrs. Jones as my fourth grade teacher and Mrs. Townes as my fifth grade teacher.

Read more of Chalkbeat's coverage of the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

Happy Home School only went through seventh grade. By that time, the county school system was in transition as new schools were being built. I had two Black teachers in eighth grade: sisters, Mrs. Jefferies, the English teacher — to this day, I think about her whenever I see a diagrammed sentence — and Mrs. Blackwell, the math teacher. At the new county high school I attended, I had a couple of Black teachers, too: Ms. Lindsey for English and Mrs. Keesee for business.

Recent scholarship tells us that Black students with one Black teacher by third grade are 7% more likely to graduate high school and 13% more likely to enroll in college. After having two Black teachers, Black students’ likelihood of enrolling in college increased by 32%. Growing up, I knew nothing of this. I was a student whose parents never graduated from high school in rural North Carolina, who loved to read, and who decided in seventh grade that I would be a lawyer.

May 17 marks 70 years since the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which found racial segregation in schools to be unconstitutional. I cannot personally speak to what it’s like to attend a segregated school. I can, however, speak to the power of Black teachers, many of whom were forced out of the classroom following the decision.

Valencia Ann Abbott as a first grader at Happy Home School in Rockingham County, North Carolina.

Speaking over the years to those who did go through a segregated school system, not once did I ever hear sorrow, neglect, or regret. I have heard stories of pride, responsibility, and community and what was lost when Black educators were pushed out when Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision dismantled the Black educational community.

I would come to understand that Black educators, even those who were more highly qualified and degreed than their counterparts, lost their teaching positions. The roles they had long filled went to white teachers amid school desegregation efforts. Some 38,000 Black teachers were displaced in the South alone in the decade following the Brown decision, research has shown.

In some cases, racist educators refused to hire Black teachers. In others, they were demoted for no good reason, or forced to sit for new licensing exams that, according to Leslie T. Fenwick, the author of “Jim Crow’s Pink Slip,” served a “racist agenda.”

The loss of Black teachers, especially Black males — I would not have a Black male instructor until my senior year of college — has been chronicled in books such as Fenwick’s and “Greater than Equal” by Sarah Caroline Thuesen. This mass displacement had profound effects on communities and the teaching profession, ravaging the Black teacher pipeline for decades to come. The fallout explains why Black teachers are so often underrepresented to this day, Fenwick has said.

Knowing what I know now, I wonder if the outcome would have been different for me if I had not had those Black teachers sprinkled among the exceptional educators who taught me through high school. I know that my opportunity to graduate from college plotted the course for my daughters to do so, which they did.

More than four decades after I graduated high school, I think about how many students in the district I attended — the same district where I now work — may go through the whole K-12 system without ever having a Black teacher. I teach at a high school, and for most of my students, I am the first teacher of color they have ever had, and I don’t get them until their sophomore year.

So 70 years after the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the words of the legendary Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes resonate still:

The past has been a mint

Of Blood and sorrow

That must not be

True of Tomorrow

Valencia Ann Abbott is a social studies and history teacher at Rockingham Early College High School in Wentworth, North Carolina, where she was named the school’s 2024-2025 Teacher of the Year. Abbott received the 2024 Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Excellence in Teaching Award from the North Carolina Council for the Social Studies in partnership with the Social Studies School Service.

The 12 Black women behind Brown v. Board often go unrecognized. A new exhibit aims to change that.

2024-05-13T22:38:21+00:00

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To unearth the forgotten history of the Kansas women who served as plaintiffs in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, Donna Rae Pearson had to dig.

Without published scholarship to go on, Pearson and two other researchers hunted down the women’s obituaries, cross-referenced their details against Census records and city directories, and pored over newspaper clippings, oral histories, and court transcripts.

It was no easy feat: Some women’s names had changed, and some had moved as far away as Oregon.

The result of their work is “The Women of Brown,” which recognizes the lives and contributions of the 12 Black mothers who signed their names, alongside Oliver Brown, to the lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court.

Twelve Black women participated in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, but they often get overlooked. A new exhibit aims to shine a light on their lives and contributions.

A pop-up exhibit showcasing their findings is traveling across Kansas to mark the 70-year anniversary of the landmark decision. That includes a stop at Topeka Public Schools’ commemorative event this week.

Pearson hopes that students and others who see the exhibit will leave curious to find out more about the Black women who committed acts of “everyday activism” to further their children’s education.

Read more of Chalkbeat's coverage of the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

“I don’t think Black women — I don’t think women — get the credit that they are supposed to have when it comes to these kinds of activities,” said Pearson, a museum curator at the Kansas Historical Society and a former local history librarian at the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library. “I think that’s becoming more and more of a conversation that we have today: How did they contribute to these movements?”

The documents Pearson and her team collected will be housed at the Kansas Historical Society State Archives and Topeka’s local library, so future researchers won’t have to do as much legwork. Pearson is also starting to hear from relatives and others who knew the women, which she hopes will contribute to the scholarship, too.

“We just needed to bring them out of the dark,” she said. “We needed to say their names out loud again.”

Chalkbeat spoke with Pearson about why the 12 women joined the lawsuit and the challenges of researching Black women’s history. She also has thoughts on how students and teachers can keep the conversation going (see sidebar).

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How did the 12 Black women who became plaintiffs in the Brown case come to be part of the lawsuit?

We don’t know exactly how all of them came to be part of it. Lucinda Todd, one of the plaintiffs, and actually the first plaintiff to sign up, was heavily involved in the NAACP. She was on a special committee when talk of this lawsuit started happening, and she helped recruit parents.

We also identified different locations throughout the city [of Topeka] where these women could have possibly met. They were all involved in formal religious activities. Some of them went to church together. Some of them were involved in social clubs together. So we believe there was this network where they could have been simply having coffee or tea and saying: ‘Hey, I decided to sign up. How about you?’

Why have they historically gotten less attention than Oliver Brown?

In our legal system, ‘et al’ can hide a lot of things. That means ‘and more.’ Et al really covers up, initially, the fact that these women were part of the case.

But then you go into a little bit deeper reasons. These are Black women. And our history is not recorded as well as the majority’s history.

The case, initially, was not necessarily as well-received, for different reasons. Why this case happened does not fit our prevailing narrative [in Kansas] of being a ‘free state,’ a state about civil rights. We were actually one of three northern states that allowed permissive segregation, which means, by law, they could segregate.

As part of "The Women of Brown" exhibit, researchers gathered information about the lives and contributions of the 12 Black women who signed their names to the famous lawsuit.

What were the ways in which the women saw that their children were not getting equal opportunities as white children at school?

When you read the transcript from the local court trial, you’ll find that there were problems with the busing system and being able to pick up their children in a timely manner. The Brown children had to walk almost a mile by railroad tracks just to get to their bus stop. These long commutes would have interfered with their schooling. You’re going to get up earlier than a person who’s going to walk two minutes. That’s eating time before school and after school.

[Students who lived far from their schools] couldn’t go home for lunch. They had to bring lunch, and supposedly the lunch wasn’t going to be as nutritious as a hot, home-cooked meal.

There were other things, in terms of activities that were not available. What sparked some of this was Lucinda Todd was super mad about the fact that her daughter, Nancy, could not participate in the district-wide [music] program. There were 18 schools, but only 14 of them were participating. What schools did they leave out? The four Black schools. It was because of Lucinda Todd’s complaints that they were finally able to get [music programs].

There were sports available at the upper levels in Topeka, but the [activities were] segregated. So there was a Black basketball team and a white basketball team. There was a Black prom and a white prom. Even though they all went to school together, all those activities were actually segregated. [Kansas law at the time permitted segregated elementary schools, but high schools were supposed to be integrated.]

Initially, the women were featured in some news coverage, but then their voices just kind of dropped out. What were you able to glean from what they did share over the years?

As the secretary of the NAACP, Lucinda Todd sent out this very long press release that explains the case to the community. But over time, you see the male figures that were involved with the case, they continue to be elevated. But the women, you don’t see them asked as many questions later on, or any questions.

Toward the ‘80s and ‘90s, when the historic site was being lobbied for and built here, they brought them back again. Locally, the one disarming piece that I found was an article that was talking about them, and it tried to give a status update. It kept saying: ‘No information known.’ And we discovered that some of these women were actually still alive, living in the city.

But I also have to remember … the challenge with doing women’s history — not just Black women, but women in general — is we are [often] forced to change our names. In some cases, especially then, they were not referred to by their first and last name. They’re referred to as ‘Mrs. Brown.’ And it’s like: ‘Well, Mrs. Brown surely has a first name!’ So that made it a little bit challenging.

How do the women who participated in this lawsuit fit within the larger tradition of African American women participating in advocacy and organizing in their communities?

It’s kind of a culmination of all the experiences they were able to have. Colored women’s clubs were here as early as the 1890s. Black women are the backbone of those [church] organizations. When you decide to have an event at church, and you’re the one in charge, you start organizing. You start getting people on board, you start raising money.

Among "The Women of Brown" is Lucinda Todd, whose letter to the national NAACP sparked the lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court.

We had Black women who were involved in entrepreneurship. There were women who owned their own businesses. They were not used to necessarily sitting on the sidelines here. I think as organizers, they were in a community where it was acceptable for them to sign up and do things like this.

What lessons can we draw from ‘The Women of Brown’ about the significance of everyday activism?

I think we need to broaden our definition of what activism is. It is not always Martin Luther King, standing at a pulpit. Everyday activism is really the little things that you can do in your own community to make a difference. It’s when we take a stand for something that we believe in.

Some would say what I’m doing right now is being an activist. I’m bringing up a story; I’m posing challenging questions.

Did you make any personal connections to what you learned about the women of Brown?

As a historian, I very intentionally did not talk about the decision [in the past]. Part of the reason was because of the way it is portrayed in the media. Yes, it is a celebration of sorts. But y’all have to remember, the reason why this case happened is because there was blatant segregation in this state for an extended period of time, within our lives.

My class, when I entered elementary school in the ‘70s, was considered the first truly integrated class. My older brothers, my older sisters, in particular, went to segregated Black schools. And this was post the [Brown] decision. These are things we are still wrestling with.

I didn’t think we were looking at [the Brown decision] from a very truthful perspective. I don’t think we were looking at all the nuances, and the impact that it created on different communities.

During this time period, you had a couple of things happen to the Black community. Redlining forced us into one community. With desegregation of schools, you were breaking up that school network, that bonding of a community. Then the next step was urban renewal — that totally wiped out some of these communities.

I needed to look closer at the decision from another perspective, so I could understand it.

What would you like for students who are going to see the exhibit to take away from it?

I hope it’s a conversation-starter for them. I hope that they can relate to the women.

They were ignored. Hopefully, this will again bring them to the forefront and shine some light on them. Hopefully, it makes you curious enough to want to learn a little bit more about them.

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

What we leave out when we teach about Brown v. Board

2024-05-15T12:30:00+00:00

I came to the United States 35 years after the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka decision, ruling that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

As a mixed race student arriving from England with a strong accent and an Afro, I was not warmly received by my new suburban school community. I entered elementary school at age 7. The elementary school students immediately made fun of me for my British accent, and I was often called an immigrant and even a pilgrim.

Abigail Henry

By middle and high school, my peers made annoyingly frequent statements of their supposed colorblindness. “Abigail, I don’t see you as different from me,” they would say, “We are just the same.” Their statements, in which they claimed not to notice my Blackness, made me realize they were in denial about the racism that existed in our school community.

Now that I’m an educator, sometimes I look back at my experience and wonder, “What if I just had one Black teacher when I arrived?” I look back and know that pervasive racism in our school system is real and teacher repression — when educators are silenced and lessons challenged or banned — is real.

That is why Brown, which turns 70 this week, is often not taught to the fullness of its story and legacy. It is often taught as a celebration of American justice, equality, and exceptionalism. When I was in high school, the history teacher would smile at me during the lesson, proud of this history. I remember thinking, “Oh, so because of Brown, I should be grateful that I am the only Black student in the classroom right now? Because, mostly, I feel uncomfortable.”

To teach Brown fully, it needs to be done so through LaGarrett King’s principle of Black historical contention — the concept that not all Black people have the same ideas and approaches to Black liberation. But most of the time, we get one-dimensional lessons on the ruling because pan-African and Black nationalistic perspectives remain left out of corporate-produced textbooks and supplemental resources.

Despite the NAACP and its chief counsel Thurgood Marshall’s bold and unrelenting legal crusade against school segregation, and a victory in the nation’s highest court, not every Black person wanted their Black child to integrate into a white school.

Read more of Chalkbeat's coverage of the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

Many Black people had more than enough reason to not trust the public school system after Brown. As I have argued before, one of the strongest tools of white supremacy is denying Black people an education. Black families were rightly concerned about the racism their children would face post-Brown and the curriculums they would encounter. Rather than send their child to a white school, many just wanted their Black school to receive equal funding.

The No. 1 fault when teaching Brown is the assumption that society will make significant racial progress when Black students integrate into white schools. Historically, why has the starting point of the discourse been that Black academic success depends on a system that has racially targeted the Black community?

This is why the rise of Freedom Schools needs to be included in the conversation about Brown. Freedom Schools — free, alternative schools (mostly summer and after-school programs, but also day programs during school boycotts) — were created to prepare “disenfranchised African Americans to become active political actors.” Charles Cobb of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was among those who helped spearhead the Freedom Schools movement.

Freedom Schools in the 1960s were inspired by the centuries-old pan-African approach to education, with its Afrocentric perspective and focus on self-determination. Lessons at these schools, located in the South and around the country, focused on literacy and activism. They were also infused with Black history and rituals such as “libations,” or offerings to ancestors. Some such rituals are still common practice at Freedom Schools that exist to this day.

Philadelphia Freedom Schools, built for Black children, tackle literacy and love.

It was not until I worked at the Center for Black Educator Development’s Freedom School Literacy Academy that I discovered, while teaching Russell Rickford’s “We Are an African People” that post-Brown there were three dueling types of Freedom Schools: those established by the Nation of Islam, the 1960′s Freedom Schools, and the Black Panther Party’s Freedom Schools. The Black historical contention and nuances between these schools and the Black nationalists who founded and fostered them are as important as the movement to overturn legal school segregation.

I just finished reading Dennis Lehane’s “Small Mercies,” and was unaware of the extent to which some white parents in South Boston did everything they could to avoid school integration. After reading more about integration efforts in South Boston this image of a Black student, Valerie Banks, resonated with me when I reflect back to my first days as a student in a suburban Pennsylvania school. Valerie Banks was the only student to show up to class at South Boston High School on the first day of court-ordered busing. I ask myself, “On the first day the white students return, to what extent would her experience be like mine?”

Sites in Philly continue the Freedom School legacy

When I teach Brown to my ninth grade African American History and my AP African American Studies classes, I go over the differences between de facto and de jure segregation — that is, the difference between segregation that occurs by choice/reality and legal segregation. I ask them which one has the bigger impact on society and then point out that for many in the pan-African movement, there is no actual distinction. The white flight that followed Brown offers further evidence of why this perspective needs to be included in classrooms.

Learning about Black nationalism provides students the opportunity to engage with alternative strategies aimed at achieving Black freedom and self-determination. For this reason, I include lessons from some of the first Black nationalists such as Paul Cuffee and Martin R. Delany. (Some more of my favorite resources for teaching about Brown and its aftermath can be found here and here.)

As the educator and writer Rann Miller argues, “For too long, Black students have had the burden of adjusting to a racist society.” To make amends, teaching the whole story of Brown is a step towards helping the Black community heal.

Abigail Henry is an African American History teacher and adjunct professor in West Philadelphia. She has helped spearhead curriculum development at the School District of Philadelphia, won a Pulitzer Grant to incorporate the 1619 Project, and recently found an LLC called theBLKcabinet for African American History curriculum, resources, and consulting.

‘Colorblind’ policies and vouchers could undermine impact of Brown desegregation ruling, professor says

2024-05-15T17:38:38+00:00

Read more of Chalkbeat's coverage of the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

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When Daniel Kiel was a student at Grahamwood Elementary and White Station High School in the 1980s and 1990s, he knew he was getting a good education.

What he didn’t know was whether most of the Black students in his school were receiving the same.

“I was in the optional program at those schools, but it was a school within a school, which meant there was a traditional program alongside it,” said Kiel, now a constitutional law professor at the University of Memphis.

“While Grahamwood and White Station were extraordinarily diverse compared to many Memphis schools at the time, my classrooms were not. My classrooms were 80% to 90% white students, which meant that the other classes were 80% to 90% Black students.”

That experience, plus many others, set Kiel on a mission to explore why his classrooms looked the way they did, the history behind it all, and a system that continues to grapple with how to provide a quality education for all students.

The mission took him to Harvard Law School and to private law practice in Boston before he received a Fulbright scholarship and became a professor at the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law at the University of Memphis. His scholarly work centers on race and education — work that led him to produce a documentary in 2011 titled “The Memphis 13,” chronicling the stories of the first Black students to attend all-white public elementary schools in Memphis in 1961.

That was seven years after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that declared that mandated school segregation was unconstitutional.

This month marks the 70th anniversary of that decision. In recognition of that milestone, Chalkbeat spoke with Kiel about how the ruling influenced his interest in educational equity, the current state of school desegregation, and how new laws and interpretations of racial justice are poised to undermine it.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How did the Brown decision influence your life and decision to pursue constitutional law?

By the time I was graduating college and entering law school, I was a huge admirer of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Defense Fund, and the idea of lawyers forcing the country to grapple with injustice. So it was that idea that took me to law school.

When I was in law school, it was actually around the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, so there was some interesting coursework that I was allowed to take. We had studied Little Rock, Charlotte and Detroit … . I knew there was a connection to Memphis, and I knew from my experiences there wasn’t education justice in Memphis.

It was at that point that I started digging into the Memphis schools as part of a curiosity project as to why my schools looked like they did.

Describe what happened in the seven years between 1954, when Brown outlawed legal segregation, and 1961, when the first Black children were enrolled in Memphis’ all-white elementary schools.

For the first few years, and not just in Tennessee, there’s this thought (in Southern states) that they won’t have to abide by the ruling. Then the (Tennessee) legislature took race out of school assignments, with freedom of choice (a plan in which schools still had the discretion to deny Black student requests to enroll in all-white schools), but that still allowed local schools to maintain segregation.

That spurred the 1960 Memphis lawsuit Northcross v. Memphis City Schools, and led to the first Black students being allowed to attend white elementary schools in 1961. After the courts ordered desegregation efforts to be stepped up in the late 1960s, the process accelerated.

Still, in the 1970s, most students were still operating in segregated environments.

How do your students react to lessons about school segregation and how it was the law of the land before Brown?

They’re surprised. My students come with a range of familiarity with that story, so there’s definitely students who know that story well and aren’t surprised by it, and know how things unfolded afterward, but there also are those students who think that when the Supreme Court ruled, that was that, and all of a sudden segregation went away.

For some of my students, a lot of unlearning has to happen before they’re learning. In a particular course I teach, Education and Civil Rights, we use the Brown story and narrative as a case study to set up other kinds of pushes toward educational justice that have occurred in the United States, whether they are based on poverty, immigration status, or disability, or sex. It’s a touchstone case that the students enjoy grappling with methodically.

Recently, the Tennessee legislature tried to pass a voucher law permitting anyone, regardless of income, to use public money to pay for private school for their children. What are your thoughts on whether this universal voucher bill — which Gov. Bill Lee has vowed to reintroduce next year — will worsen school segregation?

Vouchers are hard to talk about, because the theory behind them is an attractive one, which is to give every student a chance at opportunity regardless of their circumstances. But there’s a risk involved in disabling the schools that are more likely to serve large numbers of disadvantaged students — especially in Shelby County, and in the state more broadly.

But I think about history and the way things pop up repeatedly in different guises, and in the 1950s, one of the first responses to Brown in Virginia, and one of the ways they resisted the court order, was for the school system to shut down and not have public education anymore. While that seemed awful and shortsighted, what made it worse was that they provided vouchers to students who wanted to attend private schools. But of course, the private schools were openly discriminatory and exclusive, so what vouchers were, in that instance, (was) a mechanism to maintain segregation.

Vouchers, in their 21st century form, aren’t those things precisely, but they are consistent with the idea that it’s not us, the people, the community, that is responsible for education, but that education is an individualized thing. You create an unequal playing field when you give an individual control of those things, because the way that those laws get passed, and the way vouchers typically show up, is that not every school has to take them. Students and families are often responsible for their own transportation, so that’s an access issue, and then the things that happen inside schools once they’re there can be hateful and hurtful and stigmatizing, and there’s no support for that within a voucher program.

I think the theory behind vouchers is an attractive one. It sort of draws me to the work of pushing for education equity more broadly, but in practice it has never served that goal.

What other developments do you believe can undermine the promise of Brown?

It’s not hard to look at the landscape of the way we do education and find disparities that look like the disparities from 70 years ago. They’re not the same in that the law doesn’t specifically mandate them, but it’s easy to find those disparities, and they’re discouraging.

In my space, I look at the way the U.S. Supreme Court has, in particular, transformed the Brown decision not into a decision about remedying historical injustices, but into a decision about colorblindness and government race-neutrality. I feel like neutrality didn’t get it done in 1955, and I don’t think neutrality is likely to get it done today.

The law is moving in a direction where it’s a little harder to see where you can push for the kinds of educational investments that are needed to produce equal education opportunities today. That’s one thing. But I think part of the reason why the disparities still exist is a broader lack of will from all of us that something should be done.

It’s easy to say equal opportunity should exist, but it’s harder to turn that into action and policy and results. It’s not impossible, but one thing I think is important is to lift up teachers and families and community groups and advocates who are pushing for this every day, and who are succeeding.

So, how should we view the Brown decision through today’s lens?

The story that most people want to tell about Brown is one of missed opportunities, and I think there’s something to that. But there’s been a huge increase in educational attainment in our society since 1954.

If we’re looking at high school graduation and college attendance and employment figures, achievements that were unthinkable in Black communities are now the norm. There has been a lot of progress.

I try not to lose sight of the fact that a lot has changed since 1954, and that a lot of people are still working on that.

Bureau Chief Tonyaa Weathersbee oversees Chalkbeat Tennessee’s education coverage. Reach her at tweathersbee@chalkbeat.org.

Seven decades after Brown v. Board, inequities challenge Michigan’s most vulnerable students

2024-05-15T13:51:35+00:00

Read more of Chalkbeat's coverage of the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

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Seven decades after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled racial segregation unconstitutional, students of color in Michigan continue to attend schools rife with inequities.

The Education Trust-Midwest released a new report Wednesday that draws attention to these “devastating inequities” and renewed calls for a more equitable school funding system in Michigan to address them. It launched a new data tool that lets viewers see how much their schools would be funded if inequities were addressed.

The group also launched a new campaign involving a coalition of leaders across the state to call attention to “decades of neglect to Black, Latino/a students, and students from low-income backgrounds,” the resources and support their public schools need, and also the “urgent need to address profound pandemic learning losses” that hit underserved students especially hard.

“The urgency is to save another generation of students, so they can compete in a global economy and achieve the American dream of a good quality of life,” said Alice Thompson, chair of the education committee of the Detroit NAACP and one of the chairpersons of the statewide coalition.

Among the dire findings highlighted in the report:

Nearly half of Michigan students of color and two-thirds of all Black students attended schools in districts with high concentrations of poverty, where 73% or more of the students come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. That compares with 13% of white students.
Michigan students in districts with the highest concentrations of poverty are much less likely to have highly experienced teachers who are, on average, more likely to be effective.
School-age children across the state have lost roughly half of a grade or more of learning in math and reading since the pandemic started. In school districts that serve predominantly Black and Latino students and students from low-income backgrounds, such as Kalamazoo and Lansing, learning losses were dramatically worse.
At the current pace of educational recovery, most students would need an additional five years to catch up in math. In reading, most Michigan students would need decades — well beyond their time in school — to be able to read at their grade level, according to research from the Education Recovery Scorecard.
School funding disparities between wealthy and less-resourced schools make it harder for high-poverty districts to support their students’ educational recovery from the pandemic.

“Segregation in education is not only happening based on race, but also based on socioeconomic status, and very frequently at the intersection of both of those factors,” said Jen DeNeal, director of policy and research at the Education Trust-Midwest. “And we know that concentrated poverty in particular is a real challenge in Michigan.”

Schools with high concentrations of poverty, she said, tend to have fewer resources, less experienced teachers, higher teacher turnover, and increased exposure to environmental hazards and safety concerns.

Last year, the organization and others urged state lawmakers to adopt what they called an “opportunity index” that would provide additional money to districts serving communities with higher concentrations of poverty. The budget for this current year adopted that proposal, which has provided an additional $1 billion in funding to districts to serve at-risk students. But the opportunity index that went into effect doesn’t go as far as advocates wanted.

The Education Trust-Midwest’s new data tool will give families information that hasn’t been readily available. It shows them how much their districts are receiving now in per-pupil funding, including the additional amount they are receiving for at-risk students. A second column shows how much they would receive if the opportunity index was fully funded. And a third column shows how much districts would receive per student if they adopted a funding system similar to what Massachusetts adopted many years ago that has made it a leader in addressing funding inequities.

Here’s what the data tool shows for Detroit Public Schools Community District, the state’s largest district: DPSCD currently receives $10,862, including its basic per-pupil amount and its funding for at-risk students. If the opportunity index was fully funded, the district would receive $13,448 for each student. And if the Massachusetts funding model was used, the district would receive $17,881.

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

Jeffco pioneered a program for older students with dyslexia. Now it’s getting cut.

2024-05-16T23:29:27+00:00

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A Jeffco school will dramatically scale back a program for older students with dyslexia next year, upsetting parents who say the unique offering has made a profound difference for their children.

Bright MINDS launched at Alameda International Junior/Senior High School in Lakewood three years ago. It’s on the chopping block now because of “inadequate funding and staffing shortages” and will “be dissolved” after this school year, according to a letter sent to participating families last week.

For participating families, including some who commute from outside the district, the news means the end of what’s been a golden needle in a haystack: a comprehensive public school program for students in middle and high school who have dyslexia.

Bright MINDS students will still get some reading intervention next year though much less than most get now. The letter said seventh- and eighth-graders will get only one period of intervention every other day next year, down from two periods daily this year. Other components of Bright MINDS, including sessions to help students with planning and time management, will be discontinued.

Multiple parents said a tense meeting with school administrators on Tuesday left them confused about the rationale for the cuts. They also expressed frustration that the decision has come so close to the end of the school year at a time when school choice decisions are hard to reverse.

In response to Chalkbeat’s questions about the Bright MINDS cut Thursday, a district spokesperson said she’d left a message for the school’s principal, Susie Van Scoyk, to understand the school’s “budgeting choice.”

“Schools have the autonomy through their budgets to determine the staffing and services that are needed to serve their school community,” the spokesperson said by email.

Van Scoyk told Chalkbeat by email Thursday that her team was working on a statement that would not be ready until early next week, citing the school’s graduation ceremony on Friday.

This year, Bright MINDS — the second part of which stands for Multisensory Intensive Dyslexia Support — serves about 20 students in seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. Most receive intensive daily reading instruction plus help with skills like planning and organization, since conditions such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder often co-occur with dyslexia. In addition, Bright MINDS teachers join their students in core classes to ensure they’re getting the help they need to absorb the content.

The demise of Bright MINDS, just three years after it began, comes amid ongoing budget woes in Jeffco as enrollment declines. School officials originally envisioned expanding the program from grades 7-8 to students in grades 7-12. They also hoped Bright MINDS could serve as a model for other schools across Colorado. Former Jeffco Superintendent Jason Glass, who helped spearhead the program, left the district in 2020.

While the state has made several policy changes in recent years focused on better serving elementary students with reading struggles, older students have limited options unless their families can afford pricey private schools or specialized tutors. Students who can’t read proficiently are at greater risk of dropping out, earning less as adults, and becoming involved in the criminal justice system.

Brett Gallegos said Bright MINDS changed his son’s life.

Before the ninth grader began attending three years ago, “He was literally in a ball crying when he would come home from school because he felt so worthless,” Gallegos said.

But Bright MINDS teachers stuck with his son “through thick and thin,” he said.

Recently, his son won an award for making the honor roll, said Gallegos: “It’s a night and day difference.”

It’s unclear how much Bright MINDS costs annually, but it’s primarily run by two teachers and a school psychologist. The 76,000-student district’s proposed annual budget next year is nearly $1 billion. Maintaining mental health staffing levels, increasing substitute teacher pay, and ensuring that elementary schools with certain special education programs have assistant principals are among the district’s budget priorities.

Bright MINDS students, along with reading Interventionist Sarah Richards, right, and Alameda assistant principal Andrea Arguello take a brain break during a session held in 2022.

Stephanie Bobian said her daughter called her from school crying when she learned what would happen to Bright MINDS. Bobian said the news was devastating, both because of her daughter’s reaction and because she felt defeated after ”how hard I worked as a parent to find something like this for my child.”

After her daughter was diagnosed with dyslexia in fourth grade, Bobian began a long and desperate search for help. She didn’t have money for $80-an-hour tutoring sessions, but she eventually heard about Bright MINDS through an advocacy group for children with dyslexia.

“To be able to find something like that in a public school … it’s amazing,” she said. “It’s all in one place and free.”

The Bobians’ home high school is Green Mountain, about five miles away from Alameda International. But the commute is worth it because Bright MINDS has helped her daughter, Bobian said. The girl, who also has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, was getting Cs and Ds before she started in the program last year.

“She probably could barely read at a third grade level in eighth grade,” said Bobian.

Today, she’s reading almost at grade level and — like Gallegos’ son — making the honor roll.

“She never thought she could be a good student,” said Bobian. “She’s confident now, too.”

Bobian’s younger daughter is in second grade and also has dyslexia. Bobian had hoped to send her to Bright MINDS when the time came. Now, that possibility appears to be off the table.

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

As NYC preschool offers release, some families are left without a 3-K seat

2024-05-16T20:01:39+00:00

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Mayor Eric Adams has vowed that every family who wants a seat in New York City’s free preschool program for 3-year-olds will receive one, despite recent cuts to city funding for the early childhood system.

But as the city distributed 3-K offers on Thursday, some families say they didn’t receive a seat at any of the programs to which they applied.

Diana Sidakis, a public defender who lives in Manhattan, said she tried to be savvy with her application. She spent hours extensively researching programs, compiled spreadsheets, attended tours, and eliminated any programs that seemed unlikely to admit her son.

Despite applying to 12 programs, the maximum number, Sidakis did not receive a seat for her child. She was waitlisted at all of them.

“Every kid needs education at 3 years old,” she said. “They’re socially and developmentally ready, and it changes the rest of their life. So for Mayor Adams to say that he can cut this program and every family who wants a seat will get a seat, it’s just such a fraud.”

Building up the free prekindergarten system was a signature initiative of former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who leaned heavily on federal COVID relief dollars to expand preschool for 3-year-olds, aiming to make the program universal. That effort stalled under Adams, whose administration has justified funding cuts to the program by arguing that thousands of seats are sitting empty due to a mismatch of supply and demand in some neighborhoods. Advocates counter that the mayor has not invested in promoting preschool options to families.

This year, the city’s early childhood system has taken center stage in budget negotiations between City Council members and the Adams administration. Under a plan Adams proposed last month, the city would replace $92 million of expiring federal funding for 3-K with city and state funds — but it would not restore a separate $170 million in city funding that was cut from early childhood programs in November. Adams also promised to spend $5 million to help recruit more families to the city’s pre-K programs.

At a budget hearing on Wednesday, Education Department officials said enrollment in preschool programs, including the larger pre-K program for 4-year-olds, had grown to roughly 114,000 children. In total, there were about 53,000 seats in the city’s 3-K program, with about 44,000 filled.

Despite cuts to early childhood funding, Adams has remained adamant that “every child who wants a 3-K and pre-K seat will have access to one.”

In a statement Thursday evening, city officials emphasized that thousands of 3-K seats remained open and said the city would work with families who were not initially admitted to find nearby open seats.

“The mayor was clear: Every child who wants a seat will have access to a seat and he will keep his word,” said Amaris Cockfield, a spokesperson for City Hall. “The guidance sent to a limited number of families by New York City Public Schools, unfortunately, did not fully convey all the seats still available to New York City students.”

The city made offers to 94% of families who applied to 3-K on time, receiving approximately 43,000 applicants for about 52,000 seats across the city, according to city officials. The Education Department will send an “updated letter” to families about seats that remain open in 3-K.

Still, advocates were quick to condemn the mayor’s previous promises as some families received the news that they had not been offered a 3-K seat. As of Thursday afternoon, more than 20 families across the city had reached out to the advocacy group New Yorkers United for Childcare, informing them they had been rejected or waitlisted. Others told the group they were admitted to programs far from home, adding logistical challenges for parents seeking care for their young children.

“The impact cannot be understated: without free 3-K, childcare costs families an average of $20,000 a year per kid, with many spending more — a cost far too many families cannot afford,” said Rebecca Bailin, director of the group, in a statement. “Now, New Yorkers who are already facing a skyrocketing cost of living must decide whether to leave work and stay home with their child, drain their savings, or potentially leave the city altogether.”

Prior reports have shown a lack of access to affordable child care can have a significant impact on parents’ ability to work. More than half a million people did not seek employment in 2021 due to child care needs, and about 375,000 parents chose to leave or considered leaving their jobs due to the combined impact of the pandemic and a lack of affordable child care, according to a 2022 city report.

Sidakis said she’s unsure whether her family can afford to consider private child care options if she ultimately does not receive a 3-K seat that works for her family.

“It’s just an enormous, enormous source of financial and emotional stress,” she said.

“I really don’t want to leave the city,” Sidakis added. “I’m a public defender. I’ve devoted my life to public service. I want my kids to go to public school. I believe in public school. But this is really wrong.”

Alex Zimmerman contributed reporting.

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

La implementación fallida de la FAFSA perjudicó a familias como la mía

2024-04-22T12:00:00+00:00

Read in English.

Sentada a la mesa del comedor, marqué el número gratuito, esperando que hoy fuera el día en que alguien realmente contestara. En cambio, escuché las palabras que han resonado en mis oídos durante los últimos meses. La línea de ayuda estaba experimentando un gran volumen de llamadas. Vuelva a llamar más tarde, instaba el mensaje automático antes de terminar con un brusco “Adiós”.

Cuanto más escuchaba ese mensaje, más ansiosa me ponía.

Sabía que no estaba sola en esta experiencia y eso de alguna manera me hizo sentir peor. Miles de estudiantes de último año de secundaria que necesitaban asistencia financiera para ir a la universidad no pudieron completar la solicitud de ayuda federal; la misma solicitud que el Departamento de Educación de Estados Unidos insistió en que ahora era “más rápida y más fácil” de completar.

Miriam Galicia, of New York City

“Más rápido y más fácil” no serían las palabras que usaría para describir la experiencia de mi familia con la solicitud, ampliamente conocida como FAFSA. Todo se debe a nueve pequeños dígitos que no todos los familiares de un solicitante tienen: un número de seguro social. Los padres que no lo tienen no podían, primeramente, enviar el formulario requerido.

La FAFSA, que normalmente se abre en octubre, se pospuso en medio de las actualizaciones y se publicó a finales de diciembre. Esto retrasó el proceso para todos los que solicitan ayuda financiera federal, no solo para las familias en las que no todos los miembros cuentan con un número de seguro social. Pero una vez que la solicitud finalmente se puso en marcha, muchos estudiantes que buscaban ayuda se sintieron aliviados.

En ese momento, a aquellos con un padre indocumentado se les pidió que llamaran a un número del gobierno federal para verificar la identidad de sus padres.

Así fue como me encontré memorizando ese exasperante mensaje automático que terminaba con un “Adiós”. Después de marcar el número más de 20 veces en el lapso de un mes, un día recibí una respuesta. Estaba sentada en la oficina de mi consejero universitario. Me sorprendió escuchar la voz de una mujer al otro lado de la línea. Le expliqué la situación de mi familia de la manera más clara y concisa que pude. La mujer me dijo que mis padres necesitaban hacer la llamada ellos mismos o estar presentes, algo que resultó difícil de hacer durante su jornada laboral.

La llamada terminó ahí y regresé a clase. Inspiré y exhalé, tratando de sacar la FAFSA de mi mente. Pero al igual que la llamada telefónica, era desesperanzador. Me senté en clase, sin hacer ningún movimiento para acomodarme.

“¿Entonces, cómo te fue?” me preguntaron mis amigos discretamente.

“Dijeron que no puedo hacerlo”, respondí, dándome cuenta en ese momento del estado emocional en que me hallaba.

Las lágrimas comenzaron a rodar por mis mejillas. No eran lágrimas de tristeza ni siquiera de desesperanza; eran lágrimas de rabia. Estaba enojada -estoy enojada- por la confusa solicitud y el menosprecio por miles de estadounidenses de primera generación.

El estrés estaba escrito en mi rostro y, cuando mi maestra se acercó para ofrecerme palabras de amabilidad y aliento, traté de mirar hacia el futuro cuando finalmente mi FAFSA estuviera completa.

Después de la cobertura mediática negativa sobre la fallida implementación de la FAFSA, el gobierno tomó medidas para corregir sus errores, pero tomó meses. Pasaron el proceso de verificación al correo electrónico. En ese momento, se nos pidió que enviáramos por correo electrónico pasaportes, licencias de conducir y facturas con el nombre y la dirección de mis padres. El proceso de verificación pareció interminable hasta principios de marzo, cuando finalmente se comprobó la cuenta de mis padres.

Una vez que recibí ese correo electrónico, inicié una sesión lo más rápido que pude, agradecida de que este proceso casi terminara. Pero incluso con las cuentas de mis padres verificadas, el portal apareció en blanco, lo que una vez más me impidió enviar mi FAFSA. Sentí que mi cuerpo se calentaba y mi cara se ponía roja brillante. Había realizado todos los pasos correctamente. Pensé que finalmente saldría del laberinto de la FAFSA. Estaba equivocada.

Con solo unas pocas semanas para decidir dónde pasaría los próximos cuatro años de mi vida (la fecha límite para comprometerme con una universidad es el 1 de mayo), la FAFSA parecía mi peor enemigo.

No fue hasta principios de abril, después de meses de llamadas telefónicas, trámites y reuniones con mi consejero universitario, que finalmente pude presentar el formulario de ayuda federal. Mi solicitud ya está recibida y eso es un alivio. Pero como muchos otros estudiantes en la misma situación, me pregunto si alguna vez sabré cómo serían mis paquetes de ayuda financiera en algunas de las escuelas en las que fui aceptada.

Incluso con todos los obstáculos que he tenido que afrontar estos últimos meses, soy una de las afortunadas. Recientemente, dos universidades privadas de artes liberales me ofrecieron becas, lo que me permitió evitar por completo el proceso de ayuda gubernamental. Es gracias a estas becas, y sólo a ellas, que el estrés de la FAFSA no se cierne sobre mí. Pero mi buena suerte me hace pensar en los otros estudiantes de primera generación que no tienen estas opciones.

Al provenir de un hogar de inmigrantes, supe desde que era niña que mi familia y nuestras experiencias no eran como las de la mayoría de mis amigos. Lo sabía cuando mis amigos hablaban de sus vacaciones en el extranjero o cuando sus padres asistían a las conferencias de padres y maestros. Las diferencias se hicieron especialmente evidentes durante el proceso de solicitud de ingreso a la universidad.

Recuerdo estar sentada con mis amigos en la escuela mientras expresaban su alivio por haber terminado con sus solicitudes, ensayos personales, trámites y FAFSA. Ahora todo lo que tenían que hacer era esperar. Todos estuvieron de acuerdo, todos menos yo.

Un amigo incluso sugirió organizar una fiesta para celebrar.

No pude evitar preguntarme por qué nueve números marcaron una diferencia tan grande en nuestras experiencias. Meses después de esa reunión, me quedan esa y otras preguntas. Preguntas como: ¿Por qué los estudiantes de familias inmigrantes tienen que superar tantos obstáculos? ¿Por qué se pasó por alto a nuestra familia y nuestra experiencia cuando se implementó esta nueva FAFSA “más fácil”?

Conozco el inmenso privilegio que tengo de cursar una educación superior, gracias al apoyo de mi familia, mi consejero universitario y las instituciones privadas que me ofrecen ayuda financiera. Aún así, a veces la duda aparece como una sombra. Me pregunto por qué me esfuerzo tanto para llegar a la universidad cuando algunos de los procesos que hacen posible la universidad no parecen valorar a personas como yo ni a familias como la mía.

Miriam Galicia es estudiante de último año en The Institute For Collaborative Education y es becaria de Chalkbeat Student Voices 2023-24. En otoño asistirá a Skidmore College. Como futura estudiante universitaria de primera generación, valora la oportunidad de cursar una educación superior que no tuvieron las generaciones anteriores de su familia.

Traducción cortesía de El Diario NY

How this Colorado science teacher helps students become environmental changemakers

2024-04-26T15:08:45+00:00

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Yajaira Fuentes-Tauber majored in biology at college and planned to go to medical school. But a stop-gap job teaching science in Texas changed the course of her career.

“I realized that while I liked medicine, I loved teaching,” she said.

Today, Fuentes-Tauber teaches biology at Rocky Mountain High School in Fort Collins, Colorado, and is passionate about increasing access to STEM education and empowering students to become change agents.

Yajaira Fuentes-Tauber is a science teacher at Rocky Mountain High School in Fort Collins.

Her students have published books about river otters and created “bee hotels” out of reclaimed wood.

Fuentes-Tauber was named 2023 Earth Science Teacher of the Year by the Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists Foundation and was also one of three Colorado science teachers named state finalists in the 2022-23 Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching.

Fuentes-Tauber talked to Chalkbeat about her initial misconceptions about teaching, how her students are improving watershed health, and what she does to make ocean health relevant to students in a land-locked state.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Was there a moment when you decided to become a teacher?

I graduated from college early and needed something to do while my husband, who had served in the Coast Guard, finished his bachelor’s degree.

My first job was at Rivera High School in Brownsville, Texas, an area with high levels of poverty and teacher shortages. With a week before students were back in the classroom, the principal had to take a leap of faith in offering me a full-time science teaching position, which included a concurrent alternative teaching certification program.

I planned to pursue a medical degree, but after teaching for one semester, I decided to change careers and pursue a master’s degree in science education and then a doctorate of education.

How did your own experience in school influence your approach to teaching?

As a Hispanic, Latina, English learner, and first in my family to graduate from high school, I didn’t truly experience representation in the classroom. Many teachers didn’t look like me or have the same socioeconomic status or immigration background as I did. A number of teachers in our district were part of Teach for America and they were not representative of our school ethnic groups, nor did they speak Spanish.

The factors that shape my identity have been key in bringing a different perspective to my own teaching practices. I am passionate about advancing access to STEM education because I believe that through equity, diversity, and inclusion, students can pursue their interests regardless of their identity. Much like our school motto I believe that the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.

Tell us about a favorite lesson to teach. Where did the idea come from?

One of my favorite lessons is where students explore the impact of environmental changes through the lens of ocean acidification.

Students use different color beads to represent chemicals involved in the process that causes oceans to become acidic. The activity incorporates the chemistry behind ocean acidification to help students see how this process reduces the chemical compound needed to form shells and skeletons.

Ocean acidification and sea levels is something that I had background on, having taught for eight out of 17 years in South Texas, but to my current students exploring these topics when they live in a landlocked state felt irrelevant. I wanted to raise awareness about the interconnectedness of our ecosystems. As future leaders, they need to understand how our actions impact others miles away and how changes occurring miles away have the potential to impact our community.

With the loss of coral reefs, which provide coastal protection during storms, ecotourism, and habitat for diverse species, people may migrate to inland communities. This can impact the housing market, jobs, greenhouse emissions, and the transmission rates of communicable diseases. As future voters, they are most struck by considering how a shift in population could impact the electoral college, as the number of votes is dependent on a state’s population.

What is the Caring for Our Watershed contest?

Caring for Our Watershed is an international program that empowers students to take action to improve the health of their local watershed. One of the regional contests takes place in Northern Colorado, where a panel of judges selects proposals for funding by organization’s sponsors

Our students focus on The Big Thompson and the Cache la Poudre River Watershed in developing their proposals. Most recently, we had a team that wrote and illustrated a book about river otters that was printed and read at local elementary schools.

Another project selected for funding included a student making “bee hotels” using reclaimed wood to increase habitats for bees as they are crucial in maintaining a healthy watershed.

I love that this program allows students to become agents of change while still in high school. Over seven years, students have received over $13,000 in awards and we’ve received matching funds.

Tell us about a memorable time — good or bad — when contact with a student’s family changed your perspective or approach.

It has been bittersweet to learn about issues impacting students and their families in ways that are not visible or even recorded by schools. On the one hand, it is amazing that they see me as a trusted adult, and on the other hand, I’m struck by the weight of their burdens.

Learning about issues such as immigration status and languages spoken at home has prompted me to take a more inclusive approach to teaching. I integrate opportunities for “windows and mirrors” to ensure that I create a supportive environment where all students feel valued.

For example, when students explore the expansion of businesses in undeveloped areas with native species, they take into consideration the many perspectives that stakeholders bring to the table. Some may see themselves in the “mirror” if they have family members who work in construction, while providing a “window” for students who do not share the same perspective.

What was the biggest misconception that you initially brought to teaching?

When I intended to go to medical school, teaching was initially seen as a brief detour to fill a time gap in my plans. In our community, becoming a teacher was often perceived as an easy career path, in which you have an 8-hour-a-day job with paid holidays and paid summers off.

Once in the classroom, I quickly realized that teaching is far from an easy task and our commitment goes beyond contract times, not to mention summers are not really paid time off. Yet despite this initial misconception, I loved the challenge. I loved being part of the students’ journey to self-discovery and educational empowerment. My immediate family has always valued education and they were supportive.

What are you reading for enjoyment?

The last book I read for a parent book club was “The Bright Side of Going Dark” by Kelly Harms, and I’m waiting to get the next book for our club: “The Survivor’s Guide to Family Happiness” by Maddie Dawson. I’m also waiting for “Understanding Imperiled Earth” by Todd J. Braje.

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

Civics simulations help this teacher’s students connect to lessons about history and citizenship

2024-05-13T11:00:00+00:00

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In Adam Williamson’s social studies class, students learn American history “in the full light of day.”

That means everything the country has accomplished and its historical significance, along with its mistakes along the way, Williamson said.

As a 16-year veteran teacher and department chair at Mississinewa High School, a school around 70 miles northeast of Indianapolis, Williamson told Chalkbeat that the criticism that teachers face for teaching negative or divisive lessons about history is misdirected.

“Contrary to some prevailing opinions out there, teachers aren’t responsible for this attitude — we are often the first line of defense in trying to convince students that the United States is worth revering despite its past mistakes,” Williamson said. “I savor those moments when I can make a student stop to reflect and consider the perspectives of people who lived in the past and evaluate their decisions accordingly.”

And just as important as helping students understand the past is helping them grow into their roles as future adults, citizens, voters, and leaders. For this goal, Williamson said active learning is the key.

He leads students through mock legal proceedings, as well as simulated congressional hearings as part of the We the People curriculum and competition, and helps them understand how civics will affect their day-to-day lives.

“The fact that many of them are eager to begin adult life can provide leverage for engaging them in these sorts of participatory lessons,” he said. “I often say, “You’re going to be an adult in the eyes of the world soon, so you might want to know how this works.” That reality check tends to be effective for most students.”

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How and when did you decide to become a social studies teacher?

I considered the career when I was in high school and then attempted a career in acting when I got to college. I quickly decided that there was too much drama in the drama department and reverted back to social studies education. Now, I have a difficult time thinking of something else that I would find more rewarding than teaching.

What’s a lesson that you like to teach that helps your students understand how civics is relevant to them?

I often teach civics using simulations. I particularly enjoy my mock trial and legislation simulations — I find that students begin to make direct connections to their own lives when they engage in those processes. Active learning pays dividends!

Mississinewa High School (Indiana) social studies teacher Adam Williamson

What are the biggest questions that your students have and have those changed over time?

In my history courses, I get a lot of questions about why the United States government has historically made a poor choice, or why the nation has made so many mistakes. The “information age” has presented us with new challenges regarding communication. Social media and internet video blogs have created echo chambers for criticism toward the United States government. Contrary to some prevailing opinions out there, teachers aren’t responsible for this attitude — we are often the first line of defense in trying to convince students that the United States is worth revering despite its past mistakes!

I see the teaching of United States history as an opportunity to invite my kids to confront American history in the full light of day, warts and all, and consider all that America has accomplished and all that it represents to humanity despite our missteps along the way. I savor those moments when I can make a student stop to reflect and consider the perspectives of people who lived in the past and evaluate their decisions accordingly.

What are some of the obstacles to engaging young people in voting and other civic duties? What helps?

Disengagement seems to be chronic, but that might be an illusion. It’s easy to focus on the cynicism toward government among Generation Z, but there are actually quite a few students who are engaged and/or want to be engaged in their communities.

Trying to make the rest of them understand that civic and political engagement is worthwhile isn’t an easy task. I find that running students through the processes of civic and political life demystifies things for them. Again, active learning is key. The fact that many of them are eager to begin adult life can provide leverage for engaging them in these sorts of participatory lessons. I often say, “You’re going to be an adult in the eyes of the world soon, so you might want to know how this works.” That reality check tends to be effective for most students.

Tell us about your work with We the People and the impact it has on your students.

We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution is, without a doubt, the most rewarding and effective curriculum I’ve ever used. I underwent training for the program at the annual summer institute as soon as I finished student teaching and soon after began teaching it at my first job in middle school.

The students thrived under the curriculum. It was so encouraging to see those young people diving into complex topics and engaging in dialogue about them with respected adults! Soon after, I was moved to our high school to pilot the program there and coordinate the program across the district. Since that time, we’ve had very successful We the People teams at all three levels and I’ve been able to enjoy watching students of all ages broaden their minds and consider their role in our body politic.

Nearly every student who has taken the We the People course with me has personally reflected on how thankful they were that they took part. That is very fulfilling for a teacher to hear. A few of those students have moved on to law school and public service, and I find it extremely satisfying to know that I played some part in those students’ journeys.

How do you approach news events or community happenings in your classroom?

I encourage students to stay in touch with current events by following their favorite news source, and I often invite students to ask questions about what’s going on in the country and in the world. There’s usually a connection to something we’re discussing in class, whether I’m teaching history or civics. Topical conversations pop up regularly as a result.

I also begin each semester by establishing norms for discussion and debate, and these often go a long way toward keeping the conversation civil and on-topic. When students make their own norms for discussion, they are not only invested in sticking to those norms, but they keep each other accountable to them.

Perhaps most importantly, I encourage students to be aware of the source of their information, particularly in regard to media bias and information reliability. We talk about how to determine trustworthy information sources and how to determine bias.

Tell us about your own experience with school and how it affects your work today.

I was a fairly conscientious student in high school. I cared about my grades, and I embraced the practicality of being a rule-follower. When I became a public school teacher I struggled to confront students who didn’t share those same values. It took some adjustment to understand the perspectives of students who intentionally deviated from school rules and norms and those who didn’t value academic success. I’m thankful for colleagues who helped me understand those perspectives and build rapport with those students.

In high school, I was very involved in the arts. Since I began teaching I’ve done everything I can to support those programs, from attending performances and donating to their funds to encouraging students to take that leap and express themselves through art, music, and dramatic performance.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received, and how have you put it into practice?

Before you speak, ask yourself: “Does it need to be said? Does it need to be said now? Does it need to be said by me?” Asking myself those three questions has, on more than one occasion, helped me avoid more trouble than I bargained for.

What’s one thing you’ve read that has made you a better educator?

It’s a toss-up between “Teaching with Love and Logic” by Jim Fay and David Funk and “Help for Billy” by Heather Forbes.

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan needs more youth mental health professionals. New program aims to help.

2024-05-16T21:20:24+00:00

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More mental health resources for youth are coming to Michigan this fall as part of a national effort that will also create pathways for young adults to enter behavioral health careers.

A new Youth Mental Health Corps that will help middle and high schoolers access mental health resources is launching in Michigan and three other states in September. It will eventually expand to seven more states next year.

The program also aims to tackle the state’s and the nation’s shortage of mental health professionals by giving corps members working experience. Additionally, it will provide stipends, scholarships, and in some cases, the opportunity for corps members to qualify for student loan forgiveness.

Corps members will be trained to help teens navigate resources available in their schools and community organizations. They will also share digital and media literacy resources with kids to help them navigate online harassment, bullying, and bias.

The new program, part of the federal volunteerism and service agency AmeriCorps, comes to Michigan at a time when advocates and educators say schools are far too understaffed to fully meet students’ growing needs for mental health services.

“AmeriCorps members are a tremendous resource for Michigan in helping solve the state’s pressing issues and youth mental health is one of those critical needs,” said Ginna Holmes, executive director of the Michigan Community Service Commission, in a statement. Michigan districts have added more than 1,300 mental health staff members in schools since 2018, however advocates say much more funding is needed to attract and retain counselors, psychologists, and social workers to the field.

The state had one counselor for every 615 students – the third highest ratio in the country – in the 2021-22 school year, according to the most recently available report from the American School Counselor Association. ASCA’s recommendation is once counselor for every 250 students.

For school psychologists, the ratio was one for every 1,445 students in Michigan during the same school year, and one school social worker for every 1,051 students, the most recently available data shows. The recommended ratios are one psychologist for every 500 students and one social worker for every 250 students.

Michigan is not alone in its shortage of school behavioral health staff. School mental health professional organizations say it would take more than 100,000 additional staff to reach recommended ratios in all of the public schools in the U.S.

“We are at a critical moment where we must act with urgency to address the mental health crisis that is impacting millions of our children,” said Michael D. Smith, CEO of AmeriCorps, in a statement.

The private-public partnership is funded by AmeriCorp, the Schultz Family Foundation, and social media company Pinterest.

Anyone with a high school diploma ages 18 to 24 is eligible to apply to become a corps member.

Hundreds of corps members will initially be deployed in Michigan, Colorado, Minnesota, and Texas this fall, with plans to expand to California, Iowa, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and Utah in the fall of 2025.

Hannah Dellinger covers K-12 education and state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

State leaders show new trust in Adams 14’s plan for improving its schools

2024-05-09T22:32:33+00:00

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Colorado’s State Board of Education voted Wednesday afternoon to allow Adams 14 to continue its improvement work with a partial outside manager — a sign that the state trusts the progress being made by the long-struggling school district.

Wednesday’s orders are the first time in recent years that the state has not escalated its involvement in Adams 14 but rather signed off on the district’s ongoing plan. Two years ago, the district faced school closures.

Under state law, the State Board must direct improvement in districts such as Adams 14 that have had more than five years of low ratings. The State Board voted 8 to 1 in favor of Adams 14′s continued work, with board member Steve Durham as the only no vote.

One board member, Stephen Varela, said he wished he could vote to take the district off the state’s watchlist for low performance altogether.

Adams 14, a district north of Denver that is 92% percent Latino and serves many low-income families, was one of the first districts in the state to be flagged by the system for multiple years of low performance. Despite many short-lived improvement plans, the district hasn’t been able to improve its ratings in more than 10 years, leading to many firsts as the state tried to escalate its involvement in directing improvement.

On Wednesday, State Board member Lisa Escárcega recalled that she was on the state panel tasked with reviewing Adams 14 and recommending a state intervention 10 years ago. But reflecting back, she said, “We did you no service.”

Over time, the State Board and the department have begun to emphasize working with districts — rather than being in conflict with them — as the best way to achieve good results. The new philosophy emphasizes collaboration over criticism.

“I feel like this has been a book of false starts,” Escárcega said. “If I were to say when did the turnaround work really begin in Adams 14, it was just a few years ago. It wasn’t 10 years ago.”

The new state order will direct the district to continue working with nonprofit partners TNTP, formerly known as The New Teacher Project. The state would have to approve a change in partial managers if the district wanted one.

Adams City High School, the district’s one comprehensive high school, which has also been under state-ordered improvement plans for its own low ratings, now will have a clear separate order to continue its work with outside group ConnectEd on rolling out the school’s career options, called academies, which started for ninth grade students this year.

Officials in the hearing Wednesday discussed how the high school’s latest rating actually would have put it on the path to exit state oversight, but the rating was lowered because not enough students took state tests last spring. The school fell just short of the required 95% participation.

District and high school leaders told the State Board they were disheartened that they had gotten so close but ultimately missed the target. But they said they are optimistic that their improvements will result in better state ratings next fall. They said they’ve worked recently to ensure participation rate is not a problem a second time.

Adams City High School has seen a significant improvement in graduation rates, which by some measures exceed Colorado’s average graduation rates, district leaders said. That is a big factor driving the school’s rating.

Adams 14 Superintendent Karla Loría told the State Board that the district’s work, much of it focused on creating systems for tracking data and how administrators support schools, is working. She added that having the state be more flexible with the district is also key.

“What we have in place is yielding results,” Loría said. “We would like to continue with that structure that we have in place.”

Durham, who voted against the plan for the district and the high school, said he was glad the district was making improvements, but criticized the state’s public education system as a whole for consistently praising and accepting incremental improvements instead of pushing for significant change to double the number of students who can read at grade level.

While Adams 14 data shows progress and growth, the percentage of students who meet or exceed expectations on standardized tests remains low.

The idea of approving the district’s proposed plan to continue working with an outside manager, but not handing over total control to an outside entity, was also in line with recommendations by an external panel that reviewed the district and high school.

The state took public feedback for about a month prior to Wednesday’s hearing, but only received a handful of comments, none from parents or students. The comments submitted were all in support of the district.

Correction: This story was updated to correct the context of State Board member Lisa Escárcega’s quotes.

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Líderes estatales demuestran una renovada confianza en el plan de Adams 14 para mejorar sus escuelas

2024-05-16T20:42:58+00:00

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Chalkbeat Colorado es un noticiero local sin fines de lucro que informa sobre las escuelas públicas en Denver y otros distritos. Suscríbete a nuestro boletín gratis por email en español para recibir lo último en noticias sobre educación dos veces al mes.

El Consejo Estatal de Educación de Colorado votó la semana pasada para permitir que Adams 14 continúe su labor de mejoras con un gerente externo parcial—una señal de que el estado confía en el progreso que este distrito escolar, por mucho tiempo en aprietos, está alcanzando.

Las nuevas órdenes marcan la primera vez en años recientes que el estado no se involucra aún más en Adams 14, sino que aprueba el plan continuo del distrito. Hace dos años, el distrito enfrentó el cierre de algunas escuelas.

Según las leyes estatales, el Consejo Estatal debe ordenar mejoras en distritos como el de Adams 14 que hayan obtenido calificaciones bajas durante más de cinco años. El Consejo Estatal votó 8 a 1 a favor del trabajo continuo de Adams 14; el integrante del consejo Steve Durham fue el único con un voto en contra.

Un integrante del consejo, Stephen Varela, dijo que deseaba poder votar para sacar totalmente al distrito de la lista de aquellos bajo vigilancia por mal desempeño.

Adams 14, un distrito al norte de Denver que es 92 por ciento latino y atiende a muchas familias con bajos ingresos, fue uno de los primeros distritos en el estado en ser identificados por el sistema debido a múltiples años con mal desempeño. A pesar de muchos planes de mejoras a corto plazo, el distrito no ha logrado mejorar sus calificaciones en más de 10 años, lo cual resultó en muchas primeras veces conforme el estado intentó involucrarse más para imponer mejoras.

La integrante del Consejo Estatal Lisa Escárcega recordó que estuvo en el panel del estado cuya tarea fue examinar a Adams 14 y recomendar una intervención estatal hace 10 años. Pero reflexionando sobre esa época, dijo: “No les hicimos justicia”.

Con el tiempo, el Consejo Estatal y el Departamento de Educación de Colorado han empezado a enfatizar el trabajo con los distritos—en lugar de estar en conflicto con ellos—como la mejor forma de alcanzar buenos resultados. La nueva filosofía enfatiza la colaboración en lugar de la crítica.

“Siento que esto ha sido un libro de inicios falsos”, Escárcega dijo. “Si dijera cuándo empezó realmente el trabajo para cambiar el rumbo en Adams 14, fue solo hace un par de años. No fue hace 10 años”.

La nueva disposición del estado dictará que el distrito siga trabajando con los socios sin fines de lucro de TNTP, antes conocidos como el Nuevo Proyecto de Maestros (en inglés: The New Teacher Project). El estado tiene que aprobar un cambio en gerentes parciales si el distrito quiere uno.

Adams City High School, la única high school integral en el distrito, la cual también ha estado bajo planes de mejoras dictadas por el estado debido a sus bajas calificaciones, ahora tendrá una orden aparte claramente establecida para continuar su labor con el grupo externo de ConnectEd. Esa labora incluye lanzar las opciones de carreras de la escuela, llamadas academias, las cuales empezaron para los estudiantes de noveno grado este año.

Los representantes en la audiencia de la semana pasada mencionaron que la calificación más reciente de la high school realmente la hubiera puesto en una trayectoria para salir de la vigilancia estatal, pero que la calificación se redujo porque menos estudiantes de los necesarios tomaron las pruebas estatales la primavera pasada. La escuela no logró alcanzar el porcentaje necesario de participación del 95 por ciento.

Líderes del distrito y de la high school le dijeron al Consejo Estatal que se sentían decepcionados porque estuvieron muy cerca de alcanzar el porcentaje pero terminaron no lográndolo. Pero dijeron que sienten optimismo de que sus mejoras resultarán en mejores calificaciones estatales el próximo otoño. Dijeron que han trabajado recientemente para asegurar que la tasa de participación no sea un problema una segunda vez.

Adams City High School ha observado avances importantes en las tasas de graduación, las cuales, según algunos estándares, superan las tasas promedio de graduación en Colorado, los líderes del distrito dijeron. Ese es un gran factor que está impulsando la calificación de la escuela.

Karla Loría, superintendenta de Adams 14, le dijo al Consejo Estatal que la labor del distrito, gran parte de la cual se enfoca en crear sistemas para monitorear datos y cómo apoyan los administradores a las escuelas, está funcionando. Agregó que es clave que el estado sea más flexible con el distrito.

“Lo que hemos establecido está produciendo resultados”, Loría dijo. “Nos gustaría continuar con esa estructura que hemos establecido”.

Durham, quien votó en contra del plan para el distrito y la high school, dijo que estaba contento de que el distrito estuviera mejorando, pero criticó el sistema estatal de educación pública en general por elogiar y aceptar continuamente mejoras graduales en lugar de presionar para que se obtengan cambios significativos y se duplique la cantidad de estudiantes que pueden leer a nivel de grado.

Aunque los datos de Adams 14 reflejan progreso y crecimiento, el porcentaje de estudiantes que cumplen con o superan las expectativas en las pruebas estandarizadas sigue siendo bajo.

La idea de aprobar el plan propuesto por el distrito para seguir trabajando con un gerente externo, pero sin transferir el control total a una entidad externa, también concordó con las recomendaciones de un panel externo que examinó el distrito y la high school.

El estado aceptó comentarios del público durante cerca de un mes antes de la audiencia de la semana pasada, pero solo recibió un puñado de comentarios, ninguno de padres o estudiantes. Los comentarios recibidos todos expresaron apoyo al distrito.

Yesenia Robles es una reportera para Chalkbeat Colorado que cubre distritos escolares de kindergarten a 12º grado y la educación multilingüe. Comunícate con Yesenia por correo electrónico a yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Traducido por Alejandra X. Castañeda

Preschool funding, school food, and other key education issues take center stage at budget hearing

2024-05-15T22:39:24+00:00

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As New York City schools stand to lose nearly $1 billion in the next fiscal year, City Council members pressed Education Department officials on how the looming drop in funding could impact the city’s early childhood system, school cafeteria menus, and other key education programs.

The Wednesday hearing came as City Council members and Mayor Eric Adams continue to negotiate the city’s budget for the next fiscal year, which is due by July 1.

Last month, Adams unveiled a budget proposal that would see the city’s Education Department funding shrink by 2.4%, or $808 million, next year — largely spurred by the expiration of billions of dollars of one-time federal COVID relief funds. Despite that drop in funding, the proposed budget devotes half a billion dollars in city and state funds to preserve several education programs currently propped up by the expiring federal dollars, including money for hundreds of social workers, the city’s free preschool program for 3-year-olds, and new staffers working in homeless shelters.

Other programs that have relied on the federal funds, however, remain at risk.

Education Department officials acknowledged the difficulties presented by the expiring federal funds, noting that they’ve advocated for the continuation of all such programs. Specific decisions about which programs to devote long-term city funding to have been made by the city’s Office of Management and Budget, said Emma Vadehra, the department’s chief operating officer.

Questions also centered on how the city’s schools would be impacted by sweeping cuts that Adams has ordered city agencies to enact over the past year to help cover costs for services to an influx of migrants. Under that separate directive, the Education Department faces more than $700 million in cuts to city funding for specific programs next year, including roughly $170 million slashed from early childhood programs. (The city’s overall contribution to the Education Department’s budget would still rise by nearly $1.6 billion under Adams’ proposal, though it’s not enough to offset the vast drop in federal funding next year.)

Schools Chancellor David Banks told council members it’s been “very challenging” to select certain programs to prioritize.

“I mean, it’s like, ‘Which one is your favorite child?’” he said. “These are all wonderfully, amazing programs. We don’t want to lose any of them.”

Here’s a look at some of the key education issues that arose during the hearing:

Council member clashes with DOE over preschool programs

Though Adams’ proposed budget would replace $92 million of expiring federal funding for 3-K — the city’s free preschool program for 3-year-olds — it does not restore a separate $170 million cut to city funding for early childhood programs. City Council members repeatedly expressed concerns over that cut during the hearing, seeking further details from Education Department officials about the potential impact of reduced funding.

Building up the free prekindergarten system for the city’s 3- and 4-year-olds was a centerpiece of former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration. Under Adams, the sector has been plagued with problems, including declining enrollment and lengthy payment delays to community organizations running programs.

On Wednesday, Education Department officials contended those issues had been inherited from the prior administration. They pointed to some improving metrics in the city’s early childhood system, stating enrollment in such programs had grown to roughly 114,000 children. That was up from 97,000 children earlier this year, according to city data released in November. Meanwhile, the average processing time for payments for early childhood providers had decreased to roughly 11 days.

Officials added they’ve worked to shift existing seats to neighborhoods with higher demand.

Capacity for the city’s 3-K program is roughly 53,000 seats, with about 44,000 filled, according to figures shared by Education Department officials during the hearing.

In one particularly contentious exchange, Brooklyn Council Member Lincoln Restler questioned why Education Department officials were unable to say definitively how many seats the city’s preschool programs would be able to offer next year after the $170 million cut.

“These are the cuts that the mayor has proposed that he wants to implement to your agency: What would be the impact of them?” he said. “How many fewer seats would you have? This is like the most plain, simple, obvious question that we were going to get all day. I’m a little disappointed that we’re not getting a straight answer.”

Education Department officials said any reductions would be focused in areas where seats aren’t filled.

Restler also pressed department officials for details about the full release of a report on 3-K seats. City officials hired the consulting firm Accenture last year to “map out needs and seats” as the program grappled with thousands of vacancies.

Officials previously said Accenture would be paid $760,000 to compile the report. But on Wednesday, Education Department officials cited a significantly lower figure of “$350,000 or $250,000.” They did not provide a precise timeline for the release.

City officials did not immediately explain the discrepancy between the two figures.

Budget cuts prompt concerns over school food

City Council members also expressed concerns over how budget cuts to school food would affect students next year. A $60 million November cut to the city’s school foods budget sparked outcry earlier this year, as the reduced funding forced cafeterias to remove popular items like chicken dumplings and bean and cheese burritos from their menus.

Though the city later restored some of those menu items, council members questioned whether the lingering cuts would impact cafeteria menus in the coming school year.

“We are monitoring this very closely,” Vadehra said. “We are very invested in making sure all of these food options stay on the menu for students next year.”

City officials express concerns over state funding

Education Department officials noted multiple times during the hearing that although state funding for the city’s schools increased for the coming fiscal year, the city is getting less than expected. A change to the formula determining how much money is sent to districts left New York City schools with $126 million less than anticipated.

Over the coming year, the state’s Education Department will partner with the Rockefeller Institute to conduct a longer term examination of that formula, in hopes of implementing further changes, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced last month.

“Our costs do continue to grow each year, which is why it’s important the state’s contribution — which is a lesser proportion of our budget now than it was 20 years ago — continues to increase,” Vadehra said.

City Education Department officials also told council members they had not yet received sufficient funding to fully implement a state law mandating smaller class sizes. But the department will continue to invest in hiring additional teachers and expanding classroom space to remain in compliance with the law, officials said.

An additional $180 million will go to school budgets, with around $135 million explicitly earmarked for compliance with the state class size law, Vadehra said. She estimated those funds would allow for hiring between 1,200 and 2,000 new teachers.

“Assuming those teachers can be found,” she added.

Education programs still at risk as fiscal cliff looms

City Council members drew attention to several education programs that have relied on expiring federal funds and are not included in the mayor’s proposed budget — including $65 million funding roughly 400 contracted school nurses, as well as millions of dollars to support restorative justice programs.

Education Department officials were unable to say during the hearing how many schools would be left without a nurse as that funding dries up later this year. Currently, every public school in the city has at least one nurse in the building.

Meanwhile, restorative justice programs, which aim to resolve conflict through peer mediation and other less punitive methods, are at risk of losing more than half of their current budget as the federal funds expire. Education Department officials said roughly $8 million of the $13.6 million committed to restorative justice programs this year comes from expiring federal dollars.

At the hearing, Banks encouraged council members to advocate for the funding to be restored.

“You all are still engaged in the process,” he said. “You can certainly, as you are engaged in this conversation and negotiations, push to make sure that [restorative justice] gets restored.”

In total, the city’s Education Department faces a gap of more than $200 million in expiring federal funds for education programming next year, officials said.

Alex Zimmerman contributed reporting.

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson pushes education agenda with ‘urgency’ during first year in office

2024-05-14T11:00:00+00:00

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On a recent Tuesday morning, Mayor Brandon Johnson visited classrooms at Kelvyn Park High School in Hermosa to present certificates of recognition to teachers for Teacher Appreciation Week.

Flanked by an alderman and the chief of finance for the teachers union, Johnson posed for photos and created a scene rare to find before last year: The mayor standing side-by-side with teachers, some wearing bright red Chicago Teachers Union shirts.

The scene was an indicator of the pivotal role education has played in Johnson’s agenda in office.

When Johnson, a former middle school teacher and Chicago Teachers Union organizer, was elected last year, it was no surprise education would be a central priority.

The union catapulted Johnson into office, and his win was the result of a decade of CTU organizing against how previous mayors approached public education. Instead of a system in which schools compete for students and parents choose the best option no matter how far they may have to travel, Johnson promised to focus on bolstering neighborhood schools, many which have seen declining enrollment and fewer resources.

As Johnson hits the one-year mark in office, his appointed school board has overseen a change in the district’s funding formula and directed district leaders to come up with a new five-year strategic plan, to be voted on this summer, that would rethink the city’s school choice system, which includes charter, selective enrollment, and magnet schools that require applications for admission.

“We have to fund our schools based upon the need,” Johnson said in a February 2023 video interview with Block Club Chicago. “Every single school should have a social worker, counselor and nurse as the bare minimum.”

But Johnson faces a big challenge in carrying out his education agenda: Chicago Public Schools is facing a projected $391 million budget deficit next fiscal year and has provided little detail on how it will close the gap. Federal COVID money is running out and he must bargain a new contract with the teachers union.

Johnson’s agenda also called for free public transit for students, housing for the district’s 20,000 homeless students, and creating up to 200 more Sustainable Community Schools – a partnership with the CTU that provides wraparound services at needy schools. None of these promises have seen any progress.

Still, education may be the one area where Johnson has made progress during his first year in office, said Dick Simpson, professor emeritus of politics at University of Illinois at Chicago and a former alderman.

“In comparison to, say, his other problems — solving crime, for instance — he is much further along on the school agenda,” Simpson said.

The speed with which Johnson can deliver on his education promises is important because he will soon lose exclusive control over the Chicago Board of Education, as the school board begins to transition to a partially elected body this November.

In an interview with Chalkbeat, Johnson said his focus on education “has more to do with the urgency that families are calling for.”

“We’re talking about decades upon decades of school closures, the defunding of our schools, the attack on veteran educators, particularly Black educators,” Johnson said. “So our urgency is really centered around the needs of our young people and the needs that our families have.”

Mayor Brandon Johnson visits the classroom of English teacher Noe Castro at Kelvyn Park High School with Principal Keith Adams and Ald. Felix Cardona Jr. (31st) in Hermosa on May 7, 2024.

Bolstering neighborhood schools, but not without backlash

Johnson’s plans to bolster neighborhood schools kicked into gear last December.

Just before winter break, the board of education passed a resolution aimed at boosting neighborhood schools and rethinking Chicago’s school choice system, which encourages kids to enroll in public schools outside their attendance zones. Half of all elementary students go to schools that are not their zoned neighborhood schools and more than 70% of high schoolers do.

Johnson has described the choice system as a “Hunger Games scenario” that forces schools to compete for students and resources and results in less investment in neighborhood schools. The resolution said the choice system “reinforces, rather than disrupts, cycles of inequity” and must be replaced with “anti-racist processes and initiatives that eliminate all forms of racial oppression.”

Though many selective enrollment and magnet schools were created under court-ordered desegregation, many still lack the diversity of the city and are largely segregated by race and class. A couple dozen are integrated, but serve more white and Asian American students than the rest of the school district.

The board’s resolution did not change any current policies or suggest the closure of any schools. Board members emphasized that public feedback would drive any changes, such as to admissions policies. Board members have, however, said they plan to scrutinize charter schools more.

The resolution was praised by advocates who have long pushed for more investment in neighborhood schools and the Chicago Teachers Union.

Johnson “ran on equity,” said Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. “He said that our school district had to be more equitable, and the resolution that came from the Board of Education is speaking to the inequity and their efforts to ameliorate inequity that are often disproportionately experienced by neighborhood schools.”

Mayor Brandon Johnson meets students as he tours Kelvyn Park High School in Hermosa on May 7, 2024.

But the resolution also sparked backlash from families whose children attend schools of choice, including those already frustrated that CPS was not providing bus service to general education students, largely those attending selective and magnet schools.

Those concerns pushed state lawmakers to file a bill that is up for a final vote this week, which would prevent the district from changing admissions policies for selective enrollment schools – something the current board signaled it may do. The bill would also prevent CPS from cutting funding for selective enrollment schools or closing any school until 2027, when the school board will be fully elected. The bill is supported by powerful state lawmakers and Gov. J. B. Pritzker.

Johnson said the bill would prevent the board from taking actions to help create “real equity” and would prevent the district from balancing its budget. He began rattling off the relatively small percentages of Black students at some of the city’s most sought after selective enrollment high schools and noted how those figures were higher about two decades ago.

“What I’m troubled by is that you have a school district that is hypersegregated and that stratification has continued to grow because you haven’t had leadership like mine directing the school board and the Chicago Public Schools to commit to real equity,” Johnson said. “So is Springfield intervening to protect segregation?”

Simpson noted that Johnson has “a more strained” relationship with the legislature and Pritzker, meaning he doesn’t have a lot of clout to fight for what he wants.

Mayor Brandon Johnson pats the head of kindergartner Triston during a back-to-school event at Jackie Robinson Elementary School in Bronzeville on Aug. 21, 2023.

CPS changes funding formula

In March, CPS announced it would change how it distributes money to schools, delivering on another major promise Johnson made on the campaign trail to end student-based budgeting, which provides schools a set dollar amount for every child enrolled.

The new funding formula will now give every school a base level of staff and discretionary money based on need, which principals can use flexibly. This “needs-based” formula is meant to break a cycle in which underenrolled schools in underinvested neighborhoods lose money because they’re losing students.

That change, too, has drawn a fresh batch of concerns.

Parent leaders at selective enrollment and magnet schools said their budgets provide for fewer staffers next year under the new formula. Some Local School Councils are voting against their budgets for next year.

CPS officials have said that overall funding to schools remains the same as last year but individual schools could see changes. The district is looking for cuts at the central office to address the $391 million deficit, CPS CEO Pedro Martinez has said. CPS has not yet released school budgets for next year to the public.

The union also raised concerns about the formula, saying it lacks guaranteed positions, such as teacher assistants, and said some neighborhood schools have also seen cuts. Davis Gates blamed Martinez – not the mayor – for those flaws, because she said he is not explaining the changes well to the public or lobbying the state legislature hard enough for more money to prevent staffing cuts to some schools.

Mayor Brandon Johnson hugs art teacher Meredith Kachel at Kelvyn Park High School as he surprised her for Teacher Appreciation Week. Johnson visited the school with Principal Keith Adams and Ald. Felix Cardona Jr. (31st) in Hermosa on May 7, 2024.

Sylvia Barragan, a spokesperson for Chicago Public Schools, said “multiple staff members” have visited Springfield throughout the session to advocate for more funding, and Martinez has pushed for more funding “for well over two years in Springfield, at our Board of Education meetings and beyond.”

CPS officials have said that no type of school is being disproportionately impacted. But Martinez has acknowledged that they are working to fix concerns at individual schools.

Mayor inconsistent on police out of schools

Some education-focused organizations have criticized the mayor’s administration for pushing big changes through or flip-flopping on commitments without properly engaging the public.

Hal Woods, director of policy and advocacy for Kids First Chicago, shared some examples. For one, the board publicly posted its resolution stating its intent to rethink school choice two days before the board voted, leaving little time for the public to digest it, Woods said. The district is currently holding hearings to collect feedback for the next strategic plan.

Parents and schools have also demanded more information about why the district is changing its funding formula, Woods said. He added that the former formula wasn’t working for many schools, but the district hasn’t shared enough about the new formula or its impact on schools.

Woods also said the mayor could be more clear with communities on his position to remove police from schools. Johnson supported getting rid of campus police on the campaign trail but later said local schools should have the power to choose whether to have school resource officers. Then in February, the mayor backed the school board when it voted to unilaterally remove officers from all campuses by next school year.

School police officers in the hallways of Lane Tech High School in Chicago.

“There’s plenty of data that shows how police in schools impact youth mental health, right, and the disproportionate impact on Black students and Latino students, but … they’re kind of making a decision based on their values without kind of educating the public on why they’re making that decision,” Woods said.

Johnson said “he will talk to anyone” and rejected the idea that his administration isn’t transparent enough. He pointed to the handful of board of education meetings that have been held at high schools in the evening instead of downtown during the day. He believes some of that criticism comes from people who “have had unfettered access” to previous mayors, and there are “people who now have access who were shut out before.”

“I’ve said all along,” Johnson said, “there’s plenty of room at the table for everyone.”

Fulfilling other promises before school board shifts

There are several promises Johnson hasn’t made progress on, including expanding Sustainable Community Schools, a CPS partnership with the teachers union that pairs needy schools with community organizations that provide wraparound services to families. Each program costs about $500,000.

While Johnson has shifted focus toward neighborhood schools, his administration is struggling to support the 8,900 migrant students and families who have arrived in Chicago from the southern border since at least August 2022.

As a candidate, Johnson promised to invest more money in bilingual education. Between August 2022 and last August – five months after he was elected – the number of bilingual-certified educators grew by 90, according to CPS. Between last August and the end of April, that figure grew by another 106 teachers.

CPS and the city also opened a welcome center to help migrant students enroll in school and access other resources. CPS said it helps direct families to schools with the proper resources when they are struggling with enrollment.

Mayor Brandon Johnson speaks at a press conference at Roberto Clemente Community Academy before the opening of a pilot CPS welcome center for newly arriving families on July 17, 2023.

Still, the union, lawmakers, and families have reported that many schools are struggling to meet the needs of migrant children, most of whom are learning English as a new language and are homeless. Those challenges include lacking enough staff to help children with specialized English instructions.

Johnson again blamed state lawmakers for their efforts to protect selective enrollment schools, saying it would “prevent us from having the type of budget, autonomy, and flexibility to invest in those schools” that lack resources to help English learners.

Johnson also hasn’t gained ground on providing the district’s 20,000 homeless students with housing — a bold promise tied to a signature campaign promise to pass the Bring Chicago Home referendum. That ballot measure, which would have used a tax on property sales over $1 million to help fund housing for homeless families, failed in March.

Ultimately, Johnson’s education legacy and the fate of his preferred policies will depend on what the future elected school board does, Simpson said.

“I do think the new school board, as it begins to take shape, will revisit these issues and either move forward with the general direction of Johnson and the current school board, or will roll them back to an extent,” he said.

It could also depend on the ongoing financial challenges for Chicago Public Schools. Asked how he will achieve his goals in the absence of more money from Springfield, Johnson said he’s exploring other “measures and steps that we can take as a city.” When pressed for details, Johnson’s office declined to elaborate.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Report: Michigan teacher salaries aren’t keeping pace with other states

2024-05-15T13:47:41+00:00

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Average starting salaries for Michigan teachers lag behind most other states at a time when many school districts in the state are struggling with teacher shortages and the profession is becoming increasingly unappealing to those seeking careers.

That is one of the key findings in a new report from Michigan State University researchers that also finds that the average overall salary for Michigan teachers is now below the national average, after many years of being among the highest in the U.S.

The report, “Teacher Compensation in Michigan: Recent Trends and Public Opinion,” was released last month by the Education Policy Innovative Collaborative. It includes results of a public opinion poll of Michigan residents that shows wide support for increasing pay for new teachers.

Teacher pay is a critical issue in Michigan, as it is elsewhere in the country. There are wide disparities in pay between districts, with wealthier districts able to pay their teachers more. Shortages affecting many districts — especially in science, math, special education, and career and technical education — make it more attractive for teachers to move around in search of higher pay, creating instability. Often, that instability affects the most vulnerable students.

Jason Burns, one of the authors of the report and a research specialist at EPIC, said he hopes the findings will spur “a more informed debate on the topic.”

Here are some of the key findings in the report:

The average starting salary in Michigan was $38,963 during the 2021-22 school year, ranking 39th in the nation.
The average teacher salary in Michigan in 2021-22 was $64,884, 16th in the nation and below the national average of $66,745. During the 2012-13 school year, Michigan’s average was $61,560, 11th in the nation and above the national average of $56,065. That’s a 5% increase for Michigan over that time, compared with a 19% increase nationally.
Adjusted for inflation, Michigan teacher salaries have been on a steady decline. The report says that “if salaries had kept pace with inflation since 1999, the average Michigan teacher would have earned $81,703 in the 2021-2022 school year.”
In a recent survey of Michigan residents, 76% said they believe starting teacher salaries should increase, while 43% felt the same for average teacher salaries.

The teacher salary data is based on 2021-22 data, the most recent available for the report.

Michigan’s average teacher salary ranking has declined in part because many other states have moved to increase teacher salaries. Burns said Maryland, Delaware, Georgia, Florida, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Idaho, and Utah are among those that have moved to increase teacher salaries, mostly by boosting the minimum amount teachers can earn but in some cases raising salaries for all teachers. A Michigan bill last year that would have set a minimum salary of $50,000 for starting Michigan teachers failed.

The fact that this movement to increase teacher pay is happening in both blue and red states is interesting, Burns said.

“In education, a lot of things wind up being partisan these days,” he said. “But looking at what’s happening across the country, it’s been a very bipartisan kind of effort in terms of who is actually taking action on the issue of teacher salaries.”

Chandra Madafferi, president of the Michigan Education Association, heard a presentation on the EPIC report recently. Her reaction? “Coming from the classroom, I knew it was bad. I didn’t know it was this bad.”

She said there is inconsistency in teacher salaries across Michigan, with often a $20,000 difference at the top of the pay scale between those districts that “pay really, really well and those who don’t. So the inequity is still very apparent.”

Madafferi said she appreciates that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has made historic investments in public education, “because in many places, things are better than they have been.

“In many places, pay is going up. Things are getting better but there’s still so much that has to be done,” she said.

For instance, Madafferi said many districts are dealing with infrastructure and facility issues that require expensive fixes. If they can’t get that covered through a bond proposal, the money to fix the issues comes out of general funds, leaving less money to cover teacher pay increases.

“I have had multiple superintendents say to me, ‘I want to pay my educators more,’ or ‘I want to pay teachers more, however, we just can’t.’”

The report also highlights research from the Economic Policy Institute that finds that nationally, teachers earn 26.4% less than similarly educated college graduates. In Michigan, teachers earn 21% less. The gap is referred to as the teacher penalty.

Burns said research from the Federal Reserve Bank found a similar gap — 18% to 20% lower pay for teachers.

That kind of data is concerning to people like Armen Hratchian, executive director of Teach For America Detroit. TeachMichigan, a program of TFA Detroit, seeks to recruit and retain educators.

A 21% pay gap “is a real penalty,” Hratchian said.

“We have financially made this uncompetitive, and then we aren’t supporting folks in the way we should be,” Hratchian said. “What we’ve shown is when you do that, well, it strengthens the profession.”

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

Read Thurgood Marshall’s powerful argument in Brown v. Board

2024-05-15T18:44:42+00:00

Read more of Chalkbeat's coverage of the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

In the months leading up to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision — 70 years ago this month — Thurgood Marshall, arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court, successfully challenged racial segregation in public schools. Then the NAACP’s chief legal counsel, Marshall would go on to become the nation’s first Black Supreme Court Justice. His December 8, 1953 remarks before the high court are below. Chalkbeat has added links for context.

It follows that with education, this Court has made segregation and inequality equivalent concepts. They have equal rating, equal footing, and if segregation thus necessarily imports inequality, it makes no great difference whether we say that the Negro is wronged because he is segregated, or that he is wronged because he received unequal treatment…

I would like to say that each lawyer on the other side has made it clear as to what the position of the state was on this, and it would be all right possibly but for the fact that this is so crucial. There is no way you can repay lost school years.

These children in these cases are guaranteed by the states some 12 years of education in varying degrees, and this idea, if I understand it, to leave it to the states until they work it out — and I think that is a most ingenious argument — you leave it to the states, they say, and then they say that the states haven’t done anything about it in a hundred years, so for that reason this Court doesn’t touch it.

The argument of judicial restraint has no application in this case. There is a relationship between federal and state, but there is no corollary or relationship as to the Fourteenth Amendment.

The duty of enforcing, the duty of following the Fourteenth Amendment, is placed upon the states. The duty of enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment is placed upon this Court, and the argument that they make over and over again to my mind is the same type of argument they charge us with making, the same argument Charles Sumner made. Possibly so.

And we hereby charge them with making the same argument that was made before the Civil War, the same argument that was made during the period between the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Plessy v. Ferguson case.

And I think it makes no progress for us to find out who made what argument. It is our position that whether or not you base this case solely on the Intent of Congress or whether you base it on the logical extension of the doctrine as set forth in the McLaurin case, on either basis the same conclusion is required, which is that this Court makes it clear to all of these states that in administering their governmental functions, at least those that are vital not to the life of the state alone, not to the country alone, but vital to the world in general, that little pet feelings of race, little pet feelings of custom — I got the feeling on hearing the discussion yesterday that when you put a white child in a school with a whole lot of colored children, the child would fall apart or something. Everybody knows that is not true.

Those same kids in Virginia and South Carolina — and I have seen them do it — they play in the streets together, they play on their farms together, they go down the road together, they separate to go to school, they come out of school and play ball together. They have to be separated in school.

There is some magic to it. You can have them voting together, you can have them not restricted because of law in the houses they live in. You can have them going to the same state university and the same college, but if they go to elementary and high school, the world will fall apart. And it is the exact same argument that has been made to this Court over and over again, and we submit that when they charge us with making a legislative argument, it is in truth they who are making the legislative argument.

They can’t take race out of this case. From the day this case was filed until this moment, nobody has in any form or fashion, despite the fact I made it clear in the opening argument that I was relying on it, done anything to distinguish this statute from the Black Codes, which they must admit, because nobody can dispute, say anything anybody wants to say, one way or the other, the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to deprive the states of power to enforce Black Codes or anything else like it.

We charge that they are Black Codes. They obviously are Black Codes if you read them. They haven’t denied that they are Black Codes, so if the Court wants to very narrowly decide this case, they can decide it on that point.

So whichever way it is done, the only way that this Court can decide this case in opposition to our position, is that there must be some reason which gives the state the right to make a classification that they can make in regard to nothing else in regard to Negroes, and we submit the only way to arrive at that decision is to find that for some reason Negroes are inferior to all other human beings.

Nobody will stand in the Court and urge that, and in order to arrive at the decision that they want us to arrive at, there would have to be some recognition of a reason why of all of the multitudinous groups of people in this country you have to single out Negroes and give them this separate treatment.

It can’t be because of slavery in the past, because there are very few groups in this country that haven’t had slavery some place back in history of their groups. It can’t be color because there are Negroes as white as the drifted snow, with blue eyes, and they are just as segregated as the colored man.

The only thing can be is an inherent determination that the people who were formerly in slavery, regardless of anything else, shall be kept as near that stage as is possible, and now is the time, we submit, that this Court should make it clear that that is not what our Constitution stands for.

Thank you, sir.

Illinois high school juniors must take the ACT to fulfill graduation requirements starting next spring

2024-05-15T22:51:06+00:00

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Illinois high school juniors will take the ACT instead of the SAT to graduate starting next school year.

The Illinois State Board of Education was updated on the switch during its monthly meeting on Wednesday. A spokesperson for the school board says the ACT was awarded a $53 million contract over the course of six years. The state requires students to take a college entrance exam in order to graduate.

“At the end of the day, it came down to price,” said Stephen Isoye, chairman of the State Board of Education, noting that state law requires assessment vendors to go through a competitive procurement process.

State Superintendent Tony Sanders wrote in a weekly message to school administrators on Tuesday that the ACT “aligns with the Illinois Learning Standards, provides a secure online testing experience for students, reduces administrative burden on districts,” and will give “actionable reporting for educators and families.”

The procurement office evaluated bids from the College Board, which administers the SAT, and ACT Inc. on “technical specifications, commitment to diversity, and price.” Overall, the ACT received more points.

School districts in the state have given high school juniors the SAT for almost a decade. Illinois switched from ACT to the SAT in 2016 and has renewed the contract with the College Board several times.

However, Sanders said the state board will work with ACT to support schools through the transition.

“We will help you prepare teachers for the transition and help you communicate with students and families, so you can continue doing your best work in teaching and learning,” Sanders wrote in his weekly message.

Many colleges and universities stopped requiring entrance exams during the pandemic but are moving back to requiring the tests for admissions.

The state board’s contract with the College Board to administer the SAT for 11th graders and the PSAT for 9th and 10th grades will expire on June 30. Illinois, like all states, is required by federal law to administer accountability assessment to high school students. State law says the exam must be a nationally recognized college entrance exam, leaving the state with two choices: the ACT or SAT.

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.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Public Schools pitches safety plan calling for restorative justice, no police in schools

2024-05-15T22:38:13+00:00

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Chicago Public Schools pitched a new school safety plan Wednesday that would get rid of campus police, call for more training for educators on alternative discipline practices, and require locking classroom doors.

The proposed plan, which is on the agenda for next week’s board meeting, comes three months after the Chicago Board of Education passed a resolution to remove school resource officers, or SROs, by the start of next school year. At the time, the board directed CPS CEO Pedro Martinez to create a new safety plan by June 27 that focuses on restorative practices.

Thirty-nine high schools still have on-campus police officers staffed by the Chicago Police Department. At 57 other schools, Local School Councils, or LSCs, voted to remove SROs.

The board’s plan to remove police could be reversed. State lawmakers have filed a bill that would allow LSCs to contract with the Chicago Police Department to staff SROs. That bill is still being negotiated, according to a spokesperson for Rep. Mary Gill, the bill’s sponsor who represents Chicago’s Beverly neighborhood.

The district’s new proposed safety plan, however, extends beyond campus police. The plan builds on existing district efforts to teach kids about social-emotional skills and restorative justice practices, which are alternatives to discipline meant to resolve conflict and understand the root of student behavior, according to the proposal. All schools would be required to have a safety plan based on these new guidelines by 2028.

The plan covers “physical safety, emotional safety, and relational trust, which drives the development of a holistically safe environment,” said Jadine Chou, CPS’s chief of safety and security, during a board meeting Wednesday to review the board’s agenda for next week.

Chou said the plan was developed with community organizations and considered feedback from a survey about school safety that drew 9,000 responses. The board will vote next week to open a 30-day public comment period on the proposed plan and would vote on the plan after that.

Among the proposed plan’s highlights:

All schools would be required to have at least one security guard. Schools would get more guards based on a formula that considers multiple factors, such as the size of the school building, the number of students, and neighborhood crime.
All schools would be required to have an emergency management plan that’s updated annually.
All schools would have to teach social-emotional learning and must implement restorative practices.
Schools would include training on “climate, trauma-responsive, and social and emotional learning” in professional development plans
All schools would be required to have behavioral health teams, which are charged with supporting students who are in crisis, those who have experienced trauma, or are in need of mental health assistance. Most CPS schools – 460 – already have such teams, according to a district spokesperson.
All interior and exterior doors must be locked at all times, except for bathroom doors. Staff would have keys to doors.

This fall, all schools would receive data from the district to “conduct a baseline assessment of their safety, culture and climate” and would be required to develop safety plans based on that assessment.

After brief remarks from Chou on Wednesday, board members applauded the proposal. Board member Rudy Lozano said it signals a shift from discipline to a “healing-centered equity frame for students.”

Board’s approach to school safety draws mixed response

The board’s recent actions on school safety drew praise from advocates who had long pushed CPS to invest money in more social workers and other resources, and highlighted how Black students were more likely to be arrested. The decision drew opposition from some Local School Councils and elected officials who felt that LSCs should decide whether to keep police on campus.

Most research shows that schools with police tend to have higher arrest and suspension rates but doesn’t clarify whether police are the cause or if officers are more likely staffed at schools with more challenges, according to a Chalkbeat review of research in 2020. Nationally, students have generally positive views of SROs but those views tend to worsen among Black students, who are more likely to get arrested. Another study last fall found that Chicago schools implementing restorative justice practices saw fewer student arrests. Students also reported feeling safer at school.

David Stovall, a UIC professor of Black studies and criminology, law, and justice, said the district’s proposed safety plan reflects what many community members have asked for.

However, Stovall said, the plan will work only if officials can ensure all schools are meeting requirements, such as creating behavioral health teams with mental health professionals.

“It can’t be just one office operating out of central [office], right? You have to have teams of folks in order to do that work we’re talking about,” Stovall said.

The plan seems to require more resources at a time that CPS is projecting a $391 million budget deficit next fiscal year, which begins July 1, he said.

Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, which works with the Chicago Police Department to train Chicago’s SROs, said he was “deeply disappointed” in the board’s decision. Canady said officers are trained to “build positive relationships” with students, parents, and staff.

“We recognize that in some communities, there’s strained relationships with law enforcement,” Canady said. “If we’re ever going to get that right, we’ve got to get it right with the next generation [and] the next generation just happens to be adolescents that are going to become our next adults in society.”

The movement to remove SROs came into focus in 2019, when the U.S. Department of Justice placed the Chicago Police Department under a federal consent decree and raised questions about the role of campus police. Then in 2020, the district asked LSCs to vote on whether they wanted to keep their SROs after protests over Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of Geroge Floyd.

On the campaign trail, Mayor Brandon Johnson said he supported getting rid of campus police, but later said he supports letting LSCs make that decision for their schools. Johnson flipped again earlier this year when he supported the board’s decision to remove officers.

Correction: May 15, 2024: This story previously said the incorrect number of days this proposal will go out for public comment.

Samantha Smylie contributed.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Restorative justice funding could be cut by more than half as fiscal cliff nears

2024-05-14T23:20:47+00:00

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Thanks to an infusion of federal pandemic relief money, city officials bolstered programs that encourage schools to talk through conflicts with students rather than resorting to suspensions.

Federal dollars now represent about $8 million of the program’s roughly $13.6 million budget — funding that is set to expire this summer. Mayor Eric Adams recently allocated more than half a billion dollars to save several other education programs that were financed with one-time federal money. Restorative justice was not included.

Restorative justice initiatives, which prioritize peer mediation and other forms of conflict resolution, have been a key alternative to more punitive forms of discipline, advocates say. If the funding evaporates, they worry schools will increasingly respond to student misbehavior by removing students from their classrooms.

Those programs allow “students to resolve conflicts on their own and it keeps them within the school community,” said Naphtali Moore, a staff attorney at the school justice project at Advocates for Children, a group that has pushed to find new sources of funding for programs that received one-time federal dollars. “You’re also building relationships as well.”

The possible budget cuts come at a precarious moment: Concerns about student behavior have intensified in the wake of the pandemic, and suspension rates are on the rise, returning to pre-pandemic levels last school year. Education Department officials have not released suspension data for the first half of this school year, despite a city law requiring they do so by the end of March and several requests from Chalkbeat for the statistics.

Schools Chancellor David Banks previously said he does not favor “zero tolerance” approaches to school discipline, but has also stressed that misbehavior must be met with consequences. In congressional testimony last week, he said that the city swiftly suspended 30 students who engaged in antisemitic incidents as some campuses grappled with upheaval related to the Israel-Hamas war. The schools chief has faced pressure to address broader safety concerns on many campuses, as the number of weapons confiscated in schools surged in the wake of the pandemic.

Banks has not pursued formal discipline policy changes, but school leaders across the city received training this year that reinforced their discretion to suspend students, three principals said.

“The message was, ‘if you need to suspend students you can do that’,” said one Brooklyn high school principal who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “The tone was kind of different. When we first came back from the pandemic, it was more, ‘focus on restorative justice.’”

Advocates fear that the city may retreat from restorative justice programs. Those efforts gained steam under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who overhauled the city’s discipline code and presided over a significant drop in suspensions. Some educators contend those reforms created more chaotic classrooms in some cases.

This is not the first time restorative justice programs have faced an uncertain future under Banks. City officials threatened to cut the program’s funding in 2022 only to save it at the last minute. A group of student activists pushed the city earlier this year to dramatically increase funding for more holistic approaches to student misbehavior and mental health challenges, including restorative justice.

“Kids need more support than ever, but in terms of the funding, the support is less stable than it ought to be,” said Tala Manassah, deputy executive director of the Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility, which partners with hundreds of city schools on restorative justice and social-emotional programs.

Uncertainty over funding can make it difficult to offer training earlier in the school year or over the summer when they are more likely to be effective, Manassah added. If the funding is added at the last second, that means training may not ramp up until later in the school year when “folks are already overwhelmed,” she said. “You don’t want initiatives that seem like an add-on or more of a burden.”

Some Education Department staff are already bracing for cuts. “There will be less training, less opportunities for people to form teams and meet after school, less opportunity to pay students” to deliver restorative circles where school community members talk through conflicts, said one central office staff member familiar with the city’s restorative justice programming who spoke on condition of anonymity.

An Education Department spokesperson did not answer questions about the city’s plans for restorative justice funding.

Several advocates noted there’s still time to push the city to find new money, as the city budget must be hashed out with the City Council and finalized by July 1.

“We do have two months to push the negotiations to replace the federal dollars,” said Andrea Ortiz, the membership and campaign director for the Dignity in Schools Campaign, an advocacy group. “The budget’s not done.”

Update: After this story was published, Education Department officials revealed at a City Council hearing that they are spending less federal funding on restorative justice than initially budgeted. Officials allocated $8 million in federal funding for restorative justice this school year, not $12 million.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

To help address teens’ mental health needs, Colorado to launch Youth Mental Health Corps

2024-05-15T21:18:47+00:00

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Colorado is one of four states set to launch a new public-private program this fall aimed at addressing both the growing mental health needs of teenagers and a lack of providers.

Called the Youth Mental Health Corps, the program will train young adults ages 18 to 24 to act “as navigators serving middle and high school students in schools and in community-based organizations,” according to a press release from Colorado Lt. Gov. Dianne Primavera’s office. The Youth Mental Health Corps website says corps members will “connect youth to needed mental health supports and resources in close collaboration with practitioners and community partners.”

The federal AmeriCorps service program will work with the Colorado Behavioral Health Administration and the Colorado Community College System to recruit and deploy the navigators, who will get a stipend and be eligible for student loan forgiveness and other help paying for college, the press release says.

“By joining this national initiative, we are not only addressing the urgent need for mental health resources but also creating meaningful pathways for our young adults to pursue careers in this vital field,” Primavera said in a statement.

Children’s Hospital Colorado declared a pediatric mental health “state of emergency” in 2021, and both public agencies and private organizations in the state responded with programs to address the crisis. The programs include the pandemic-era state-funded I Matter, which provides six free telehealth or in-person counseling sessions to students in elementary through high school and which Colorado lawmakers recently made permanent.

The Schultz Family Foundation, founded by former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and his wife, Sheri, and the online platform Pinterest are backing the Youth Mental Health Corps program, according to a press release from AmeriCorps.

The press release mentions “broad concern about the impact of social media on the mental health of young people” and says the Youth Mental Health Corps will “help students navigate social challenges online such as harassment, bullying and bias.”

Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, and Texas will launch Youth Mental Health Corps programs in September with “hundreds” of navigators across the four states, the press release says. Seven other states — California, Iowa, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and Utah — are set to launch programs in the fall of 2025, it says.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Outdoor preschools could soon get state licenses in Colorado, unlocking public dollars

2024-05-13T22:54:32+00:00

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Fourteen preschoolers sang “Eggs, larva, pupa, adults,” on a recent morning, curling up on the grass, wriggling around like caterpillars, lying still, and then flapping their arms in search of wildflowers.

The song, along with redwing blackbird calls and a bit of traffic noise, was the soundtrack of their morning circle, which kicked off near a wetland in southeast Denver.

The children weren’t on a field trip. They were attending preschool outside like they always do, under the supervision of teachers from Nature School Cooperative. It was early May and, although the 3- and 4-year-olds didn’t know it, a momentous week for schools like theirs.

Colorado lawmakers were about to pass a bill that would allow outdoor preschools — sometimes called forest schools — to be recognized with state child care licenses adapted to their format.

Advocates say the great outdoors is an ideal classroom, giving young children the chance to move freely, learn about the natural world, and assess risks and solve problems in a way indoor classrooms don’t allow. They say licensing will open the programs to a wider swath of families by unlocking public dollars available through Colorado’s universal preschool and child care subsidy programs.

A child at Nature School Cooperative explores in southeast Denver.

Candace Johnson, whose two children attend Nature School Cooperative five days a week, said the school is a big expense, but worth it because her kids get so much out of it, even on cold, snowy days

She said it would be “invaluable” if the schools could be licensed and access funds to cut costs for parents.

Gov. Jared Polis is expected to sign the bill, which received support from some Republicans, into law in the next few weeks. Colorado will then become the second state after Washington to license outdoor preschools. State officials still have to hammer out detailed rules, so it will be a year or two before Colorado begins handing out licenses.

In the meantime, advocates are celebrating the creation of a clear, state-approved pathway for outdoor preschools.

“We are just very excited and thankful,” said Jennifer Kollerup, who heads the Colorado Collective for Nature-Based Early Education.

Ryan Pleune, who co-owns Nature School Cooperative, said he was thrilled when lawmakers passed the bill. He hopes someday his program can be tuition-free for every family.

State rules aren’t tailored to outdoor preschools

Matt Hebard cried when he was testifying in support of the outdoor preschool bill in February.

He began pushing for state recognition for outdoor preschools more than a decade ago, when he worked for what was then Colorado’s Office of Early Childhood and is now the Department of Early Childhood.

“It just didn’t really get a whole lot of traction,” said Hebard, who now lives in Alaska.

In 2020 Hebard founded Denver Forest School, an outdoor school that serves more than two-dozen children ages 2 to 7 at Bluff Lake Nature Center on the city’s eastern edge.

It’s one of about 45 outdoor early childhood programs in Colorado, according to Kollerup. Some, called hybrid programs, operate in a building part of the time and outdoors part of the time and have a traditional child care license.

Others operate entirely outdoors and follow rules that make them “license exempt” — for example, by having only four children in the group, requiring parents stay for the session, or focusing on a single skill the way a gymnastics class does.

But these arrangements are more or less workarounds since the highly regulated child care licensing system was never designed for outdoor preschools. And since license-exempt programs aren’t generally eligible for public funding, most families have to pay full tuition.

In Washington, which began licensing outdoor preschools in 2019, 17 such programs are licensed. Together, they have space for about 330 children, and 57 children enrolled in them receive state child care subsidies, according to a spokesman for the Washington State Department of Children, Youth, and Families.

A child holds an insect in their palm at Nature School Cooperative.

Colorado officials say new rules for hybrid programs and part-day outdoor programs will be finalized by the end of 2024, with licenses available in early 2025. Licenses for full-day outdoor programs will take until 2026, in part because rules will be customized based on each program’s geographic location and features. The outdoor preschool bill includes $260,000 for 2024-25 for new licensing specialists who will focus on full-day outdoor preschool programs.

“This legislation actually gives us that staffing and ability to do those site-specific risk-benefit analysis and risk mitigation plans,” said Carin Rosa, director of the licensing division at the Colorado Department of Early Childhood.

The ability to get licensed could bring a variety of benefits to outdoor preschools, including allowing them to enroll more children, extend their hours, and serve more low-income and working families. Licenses may also grant more flexibility in what children can do, potentially allowing activities like tree-climbing, using sharp tools, or gathering around a fire pit.

Although some parents worry their kids will end up miserable in bad weather — with cold hands or wet feet — outdoor educators say with the right gear and planning, that rarely happens.

Parents see the benefits of outdoor schools

Johnson grew up in Houston, a city she remembers as full of concrete. Even when her family moved to Minnesota, aside from fishing once in a while, they didn’t do outdoorsy things. Her parents spent most of their time working.

“We never did vacations, we never went to cabins — that just wasn’t something that we did,” she said.

Johnson, who is Black, wanted to make sure her children felt at home in the outdoors in a way she never did growing up. Nature School Cooperative provides that, giving her 4-year-old and almost-3-year-old the chance to play in streams, jump off rocks, and develop resilience to whatever the day throws at them.

“This school goes above and beyond to make it an inclusive space and make people feel it’s for them,” she said.

The school’s ethos has rubbed off on Johnson. She’ll sometimes use the “deers ears” hand gesture to get her children’s attention when an argument is brewing. She’s also let go of her need for control in every situation, taking “a leap of faith that they can handle things that are challenging.”

Zac Sigl’s 3-year-old son Leonardo attends Nature School Cooperative one half-day a week and a traditional preschool run by the Denver school district the other four days.

Outdoor preschool is his favorite — he likes pulling on his yellow rain boots, digging in the dirt, and climbing anything he can. Sigl said they tried gymnastics, but Leonardo couldn’t focus on it and made a game of running away from the class.

That doesn’t happen when he’s at outdoor school. In fact, teachers there told Sigl that Leonardo is a natural leader, staying with the group and helping other children.

“Every single time after picking him up he’s on cloud nine,” Sigl said.

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

After a child’s death, California weighs rules for physical education during extreme weather

2024-05-15T09:07:00+00:00

LAKE ELSINORE, California — Yahushua Robinson was an energetic boy who jumped and danced his way through life. Then, a physical education teacher instructed the 12-year-old to run outside on a day when the temperature climbed to 107 degrees.

“We lose loved ones all the time, but he was taken in a horrific way,” his mother, Janee Robinson, said from the family’s Inland Empire home, about 80 miles southeast of Los Angeles. “I would never want nobody to go through what I’m going through.”

The day her son died, Robinson, who teaches physical education, kept her elementary school students inside, and she had hoped her children’s teachers would do the same.

The Riverside County Coroner’s Bureau ruled that Yahushua died on Aug. 29 of a heart defect, with heat and physical exertion as contributing factors. His death at Canyon Lake Middle School came on the second day of an excessive heat warning, when people were advised to avoid strenuous activities and limit their time outdoors.

Yahushua’s family is supporting a bill in California that would require the state Department of Education to create guidelines that govern physical activity at public schools during extreme weather, including setting threshold temperatures for when it’s too hot or too cold for students to exercise or play sports outside. If the measure becomes law, the guidelines will have to be in place by Jan. 1, 2026.

Many states have adopted protocols to protect student athletes from extreme heat during practices. But the California bill is broader and would require educators to consider all students throughout the school day and in any extreme weather, whether they’re doing jumping jacks in fourth period or playing tag during recess. It’s unclear if the bill will clear a critical committee vote scheduled for May 16.

“Yahushua’s story, it’s very touching. It’s very moving. I think it could have been prevented had we had the right safeguards in place,” said state Sen. Melissa Hurtado, a Bakersfield Democrat and one of the bill’s authors. “Climate change is impacting everyone, but it’s especially impacting vulnerable communities, especially our children.”

Last year marked the planet’s warmest on record, and extreme weather is becoming more frequent and severe, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Even though most heat deaths and illnesses are preventable, about 1,220 people in the United States are killed by extreme heat every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Young children are especially susceptible to heat illness because their bodies have more trouble regulating temperature, and they rely on adults to protect them from overheating. A person can go from feeling dizzy or experiencing a headache to passing out, having a seizure, or going into a coma, said Chad Vercio, a physician and the division chief of general pediatrics at Loma Linda University Health.

“It can be a really dangerous thing,” Vercio said of heat illness. “It is something that we should take seriously and figure out what we can do to avoid that.”

It’s unclear how many children have died at school from heat exposure. Eric Robinson, 15, had been sitting in his sports medicine class learning about heatstroke when his sister arrived at his high school unexpectedly the day their brother died.

“They said, ‘OK, go home, Eric. Go home early.’ I walked to the car and my sister’s crying. I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I can’t believe that my little brother’s gone. That I won’t be able to see him again. And he’d always bugged me, and I would say, ‘Leave me alone.’”

That morning, Eric had done Yahushua’s hair and loaned him his hat and chain necklace to wear to school.

Yahushua Robinson’s friends sent cards, drawings, and messages after the 12-year-old died last August with heat and physical exertion as contributing factors.

As temperatures climbed into the 90s that morning, a physical education teacher instructed Yahushua to run on the blacktop. His friends told the family that the sixth grader had repeatedly asked the teacher for water but was denied, his parents said.

The school district has refused to release video footage to the family showing the moment Yahushua collapsed on the blacktop. He died later that day at the hospital.

Melissa Valdez, a Lake Elsinore Unified School District spokesperson, did not respond to calls seeking comment.

Schoolyards can reach dangerously high temperatures on hot days, with asphalt sizzling up to 145 degrees, according to findings by researchers at the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. Some school districts, such as San Diego Unified and Santa Ana Unified, have hot weather plans or guidelines that call for limiting physical activity and providing water to kids. But there are no statewide standards that K-12 schools must implement to protect students from heat illness.

Under the bill, the California Department of Education must set temperature thresholds requiring schools to modify students’ physical activities during extreme weather, such as heat waves, wildfires, excessive rain, and flooding. Schools would also be required to come up with plans for alternative indoor activities, and staff must be trained to recognize and respond to weather-related distress.

California has had heat rules on the books for outdoor workers since 2005, but it was a latecomer to protecting student athletes, according to the Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut, which is named after a Minnesota Vikings football player who died from heatstroke in 2001. By comparison, Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, this spring signed a law preventing cities and counties from creating their own heat protections for outdoor workers, has the best protections for student athletes, according to the institute.

Douglas Casa, a professor of kinesiology and the chief executive officer of the institute, said state regulations can establish consistency about how to respond to heat distress and save lives.

“The problem is that each high school doesn’t have a cardiologist and doesn’t have a thermal physiologist and doesn’t have a sickling expert,” Casa said of the medical specialties for heat illness.

In 2022, California released an Extreme Action Heat Plan that recommended state agencies “explore implementation of indoor and outdoor heat exposure rules for schools,” but neither the administration of Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, nor lawmakers have adopted standards.

Lawmakers last year failed to pass legislation that would have required schools to implement a heat plan and replace hot surfaces, such as cement and rubber, with lower-heat surfaces, such as grass and cool pavement. That bill, which drew opposition from school administrators, stalled in committee, in part over cost concerns.

Eric Robinson remembers his son Yahushua Robinson, 12, who died in August after a physical education instructor told him to run outside on the blacktop during the sweltering heat.

Naj Alikhan, a spokesperson for the Association of California School Administrators, said the new bill takes a different approach and would not require structural and physical changes to schools. The association has not taken a position on the measure, and no other organization has registered opposition.

The Robinson family said children’s lives ought to outweigh any costs that might come with preparing schools to deal with the growing threat of extreme weather. Yahushua’s death, they say, could save others.

“I really miss him. I cry every day,” said Yahushua’s father, Eric Robinson. “There’s no one day that go by that I don’t cry about my boy.”

This article was produced by KFF Health News, 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. KFF Health News is the publisher of California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

Report: Illinois schools won’t be ‘adequately funded’ by 2027

2024-05-15T17:31:16+00:00

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Illinois will not be able to adequately fund public schools by a 2027 state deadline, according to a new report.

Due to inflation and state lawmakers holding K-12 funding flat in 2020 during the height of the COVID pandemic, districts would not be adequately funded until 2034 if the state continues to only add $350 million to the evidence-based funding formula, according to a report from the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability.

But lawmakers could adequately fund schools by 2030 if they provide an additional $500 million a year, the report said.

However, state budget officials are predicting a decrease in revenue in the next year. Federal COVID-19 relief money, which boosted school budgets the past few years, is also set to run out.

“I think school districts will have to make some tough financial decisions in the next coming years,” said Elaine Gaberik, one of the co-authors of the report. “This goes back to showing how important the state funding is going to be in these next couple years.”

In February, Gov. J.B. Pritzker proposed adding an additional $350 million for public schools and $150 million for early childhood education to the state budget for the next fiscal year, which covers the 2024-25 school year.

Hundreds of Chicago Public Schools educators are going to Springfield on Wednesday to ask for more state funding. They maintain that the district is underfunded by $1.1 billion. That is the amount Chicago would need to reach adequacy under the state formula. Mayor Brandon Johnson was also in the capitol last week to ask state lawmakers to give more money to Chicago schools.

Elizabeth Todd-Breland, vice president of the Chicago Board of Education, said during the Agenda Review Committee on Wednesday her daughter will be an adult before the state can adequately fund schools.

“Generations of public school students will be deprived of their right to a quality, fully-funded public education and we should all see that as being unacceptable,” said Todd-Breland.

Roughly $2.5 billion of Chicago Public Schools’ $9.4 billion budget comes from state funding. Of the $2.5 billion in state money, $1.7 billion comes from the state’s evidence-based funding formula. Seven years ago, before the state changed its funding formula, CPS received about $1.9 billion from the state.

Illinois’ evidence-based funding formula calculates how much money a public school district needs based on the needs of the students the district serves and how much local revenue a school district can raise. A district could receive additional state funding if they have a larger amount of students from low-income families, English learners, or students with disabilities. Districts in areas with less property wealth are also prioritized for more state funding, while richer districts with higher value property get less.

Since the formula was created, state funding for K-12 schools has grown by more than $3 billion, with the majority of the new money going to districts that need it most.

The Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, which helped design the evidence-based funding formula in 2017, looked at four possible scenarios state lawmakers could take action on. Each scenario takes into account how much money it would take to fully fund schools, estimates the amount of time, and includes other factors, such as inflation.

The report mentions other possibilities for lawmakers to weigh as they put together the budget. If the state decided that it wanted to reach the 2027 funding goal, the report estimates that it would take at least $1.1 billion a year starting in 2025. Another possibility is to continue to add $300 million to the evidence-based funding, but add more funding based on the rate of inflation. However, inflation rates can drastically change. As noted in the report, inflation rose to 5% in 2022 and 8% in 2023.

Gaberik, one of the co-authors of the report, told Chalkbeat that one of the best things the evidence-based formula did for public schools was to change the ratio of local funding to state funding.

Before the formula was put into use, school districts relied heavily on property taxes, which created inequities in educational opportunities for students across the state, according to Gaberik.

When the state’s General Assembly created the evidence-based funding formula in 2017, the goal was to adequately fund all schools by 2027. During negotiations, there was a bipartisan promise to continue to add at least $350 million a year to public schools every year until every district reached its “adequacy target.”

State lawmakers committed to this promise every year, except in 2020 when they agreed to keep funding flat due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Since then, education advocates have been pushing lawmakers to increase K-12 funding by at least $550 million annually in order to get all school districts to adequacy more quickly. But lawmakers have continued to add $350 million annually in the years since.

Andy Manar, deputy governor for budget and economy, said in a letter dated May 8 to various Illinois agency directors that the state’s revenues are down by $800 million. Plus, the state’s share of COVID relief funds will end this year. Manar said that it is unclear how many programs this will impact, but budget officials will continue to work with the state’s General Assembly to create a balanced budget.

The legislature must pass a budget by June 30, but is expected to do so before the end of its spring session, currently scheduled to finish on May 24.

Reema Amin contributed reporting.

IPS changes homework, discipline policies in bid for equity

2024-05-15T17:36:43+00:00

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When eighth grader Kelsey Aguilar is called from class to de-escalate a conflict between her peers, she heads to the Guided Learning Center at Harshman Middle School with a calm demeanor.

That’s where she’ll get to the heart of an issue between friends or couples, unpacking insults on social media or rumors that could lead to a fight.

The mediation program that Aguilar participates in as a peer mediator is part of the school’s restorative justice approach to discipline. It’s less punitive, aims to stop fights before they start, and focuses on healing transgressions between students.

It’s a disciplinary approach that Indianapolis Public Schools hopes to embrace district-wide through the adoption of a series of policies that aim to promote equity and reduce barriers to learning that affect certain groups of students. The policies, which the school board has been approving in batches, include a shift in how teachers should approach assigning homework and how the district should identify students for its gifted program. The board approved the latest round of policy changes — including one highlighting restorative justice in student discipline — on Tuesday.

The policies could address some of the district’s disparities that are common in education.

For example, Black and multiracial students in the district have historically been disciplined at higher rates than their white peers, according to district data. Some of the district’s most popular schools with specialized academic programming are disproportionately white.

And while the latest ILEARN state test scores show white students appear to have recovered from pandemic learning loss, Black and Hispanic students have yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels of proficiency.

At Harshman, officials say the mediation program has helped reduce the number of suspensions both for Black students and for students overall.

And Kelsey believes it has definitely reduced the number of fights among her peers — even though some may see mediation by a classmate as a joke.

“I honestly think it’s a serious thing because we’re solving problems with other people,” she said. “I think that’s a great thing for us to do.”

Changes to dress code, homework assignments adopted

The policy changes were proposed by the Culturally Responsive and Equitable Education Committee, which the school board created last year. They reflect much of the district’s ongoing work around expanding academic opportunities to more students of color and those from diverse backgrounds.

The district’s Rebuilding Stronger plan, for example, will bring Honors Algebra, Honors Geometry, Honors Biology, and Spanish I classes to all middle schools. The plan will also expand Montessori, STEM, high-ability, dual language, performing arts, and International Baccalaureate academic models to more schools throughout the district.

Many of the committee’s proposed changes codify the district’s current equity efforts under Superintendent Aleesia Johnson, said school board member Nicole Carey, who led the creation of the committee. But the policy shifts will hold any future leaders of the district accountable to this equity mindset, she said.

Here are equity-focused policies that the board approved in April:

The district’s revised homework policy acknowledges that students come from “diverse backgrounds with different resources and support systems.” The policy says that, “Homework assignments must be equitable and considerate of these varied home environments.” In addition, the policy states that the assignments should also consider students’ academic needs and out-of-school responsibilities.
The district’s revised policy on its gifted and talented program commits the district to using culturally responsive, unbiased assessments to identify students eligible for its academically gifted program. That program is currently housed at the K-8 Sidener Academy but will expand to two separate elementary and middle schools in 2024-25. It also directs the district to actively inform families from diverse backgrounds about the gifted program. (Enrollment data from 2023-24 shows Sidener Academy is whiter and has fewer students qualifying for free or reduced-price meals than the district as a whole.)
The district’s new universal dress code provides less-rigid guidelines that aim to reduce disciplinary actions that keep students out of classrooms.

Below are some equity-focused policy changes the board approved Tuesday:

The revised policy on the use of seclusion and restraint requires all administrators, special education teachers, and school-based crisis teams to undergo training in de-escalation techniques and conflict resolution strategies. All incidents involving seclusion or restraint of a student must be documented and provided to the student’s guardian in a timely manner, and an annual report of these incidents will be presented to the board.
Another revised policy directs administration to develop clear, written criteria for the approval of student groups. It also encourages groups that represent diverse demographics and interests.

In March, the equity committee proposed a more comprehensive restorative justice policy that would require training for all staff members. But it’s unclear if that will come before the board.

Restorative justice at Harshman could be inspiration for others

Meanwhile, the new discipline policy says restorative justice approaches should be used as alternatives to traditional discipline “when appropriate.” It also says educators should collaborate with families on approaches to discipline.

At Harshman Middle School, officials say their mediation program has reduced the number of incidents of aggression or physical fighting between current eighth graders from the first semester of last year to the first semester of this year.

Sometimes, peer mediators such as Kelsey are called to oversee a mediation session with staff present. Other times, staff mediate. There are even sessions to resolve conflicts between staff and students.

Even the school’s hallways advertise restorative justice.

“Problem: Unresolved conflict,” reads one sign. “Solution: Peer mediation. Let’s talk about it!”

The school received support from the Peace Learning Center, funded through a grant, to provide mediation training for students and staff. Students are selected as mediators after an interview process.

School staff say the program has created a mindset shift in students, who will alert staff members of potential rising tensions between students or request mediation on their own.

“They don’t want to fight each other, they don’t want to argue, they don’t want to miss class, they don’t want to be suspended,” said Rockeyah Lord, a dean at the school.

Because the program aims to resolve issues before they devolve into fights, Lord said, suspensions overall have decreased.

Kelsey said she got involved in the program because she used to be involved in a lot of drama herself — but at times wanted a way to get out of it.

“I knew that other people do want to get out of it too sometimes,” she said. “So it’s better to talk about it than to keep going with it.”

Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Lawrence Township schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.

Amid record-high youth homicides, New B.O.Y. tries to give Indianapolis teens something to live for

2024-05-15T10:00:00+00:00

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This article was co-reported by Chalkbeat Indiana and Axios Indianapolis as part of a reporting partnership about youth gun violence in Indianapolis.

How do you save the lives of teenage boys who act like they aren’t afraid to die?

City officials are looking into it. Police are asking for help. Kareem Hines and his mentors keep trying.

“We, unfortunately, lose kids a lot,” said Hines. “The positive stories, the successes that we see with the kids, keep us going.”

Hines’ New B.O.Y. program — short for New Breed of Youth — is one of several in Indianapolis trying to reverse an alarming statistic: the highest number of youth homicides in at least six years, the majority of which involve guns. Some young men he works with are saved. Others are not, and Hines sees them on the news. Last year, the program lost six participants who ended up dead or in prison.

Either way, week after week, Hines and his team of mentors try to give their young men something to live for.

New B.O.Y., which began in 2009 and works with about 125 boys, is based on the mantra of “connection before correction.” It’s built on consistency.

Kareem Hines practices boxing with a young participant during the New B.O.Y. Guns Down, Gloves UP Boxing Program meetup on April 27, 2024 at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Park in Indianapolis.

Youth martial arts classes are on Tuesdays. Boxing classes are on Saturdays. There are field trips to go skiing or visit college campuses. And nearly every Wednesday, there are group talking sessions called “leaders circle” that bring children and parents together to review the week’s good and bad events.

Hines knows himself the power of a mentor and constant engagement from growing up in Harlem with a single dad. He met his own mentor at the YMCA, where he got his first job at 15. That mentor was the reason he moved to Indianapolis at age 20 in 1995, when he got a job at the Fall Creek YMCA that has since closed.

Since then, Hines worked in various mentoring and community outreach programs until launching New B.O.Y. in 2009.

But understanding just how challenging New B.O.Y.’s mission is means understanding the world in which the program operates.

It’s one in which teenagers pose smiling with guns on Instagram. Students “go 30″ — fight each other — in the school bathroom just to see who wins. Flyers circulating online promote parties that combine social media fights and guns in a confined space. “Drill” rap music describing shootouts with enemies is popular.

And embedded in all of this is the trauma of living in poverty, growing up in high-crime, under-resourced neighborhoods, or nursing broken relationships with adults.

Hines emphasizes that his program isn’t a cure-all.

“We’re just a piece of the puzzle,” he said. “We understand the plight of these young men, so we try to stand in the gap in every area, but we can’t be with them 24 hours a day.”

The program draws strength from youth like Patrick Collier who succeed.

As he’s grown in New B.O.Y. from a jaded pre-teen in foster care to a budding entrepreneur, Collier, now 18, has closely known four fellow participants who’ve been killed and two who’ve been locked up.

Losing them, he said, is more like losing a brother — and at times he did not want to come to New B.O.Y. activities for fear of learning of another person was dead or arrested.

“Ultimately, I realized that if I’m losing people this much, that just means that I have to do something,” said Collier, who hopes to study social work at Indiana University Bloomington next year. “I have to wrap my hands around the people that are in the program.”

Kareem Hines grew up in Harlem, where he spent many hours at the YMCA right across from his home. That's where he said he learned about the power of a mentor.

Talk sessions offer teens tough love, understanding

Hines is both a fiery preacher and understanding therapist. When he talks, these teenagers listen.

It’s a method of engagement with youth that he’s honed over decades of working with them.

In the leaders circle sessions that last for hours, he invites participants to describe the environment in which they live. He asks them to explain their poor decisions but celebrates their wins. And he tries to wrap it all up in a message of love and understanding.

The program’s participants are typically referred through the state’s Department of Child Services or the local probation department, but some can come from community-based referrals as well. The majority of the participants, like the majority of the city’s homicide victims ages 19 and under, are Black.

There’s the young man with a penchant for yo-yos who has lacked a strong female presence in his life and struggles with anger issues. But he celebrates his weekly wins at circle sessions — in January, he reported, he’d “been thinking about what I do before I do it.”

There’s the teenager in and out of juvenile court system who, under New B.O.Y.’s guidance, wrote a memoir sharing his family trauma.

During a leaders circle session in October, when Hines asks how easy it is for him to obtain a gun, he doesn’t hesitate: “It’s easy as 1, 2, 3.”

“I’m tired of that life” on the streets, he said. “I’ve been in that since I was nine. I’m 15.”

Hines frequently acknowledges the lack of fathers in the boys’ lives. He nods to the fact that adults have let them down. And he often asks the group questions that everyone knows the answer to. In this way, he and other mentors signal that they understand where these boys are coming from.

“Should you feel uncomfortable at a teenage party in this city?” he asks during one session in January. Yes, the boys nod, because you might get shot.

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“What’s ‘catching a face?’” he asks after playing a drill rap song through a loudspeaker at an April session.

It means killing somebody, they answer.

But these sessions also feature important life lessons.

Hines frequently passes out the latest articles of teenagers arrested for murder or killed in shootings, asking the boys to read it aloud and assess what the subjects should have done differently. In one session, he encouraged the boys to play chess, not checkers — in other words, to think critically about their decisions.

And during another session in January, the boys heard from JaMarcus Fields, who served 26 years in prison for murder.

“The system is not playing while we out here trying to play tough,” Fields said. He described his first night in prison as a scared 18-year-old.

“I literally went to sleep a little kid and had to wake up the next morning a grown man,” he said as the boys sat listening quietly. “I didn’t have a choice.”

Some boys still end up in prison — or worse

Still, not everyone makes it through New B.O.Y. alive or living life as a free man.

Hines uses every loss as a teachable moment.

In February, the boys stared at a text message about a former New B.O.Y. participant, now in his twenties.

“[He] has me reaching out to you to see if ur available to come to his sentencing Monday,” the message read. “He was fighting a murder charge but he’s pleading out.”

But Hines laments the fact that he hasn’t seen the young man come back to the program in a long time.

Kareem Hines speaks with students during a New B.O.Y. leaders circle session in February.

“He needs a few character references — can I give him a character reference?” Hines asks the group.

The boys shake their heads.

“Hell no. Hell no,” Hines said. “Hell no, I can’t.”

Still, Hines and the mentors keep going, even when participants stray from the flock. Stopping is not an option.

“I got about another 10 to 12 other young men who are still pushing, who made a different decision,” he said. “So we got to be there for them.”

Celebrating wins and giving boys ‘an incentive’

Collier was a frustrated middle school student when he met Hines at around 12 years old.

Years of being in and out of multiple foster homes left him standoffish, lacking trust in adults, and acting out in school. But the night that Hines showed up at his foster family’s house, wearing clothes that someone his age would wear, Collier was taken aback.

“He’s real,” Collier said on why young men respond positively to Hines. “There’s no facade he puts up. There’s nothing he tries to do that isn’t him. There isn’t an agenda oriented around profit that he works on.”

New B.O.Y.’s constant programming is what drew Collier out of his shell and ultimately earned his trust. He joined the program’s Young Entrepreneurs Program and launched a nonprofit with a fellow New B.O.Y. participant to bring food, clothing, and other services to those in need.

And like Hines, the programming felt authentic.

“It was never like, ‘Hey, let’s get this photo and then we’re going to drop him off,’” he said. “It was really genuine. I mean, there were rarely any cameras around. There were rarely people that weren’t always locked into the program.”

New B.O.Y. has played an annual flag football tournament against Evolve, another mentoring group, for the past few years. "None of y'all gonna be in the news," Hines said in a speech before the start of last year's tournament, referring to the news stories of murdered youth. "We gonna pour life into you today, like we try to do today and every day."

Outside of the tough love that New B.O.Y. participants get in the leaders circle, Hines and his team of adults are there year-around to provide the positive life experiences Collier had.

On a sunny Saturday in November, uplifting music is bumping on the field next to what used to be Indianapolis Public School 11. The young men huddle in excitement with mentors as they review their plays in the annual flag-football tournament against Evolve, another mentoring group.

“I keep an incentive in front of them,” Hines told Chalkbeat. “No matter what, I want to keep them with some kind of hope.”

New B.O.Y.’s programming aligns with Hines’ philosophy of correcting poor behavior while still actively celebrating life and its successes. He dislikes grandiose celebrations of life that occur only after a child has been killed. And he laments when news crews come to him for interviews only after someone dies.

He frequently calls on parents to be more involved with their children, not only through the bad, but the good.

“If you don’t love yours, and wrap your arms around yours, the streets will,” Hines told families at New B.O.Y.’s annual awards ceremony in December.

“I need you to focus on the discipline," Hines told families who watched a martial arts performance at New B.O.Y.'s annual awards ceremony in December. "Forget the technique, because you’ve got young people up here at varied levels of experience. But just look at how together they try to be.”

At the ceremony, boys in the martial arts program came up to the stage. Like a drill sergeant, Hines made the students answer him back, repeatedly:

“Who do you believe in?” he shouts. “Myself,” they answer.

“Who do you love?”

“Myself.”

Read the Axios Indianapolis story here.

Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Lawrence Township schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.

Arika Herron is a reporter for Axios Indianapolis. You can reach her at Arika.Herron@axios.com.

State budget proposals aim to tackle literacy crisis and make school funding more equitable

2024-05-14T11:00:00+00:00

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Michigan lawmakers are poised to approve a state education budget that would build on last year’s historic investment in the state’s most vulnerable students, while also increasing funding to improve student mental health, education for English language learners, and literacy.

But some students, parents, educators, and advocates are worried that the state won’t be able to fully fund “dire” needs at a time when Michigan faces several budgetary challenges.

Roughly $5.6 billion in federal COVID relief funds will expire this year, and state revenue growth is expected to slow in coming years. Declining enrollment also has created funding shortfalls in some districts.

Some fear districts will face painful cuts.

“The state of education right now is – truly, we’re desperate,” said Kathi Martin, a speech language pathologist and union president in Dearborn Public Schools.

“The amount of resources we have never seems to be enough,” she added.

Last week, the House passed a proposed budget that would increase school funding by $900 million compared to last year’s. That’s just slightly higher than what Whitmer proposed in her executive budget.

The Senate appropriations committee has also proposed an increase in school aid, of $1.1 billion. The Senate has not yet voted on the committee’s recommended budget, however, and is expected to take a vote in the coming days.

The legislature has a deadline of July 1 to pass a state budget. When both houses pass a budget, it will go to the governor to sign. It will take effect Oct. 1.

Last year, lawmakers passed a $21.5 billion school budget that included historic increases to benefit the state’s neediest students. But advocates say legislators must keep up the momentum to continue to work toward more equitably funding Michigan schools.

Here’s what lawmakers have proposed:

Increases to the “opportunity index”

For years, Michigan has been ranked among the worst states in the nation for the inequities in funding between schools in wealthy and poor communities.

Last year, the budget gave an additional $1 billion in funding to districts to serve at-risk students through the “opportunity index,” which provides money to districts serving communities with higher concentrations of poverty.

“Michigan must continue to take bold steps for an equitable education for its students,” said Elnora Gavin, a Benton Harbor School Board member, in a statement.

Here are some of the highlights:

The Senate committee’s proposal includes a $122.6 million increase to at-risk funds. It would allow districts to use up to 60% of the money to recruit and retain instructional staff as well as staff who help improve students’ social, emotional, or physical health.
The House proposes a $70.1 million increase. That proposal also includes language that would allow the Detroit Public Schools Community District to use up to 40% of the money to hire more instructional staff or increase teacher salaries.
The executive proposal would increase at-risk funding by $23.8 million. It would allow some districts to use up to 30% of the money for teacher recruitment and retention.

Advocates have asked lawmakers to increase the opportunity index funds by 20% over the next five years until it eventually equates to around $2.9 billion in additional funding for at-risk students each year.

What legislators are currently recommending for 2024-25 ranges from a 2.5% to around 12.8% increase over last year’s at-risk funding.

More money for mental health

Since 2021, Michigan has invested more than $715 million in student mental health programs and hiring more school counselors. However, advocates and educators say more school counselors, psychologists, and social workers are needed to adequately address students’ needs during an ongoing youth mental health crisis. The state had the third highest ratio of counselors to students in the country, according to the most recently available data.

“A lot of students’ grades are low because they are facing mental health problems and are not being heard by our teachers,” said Christina Yarn, a 17-year-old attending Saginaw Community Schools’ Heritage High School.

The governor’s office and the House both propose $300 million in per-pupil funding – $3.3 million more than last year– to improve student mental health and school safety, which is in line with what advocates have asked for. Both proposals have restrictions on the funds to be used for school resource officers. The Senate committee proposes a lower amount, $150 million for the funds, with no restrictions on districts for paying school police.

Small increase for English language learners

The state increased funding for English language learners last year, but still ranked among the worst in the nation for its funding of such programs compared to other states in 2023, according to Ed Trust Midwest.

“We have many immigrant and migrant students attending our schools,” said Martin. “Lots of children come to school and they don’t know English. In order to adequately teach these children, we need more resources than just one teacher in a room with 27 kids.”

The Senate committee’s proposal would double funding for English learners with an increase of $39.7 million.The governor and the House propose much smaller increases – $3 million and $5 million respectively.

One-time funds for literacy

Michigan has long struggled with student literacy rates. It ranks 43rd in the country for fourth grade reading. While more money was allocated to literacy efforts such as reading coaches and early literacy training for teachers last year, some administrators say they are unable to fill open positions.

The governor proposed $155 million in one-time funding to create a Committee for Literacy Development; offer a ranked list of curricula and professional development for teachers; and fund early literacy teacher coaching positions. The House and the Senate committee’s proposals include similar budget items.

Cuts to the teacher retirement fund

In order to pay for proposed increases to big items on the proposed budgets, legislators are considering making cuts to contributions to the state’s retirement funds for public school employees.

The governor wants to fund $758.9 million less than the $2.5 billion the state put into the Michigan Public School Employees’ Retirement System in 2023-24. The House proposes reducing payments to the funds by $562.4 million. The Senate committee recommends $41.3 million in cuts.

Republican lawmakers have voiced concerns that these cuts would add to an existing pension debt in the system.

Democrats, including Whitmer, say that health care is fully funded under the plan and that it is feasible for the state to scale back its investments in helping districts make payments into the plan.

Hannah Dellinger covers K-12 education and state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Organizers of Democratic National Convention in Chicago launch student art competition

2024-05-15T12:00:00+00:00

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Keiana Barrett still has the button she wore at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

The event, held in Denver, ended with former President Barack Obama, then a U.S. Senator from Chicago, becoming the party’s nominee.

Barrett, now a senior advisor for the Chicago 2024 Host Committee, is helping launch an art competition for high school students to design buttons, posters, and other art to be displayed during the Democratic National Convention in late August.

“We want to make sure that throughout the convention experience, the delegates, the visitors, our allied groups will have an inescapable opportunity to see the beauty of Chicago through the eyes of our young people and to give them a platform to continue to sharpen their creative pencils,” Barrett said.

Earlier this year, Chicago Public Schools announced it would begin the 2024-25 school year on Aug. 26, slightly later than usual to accommodate traffic and an expected 75,000 additional visitors during the week of the convention, Aug. 19 - 22.

Students and graduating seniors from public and private high schools across the Chicago area have until June 10 at 5 p.m. to submit their designs. Original artwork can include drawings, paintings, photography or other two-dimensional media, but must be created by hand and without the help of artificial intelligence.

One winner will have their design featured on a commemorative button and poster, and will get a $200 Visa gift card and two one-day passes to the convention. Other finalists will be selected to have their art displayed at the convention, which is taking place primarily at the United Center on Chicago’s West Side.

More information about the competition and how to submit is available here.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Concerned about mental health, NY lawmakers and advocates want fewer school lockdown drills

2024-05-14T21:54:30+00:00

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Lawmakers, parents, and school safety advocates rallied in Albany on Tuesday, calling for the passage of legislation that would reduce the number of school lockdown drills required under New York state law.

It’s the culmination of a multi-year effort by advocates who want changes in state law, which currently requires public schools to conduct at least four lockdown drills each year. Proponents of the bill say that number was arbitrarily chosen and that conducting so many drills harms student mental health without providing clear safety benefits.

The bill — recently amended through negotiations — would lower the required number of drills to two, while still allowing schools the option to conduct additional drills. It would also mandate that drills are conducted in a “trauma-informed, developmentally, and age-appropriate” manner, with accommodations for students with disabilities, training for educators, and advance notice provided to school staff and parents.

On Tuesday, state Sen. Andrew Gounardes and Assembly Member Jo Anne Simon, the sponsors of the bill, joined other lawmakers, advocates, and mental health experts to call for changes to the state’s “excessive and ineffective” lockdown drill requirement.

“We don’t want kids to grow up normalizing and believing that this is just an everyday fact of life,” Gounardes said. “Lockdown drills are supposed to prepare students for an active shooter in the event that one enters the school, but our current approach is deeply traumatizing for kids — not to mention teachers and parents — and simply is not making them safer.”

Simon added there was no data to suggest that lockdown drills are effective, or to justify requiring four drills, when the state enacted its law in 2016.

“There is no excuse for us traumatizing and re-traumatizing our kids because we are worried,” she said. “We have to find a way to solve this problem that doesn’t put the obligation on them.”

As of 2016, lockdown drills occurred in 95% of public schools in the U.S., with at least 40 states requiring them, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates against gun violence. But the organization has advised against conducting them, pointing to the “collateral consequences to school communities’ mental health and wellbeing.”

New York remains just one of a handful of states that mandate four or more lockdown drills per year — meaning its students can experience twice as many drills as those in other states, according to an analysis from the Trace.

“Excessive drills increase anxiety and depression in children of all ages,” said Sheffali Welch, a member of Moms Demand Action and a New York City parent. “Haven’t our kids been through enough?”

There are some signs that concern over the impact of the drills is gaining traction in Albany. At a meeting last month, the New York Board of Regents discussed proposed amendments to state regulations related to school safety planning — requiring schools to establish procedures for notifying parents about drills and mandating that drills be conducted in “a trauma-informed, developmentally and age-appropriate manner.”

Though state lawmakers initially sought to lower the number of mandated drills to one and offer parents the ability to opt their children out of drills, both provisions were changed during negotiations over the bill.

Still, advocates see the growing momentum to pass the legislation as a win, and lawmakers noted Tuesday they’re hopeful the bill will pass this legislative session.

“Kids are gaining from this,” said Robert Murtfeld, a Manhattan parent who has been advocating for the law for years, in a phone interview ahead of the press conference. “It’s the best solution for everybody to move forward with this in New York.”

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

Denver Public Schools, teachers union in dispute over pay raises

2024-05-13T22:28:54+00:00

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The Denver teachers union says its contract with Denver Public Schools should mean bigger pay raises next school year. But DPS says it doesn’t have the money.

At issue is a provision in the contract between DPS and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association. The provision says that if Colorado lawmakers boost funding to DPS by reducing the so-called budget stabilization factor, a mechanism that withholds state funding from K-12 schools to pay for other priorities, Denver teachers could get bigger cost-of-living raises.

After years of advocacy from both DPS and the teachers union, Colorado lawmakers did indeed vote this year to “fully fund” K-12 schools going forward. But DPS and DCTA disagree about whether the Denver district will have enough money to pay teachers those bigger raises.

“We did our part,” said Rob Gould, president of the DCTA. “We advocated.”

DPS should raise its teacher salaries to stay competitive with surrounding districts, Gould said, many of which are set to pay starting teachers more than Denver does.

“Just like everybody, we’re trying to put gas in our car to go to work, we’re trying to keep up with costs at the grocery store, we’re trying to keep up with rent,” Gould said of Denver teachers.

But DPS officials said the expected increase in state funding is not enough to trigger the provision about cost-of-living raises in the contract, which they said has been favorable to teachers overall. The average salary for Denver teachers has increased 47% since 2018, a year before the union went on strike for higher pay, according to a district presentation.

“We love teachers,” said district spokesperson Bill Good. “We value our teachers. This is a contract dispute, for lack of a better term, and has no bearing on how much we value our teachers and appreciate our teachers.”

The contract between DPS and DCTA dictates how much teachers are paid. Signed in 2022, it promised that if state lawmakers boosted DPS’ funding by enough money to cover the cost of teachers’ guaranteed step-and-lane raises, teachers could also get “full” — meaning more generous — cost-of-living raises in the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years.

That happened for the 2023-24 school year. Teachers and other union members got an 8% cost-of-living raise on top of raises for years of experience (steps) and education (lanes). In total, union educators got an average 11.5% raise this year, according to the district.

But DPS officials said the district doesn’t have enough money to do the same in 2024-25.

Next school year, officials argue that the expected increase in state funding to DPS won’t cover the cost of teachers’ guaranteed step-and-lane raises. DPS will be about $3 million short, said Chuck Carpenter, the district’s chief financial officer. As such, the provision in the contract granting teachers’ full cost-of-living raises won’t be triggered, district officials said.

Instead, DPS is proposing to give educators a 5.2% raise plus a $1,000 stipend next year. DCTA is asking for raises that would total an average of 8.3%.

To raise awareness of what the union characterized as DPS “backtracking” on its agreement, educators staged “walk-ins” at schools across the city last week and were set to hold a rally outside a Denver school board meeting Monday afternoon.

In an email from Denver Superintendent Alex Marrero to Gould, Marrero wrote that DCTA “knew, or should have known, that it was unlikely, if not impossible” for the district’s budget to increase enough for the contract provision to be triggered two years in a row.

Gould disagreed that the union knew its members wouldn’t get more generous raises. And he questioned the district’s integrity in making the contract deal.

“Why on earth would you make a deal if you had already known you couldn’t pay it?” Gould said. “To me, that’s bad faith bargaining.”

The teachers union disputes that DPS is $3 million short and has filed a grievance with the district. Union leaders said the district should take into account the annual “turnover savings” that result when veteran teachers at the top of the pay scale retire and are replaced by early-career educators who make less money. Over the past two school years, that savings has been about $10 million a year, according to district documents cited by the union.

But DPS said the turnover savings are not part of the calculus in the most recent contract.

“There is nothing in the contract that says if the money isn’t there on the [budget stabilization] factor buy down, we can go to these other sources to get that money,” Good said. “Our position is because the trigger wasn’t met, we are holding to the contract, which is 5.2% and $1,000.”

If the trigger was met and DPS had to pay the approximately 5,700 educators covered by the union contract a full cost-of-living raise, Carpenter said it would cost DPS another $16.9 million.

“That is a lot more than what we’ve got,” he said.

Gould, on the other hand, said the turnover savings are referenced in the contract. The provision in question mentions that costs to the district should be calculated “on actual expense,” which Gould said is shorthand for the cost of step-and-lane raises minus the turnover savings.

A hearing on DCTA’s grievance is scheduled for Tuesday, Gould said. If the district hearing officer sides with DPS, Gould said the union is prepared to request arbitration or eventually file a lawsuit.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Without housing, we were out of options. COVID quarantine offered my family a path forward.

2024-05-14T11:00:00+00:00

The writer of this essay is a 2023-24 Student Voices Fellow at Chalkbeat. Click to learn more about our high school fellowship program.

Content warning: This essay contains references to thoughts of suicide.

As the winter breeze blew through my braids, I felt a surge of excitement. Back then, good news was hard to come by so I was eager to share some with my mom. A smile spread from ear to ear as I rushed toward a white Honda parked across the street from my school, imagining her reaction.

But the usual sensation of love and security that I felt in my mom’s presence seemed to diminish with each step that I took. My mom didn’t trust me crossing the street, so she would usually park closer. This time, she didn’t roll down her window and call out to me with familiar laughs and friendly jokes. Something was wrong. A brewing surprise awaited me in that car. I hate surprises.

Alexa Brown-Hill

I hesitated for a moment before opening the car door. When I did, my heart sank when I saw who was driving. As I settled into the back seat, I wasn’t met with the typical “How was your day?” but instead with a chilling silence. Every slight noise — the hum of the car engine, the shuffling of my burgundy coat, my heart pounding — seemed magnified.

I recall having to swallow what felt like a brick to playfully ask, “Can we go home?”

“You have no home,” my mom’s partner said, turning around from the driver’s seat to look at me. He taunted me. I begged and pleaded to go home as tears fell from my eyes. He laughed and repeatedly said, “You have no home.”

Months earlier, my mom’s day care business began to fail. Money wasn’t coming in, running hot water was a luxury, and choosing what to eat was no longer a privilege. Although she was in a “marriage,” my mom was always left to figure things out on her own. Only this time, she couldn’t find a solution.

Eventually, her partner decided it was best to sell our home, the same home where his presence contributed little but chaos and stress. My mornings were often filled with the discordant symphony of screaming and arguing — whether it was about his infidelities or his decision to take our front gates down, resulting in my mom having to close the day care.

At the time, school and God were my only escape. At school I kept up appearances, pretending everything was normal, even as my life was slowly falling apart. I reminded myself that school would be the way out for my mom, my sister, and me.

I remember walking home one day to an empty house. The tables, the daycare toys — everything was just gone. That’s when the reality of my situation hit me. I felt shock, sadness, and worry. In that moment all I could do was document my barren home on Snapchat memories. I guess some part of me knew that this would be important one day, even if I didn’t understand it at the time.

Life after that chaotic winter night in 2019 was “no crystal stair,” as the poet Langston Hughes put it:

It’s had tacks in it

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor—

Bare.

But when you saw me at school, you would’ve never known that the night before, I had slept in the car or that I had to get ready and freshen up in a gas station bathroom. I was always full of giggles. Growing up, I was taught that what happens in the house stays in the house, even if you no longer have one.

I remember the third night after losing my home — after spending two nights in a cold car — my mom’s partner, who had been sleeping at his sibling’s house, finally brought us to a Holiday Inn. He paid for us to spend the night there but initially didn’t give us any of the proceeds from the sale of our home. We arrived with nothing but the clothes on our back and whatever my mom managed to pack in a small brown bag.

At school I kept up appearances, pretending everything was normal even as my life was slowly falling apart.

That night, for the first time, I had thoughts of ending my life. I was only 12 years old.

I had made up my mind that life would be easier for my mom without me. As my thoughts spiraled downward, I received a text message from my sister. She sent me Romans 8:28: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” The scripture was a lifeline and managed to calm the storm in my mind.

After about three months in hotels and motels, we had run out of money. To make matters worse, my mom’s license plates got taken, so getting to school meant walking, often in the freezing cold, or taking a cab we couldn’t afford.

Bereaved students like me are more likely to struggle in school. Here’s what we need to thrive.

Life while being homeless was like a rabbit hole. Things were constantly changing. This instability caused me to be late to school almost every day of my seventh grade year, drawing the attention of my guidance counselor. It was hard for me to reach out for help, but when I finally got the courage to do so, my situation became gossip. I never spoke about it again.

Unfortunately, the school wanted to get the state involved. Just when I thought my world would get flipped upside down, and I would be separated from my mom and forced to repeat a grade, COVID and quarantine changed things.

During what was meant to be a two-week quarantine, our only options for housing was to go to a homeless shelter or upstate to my mom’s father’s place. Eventually, with hesitation, my mom decided to take my sister and me to her father’s home — a place I came to call “the hell house.”

The external appearance of this house was deceiving. The grass was freshly cut, and there was a pool in the backyard, but inside this beautiful home hid an ugly truth: the constant threat of violence.

Before COVID, life felt like it was moving too fast, and we couldn’t keep up. Quarantine was supposed to give us a break, a chance to figure out our next step. However, living in the hell house triggered my mom, plunging her into a deep depression. Nothing could snap her out of it. When we were kicked out into the snow eight months later, we had nowhere to go. No car, no money, nothing.

The rule “what happens in the house stays in the house” no longer applied. My sister reached out to our godmother in Newark who welcomed us with open arms. Her family provided the steady, loving environment that I so desperately needed. My mom was always doing for others, so it was hard for her to acknowledge that she and we needed help. If it wasn’t for quarantine, I would not be where I am today: safe, stable, and surrounded by love.

Alexa Brown-Hill, a junior at Bard High School Early College in Newark, is a multifaceted individual who is deeply passionate about literature and aspires to become a published author and a makeup artist. She is a 2023-24 Chalkbeat Student Voices fellow.

NYC schools could lose 400 nurses as federal relief funds expire

2024-05-14T00:39:41+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat New York’s free daily newsletter to keep up with NYC’s public schools.

New York City public schools could lose hundreds of nurses next year, as the city faces the expiration of billions of dollars in one-time federal COVID relief funds.

For years, many education programs have been propped up by the federal funds, including $65 million that supported roughly 400 contracted nurses, some of whom provide care at buildings that previously lacked a school nurse. But as that money dries up later this year, the future of those nurses and other school programs funded by the federal dollars remains uncertain.

Last month, officials announced the city’s Education Department would see its budget shrink by 2.4%, or $808 million, in the next fiscal year — largely spurred by the expiring federal funds. With the disappearance of the relief money, Mayor Eric Adams’ latest budget proposal allocated more than $500 million in city and state funds to preserve some of the programs it funded, including hundreds of social workers, staffers in homeless shelters, and preschool for 3-year-olds. Others, however, remain at risk.

Currently, every public school has a nurse or school-based health center, according to city officials. If a school nurse calls out sick or is otherwise unavailable, then a contracted nurse is deployed to that school to provide coverage.

“We’re grateful to the stimulus funding that has allowed us to ensure every school has a school nurse on site, and we will continue to advocate for and prioritize this need through the budget process,” said Jenna Lyle, a spokesperson for the city’s Education Department.

Prior to the pandemic, at least 137 schools serving roughly 70,000 students did not have a school nurse, according to Advocates for Children, an organization that works on behalf of low-income families.

Without a school nurse in the building, kids with particular health needs like those with asthma or diabetes are at a higher risk of experiencing complications, said Anna MacEwan, a former school nurse who previously worked at a K-12 campus in downtown Brooklyn. It also shifts further responsibilities onto teachers, she added.

“You have to have a nurse in the building … to manage all the things that come up,” MacEwan said.

Nurses also provide families with additional peace of mind, said Noelia Gomez, an after-school program director with Good Shepherd Services, a nonprofit organization that supports children and families.

“Having nurses gives families a safeguard,” she said. “Somebody that they can trust — that’s going to care for their child like they would at home.”

She noted her program serves more than 500 students at P.S. 246 in the Bronx, each of whom may at some point need medical attention or support.

“It’s a very scary thought,” Gomez said. “What happens if the nurse isn’t there?”

With the mayor’s proposed budget still subject to negotiations with the City Council, advocates and local lawmakers are continuing to push for funding for initiatives that have relied on the federal dollars. The city must finalize its budget by July 1.

Council members will discuss the city’s Education Department budget at an Education Committee hearing on Wednesday.

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

The botched FAFSA rollout hurt immigrant families like mine

2024-04-22T12:00:00+00:00

The writer of this essay is a 2023-24 Student Voices Fellow at Chalkbeat. Click to learn more about our high school fellowship program.

Leer en español

Sitting at my dining room table, I dialed the toll-free number, hoping that today would be the day that someone actually picked up. Instead, I heard the words that have rung in my ears for the past few months. The helpline was experiencing a high volume of calls. Call again later, the automated message urged before ending with an unceremonious “Goodbye.”

The more I heard that message, the more anxious I became.

I knew I wasn’t alone in this experience, and that somehow made it worse. Thousands of high school seniors who needed financial assistance to go to college were unable to complete the federal aid application — the same application that the U.S. Department of Education insisted was now “faster and easier” to fill out.

Miriam Galicia

“Faster and easier” would be the last words I’d use to describe my family’s experience with the application, known widely as the FAFSA. It’s all because of nine little digits that not all applicant family members have: a social security number. Parents without one couldn’t initially submit the required form.

The FAFSA, which usually opens in October, was postponed amid the updates and released instead in late December. This delayed the process for everyone applying for federal financial aid, not just families in which not all members have a social security number. But once the application finally went live, many aid-seeking students breathed a sigh of relief.

At this point, those with an undocumented parent were told to call a federal government number to verify their parents’ identity.

That’s how I found myself memorizing that infuriating automated message that ended with “Goodbye.” After dialing the number 20-plus times in the span of a month, one day I got an answer. I was sitting in my college counselor’s office as the February chill crept into the room. I was surprised to hear a woman’s voice on the other end of the line. I explained my family’s situation as clearly and concisely as I could. The woman told me that my parents needed to make the call themselves or be present for it — something that proved hard to do during their workday.

The call ended there, and I headed back to class. I breathed in and out, trying to push the FAFSA out of my mind. But like the phone call, it felt hopeless. I sat in class, making no move to settle in.

“So how did it go?” my friends asked discreetly.

“They said I can’t do it,” I replied, not realizing until then how emotional I was.

Tears started rolling down my cheeks. They were not tears of sadness or even hopelessness; they were tears of anger. I was angry — I am angry — about the jumbled-up application and the disregard for thousands of first-generation Americans.

Stress was written on my face and, as my teacher came over to offer words of kindness and encouragement, I tried to look ahead to when my FAFSA was finally complete.

After negative media attention about the botched FAFSA rollout, the government did take steps to correct its mistakes, but it took months. They moved the verification process to email. At that point, we were required to email passports, driver’s licenses, and bills with my parents’ names and home address. The verification process seemed endless until early March when my parents’ account was finally verified.

Once I received that email, I logged in as quickly as I could, thankful that this process was almost over. But even with my parents’ accounts verified, the portal showed up blank, once again stopping me from submitting my FAFSA. I felt my body heating up, my face turning bright red. I had taken all the right steps. I thought I’d finally emerge from the FAFSA maze. I was wrong.

With only a few weeks left to decide where I would spend the next four years of my life — the deadline to commit to a college is May 1 — the FAFSA felt like my worst enemy.

It wasn’t until early April, after months of phone calls, paperwork, and meetings with my college counselor, that I was finally able to submit my federal aid application. My application is in, and that’s a relief. But like many other students in the same situation, I wonder if I will ever know what my financial aid packages would look like at some schools I’ve been accepted to.

Even with all the hurdles I’ve had to face these past months, I am one of the lucky ones. Just recently, I was offered scholarships from two private liberal arts colleges, allowing me to bypass the government aid process altogether. It is because of these scholarships, and only these scholarships, that the stress of FAFSA isn’t looming over me. But my good fortune makes me think about the other first-generation students who don’t have these options.

Coming from an immigrant household, I’ve known since I was a little girl that my family and our experiences weren’t like those of most of my friends. I knew this when my friends talked about their vacations abroad or when both of their parents showed up to parent-teacher conferences. The differences became especially apparent during the college application process.

I remember sitting with my friends at school as they voiced relief about being done with their applications, personal essays, paperwork, and FAFSA. Now all they needed to do was wait. Everyone agreed — everyone but me.

One friend even suggested throwing a party to celebrate.

I couldn’t help but wonder why nine numbers made such a world of difference in our experiences. Months after that hangout session, I’m left with that and other questions. Questions like: Why are students from immigrant families made to jump through so many hoops? Why was our family, our experience, overlooked when this new “easier” FAFSA was implemented?

I know the immense privilege I have to pursue a higher education, thanks to the support of my family, my college counselor, and the private institutions offering me financial aid. Still, sometimes self-doubt creeps up like a shadow. I wonder why I am trying so hard to get to college when some of the processes that make college possible don’t seem to value people like me and families like mine.

Miriam Galicia is a senior at The Institute For Collaborative Education and is a 2023-24 Chalkbeat Student Voices fellow. In the fall she will attend Skidmore College. As a soon-to-be first-generation college student, she values the opportunity to pursue higher education not afforded to previous generations of her family.

Bereaved students like me are more likely to struggle in school. Here’s what we need to thrive.

2024-04-18T12:00:00+00:00

The writer of this essay is a 2023-24 Student Voices Fellow at Chalkbeat. Click to learn more about our high school fellowship program.

The afternoon wind blew through the classroom windows, causing the pages of “The Epic of Gilgamesh” to shift. I sat there silently. The words of my teacher Dr. Russell blurred into the background as thoughts of my mother consumed me. Did she know I loved her? Did she understand why I didn’t go with her? Does she forgive me?

From the time I was little, I was always praised for my academic abilities. But now, in the wake of this colossal loss — my mother’s unexpected death when I was just 14 — I was simply another gifted student who had fallen off her path. In reality, I was carrying a burden far heavier than the weight of any school assignment: grief.

Alexa Brown-Hill

When my mom died, I was already navigating the tumultuous waters of adolescence and homelessness. Now, I was grappling with the loss of both of my biological parents — my mother’s death being more recent and devastating.

When I started my freshman year of high school, I had looked to the future with hope, envisioning all the moments I would share with my loved ones. Moments like my 16th birthday, my senior prom, and my high school graduation. I never would have imagined that within a few months, I would bury my mom and my whole world would fall apart.

As with any mother and daughter, my relationship with my mother, Michelle, had its ups and downs. But no matter what, she was always there, loving her daughters hard and caring for us. She was an independent Black entrepreneur, a person who would give you the clothes off of her back if you needed them, and someone who allowed her children to dream big. At 38, my mom, with her beautiful smile, was called home.

As I sat in English class on that windy afternoon, I had so many questions. Why me? Why did I have to lose both parents while my classmates’ parents were alive and well? My peers seemed so carefree, while I struggled to keep myself afloat.

I felt alone, but I wasn’t alone. An estimated 1 in 12 U.S. children will lose a parent or sibling by the age of 18, according to the Childhood Bereavement Estimation Model. And grieving children are more likely to struggle in school, and experience symptoms of depression, anxiety, and social withdrawal.

In my case, my grief manifested as a decline in my academic performance. As I mourned the loss of my mom, it was hard to get up in the morning and make it through the day. I recall feeling like an astronaut floating in space without a tether.

Still, glimpses of light came from people who recognized my pain. The school social worker provided a listening ear and set me up with the text therapy resource; some teachers offered me extra time on tests and assignments.

The saying “it takes a village” really comes into play here. My family supported me. Whether it was a road trip to South Carolina with my Aunty Mo to take a break from the world or the Friday nail dates with my sister, these moments offered respite from the suffocating weight of my grief.

Alexa Brown-Hill, center, with her sister Diamond, left, and her mom, Michelle.

Two years later, my grief journey is still not over. It will never be over, but I have gleaned some important lessons from it. Lessons like never giving up, letting your choices in life be for you, and giving yourself grace. Perhaps the most meaningful lesson is how important empathy and compassion is within the school community.

On too many occasions grieving students are met with indifference or misguided attempts to “inspire” them to persevere in the name of their lost loved one. Educators insinuate that the student is somehow disappointing the deceased if they take the time to process their grief. On countless occasions, I had people say unhelpful things like, “Be who they would want you to be” or “Do it for them.” But when your mental health isn’t good, you most likely won’t perform as well academically.

This is not an essay about personal loss. It’s a call to action for educators and schools to recognize the impact of home life on student performance and make changes.

New Jersey will soon become the first state to require school districts to teach students about symptoms of and coping methods for grief, as well as to provide in-school grief resources, such as mental health crisis support and therapy. But it’s not enough.

Educators need to know what grief looks like in children and teens. Schools need to realize that grief is not an obstacle to overcome but a lifelong journey to explore with care and generosity of spirit. Teachers should offer accommodations to bereaved students who need them, and campuses should have safe spaces where grieving kids can be heard and feel understood. That could be school counseling sessions or just a quiet room for when the world gets a little too loud.

Allow us, those who have experienced profound loss, to bridge the space between grief and education. Allow us to help create a community where every student feels supported, valued, and equipped for success. We, humans, need to learn to take breaks, to stop and feel what we need to feel. Only then can healing begin, and only then can students truly thrive both inside and outside the classroom.

Newark Public Schools considers new AI tutor chatbot for districtwide use after pilot testing

2024-05-13T10:00:00+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Newark’s free newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system.

Newark Public Schools wants to see a districtwide expansion of an artificial intelligence tutoring tool after it was piloted at First Avenue School last year, as the district searches for ways to help students catch up from pandemic learning loss.

The district was among the first in the country to test the chatbot called Khanmigo, an AI program developed by online learning giant Khan Academy that is designed for classrooms and acts as a tutor for students and an assistant for teachers. The Newark Board of Education in March approved a data-sharing agreement with Khan Academy to study whether the tool was effective “in the North Ward schools,” according to the agreement. In an email to Chalkbeat Newark on Thursday from Superintendent Roger León, district officials confirmed they are looking to expand the use of the program districtwide.

Khanmigo is still in its pilot phase but is designed to guide students as they progress through lessons and ask questions like a human tutor would, according to Khan Academy spokesperson Barb Kunz. It can also assist teachers with tasks such as planning lessons, tailoring instruction, creating texts and images, and providing recommendations on what students could work on next.

Khanmigo was launched last year in grades 5-8 and used in core content areas, which are typically math, reading, writing, and science, according to the district. The district is monitoring its implementation but has not said how Khanmigo is used in classrooms, what students and teachers think about the tool, or why there is a need for it in Newark. During March’s school board meeting, León said the agreement with Khan Academy is “all too very important work and everyone across the country is trying to figure out how to move the program.”

“The strategy here is not to do it in any one school only,” León added. “This is a program that we are piloting and then it will flourish.”

So far, there has been little research on whether such tools are effective in helping students regain lost ground. Experts also say districts should be clear about their goals in using AI tools like Khanmigo and learn from teachers and students as they use new platforms.

How does Khanmigo work?

Khanmigo, powered by ChatGPT technology, includes features meant to help students work through math and science problems, analyze text, chat with historical figures, navigate college admissions, and revise essays, among other features. It is also designed to help teachers create instructions for assignments and review student performance.

As part of the district’s data-sharing agreement with Khan Academy, researchers will analyze state testing data to determine how using Khan Academy is associated with student growth and achievement. The initial pilot testing for the tool ended in June 2023 and was offered at no cost to the district, Newark Public Schools officials said last week.

Newark is one of 53 school districts across the country to pilot the tool, which is accessed through Khan Academy’s website rather than a separate app. First Avenue Students can access Khanmigo to get hints for solving challenging math problems or explain concepts they find confusing across all subjects. The chatbot can also guide students in exploring topics they’re interested in or exploring new ones.

But one thing it can’t do is give students the answers, according to Khan Academy’s website.

This isn’t the first time Newark has considered a new classroom tool to improve student learning. Over 40 educational platforms are being used by the district, according to a January committee report. An infusion of COVID relief dollars into Newark schools became the district’s “saving grace” in expanding summer programs and tutoring initiatives in 2023, León said last year.

After the pandemic, city, district, and community leaders sounded the alarm about the need to provide more support to improve student achievement. Student performance in math and English language arts on spring state test scores in 2023 went up by 2 percentage points from the prior year, highlighting slow academic recovery after the pandemic. That required more than 10,000 public school students to attend summer school in 2023 – double the number from the year before. District leaders also developed plans in science and English language arts that focus on new approaches to learning to boost student achievement.

Next school year’s budget includes a $6.8 million increase in tutoring efforts previously covered by American Rescue Plan funds, but few details have been shared about the district’s plan to potentially pay for the Khanmigo program districtwide. The price for school districts to use Khanmigo starts at $35 per student for the school year. There are also discounts for schools and districts with a high number of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch.

Other districts that piloted the tool are also looking to expand the program by using grants or other funding sources. Palm Beach County Schools in Florida is receiving up to $2 million from the Stiles-Nicholson Foundation for the use of the platform through June 2025.

Last Friday, philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates visited First Avenue School to see the implementation of Khanmigo in classrooms. In 2020, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation committed $12 million to Khan Academy to support the continued development of the organization in grades 3-12 math. (The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a Chalkbeat funder. Learn more about our funding here.)

Experts say more research is needed to evaluate AI in education

Computer programs powered by artificial intelligence have been around in recent decades but applications such as Khanmigo, which learn from students engaging with it, are new and growing quickly as technology develops, said Amanda Neitzel, a director at ProvenTutoring, an initiative at John Hopkins University that helps schools choose evidence-based tutoring programs.

Kunz says Khanmigo is “still very much in the early days of AI” and Khan Academy is helping K-12 school district partners “understand, explore, and use these tools.”

So far, there have been errors in how Khanmigo solves basic math problems, which Kunz said they have since fixed. Teachers and students across pilot districts have also said the tool occasionally offers too much help and was too available, especially when students were taking assessments such as quizzes and course challenges, Kunz said.

Khan Academy changed the prompts to better align with a “socratic tutor,” a tutoring approach that involves a dialogue between teacher and students, and made Khanmigo unavailable when students complete assessments on the site, Kunz added.

Teachers are also requesting more coaching on the differences between Khanmigo’s “student mode,” which guides students through lessons and problems, and “teacher mode,” which is designed to help educators plan lessons and collaborate on solutions.

But Neitzel warns that research on the efficacy of tutoring programs such as Khanmigo in the classroom is needed as they gain popularity among school districts.

“It is important to do those research studies that look broadly across certain student groups because schools have limited resources,” said Neitzel, who is also an assistant research scientist at John Hopkins Center for Research and Reform in Education. “They need to choose something that has the best shot of helping the most students.”

Feedback important to evaluate, improve new platforms

The effectiveness of AI tools such as Khanmigo depends on their design and implementation and other factors such as teacher feedback, training, and understanding the social emotional effect on students play a role in improving technology, said Alan Reid, a researcher at John Hopkins Center for Research and Reform in Education.

Reid studies educational technology products and reviews their efficacy in classroom instruction. He says AI products could yield positive learning outcomes by providing personalized attention and learning to students, but does not believe tools such as Khanmigo could replace human instruction completely. He sees educators using new platforms to supplement classroom work but wouldn’t be surprised if a teacher’s role shifts as technology evolves.

“That’s just by the nature of having so many digital programs and products and apps and screens and things that don’t lean on the instructor’s expertise as much as just the instructor becoming more of a guide and a facilitator through these products,” Reid added.

Kunz, the spokesperson for Khan Academy, said “in an ideal world every student would have a human tutor” but the hope is that Khanmigo will be able to provide an AI alternative “that can be scaled so that anyone, anywhere can get help when they need it.”

School districts need to think about different tutoring models and intervention strategies that provide critical support for mastering foundational skills, said Jennifer Krajewski, director of Outreach and Engagement at ProvenTutoring.

Khanmigo could be a useful tool to provide on-demand help with homework, Krajewski said, but could also supplement more robust intervention strategies during the school day depending on what students need and what the school district wants to target.

“I think school districts need to understand that distinction,” Krajewski said, “and start with what are their most pressing needs.”

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

NYC schools can now donate cafeteria food to fight hunger and reduce waste. Here’s how.

2024-05-10T19:30:40+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat New York’s free daily newsletter to keep up with NYC’s public schools.

New York City’s Education Department recently launched a program allowing schools to donate unused packaged food to local food pantries, soup kitchens, and shelters — an effort nearly two years in the making.

After a small group of schools piloted a food donation program, officials trained roughly 400 school food managers, supervisors, and directors earlier this year on how to set up their own programs, Chalkbeat has learned.

Every school will have the opportunity to opt into the effort, officials said. The Office of Food and Nutrition Services will help schools set up the procedures and equipment for donating untouched food, while a school’s administration will facilitate the donation to school community members or local pantries.

The program is gearing up at a critical moment, as pandemic-era family benefits dry up and childhood hunger is a growing concern. New York City has seen a 100% increase in the number of visits to food pantries by children and their families from pre-pandemic levels and 1 in 5 children don’t always know where their next meal will come from, according to food rescue group City Harvest.

Meanwhile, Mayor Eric Adams plans to reduce funding by about 56% for an emergency food program that works with about 500 community kitchens and food pantries citywide.

The school-based food donation program was “informed by conversations with several food pantries and best practices from existing school-based food pantries and ad hoc student-led food donation programs,” said Jenna Lyle, an Education Department spokesperson.

Since the program is just getting started, officials do not yet have data on participating schools, but said they plan to track how many opt into it.

Students, advocates, and elected officials have long tried to push the nation’s largest school system — which serves roughly 880,000 meals a day — to come up with a plan to divert food waste from landfills and into the hands of hungry New Yorkers. A Department of Sanitation study found that more than 40,000 tons of trash from New York City’s school buildings can be recycled, composted, or reused.

“There’s so much food being wasted,” said Eila Gandhi, a student at East Side Middle school.

Through the Middle School Leadership Council in Manhattan’s District 2, Elia has been working with Zoya Baulin, another East Side student, and Anya Bravin, from the Clinton School, on advocating for leftover packaged food from schools to go to homeless shelters and other anti-hunger organizations. But they kept hitting roadblocks, finding complicated rules and strict guidelines for donating the food and for shelters accepting the food.

They were happy to hear about the Education Department’s new program and are in touch with their principals about how their schools might participate.

“We feel like it could help so many different groups of people,” Anya said. “It can help people who have food insecurity. It could help schools get rid of this food. It can help homeless shelters to not have to feed so many people from their own money, and it could also help the environment.”

The Education Department’s food service team has been working to reduce excess food or leftovers whenever possible, said Lyle. “We applaud our students who are advocating for their communities and looking to support their local organizations and shelters.”

Rachel Sabella, director of No Kid Hungry New York, was encouraged to hear about the food donation program — especially now. Her advocacy organization recently polled public school families and found that nearly 9 in 10 reported that food prices were rising faster than their incomes.

“We look forward to learning more about this program expansion and the ways it can relieve the difficult choices too many families are forced to make between food, rent, and other necessities,” Sabella said in a statement.

Here’s what schools should know about participating in the program.

What’s the first step a school can take to participate in the program?

A school needs to set up what’s called a “share table,” where students can discard unopened packaged food or whole pieces of fruit from their trays, letting their peers pick up the food if they’d like.

Because of federal school food reimbursement regulations for meals — which are free for all New York City public school students — kids cannot, for instance, just take a cookie or an apple, but instead must take a complete meal with a protein and other food items. Because of that, many kids often end up tossing a lot of untouched food.

Several schools already have share tables set up in their cafeterias as a way to reduce food waste. (Education Department officials said they are in the process of collecting data on which schools have share tables.)

What food items are eligible for donation?

Only food from share tables can be donated.

The food must be non-perishable or unspoiled and must be donated within 36 hours of being served.

Where will the food donations go?

School leaders have two options:

They can donate the food directly to their school community, with school leaders selecting students and families to participate, according to a January presentation given to schools. “[This] enables students and families in need, access to food right in their own schools,” the presentation stated. “This program will help to make balanced, nutritious meals a reality.”
They can partner with an established local community food pantry or program that serves New Yorkers in need. The school can work with an organization to determine the food pick-up or delivery system.

Who will run the program at a school?

Principals must identify a “designee” to oversee the program. The designee can be a school staffer or a school community volunteer, such as a parent or guardian.

Students may volunteer to assist and support the program under that person’s guidance.

How will the food get from a cafeteria to families or organizations?

After each meal, whoever is running the program will evaluate food items left on the cafeteria’s share table. They — or student volunteers— will then place all eligible food items in a designated refrigerator or milk chest.

Each shelf must then be labeled with the date the items were placed there. And at the end of the last meal served (some schools serve breakfast, lunch, and after-school snacks), the person overseeing the program must complete a “daily food donation receipt,” submitted to an assigned kitchen staff member.

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

Cannabis use is hurting Detroit students. It’s also making more kids too young for school sick.

2024-05-13T17:07:33+00:00

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In the five years since Michigan voters approved recreational pot, cannabis culture has engulfed everyday life, especially in Detroit.

Billboards promising speedy weed delivery are everywhere. So too is a distinct skunky smell that lingers on streets, alleyways, and in apartment buildings.

The increased access to weed is contributing to a growing public health problem: More children are unintentionally ingesting marijuana edibles, getting sick, and going to the hospital.

From 2020 to 2022, the Michigan Poison and Drug Information Center, which takes calls from across the state, recorded 801 incidents of cannabis toxicity among children ages 5 and younger. That represents a nearly 75% increase of unintentional youth cannabis ingestion, a “worrisome and concerning” spike, said Varun Vohra, the center’s academic and managing director. Meanwhile, cases of unintentional cannabis use by children ages 4 to 13 grew by 60% from 2020 to 2023.

These trends have led public health professionals, local leaders, and school officials to search for solutions. In Detroit, school leaders are highlighting the urgency of what is likely a statewide problem. Detroit Public Schools Community District Superintendent Nikolai Vitti and school board members recently issued a plea for help to lawmakers and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Vitti said cannabis use — intentional or not — is widespread in Detroit schools, disrupting classes and sending students to the hospital nearly every week.

This school year alone, the district has counted roughly 750 incidents involving marijuana as well as vape pens that students use for tobacco. The latter make up a huge chunk of those incidents.

The public climate for cannabis is such that a 9-year-old, Kaydn Mahouli, complained about the billboards for weed to Detroit City Council members.

All of this speaks to a new frontier for child health and safety that has officials in schools and beyond scrambling to address an unintended outcome of cannabis legalization.

Child cannabis poisoning on the rise nationwide

Michigan voted to legalize recreational marijuana in 2018, and recreational dispensaries opened their doors in December 2019. In Detroit, the first dispensary to sell recreational weed began operation in January 2023, a delay stemming from legal battles over the city’s marijuana ordinance.

Dr. Kelly Levasseur, chief of pediatric emergency medicine at Children’s Hospital of Michigan, said the number of young patients entering the emergency department after the legalization of recreational marijuana rose dramatically.

“In 2020, during COVID … I’d have maybe one patient come in every few months, and now it’s probably every other week,” she said. “It is so common.”

Levasseur said toddlers and children, from roughly 16 months to 6 years old, comprise the majority of patients suffering from cannabis intoxication. They arrive with telltale symptoms of central nervous system depression: They are disorientated, sleepy, and confused as parents carry them into the waiting room. In severe cases, a child’s respiratory function becomes compromised.

“We can almost recognize these kids when they’re walking down the hallway,” Levasseur said.

Meanwhile, she is also treating teenagers for cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, an illness caused by daily cannabis use that results in severe cyclical nausea and vomiting. Levasseur said it typically resolves when the patient completely stops using marijuana.

Dr. Jason Vieder, vice chair of the emergency department at Henry Ford Health, said the issue is especially acute among young children who get their hands on temptingly sweet cannabis gummies, cookies and brownies.

Part of the problem, not only for children but also young people and adults, is that the dosage in these products is an “inexact science,” Vieder said. He said that while prescription pills might have lines scored down the middle to accurately separate half doses, eating half an edible does not necessarily mean people are getting half the supposed marijuana dose.

The issue is certainly not unique to Michigan.

Bart Hammig, a scholar of public health at University of Arkansas, has published research on the rise of pediatric cannabis poisoning nationwide. Although the research is challenging given federal laws about cannabis, Hammig told Chalkbeat that “the rate of [emergency department] visits associated with cannabis use has increased about four to five times in the past decade.”

Even states that pioneered the template for legal cannabis struggle to address this issue.

Colorado became the first state, along with Washington state, to legalize recreational pot in 2013. But doctors like Sam Wang of Children’s Hospital Colorado still see a high volume of children with cannabis poisoning.

“So our state has kind of led the way … with things that include child resistant packaging, marketing and advertising regulations, dose limitations … public education, etc. And we’d like to think that this has helped,” Wang said. “But unfortunately, the rates have continued to increase.”

Wang and other physicians and researchers stressed the need for more public awareness campaigns, especially when it comes to adults leaving cannabis edibles around the house where little hands can grab them.

Searching for ways to reduce kids’ cannabis use

Vitti and school board members have outlined several ways to curb cannabis use among kids, including stricter regulations on packaging and labeling of marijuana products.

They are also calling for detection systems in schools for marijuana and vape pens, and public awareness campaigns funded through cannabis revenues and taxes.

Vitti said the need to address these issues is deepening. In an interview with Chalkbeat, he cited two recent drug-related incidents that involved a second and third grader. “When we have young children involved, there is definitely a greater sense of urgency,” he said.

When asked for a response to Vitti’s letter, a spokesperson for Whitmer referred Chalkbeat to Michigan’s Cannabis Regulatory Agency.

That office has rules aimed at keeping pot edibles and products away from kids. The rules prohibit products that could appeal to children and minors based on shape, label, and overall packaging. For example, cartoons or caricatures are not allowed, nor the word “candy,” and products must be sold in opaque, child-resistant packages.

“Enforcement of these rules has been — and continues to be — a high priority for the CRA for years,” David Harns, a spokesperson for the agency, said in an email to Chalkbeat.

Harns wrote that the image Vitti included in his letter of marijuana edibles masquerading in packages that resemble Sour Patch Kids, Jolly Ranchers, and Skittles does not represent “regulated Michigan products.”

DPSCD Police did not respond to Chalkbeat’s request for comment about how often school police are encountering these products in Detroit schools.

Detroit City Council Member Angela Whitfield Calloway, a former Detroit public schools educator, said she is “beyond alarmed” about the situation.

She said more cannabis revenue should go toward funding robust education and awareness campaigns in traditional public, charter, and private schools.

“We have to have outreach, and we can’t depend on the schools because the schools are reaching out to us. They’re saying, ‘City of Detroit, we need your help,’’ Calloway said.

The proliferation of billboards advertising recreational cannabis across the city is also on her radar after comments to the City Council from Mahouli, the 9-year-old who expressed his concerns about children seeing the same billboards he sees “everywhere” that advertise marijuana.

Mahouli’s grandmother, Jacqueline Miller, explained to council members that Mahouli helps his mother at her substance abuse clinic in Pontiac and wants to become a doctor so he can take over the clinic one day.

Calloway has directed Detroit’s Legislative Policy Division to explore how the city could potentially restrict such advertisements.

Meanwhile, Council Member Scott Benson has proposed earmarking 10% of gross receipts from cannabis sales for youth substance abuse programs. Detroit currently uses 2% of its cannabis tax revenues for substance abuse outreach, and that includes a $40,000 youth program launching this summer through the Detroit Health Department. Benson says that’s not enough.

Roughly $101 million in state cannabis taxes from last year went to the K-12 School Aid Fund.

Although often less novel than marijuana, tobacco is also attracting similar concerns.

State Sen. Stephanie Chang, a Democrat from Detroit, said she is generally open to allocating more cannabis revenue for prevention. But she wants to drill down on more details and talk to stakeholders. And she pointed to her bill to address vaping, which includes banning flavored vapes, earmarking taxes for tobacco prevention and K-12 education, and enacting more regulations on businesses selling tobacco products.

Chang was recently at a student roundtable at Davis Aerospace Technical High School where students were asked if they know someone who has been harmed by vaping. “I think almost every student raised their hand,” she said.

Vitti has similar concerns. “The vape pens are even more dangerous [than cannabis] as far as usage and it’s a major problem,” he told Chalkbeat. “And that’s where we are seeing gas stations, close to school, selling vape pens, to underage children. That needs to be cracked down.”

Karmen Hanson, senior fellow with the National Conference of State Legislatures, has researched how states that were first to enter the so-called green rush, like Colorado and Washington, have incorporated public health into cannabis policy.

“Legislators and other policymakers will come back year after year, and regulators for that matter, too, to try to correct things that they believe need repairing or tweaking,” she said.

Hanson said local leaders now have the opportunity to learn from those examples.

Robyn Vincent is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit, covering Detroit schools and Michigan education policy. You can reach her at rvincent@chalkbeat.org.

How the ‘Southlake Playbook’ brought partisan battles to America’s school boards

2024-05-10T10:48:00+00:00

The following is adapted from “They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms,” a book by NBC News senior reporter Mike Hixenbaugh set to be published by Mariner Books on May 14.

Three years ago, a conservative uprising swept through the wealthy, North Texas city of Southlake.

The impact of that local movement has since rippled well beyond the suburb’s borders — helping bring divisive political strategies to nonpartisan school boards across the country and quietly influencing what children are taught about race, gender and sexuality. As these conflicts continue to roil communities, the story of what happened in Southlake — and how it inspired conservative activists nationwide — reveals what’s at stake as voters consider competing visions for America’s schools in the 2024 election.

Southlake’s fight began after a series of racist incidents spurred local officials to roll out a plan to make the affluent Carroll Independent School District more inclusive. Then came the backlash.

In 2020, parent activists — outraged at what they depicted as anti-white and anti-American indoctrination — formed a political action committee called Southlake Families PAC, which promised to end diversity programs and elevate “Judeo-Christian values” at the suburban Carroll school district. They raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to support a slate of hard-line conservative candidates, launched attack ads accusing their opponents of being radical leftists and, in 2021, won control of the Carroll school board.

The landslide victories caught the attention of conservatives nationally.

Afterward, The Federalist, a conservative online magazine, compared Southlake’s political revolt to the early days of the tea party movement in 2010, when anti-Obama blowback propelled a new generation of far-right Republicans into power. “Only this time,” the magazine wrote, “the stakes are far higher, with conditions ripe for a new takeover.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board praised the outcome in an op-ed titled “Southlake Says No to Woke Education,” writing, “Perhaps parents in other parts of the country will take the lesson that they can resist indoctrination that tells students they must divide and define themselves by race and gender rather than focus on learning and achievement.”

Laura Ingraham opened her nightly Fox News broadcast on May 3, 2021, with big news out of a small town in Texas. The clear message from Southlake, she told viewers of the “Ingraham Angle,” was: “We’re winning.”

Ingraham, like other Fox hosts, had spent months calling on her audience to fight the rise of Black Lives Matter and critical race theory in American society. “More of you are smartly heeding that call, because in Saturday’s election in Southlake, Texas, candidates opposed to the far-left BLM curriculum won the two open seats on the Carroll Independent School District board with nearly 70% of the vote.”

It may have been the first time that a Fox News prime-time program led with the results of a local school board election. Six months after former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat, conservative pundits appeared hungry for something to celebrate — some indication that the political winds were shifting ahead of the 2022 midterms. After years of selling their viewers a dark vision of America besieged by sinister forces from the left, the Southlake story appeared to present the bosses at Fox News with an opportunity to feed their audience something markedly different: hope that their side would prevail.

Activist Chris Rufo, the man most responsible for turning critical race theory into a conservative battle cry, was so excited by the outcome in Southlake that he apparently failed to fact check his celebratory tweet: “In 2020, Joe Biden narrowly won this district. Today, anti-woke candidates won by 40 points,” Rufo wrote, conflating Southlake’s 2020 presidential results — which skewed heavily for Trump — with those of the broader, more moderate Tarrant County, whose electorate had swung narrowly for Biden.

Nevertheless, Rufo’s point was fast becoming conventional wisdom on the right: Southlake, the argument went, held the answer for how Republicans could regain the ground they’d lost over the years in fast-growing and rapidly diversifying suburbs nationally. Republicans believed they could motivate voters by recasting nonpartisan school board elections as fights for the soul of America.

Days later, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon declared on his War Room podcast: “The path to save the nation is very simple — it’s going to go through the school boards.” That summer, the Center for Renewing America, a leading think tank in a conservative consortium that’s now preparing for a second Trump administration, published a 33-page handbook for taking control of school boards, holding Southlake Families PAC up as a model.

Mike Hixenbaugh author of They Came for the Schools.

The sense that the strategy was a winner for conservatives nationwide was also the headline message that spring when the leaders of Southlake Families PAC threw themselves a victory party at the home of Leigh Wambsganss, a longtime local conservative activist and one of the political action committee’s co-founders.

The chairman of the Texas GOP, Allen West, had come to celebrate their success — and issue a challenge.

“This is a best practice,” he said. “This is a lesson learned. You have to put this in a white paper. You have to make a video. You’ve got to make sure that you export this to every single major suburban area in the United States of America.”

West paused between those words for emphasis: Every. Single. Major. Suburban. Area. In the United States.

In August 2021, 17 months after the initial shutdowns to prevent the spread of Covid, a disturbing scene unfolded in a darkened parking lot outside a school board meeting in Williamson County, Tennessee, a wealthy and predominantly white community in the suburbs south of Nashville.

As the Delta variant of the coronavirus burned through the population that summer, filling hospital beds across the nation, the school board in Williamson County had made the politically divisive decision to follow the advice of public health experts and reinstate the district’s mandatory mask policy for the upcoming school year.

After the vote, an angry crowd swarmed mask proponents as they headed to their cars. “Take that mask off,” a woman shouted, getting into the face of another resident. Later, two men followed a mask-wearing official to his car, shouting, “We know who you are!”

“You can leave freely,” one of the men yelled, “but we will find you!” The other man made the threat more explicit: “You will never be allowed in public again!”

Video of the altercation went viral on social media, becoming the latest in a line of chaotic school board meetings to make headlines that summer, as conservative parents nationwide revolted against pandemic safety measures and lessons on racism that they attacked under the right’s ever-expanding definition of critical race theory.

Similar scenes had played out in Loudoun County, Virginia, where parents opposed to a district diversity plan shut down a meeting chanting, “Shame on you!” and in Rockwood, Missouri, where a school superintendent felt compelled to hire private security to stand guard outside the homes of Black senior administrators responsible for overseeing the district’s diversity and inclusion programs.

School board meetings grew so volatile that summer and into early fall that the National School Boards Association wrote a letter to President Joe Biden requesting help assuring the safety of school employees and board members. Attorney General Merrick Garland followed up by sending a memo to the FBI and federal prosecutors noting a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against school officials, and directing agency leaders to come up with strategies to address those concerns.

Conservative activists seized on the missive to spread a conspiracy theory that the Justice Department planned to target parents opposed to critical race theory and to prosecute angry suburban moms as “domestic terrorists.”

Many conservative parents embraced that title as a badge of honor that summer as they rallied around new national groups like No Left Turn in Education and Moms for Liberty that had formed to take the fight to school boards.

Robin Steenman had launched a Moms for Liberty chapter to oppose the mask mandate and lessons on racism in Williamson County, the site of the ugly parking lot showdown. An Air Force veteran and white mother of three, Steenman’s own children did not attend public school, but as a taxpayer in the Nashville suburb, she was determined to rid the district of any lessons or curriculum that she believed focused too heavily on the history of racism in America.

A member of Moms for Liberty protests against mandatory face masks for students in Brevard County, Florida. Conservative parent protests that started during the COVID-19 pandemic evolved from fighting masks to opposing how schools taught race, gender, and sexuality.

Although Steenman said she admired Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to judge others based only on the “content of their character,” she and her supporters wanted the district to ban the children’s book “Martin Luther King Jr. and the March on Washington,” because it contained historical images — including depictions of white firefighters blasting Black people with hoses — that might make white children feel bad about themselves.

“There’s so much positive that has happened in the 60 years since,” Steenman told a Reuters reporter, referring to several historical books she wanted removed. “But it’s all as if it never happened.”

The district refused to remove the books, arguing that they presented important historical facts in a clear, age-appropriate format. Later, the school board agreed to minor adjustments in the way teachers presented some of the material, but that did not appease Steenman, who’d come to believe that speaking at board meetings and writing stern letters wouldn’t be enough to effect real, lasting change.

If she and her supporters were going to take control of their public schools, they would need to harness the anger on display at public meetings that summer to win seats on the school board itself.

To do that, Steenman looked to the example set in a Texas town some 700 miles away.

In October 2021, five months after Southlake Families PAC’s landslide election victory, Steenman filed paperwork to form a new political action committee of her own. She and her allies named it Williamson Families PAC and quickly launched a website, which featured a mission statement taken nearly word for word from SouthlakeFamilies.org.

“Williamson County is built upon the rock of Judeo-Christian values that are the foundation of our country. We welcome all that share our concerns and conservative values.”

Steenman confirmed her inspiration in an interview with The Tennessee Star, a conservative online news site: “Williamson Families is a recipe that’s been done before. It was done in Southlake, Texas,” she said. “So I said, ‘Wow, that really works. That could really work here.’”

Like Southlake Families, Steenman’s political action committee held a kick-off celebration. Instead of Allen West, theirs featured John Rich, a popular country singer known for supporting Republican politicians. And like the Texas-based PAC that inspired it, Williamson Families quickly raked in nearly $200,000 and set its sights on recruiting candidates for the following year’s school board elections.

As in Southlake, Steenman and others on the PAC privately interviewed prospective candidates, looking to weed out those who were insufficiently conservative. The Williamson County-based PAC also hired a heavy-hitter GOP consulting firm called Axiom Strategies — the same firm advising Southlake Families. Axiom, known for its work on Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign and Glenn Youngkin’s campaign for governor that fall in Virginia, was now in the business of bringing sophisticated, national-level political strategies to local school board races.

Williamson Families PAC succeeded in turning the local election into a high-stakes partisan battle that deeply divided the community. But it fell short of its goal of taking control of the school board in the spring of 2022, winning just two of six open seats.

The Southlake Playbook, it turns out, wasn’t the universal winner that Republican strategists had hoped for. Suburbs that favored President Joe Biden in 2020 have tended to reject anti-diversity school board candidates; those favoring Trump, as in Southlake, have tended to embrace them. And some moderate conservatives — the people Republican strategists had hoped to win back — have been turned off by right-wing attacks on public schools.

Nevertheless, Steenman and her allies in Williamson County promised to continue fighting.

And she wasn’t the only white suburbanite inspired by Southlake.

From 2021 to 2023, Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan political encyclopedia, identified more than 2,000 school board elections where candidates took a stance on the battles over racism, LGBTQ inclusion or pandemic safety measures.

Just as in Williamson County, new Southlake Families-inspired political action committees began sprouting up across the country to push some of these candidates to victory.

A group seeking to block diversity lessons in Spalding County, Georgia, formed a PAC with a mission statement including the same copied-and-pasted phrase, “unapologetically rooted in Judeo-Christian values,” and noting that the group would “welcome all that share our concerns and conservative values.”

McKinney First, a political action committee formed to root out critical race theory in another North Texas school system, included identical language on its website. To stop the spread of CRT in the west Houston suburbs, there was Spring Branch Families PAC. North of Austin, politically connected parents formed Lake Travis Families PAC.

Nearly a dozen PACs formed that year in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs alone — so many that a liberal Fort Worth newspaper coined the phrase “the Southlake Playbook” to describe the surge of conservative organizing around local nonpartisan school boards.

These clashes have had a real impact, even in districts where hard-line conservatives have failed to win control. Fearing community backlash, two-thirds of teachers nationally reported limiting instruction about political and social issues, including racism and LGBTQ topics, according to a recent survey by the Rand Corp.

Wambsganss, the Southlake Families co-founder, would go on to replicate her own strategy in several other Texas school districts while overseeing a PAC funded by a far-right Christian cellphone company called Patriot Mobile. She reported receiving more than a thousand emails after the initial Southlake Families PAC election triumph, many from conservatives looking for tips on launching their own hyper-local political action committees.

Conservative activists in the affluent majority-white suburbs west of St. Louis were among those reaching out. Organizers there said they consulted directly with Southlake Families leaders before creating Francis Howell Families PAC in 2021 with a mission of supporting school board candidates who would ensure that schoolchildren learned “respect for our nation’s founding principles.”

After they won control of the school board, the Francis Howell Families-endorsed candidates once again followed Southlake’s lead, voting to rescind an anti-racism resolution adopted in 2020 that had called for “racial healing, especially for our Black and brown students and families.” In December 2023, PAC-endorsed board members voted to cancel a Black history course at district high schools — a decision it later rolled back after critical national media coverage.

These victories were just the beginning, Wamsgnass told a conservative outlet last year, as she and her supporters began to look ahead to 2024 and beyond.

“Parents in Southlake taught parents across the country that you can be called a racist and you can be called a homophobe, knowing that none of that is true, and you can keep standing,” Wambsganss said.

“People across the country are looking for leadership,” she added. “They’re looking for a blueprint.”

The education bills that passed (and failed) in the 2024 Colorado legislative session

2024-05-10T20:35:02+00:00

Schools and money loomed large in the 2024 Colorado legislative session.

State lawmakers approved a new school funding formula 10 years in the making. They passed a “fully funded” K-12 budget, provided financial relief for districts enrolling an influx of newcomer students, and gave a big budget boost to public colleges and universities.

This year’s session, which wrapped on Wednesday, was the sixth in a row that both houses of the legislature were controlled by Democrats. Gov. Jared Polis is also a Democrat.

The new school funding formula prompted the most heated discussions. Lawmakers pushed it through in the waning days of the session, with the final vote taking place on the final day. The bill, which calls for $500 million in new spending over six years, follows a framework created by a 17-member task force but also includes compromises shepherded by sponsors.

The bill gained momentum after lawmakers ended the so-called budget stabilization factor, which withheld constitutionally mandated funding from K-12 schools in order to fund other priorities. Colorado is now in what lawmakers have called its “fully funded” era, though many advocates and district leaders say that schools still need more money.

College and university leaders raised similar concerns about their budgets, warning that they would need to hike tuition if the state didn’t provide more funding for their operations.

The powerful Joint Budget Committee, which has a heavy hand in crafting the state budget, provided millions more for higher education than Polis suggested. While the money will keep tuition increases lower, concerns about chronic underfunding remain.

Here’s a rundown, by topic, of education bills that passed (and a few that failed) this year. Some bills have already been signed into law by Polis, while others have not.

Student rights

Schools will be required to use a student’s preferred name under House Bill 1039. Refusing to use a student’s preferred name will be considered a form of discrimination.

Bullying based on a student’s weight, height, or body size will now be prohibited under House Bill 1285, which adds bullying related to physical appearance to the list of behaviors that are subject to school discipline policies and reporting requirements.

Preschool, public school, and college students will be allowed to wear objects of cultural or religious significance at their graduation ceremonies under House Bill 1323.

Students who are involved in the criminal justice system will have more support enrolling or re-enrolling in school and participating in school activities such as graduation ceremonies and sporting events per House Bill 1216. The state will also begin tracking attendance, dropout, and graduation rates for such students.

Student health

I Matter, a free therapy program for Colorado students started during the pandemic, will become permanent after lawmakers passed Senate Bill 1. I Matter provides six free telehealth or in-person counseling sessions to students in elementary through high school.

Students will be allowed to carry and administer naloxone, a drug that can be used to reverse opiate overdoses, at school without risk of discipline or confiscation under House Bill 1003.

By the 2027-28 school year, an external organization will provide state-funded training to mental health staff in at least 400 public schools with an emphasis on rural schools and students who lack access to mental health support, per House Bill 1406.

Senate Bill 7 creates a behavioral health first aid training program that will contract with a Colorado nonprofit organization to train educators to recognize and respond to the signs of mental health crises and substance abuse in teens.

A grant program that funds school-based health centers will be expanded to include behavioral, preventative, and oral health care services under Senate Bill 34.

A bill to create a task force to study how much time schools give students to eat lunch — and ways to increase that time — never made it out of committee and did not pass.

Student and teacher safety

A task force created by House Bill 1320 will investigate incidents of student aggression against teachers, the effects of special education staffing shortages, and insufficient funding for student wraparound services. The task force will make recommendations for improvements.

Middle and high school sports coaches at public and private schools will have to complete an abuse prevention training program under Senate Bill 113.

Carrying a firearm, openly or concealed, will be prohibited on the grounds of any school, college, or child care center — with some exceptions — under Senate Bill 131.

The Colorado Department of Education will contract with an outside organization to develop best practices for how schools respond to reports of harassment and discrimination per Senate Bill 162. Public schools must begin training their employees in the 2025-26 school year.

Higher education

House Bill 1340 creates a tax credit for students enrolled in college. This bill would fund at least two years of in-state college for students whose families make less than $90,000 a year.

Students between the ages of 17 and 26 who have experienced homelessness at any time during high school will get help paying for college under House Bill 1403.

Colorado colleges and universities that enroll a higher-than-average proportion of students who are the first in their family to go to college will be designated as first-generation-serving institutions under House Bill 1082.

Students who transfer from one university to another will be able to retain the credits they earned, among other rights for transfer students enshrined in Senate Bill 164

Senate Bill 51 fixes an oversight in a law passed last year that was meant to expand adult diploma programs to help the more than 300,000 residents who never graduated high school.

Child care and early childhood education

A pandemic-era team that helps Spanish-speaking child care providers become licensed will continue its work after Colorado lawmakers approved ongoing funding in House Bill 1009.

Colorado’s child care subsidy program will get an overhaul that’s meant to boost aid for some families, make the subsidies easier to access, and attract more providers to accept subsidies. House Bill 1223 will also cover full tuition for child care employees with kids in child care.

Nature-based preschool programs can become licensed child care centers under Senate Bill 78.

House Bill 1331 creates a $5 million grant program for academic enrichment programs that occur when school is not in session. The programs must serve public school students.

Students with disabilities

House Bill 1063 puts stricter guardrails on the use of shortened schedules for students with disabilities and will require the state to collect data on how often students miss part of the school day because they are sent home early or placed on modified schedules.

A bill that would have banned seclusion, which is the practice of shutting students inside a room alone, was defeated at the request of the sponsor. State data shows that young students with disabilities are disproportionately secluded.

Senate Bill 69 requires the state to create a training program for parents and special education advocates “in plain and easy-to-understand language” about individualized education programs, or IEPs, which detail the services schools must provide students with disabilities.

Teacher workforce

School districts experiencing a teacher shortage will be able to hire more retirees to fill vacancies without impacting those retirees’ pension benefits under House Bill 1044.

Rural school districts will be able to hire retired superintendents and principals without impacting their pension benefits under Senate Bill 99.

Teachers will have an alternative way to get endorsed to teach special education or early childhood education, two fields with persistent shortages, per House Bill 1087. Instead of completing a college program, teachers can participate in a new induction program.

Out-of-state school psychologists who want to work in Colorado schools will be able to more easily transfer their licenses under an interstate compact created by House Bill 1096.

House Bill 1264 creates an online portal for educators to post resumés and school districts to post job openings. The portal will also include information about career incentives, stipends, loan forgiveness programs, mentorship opportunities, and more.

Teacher training

House Bill 1446 creates a free, optional training program for science teachers that will include “instruction on interventions for students who are below grade level or struggling in science, children with disabilities, and students who are English language learners.”

Experienced teachers will get paid stipends to mentor novice teachers with fewer than three years of experience under an expansion of an existing program, per House Bill 1376.

Some student teachers will get stipends under House Bill 1290.

School funding

Colorado lawmakers earmarked $24 million to be distributed to school districts that enrolled migrant students after the Oct. 1 student count under House Bill 1389.

Lawmakers passed House Bill 1390 in an attempt to shore up a new state program that provides free school lunches to all students. The program is facing a funding shortfall, and the bill delays implementing certain parts of the program in order to save money.

Charter schools

Charter schools authorized by the state’s Charter School Institute can now ask to share in some of the proceeds of local voter-approved tax increases when the schools need funding for construction or building renovation projects, per House Bill 1154.

CSI-authorized charters will also receive so-called mill levy equalization funding — state funding equal to the voter-approved tax revenue received by district-run schools in the same communities — under House Bill 1394.

A bill that would have significantly changed how Colorado charter schools operate and made it easier for local districts to close them was defeated by state lawmakers.

History and research

House Bill 1444 provides two more years of funding for a History Colorado research program “regarding the physical abuse and deaths that occurred at federal Indian boarding schools in Colorado.” The bill prioritizes collecting oral histories from survivors.

Climate education

Colorado high school graduates will now be able to earn a “seal of climate literacy” on their diploma to show they have the skills for green jobs or a background in managing Colorado’s natural resources under Senate Bill 14.

Prison education

House Bill 1461 will allow incarcerated students to take full advantage of a law that grants them early release for earning college degrees.

Career education

Colorado employers that employ an apprentice for at least six months can now get a tax credit of up to $12,600 per apprentice under House Bill 1439.

House Bill 1365 allocates $3.8 million for a fourth round of Opportunity Now grants to address workforce shortages in infrastructure and building trades.

Book bans

Colorado lawmakers voted down a bill that would have made it harder to remove content from a school or public library. But the issue resurfaced later in the legislative session in Senate Bill 216 — with a notable omission. School libraries are not part of the bill that passed.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

To meet class size mandate, NYC officials look to virtual learning

2024-05-09T22:24:48+00:00

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To reduce New York City’s class sizes under a new state mandate, Education Department officials floated one option to help principals comply: virtual learning.

In a plan released this week outlining ways that schools could meet the law’s goals, the Education Department suggested that some students could “receive regular remote instruction, potentially reducing the overall impacts on space in schools.”

Spinning up a virtual learning program would be optional, and the plan does not force principals to choose any specific method for achieving the new caps. It suggests 11 other possible ways principals could free up space, including repurposing rooms not currently used for instruction; boosting the number of classes taught by assistant principals; running student schedules with staggered start times; and ensuring students are spread evenly across classrooms.

Virtual learning could be valuable on campuses that are tight on space as officials scramble to find ways to reduce class sizes, including lengthy and expensive construction projects or capping school enrollment.

Many schools and families struggled with virtual learning amid the chaos of citywide building shutdowns during the pandemic, but city and union officials are betting that more targeted applications can bear fruit. The Education Department now runs two remote schools, and saw success with a remote learning pilot, offering online classes to students who couldn’t take those courses at their schools. And the most recent teachers union contract has expanded schools’ ability to offer virtual learning.

The class size reduction plan is preliminary and subject to approval by the unions representing teachers and school administrators. And it’s unlikely that the state’s class size mandate will directly lead to a big increase in virtual learning in the short term, since only 40% of the city’s classrooms must comply with the new class size caps this September.

“We’re very confident we are going to be in compliance next year,” First Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg said during a meeting of the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council on Thursday.

Under the law, classes must not exceed between 20 and 25 students depending on the grade level, and they also apply to virtual classrooms. Physical education and other classes involving performing groups are limited to 40 students. The law phases in over time, with 20% of classrooms per year required to comply with the new caps. All classrooms must be within those limits by 2028.

The city appears to be on track to meet the state’s requirements, and officials are requiring that all district superintendents increase the percentage of classrooms that are in compliance with the new caps by 3% next year.

“We are looking to make progress in implementing this law across the city, even as we are close to compliance for next year,” wrote Education Department spokesperson Jenna Lyle. “This includes putting $180 million in new funding into school budgets.”

Few schools signed up to offer virtual learning this year

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew, who has pushed for class size reductions, has said that virtual options could help with space problems.

“You have less of a problem with programming your regular school day because you have less students in the building at any given time,” Mulgrew told Chalkbeat earlier this year. “It also gives you more classroom space to work with.”

The city’s virtual pilot program, allowing students to take classes from teachers on other campuses, was a boon for small schools that may have struggled to offer a full range of electives and advanced placement classes.

Under the expanded version of the program negotiated last year in the union contract, schools can offer classes during the regular school day or on evenings and weekends, allowing students to catch up on credits, pursue accelerated coursework, or go to school on a non-traditional schedule if they are working or have other responsibilities.

The contract said that 25% of high schools and 6-12 schools were eligible to offer virtual schooling this year, with all schools able to participate by the 2027-28 school year. Schools were required to sign up and neither students nor educators can be required to participate in virtual classes.

But a bureaucratic approval process created obstacles for schools to participate, according to union officials. Only 40 high schools are participating this year, though Education Department officials said 80 schools are approved for this fall with additional campuses still under consideration. (This does not include schools that allow students to attend virtual classes offered by teachers at other campuses.)

“Myself and the chancellor are more hands on now,” Mulgrew said, noting that middle and high schools are eligible to participate next year. “We both are frustrated with it.”

Walking back plan to force principals to prioritize teacher hiring

City officials also indicated that, at least for now, they will not require school leaders with vacant roles to prioritize hiring teachers over other positions — a move officials previously floated that would have constrained principals’ freedom to manage their own hiring decisions.

“We’re not eager to restrict principals’ and communities’ ability to hire who they think is most critical until we need to,” Emma Vadehra, the Education Department’s chief operating officer, said during the Thursday parent council meeting.

Some advocates have expressed worry that the city, which pushed back against the class size mandate, will not ultimately comply with the state’s requirements.

“Any plan worth the paper it is printed on must project how many classes will be reduced each year, using which levers, and with what results,” Leonie Haimson, executive director of the advocacy group Class Size Matters, said in a statement. “This document fails on every account.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney contributed reporting.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

To engage students in math, educators try connecting it to their culture

2024-05-13T10:04:00+00:00

This story about ethnomathematics was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

Before she got to the math in her lesson on linear equations last fall, Sydney Kealanahela asked her class of eighth graders on Oahu why kalo, or taro root, is so important in Hawaii. What do you know about kalo, she asked them. Have you ever picked it?

A boy who had never spoken in class, and never seemed even slightly interested in math, raised his hand.

“He said, ‘I pick kalo with my grandma. She has a farm,’” Kealanahela recalled. “He was excited to tell us about that.”

Class discussion got animated. Everybody knew about poi, the creamy staple Hawaiian food made from mashed taro. Others had even noticed that there were fewer taro farms on Oahu.

That’s when Kealanahela guided the conversation to the whiteboard, plotting data on pounds of taro produced over time on a graph, which created a perfect descending line. The class talked about why there is less taro production, which led to a discussion about the shortage of farm labor.

Kealanahela had taught eighth-grade math for six years at a campus of the Kamehameha Schools, but this was the first time she had started a lesson with a conversation about farming. The idea came from professional development she’d just completed, in ethnomathematics, an approach that connects math to culture by embedding math in a story about something relevant to students’ lives.

Ethnomathematics isn’t new, but until recently it was limited to a niche area of educational and anthropological research on how different cultures use math. Over the past couple of decades, it has evolved into one of several efforts to create more engaging and inclusive math classrooms, particularly for Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous students, who tend to score lower on federal tests than their Asian American and white peers. Ethnomathematics advocates say that persistent achievement gaps are in part a result of overly abstract math instruction that’s disconnected from student experience, and that there’s an urgent need for new approaches that recognize mathematical knowledge as it’s practiced outside of textbooks.

Many Black and brown students don’t feel comfortable in math classes, said Shelly Jones, professor of math education at Central Connecticut State University. She said those classes tend to be “competitive” and that teachers “hone in on what Black and brown students don’t know as opposed to honoring what they do know.” She added: “We are trying to pull in students who have not traditionally felt they belonged in math spaces.”

That said, research on the impact of ethnomathematics is limited, and its practice is largely confined to individual classrooms — like Kealanehela’s — where the teacher has sought out the approach. And teachers who incorporate ethnomathematics without the right support and instructional tools risk stumbling into a cultural minefield, experts say. Most teachers in U.S. classrooms are white. If one of those white teachers decides their Hispanic students should learn base-20 Mayan numbers, and their students ask why, the teacher will have to come up with an answer, said Ron Eglash, a professor in the University of Michigan’s School of Information.

“Telling kids, ‘Because it’s your heritage,’ sounds really awkward from a white teacher,” Eglash said.

But experts say that high-quality ethnomathematics lessons boost student confidence and engagement when used by teachers (of any race) who have been trained and who allow students the time to explore the material on their own and through discussion.

Math isn’t just ‘something the Greeks created’

Ethnomathematics falls under the same umbrella as culturally responsive math instruction. Experts say that teaching math this way requires teachers to get to know their students and create a learning environment where students can connect to math concepts. It involves developing lessons that reveal the math in everyday activities, like skateboarding, braiding, and weaving. It can also include exploring the math involved in cultural practices, like beading.

“A lot of this work is about removing barriers or perceptions from a marginalized population that math is something the Greeks created and is imposed on me,” said Mark Ellis, a professor of education at California State University, Fullerton. He said that culturally responsive instruction takes other measures into account, besides academic outcomes, when determining impact. These include students’ attitude about math, sense of belonging in math classes, and engagement in math discourses.

Traditional math instruction, Ellis said, is treated as if math were acultural, even though, as we know it in the U.S., math descended from the computational traditions of many places, including Mesopotamia (360-degree circles), ancient Greece (geometry and trigonometry), India (decimal notation, the concept of zero) and China (negative numbers). If these mathematical traditions are taught, Ellis and others ask, then why not Hawaiian calculations for slope, sub-Saharan fractal geometry, and Mayan counting systems?

Related: Eliminating advanced math ‘tracks’ often prompts outrage. Some districts buck the trend

Eglash argues that ethnomathematics lessons aren’t just for students from the culture that the lessons draw from. It’s important that students explore math concepts from all cultures, including their own, he said.

Ethnomathematics, a term coined in the 1970s by Brazilian mathematician Ubiratan D’Ambrosio, first appeared in the U.S. about 25 years ago. That’s when Eglash and his wife, University of Michigan design professor Audrey Bennett, developed a suite of teaching modules by which students learn the history or context of a practice — braiding hair into cornrows, for example — and then use algebra, geometry, and trigonometry to create their own cornrow designs with software.

Eglash and Bennett designed the teaching tools with the idea that students can use a module to create their work, which can mean mixing cultures. A Puerto Rican student used Eglash’s module about Native American beading to create a Puerto Rican flag simulation.

In 2009, Richmond City Public Schools asked Eglash and Bennett to teach a module called Cornrow Curves to a class of Black 10th graders. Eglash asked the class where cornrows came from. Their answer: “Brooklyn!” That led to discussion about the African origins of cornrows — where they indicated marriage status, religious affiliation, and other social markers — and on through cornrows’ history during the Middle Passage, Civil Rights, hip-hop, and Afrofuturism.

Only then did the students begin doing math, designing their own cornrows, noticing how the plaits get closer together or further apart depending on the values students enter in a simulation. One student created a design for straight-line cornrows by visually estimating how far to space them apart. In her presentation to class, Eglash recalled, she said that “there are 12 spaces between the braids on one side, which covers 90 degrees, so the braids are positioned every 7.5 degrees because 90/12 = 7.5.”

The Cornrow Curves module and other lessons like it have now been adopted by districts in 25 states. The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, began offering a culturally responsive computer science curriculum in 2008 that incorporates ethnomathematics lessons that Eglash and Bennett developed. Some evidence indicates that this course helped boost student participation in computer science: An external evaluation found that enrollment in the classes rose by nearly 800 percent from 2009 to 2014.

This screen capture of a Cornrow Curves programming module shows how mathematical concepts can be used to describe plaits of hair.

In 2012, Chicago Public Schools adopted the same curriculum for an introduction to computer science course and invested in significant professional development for teachers. In 2016, the intro to computer science course became a graduation requirement for all Chicago high school students, and 250 teachers are trained each year on the curriculum.

An outside analysis of the Chicago program showed that students who took the course before taking AP computer science were 3.5 times more likely to pass the AP computer science exam than those who only took the AP course. A separate study in Chicago and Wisconsin showed that where the course was offered racial and gender achievement divides disappeared and that students were more likely to take another computer science class.

Culturally responsive lessons help students feel like they belong

Keily Hernandez, 15, a first-year student at Chicago’s George Westinghouse College Prep High School, was happy to see the computer science course on her schedule this year, because she plans to major in computer science in college. At first, she found the cornrows module challenging — getting the designs to look the way she wanted them to look was difficult — but it was also fun, she said.

The class is collaborative, she said, and students often turn to each other or to the internet for ideas and help. Hernandez said that taking the class has relieved her doubts that she can be a computer scientist.

“The class made me reassured,” she said. “Math isn’t something that you just know, the same way that computer science isn’t something that you just know. You get better at it the more you do it.”

It’s students like Hernandez that Linda Furuto wanted to attract when she took the job as head of the math and science subdivision at the University of Hawaii West Oahu in 2007. At the time, student enrollment was so low that the school offered just two math courses. Furuto, who had grown up on Oahu and received her doctorate. in math education from the University of California, Los Angeles, recalled thinking, “This isn’t working. We need to implement ethnomathematics here.”

Related: Data science under fire: What math do high schoolers really need?

Over the next six years, she began to integrate ethnomathematics into coursework, and student interest grew. By 2013, the university offered more than 20 math classes.

“Students would say things like, ‘I hated math. I felt no connection to it. But now I see that math is my culture and because of that I want to be a secondary math teacher,’” Furuto said. “Just knowing that the life of a student has in some way, shape or form been transformed speaks volumes.”

In 2018, Furuto established the world’s first ethnomathematics graduate certificate and master’s degree program. So far, about 300 teachers have participated in the online program; about half are from Hawaii.

While teachers in Chicago get ongoing professional development in cohorts both before and while they teach the district’s ethnomathematics-based computer science course, educators who complete the University of Hawaii program are highly likely to be the only teacher at their school with this niche training.

Janel Marr teaches in the University of Hawaii’s ethnomathematics graduate program.

Kealanahela, the teacher on Oahu, said that as inspired as she was by the ethnomathematics program, she doesn’t have time to teach using the method more than twice every three months.

“To create a really good lesson that feels authentic to me, and not just thrown together,” she said, “it takes time to do the research.”

For a teacher who doesn’t have colleagues in their school using the same approach, it can be hard to fit in something new like ethnomathematics, said Janel Marr, a math resource teacher in Oahu’s Windward School District.

Marr was one of the first teachers to participate in the ethnomathematics graduate program, as an eighth-grade math teacher. Today she teaches in the graduate program.“When you go back to the classroom, there are so many other things from all sides, from administration and curriculum to state tests,” she said. “It starts to get overwhelming. It’s not being implemented as much as we in the program would want it to be.”

Math content should relate to the real world

Ideally, said Eglash, ethnomathematics content should be related to real-world situations, even if that involves exploring painful periods of history. Where possible, content should connect with art, history, sports, and math to provide multiple ways for students to interact. This is critical, he said, to address power dynamics and “identity barriers” in the classroom, like the race of the teacher. When teachers let students explore content individually and through group discussion, students gain control over their own learning.

“The teacher finds a way to use the tool that is authentic — which is something the kids pick up on and respect, even for white folks,” he said. “It’s when you are trying to be something you are not that teaching becomes awkward.”

Doing ethnomathematics right can also engage teachers, Marr said. She had been teaching eighth-grade math at Kailua Intermediate School for 13 years when she hit a wall. Her students would ask why they had to learn math, she said, and she didn’t have an answer. She was looking for inspiration when she heard about the University of Hawaii’s ethnomathematics program.

“My students would learn to work with the numbers and everything, but it wasn’t like they were making a connection of why there is slope,” Marr said.

Related: How one district diversified its advanced math classes — without the controversy

After earning her master’s, Marr had the idea to approach linear equations in a new way. She showed her students a photo of a mountain with a long, bare line down its lush, forested side and asked if anyone knew what they were looking at. Most students didn’t.

She wrote a word on the whiteboard: holua. The path, students learned from research they did in class, was made of gravel pounded into lava rocks, and it ran down the side of the Hualālai Volcano on the east side of Hawaii. Elite members of ancient Hawaiian communities sledded down mountainside paths like this one as part of the extreme sport known as holua.

“We talked about those pictures and talked about, well what would the slope be? How fast might they be going? Because slope is really related to the rate of speed,” she said. “Math isn’t just theoretical. It’s having an experience of being part of the place.”

Chicago’s dancing crossing guard wins CPS Guard Of The Year award

2024-05-10T21:40:00+00:00

This story originally appeared in Block Club Chicago.

Chicago’s dancing crossing guard has won Chicago Public Schools’ Crossing Guard of the Year award.

Tammy Anderson will be one of four crossing guards honored at a ceremony Thursday. The Beasley Academic Center crossing guard has been escorting students safely to the school at 5255 S. State St. for eight years, amassing a number of fans along the way with her megawatt smile and dance moves.

Anderson found out about the honor on her birthday last month, when Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd) surprised her while she was on duty with a personal letter from Mayor Brandon Johnson.

“I didn’t even know who she was. She was walking towards me, so I held up the ‘stop’ sign like we’re supposed to do when someone you don’t know is walking up on you,” Anderson said. “But then she introduces herself and hands me the letter. It was the best birthday present.”

Congratulations to Tammy Anderson for being named Crossing Guard of the Year by CPS. She works her magic & great smile at Beasley Academic Center at 53rd & State Streets. Our students love her. I’m so appreciative of her focus on keeping our young people safe..all with a flare!! pic.twitter.com/FzR7e0rqGD
— Alderman Pat Dowell (@AldPatDowell3rd) May 2, 2024

Anderson has become a fixture of Washington Park, as she’s frequently seen directing traffic near the school while dancing, flashing her kilowatt smile, and waving and talking to drivers and commuters as they pass by.

The crossing guard went viral in 2022, when video circulated showing her joyful personality. Two years later, Anderson’s popularity has continued to grow, from being featured in Black History Month television segments to making cameos in the Welcome to Chicago presentation playing at Flyover, Navy Pier’s newest attraction.

And the commuters are still driving past the school to get a piece of the sunshine, still honking and waving as they pass. lt’s still one of the best parts of the job for Anderson, she said.

Now, the mom is preparing for the high school graduation of her youngest child, who will attend Georgia State University in the fall.

“She’s going to study software engineering, and she’s already been interning at LinkedIn. My goddaughter will be going there, too. I’m so proud of them,” Anderson said.

What’s next for the beloved crossing guard?

“Maybe I’ll write my life story,” Anderson said. “I think it’s time.”

At summer seminar, teachers learn advanced courses aren’t just for some

2015-07-17T18:35:33+00:00

Read more of Chalkbeat's coverage of the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

When Miranda Schaelling started an Advanced Placement environmental science course three years ago at Harrison High School in Colorado Springs only 16 students enrolled. But next fall, her class roster will boast 126 students.

Her key to increasing enrollment? Encourage everyone to join, regardless of science proficiency, and to not worry about the end-of-year test many students take for college credit.

“I tell them all the time, especially after the first exam…it’s not about passing the test, it’s not about making a qualifying score, it’s about learning how to handle the workload,” she said. “Especially because a majority of my students are sophomores, it’s about learning study skills, learning accountability, learning what college is actually like.”

More than 60,000 Colorado high school students were in enrolled in at least one AP course during the 2012-2013 school year. That’s 7,000 more than just five years before, according to data from the Colorado Department of Education.

But according to data from College Board, only half of the students who could potentially succeed in an AP course took one. Even a smaller percentage of students of color, who could be successful in an advanced course, enrolled in those classes.

“So for every five black adolescents who has a very high potential to pass an AP exam, only one will ever take the course,” said Greg Hessee, the director of Colorado Legacy Schools for the Colorado Education Initiative, which provides grants to schools to pay for AP tests for students who can’t afford the fee.

In the past, schools haven’t pushed AP courses on all students.

They worry that by pushing all students to take rigorous courses, regardless of how prepared they are in the subject, could dilute the course for more advanced students or that those unprepared students could feel overwhelmed. In addition, some are skeptical that students who take these courses actually benefit from them if they don’t pass the end of year exam.

But these problems shouldn’t arise if AP programs are implemented correctly, said Kevin Welner, the director of the National Education Policy Center.

“If [expanding access to AP programs] is done poorly, yes this is problem,” Welner said. “If you have teachers who haven’t been prepared to teach a more diverse class of students and they try teach to the ‘middle’ of the class [and don’t] teach in a way that is engaging and challenging to all levels of kids, then yes, there could be a problem. But if you have the supports for students and teachers built into it, then no, it’s not a problem.”

That’s why the AP for All Summer Institute is important, Hessee said. About 500 teachers from around the world, hoping to replicate Schaelling’s success at enrolling more students in rigorous high school courses, participated in this week-long conference in Denver. The emphasis of this program is that advanced classes should be open to all students, regardless of proficiency in the subject, race, or socioeconomic status.

“I think that’s why it’s important to have it here in Denver. To give teachers those support systems as well as strategies…so they know how to handle this when they get back in their classroom,” Hessee said. “I believe we’re building momentum to change the historic notion of AP just being for that top five percent of students to something that all students deserve to receive support with.”

A student’s readiness for AP classes can be determined by a number of factors, such as their grade in a prerequisite class or their scores on a preliminary SAT exam. Some schools use an online tool, known as AP Potential, to identify students with a 60 percent or higher likelihood of succeeding in particular AP subjects.

Hessee said AP courses, and the resulting skills in college readiness, are especially important at a school like Schaelling’s Harrison, which serves a high-risk population: 71 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch and more than 60 percent of the students are Hispanic or black.

“Every student who has the will should be allowed to engage in Advancement Placement courses,” Hessee said. “That’s not how all AP programs have been run but more and more frequently it is. It’s not just the honors students…it’s any student who wants to learn at an advanced rate regardless of whether or not they can pass an Advanced Placement exam.”

At the summer workshop, teachers learned tactics to identify students with potential to thrive in AP courses, even if they might not pass the end of year test. Teachers were told by workshop leaders that if students challenge themselves, they can benefit from the advanced courses by getting a taste of college rigor.

“If they increase enrollment in their course they can also increase college readiness, even for students who aren’t your typical AP kids, kids who aren’t considered ‘AP worthy’ or ‘AP ready,’” Hessee said.

The idea that AP courses can be for all students is something Schaelling tries to implement at Harrison.

“We’re trying to get a lot more kids [to take AP classes], and I teach at more of a lower socioeconomic school, so AP for us is a really big deal,” she said. “Teaching them those college skills is essential for them because I know they’re going to go to college. They’re on their way. They just need the skills more than they need the passing test scores.”