Correction appended Sept. 30

Educators and advocates from across the country — many of whom say they have already seen the effects of anti-immigrant political rhetoric on their students — convened Wednesday night to strategize on how to counter it in their schools. 

Adam Strom, director of Re-Imagining Migration, told the webinar’s 93 attendees to take an active role in combating prejudice by facing the issue head-on. He encouraged participants to address bullying against immigrant students specifically in school policy — and to teach about stereotypes without unintentionally reinforcing them. 

“Xenophobia harms all kids,” he said, “particularly immigrant youth.” 

The meeting came two weeks after former President Donald Trump claimed during a presidential debate that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were killing and eating their neighbors’ pets. Debunked by multiple official sources, Trump and his Republican running mate, JD Vance, have persisted in repeating the lie, which resulted in bomb threats that shuttered six Springfield schools and two local colleges. 

Less than 30 miles away in Dayton, Joni Watson, a retired public school teacher, works for an adult literacy nonprofit that helps participants earn their GED. Watson’s group also helps Dayton-area newcomers learn to read and write English through free one-on-one tutoring. 

“This topic is near and dear to my heart as I am really in the thick of it on a daily basis,” she told The 74. “I am just sick about what Vance and Trump are doing and saying.”

In a pre-webinar survey of 74 respondents, 31% said they knew of immigrant children who had reported being bullied or teased at school. Twenty-three percent said they heard students make anti-immigrant comments on campus this school year while another 23% heard staff make such statements since the beginning of the year. Eleven percent said they heard or witnessed staffers make anti-immigrant comments to families and caregivers.  

Strom advised educators to reach out to young immigrants and their families to check in on how they are feeling during this turbulent time and to tell all students that bullying of newcomers is unacceptable. He said, too, that educators should respond immediately when such incidents occur. 

During the session, Strom unveiled Re-Imagining Migration’s new Rumor Review App. The AI-powered tool, which fed off thousands of pages of information from the organization’s website, including reports and lesson plans, was developed to help users identify misinformation. 

It encourages them to check the validity of such claims by consulting credible fact-checking sites such as Snopes — and to learn and spread correct information to their school communities. Since putting Springfield in the crosshairs, Trump has moved to inciting false fears over immigrant communities in Aurora, Colorado and Charleroi, Pennsylvania.

Psychotherapist Liz Carrasco said she wanted to attend the webinar because she’s seen the impact of hate speech on her students. 

“Many worry that their families could be torn apart, or that they will face discrimination in their pursuit of education and work,” she said. “For these students, political rhetoric is not just words — it has very real and immediate consequences for their safety and their future.”

A U.S. citizen who was born in Mexico, Carrasco works with UNLV PRACTICE Nevada Rural Communities Mental Health Outreach Program, which supports young people ages 12-25, and teaches at the university’s School of Social Work. Carrasco, who was not speaking on behalf of UNLV, said she works with immigrants who have gone through horrific ordeals, including some who were victims of human trafficking.

Strom asked participants to be honest about whether and how they teach about migration and instructed them to develop better, more robust lessons that capture immigrant students’ experiences. 

He said this can be done at all grade levels.  

“Think about how you might use childrens’ books to normalize the stories of newcomers,” he said during the hour-long event.  

Anindita Das, community engagement strategist at an Iowa college, said she was compelled to attend the event because reducing prejudice helps build a more inclusive and harmonious society.

“Being an immigrant myself, I know immigrants bring diverse cultures, perspectives and experiences, enriching the social fabric of the host country,” she said. “Immigrants contribute significantly to the economy through their labor, entrepreneurship and innovation. Addressing prejudice ensures they can fully participate and contribute.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story had an outdated description of Liz Carrasco’s job with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Many capable Hispanic, Black and English learner students did not elect to join these classes on their own or were passed over by their instructors. And their parents were often unaware they could make the request. 

Dallas ISD, which serves some 142,000 children, took note of the disparity and in 2017 formed a racial equity advisory council — some of whose members had children in the district — with the goal of improving opportunity for all. 

It decided to move from an opt-in model to an opt-out policy in the 2019-20 school year. Since then, all students who score well on state exams are now automatically enrolled in advanced mathematics, reading, science and social studies — or some combination of the four. Under the current model, students cannot opt out without written parent permission. The move has dramatically increased participation among traditionally marginalized children.

The initiative is particularly consequential in mathematics. It places far more students on track to take eighth-grade algebra, a prerequisite for more advanced coursework in high school. Prior to the shift, only 20% of Dallas ISD 8th graders were enrolled in Algebra I compared to 60% today. 

“We talked about some cold hard facts and part of that was to … increase enrollment in the good stuff and ensure students are going to be successful once we get them in there,” said Shannon Trejo, Dallas ISD’s chief academic officer. “Advanced coursework in high school is a pipeline: You have to get in in middle school. The question was, ‘How do we ensure students who are prepared are enrolling?’”

And the policy has not led to a decrease in student scores as some speculated: Last year’s 8^th-grade Algebra I students had similar pass rates as those in years prior, the district said, with 95% of Hispanic students passing the test and 76% meeting grade-level proficiency; 91% of Black students passing and 65% meeting grade level and 95% of English learner students passing the state exam and 74% meeting grade level. 

Drexell Owusu, chief impact officer at The Dallas Foundation, which connects donors with charitable organizations among other endeavors, said he appreciates the district’s decision to raise the bar for students who’ve shown they are capable of more challenging work. 

“As a parent to three Dallas ISD students, I hold my own children to this standard, knowing that the challenge of advanced coursework is how they will reach higher heights as learners and people,” said Owusu, a member of the district’s advisory council. “As a business and community advocate, I’m thrilled with the increase in success rates for honors courses knowing that this will lead to great jobs and increased living-wage attainment for these students in the future.”

Dallas’s decision to open up its honors classes comes as educators and advocates across the country are reckoning with racial inequities in advanced courses and questioning whether current curricula serve today’s students. Some are urging decision makers to include access at every turn of a child’s academic career and to consider more modern and relevant coursework. 

This is particularly true of calculus, long considered a benchmark of high school success and often perceived as a prerequisite of college admissions — at least for wealthier students who have access to the course, which can be hard to find in Black, Hispanic and impoverished communities.

Like many school districts across the country, Dallas saw its math scores falter in recent years, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the “Nation’s Report Card.” Eighth-grade math scores dropped by eight points nationally since the test was last administered in 2019, while fourth-grade scores dropped by five points — the largest decreases ever recorded.

The results were less alarming for Hispanic eighth graders in Dallas, who saw their scores fall from 265 to 261 and Black students in that grade who saw their marks dip from 252 to 249. The city’s fourth-grade math scores were about as dire, with Hispanic students in that grade seeing a six-point drop, from from 236 to 230, while Black students slid from 222 down to 218. 

Hispanics make up 71% of Dallas’s student body, Black students account for 20% and English language learners, who the district refers to as emergent bilinguals, make up 49%, according to Dallas ISD’s most recent data. White students account for 5.5% of total enrollment.

Students of color had been dramatically underrepresented in the district’s advanced programming. Just 33% of Hispanic sixth graders, 17% of Black sixth graders and 31% of English learners in that grade were enrolled in 6^th-grade honors math classes in the 2018-19 school year. Conversely, 51% of white sixth graders took advanced math that year. 

By the 2022-23 school year, 59% of Hispanic sixth graders, 43% of Black sixth graders and 59% of that grade’s English learners were enrolled in 6^th-grade honors math classes. The percentage of white sixth graders in advanced math also grew substantially, to 82%.

In past years, Dallas ISD school board Trustee Ben Mackey said some students weren’t selected for such programs because teachers believed they misbehaved in class. 

“Maybe that kid was acting up because they were not challenged,” he said. “Within two years of this policy, 94% of eligible students are taking these classes. It makes such a drastic difference in terms of whether the student will be college ready and career ready. We need to give every single person a chance to be successful in life, so when they leave us, they are not three steps behind.”

Juany Valdespino-Gaytan, the district’s executive director of engagement services, said the new model helps capture talented students who might not have known about the honors path. 

“The whole premise is that we are really trying to increase access to all students,” she said. “The policy change was our first effort toward that goal, making these courses available to any student and automatically requiring them to opt out. It puts students in a space where they are advocated for based on their performance.”

Trejo, the district’s chief academic officer, said Dallas ISD is tracking outcomes year over year, with a focus on whether students continue on an advanced pathway in high school. 

“I want our kids to graduate and be able to choose among different colleges and among different careers because they have been so well prepared in mathematics that people want them,” Trejo said. 

But Kellam began to change his mind after a local nonprofit presented a new opportunity during a career class last fall: Launchpad, a new, three-year career and technical education program that not only was free, but paid students for their work.

Though he couldn’t both do Launchpad and earn a bachelor’s degree, the more Kellam learned about the program, the more he thought about changing his path.

“After learning that Launchpad was not compatible with a four-year college, I dropped” my plan, Kellam said. “I wanted to do Launchpad more than I wanted to do college because of the opportunities it gives me to get a better job.”

Kellam is one of 45 students who were selected last fall among an inaugural group of 90 applicants. Launchpad’s program is presented in four stages. 

In the first, which began in January and lasts through the semester, students attend weekly afterschool meetings to participate in a variety of workshops and activities. Offerings include learning about infotechnology and building a computer; going on private tours with local companies; and creating presentations to teach younger students about the tech industry.

In the second, students take half-days during senior year and the summer after graduation to complete online classes through Arizona State University. They also receive coaching from Launchpad staff and build relationships with local industry experts through networking and observing different companies. 

The third stage is an intensive bootcamp at Launchpad’s Philadelphia office after graduation. Participants will work at least 30 hours a week to learn technical skills, develop a portfolio of completed projects and earn more college credits. In the fourth stage, they transition into a guaranteed paid career with an industry partner, working with real clients. The goal is to place participants in jobs that pay at least $50,000 a year.

Dannyelle Austin, executive director of Launchpad, created the program’s framework in 2022. She said it’s crucial for students to start workforce development and career education early on. “So often, workforce programming waits until young people are disconnected from school and work to try to engage them, as opposed to saying, ‘We know there are young people that are not going to go to college — how do we tap into them when they’re still in high school, when they’re still connected and engaged?’” Austin said.

Launchpad’s mission is to show students that career success doesn’t require a college degree, she said. 

A 2019 report from the U.S. Department of Education found that by eight years after their expected graduation date, students who focused on career and technical education while in high school had higher median annual earnings than those who did not.

Launchpad was created by Building21, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit founded in 2013 to help traditional schools transition to a competency-based approach, which values student performance levels instead of grade-point averages. The nonprofit uses the framework in two of its own high schools — Building 21 Philadelphia, which Kellam attends, and another in Allentown, roughly one hour to the north. It also coaches educators and schools around the U.S. to transform their curriculum to be competency-based. 

Austin said she hopes Launchpad can branch out to include more industries, but it’s starting with tech because of the variety of opportunities available.

“There’s such a need for tech — and coders, web developers in our [Philadelphia] community particularly —  and we also know there’s not a lot of Black and brown folks in tech,” Austin said. “We have to think about equity and really help our young people see themselves in this field.”

The students will be compensated through Launchpad, eventually earning up to $5,000 for their work and time by the end of the program. Austin said the program is funded by donations and grants.

The initial 45 students come from 10 public and charter schools around Philadelphia that have partnered with Launchpad. One, Belmont Charter High School, has three students participating. Malaun Yuille, Belmont’s director of college and career services, said Launchpad is a great fit for students who are already taking technology classes but might not want to go to college.

“Since our school does not currently have a career-technical education program, we look for different organizations and businesses within our community to provide our students with opportunities to gain job-readiness skills,” Yuille said. “I like that Launchpad provides them with different opportunities to gain skills as well as being able to find employment.”

She said students have told her they are enjoying the program so far and appreciate the hands-on experience.

Manora McCoy, a student at Mastbaum High School in Philadelphia, said her favorite part has been the project they’re working on right now: creating an interactive presentation that highlights local job opportunities in tech. McCoy wants a career in health infotechnology.

“My mom is very proud of me for getting into a tech career, because nobody in our family is really interested in that,” she said. “This program is amazing.”

Chip Linehan, Building21 co-founder,  said Launchpad’s first group of students have been “phenomenal, with amazing energy.” They have been ready to learn and are looking forward to the next three years of the program, he said.

“We are working really hard to connect these young people to the futures that they deserve,” he said. “It is so apparent that for these kids, the sky’s the limit.”

Concerned, Pierce took down the classmate’s name and passed it on to the Kingdom East School District’s homeless liaison, Lori Robinson, who said the family “absolutely” qualified for services like transportation help and nutritional assistance. 

It’s a scenario Superintendent Jennifer Botzojorns has seen play out repeatedly. Her bus drivers, many of whom have been in their roles for over a decade, frequently function as the eyes and ears of the rural district, helping schools support students who may otherwise slip through the cracks.

“They really know their routes and they know the kids, so they can see if suddenly kids [are missing] a winter coat when they had one in the past … or there’s no car in the driveway,” Botzojorns said. “It’s this hidden relationship that’s really important.”

As the only adults in the school system who actually see students’ homes each day, bus drivers have a unique vantage point on housing instabilities, advocates and practitioners say. 

For Pierce, who’s shared several tips with Robinson, helping students begins with getting to know them.

“Now you’re part of our family,” he tells students when they start riding his bus, part of a specialty transportation service the district contracts with to transport students experiencing homelessness. 

He and his wife purchase gifts for students on their birthdays. Before the holiday, they bought grocery cards and 12-pound hams for each family, he said. Over time, many of the young people have come to lean on him, which he attributes to being a caring adult who is less of an “authority figure” than their teachers.

The students Pierce drives are already dealing with homelessness, but they are also the ones who are most likely to know other students facing the same hardship.

“The students tell us a lot,” Pierce said. “If you want to know who’s homeless and who’s not, you need to talk to the students, you’ve got to get a good rapport with them.”

U.S. schools identified over a million students — 2.2% of all learners — as homeless in 2020-21, the most recent school year for which data are available, according to a 2022 report. But even those figures undercount the issue as thousands of districts reported zero homelessness, a telltale sign they are failing to identify youth in need of help.

Students experiencing homelessness have lower overall attendance, standardized test scores and high school graduation rates than any other peer group. The limited data that exist suggest roughly the same share of youth in rural areas like Vermont experience homelessness as in urban areas, but with far less of a social support system.

Vermont has the second-highest per capita rate of homelessness in the nation, lower only than California’s, according to a December 2022 report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. At the same time, the Green Mountain state provides temporary shelter to a higher share of its residents without homes than any other state, with 98% safely indoors on a point-in-time count from last year.

“We’ve got a brutal [housing] affordability crisis in Vermont right now,” U.S. Sen. Peter Welch told The 74 in an email. The legislator said he is proud of his state’s efforts to shelter homeless families, but hopes school staff can also be part of longer-term solutions.

Once the Kingdom East school district knows a student is experiencing homelessness, its transportation staff continues to play a key role in supporting the child. If they’re living at a shelter or motel, the busing director alters the routes so that the student is the first pickup and last dropoff to avoid outing them as homeless to their peers. At the end of the day, district guidance counselors hand off backpacks full of clothes and food to bus drivers who discreetly give them to children in need when they step off.

“They’re backpacks and people don’t think anything of it,” transportation manager Darlene Jewell said.

Kara Lufkin, the homeless liaison for the St. Johnsbury school system, which neighbors Kingdom East, uses MV Learning, a Michigan-based company that trains school staff on how to spot the signs of homelessness. The company provided training videos to her district’s transportation fleet.

“It’s really just an awareness of what are some things to look for … that could potentially mean a student was homeless,” she said.

Federal law requires all school staff who serve homeless youth to be trained in the possible signs of homelessness. The policy does not explicitly name bus drivers, or any other role, “but since bus drivers would serve students experiencing homelessness, we’d expect those drivers to be included in the professional development sessions,” said Jan Moore, director of technical assistance at the National Center for Homeless Education. 

However, oversight is lax and many transportation staff never receive the training — meaning their schools miss a key opportunity to support their most vulnerable students.

“There are disparities across the board in how, if or when training is occurring,” said Karen Roy, an advisor for MV Learning. “We want to make sure everybody is trained in recognizing what some of those red flags might be so that kids are identified. Because if we don’t identify them, we can’t begin to serve them.”

Roy said the drivers who do receive training come out of her sessions often connecting the dots retrospectively on past interactions they’ve had with students. One bus driver in a rural district in northern Michigan, for example, saw two children leave for school directly from a barn in the morning, she said.

“He didn’t really think about it until he had the training. And then he said, ‘Hey, these kids are likely homeless, they’re not living in a safe place.’ So he referred them to the liaison.”

Schools are required under the law to make sure students experiencing homelessness have “equal access” to education — which often means providing them with food, clothing, transportation and more.

Lexi Higgins runs a program called Busing on the Lookout that trains bus drivers on how to recognize and report human trafficking, an issue she said is “incredibly linked” to homelessness because most youth victims of trafficking are housing insecure when they’re recruited. Her company has trained drivers from over 2,000 districts.

“[Bus drivers] are sometimes forgotten when we’re talking about education professionals because they’re not on the school campus,” Higgins said. “But they really are playing an incredibly important role … and have some unique skills based on their job to be able to flag threats to the safety of the students that they’re seeing every day.”

Pierce, the East Kingdom driver, suspects such training sessions will prove to be a fruitful strategy.

“The drivers are the centerpoint for a lot of this,” he said. “I’ll bet we’ll find a lot more people who need help.”

Lufkin and Robinson, the homeless liaisons from the neighboring Vermont districts, recently tag-teamed to help a student after a bus driver sounded the alarm. Robinson had lost touch with a family on her caseload, but learned through transportation staff that the student was getting on and off the bus at different locations each day. When she got back in contact, she found out they were fleeing a domestic abuse situation. When the family found an apartment a town over, she connected them to Lufkin. 

The bus driver’s tip, Robinson said, “was the first hint that I had that anything was wrong.”

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — Joy Malak floundered through her freshman year in college.

“I had to learn how to balance my finances. I had to learn how to balance work and school and the relationship I’m in.” The hardest part about being a new college student, Malak said, “is not the coursework. It’s learning how to be an adult.”

That took a toll on her grades.

“I didn’t do well,” said Malak, who powered through and is now starting her sophomore year as a neuroscience and literature double major at the University of California, Santa Cruz, or UCSC. “It took a while for me to detangle my sense of self-worth from the grades that I was getting. It made me consider switching out of my major a handful of times.”

Experiences like these are among the reasons behind a growing movement to stop assigning conventional A through F letter grades to first-year college students and, sometimes, upperclassmen.

Called “un-grading,” the idea is meant to ease the transition to higher education — especially for freshmen who are the first in their families to go to college or who weren’t well prepared for college-level work in high school and need more time to master it.

But advocates say the most important reason to adopt un-grading is that students have become so preoccupied with grades, they aren’t actually learning.

“Grades are not a representation of student learning, as hard as it is for us to break the mindset that if the student got an A it means they learned,” said Jody Greene, special adviser to the provost for educational equity and academic success at UCSC, where several faculty are experimenting with various forms of un-grading.

If a student already knew the material before taking the class and got that A, “they didn’t learn anything,” said Greene, who also is director of the university’s Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning. And “if the student came in and struggled to get a C-plus, they may have learned a lot.”

Critics respond that replacing traditional A to F grades with new forms of assessments is like a college-level version of participation trophies. They say taking away grades is coddling students and treating them like “snowflakes.”

Bradley Jackson doesn’t use those words. But Jackson, vice president of policy at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, said that by getting of grades, “we get rid of crucial information that parents and students use to determine what they’re getting out of the expensive educations they’re paying for.”

Some of the momentum behind un-grading is in response to growing concerns about student mental health. The number of college students with one or more mental health problems has doubled since 2013, according to a study by researchers at Boston University and elsewhere. Teenagers said that the pressure to get good grades was their biggest cause of stress, a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center found.

“A lot of the time I’m just so stressed in the class that I can barely focus,” said Serena Ramirez, a UCSC freshman. “Now you’re an adult, you’re by yourself, you’re responsible for your grades. The additional stress of grades just sort of undermines the whole learning.”

That was also the case for Tamara Caselin in her freshman year at UCSC. She worked 40 hours a week on top of school and ended up changing her major, which was originally business management economics. “I felt that I was way too focused on my grades, that I wasn’t focused on my personal well-being,” said Caselin, who is now a junior.

The Covid-19 pandemic made things even worse. It “brought to light the stressors students have in their lives,” said Nate Turcotte, an assistant professor in the Department of Leadership, Technology and Research at Florida Gulf Coast University who is using assessments other than grades. That’s why some of the nation’s most prestigious universities switched from letter grades to “pass” or “fail” at the outset of the crisis.

The pandemic era’s wide-scale disruption also makes it a good time to consider changing long-held educational practices, said Robert Talbert, a math professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan who is co-writing a book about new ways of assessing students and has tried some in his own classes. “Everything seems to be on the table right now. Why not throw in the grading system while we’re at it?”

Responded Jackson: “To say that because we’ve been through a very difficult and trying time, we now need to give up forever into the future these objective criteria that we use in order to determine whether students are improving — that seems to me to be a tremendous overreaction.”

In addition to those at UCSC, a small but growing number of faculty and some academic departments at universities and colleges nationwide are experimenting with alternative kinds of assessments.

Although they’re not eliminating grades, some instructors in the mathematics department at the University of California, Davis, are letting students decide between taking verbal and written exams, for instance, and giving them a choice of how much those exams and homework count, said Tim Lewis, the department’s vice chair for undergraduate matters.

“These efforts are meant to improve learning outcomes, as well as to be fair and advance equity, especially for new students and transfer students,” Lewis said.

The developments in California follow a March report to the University of California Board of Regents’ Academic and Student Affairs Committee that traditional grading methods could perpetuate bias; it encouraged schools to explore new means of assessment.

Several colleges and universities outside of California already practice unconventional forms of grading. At Reed College, students aren’t shown their grades so that they can “focus on learning, not on grades,” the college says. Students at New College of Florida complete contracts establishing their goals, then get written evaluations about how they’re doing. Evergreen State and Hampshire colleges forgo letter grades in favor of written evaluations. And students at Brown University have a choice among written evaluations that only they see, results of “satisfactory” or “no credit” and letter grades — A, B or C, but no D or F.

“It takes stress and anxiety away and it prioritizes their mental health. But more importantly, it prioritizes their learning,” said Turcotte. “Instead of ‘What did I get?’ it’s ‘What did I learn?’ There’s a freedom to explore, a freedom to take chances without this fear of, ‘Am I going to get marked down for this?’ ”

MIT has what it calls “ramp-up grading” for first-year students. In their first semesters, they get only a “pass,” without a letter; if they don’t pass, no grade is recorded at all. In their second semesters, they get letter grades, but grades of D and F are not recorded on their transcripts.

“Starting any university is challenging to get acclimated academically to a new environment and it’s a big change for most students because for many of them it’s their first time away from home or at a new school,” said Ian Waitz, MIT’s vice chancellor for undergraduate and graduate education and a professor of aeronautics and astronautics.

“There’s a desire to have that acclimation to the entire environment happen in a less abrupt way, where people have more of an opportunity to get calibrated.”

Many proponents of un-grading say it addresses the unfairness of a system in which some students are better ready for college than others, have to balance school with work or are first generation and feel extra stress to perform well as a result of it.

“That’s a lot of pressure, and I hear a lot, like, ‘How are your grades?’ ” said Amaya Rosas, who also attends UCSC and is the first in her family to go to college. She said she feels as if “I need to get good grades because I don’t want to let everybody else down.”

Greene said students who come from lower-income families are the most vulnerable to anxiety from grades. “Let’s say they get a slightly failing grade on the first quiz. They are not likely to go and seek help. They’re likely to try and disappear.”

Some drop out altogether. “One of the things that they say again and again — it’s kind of heartbreaking — they say, ‘I wasn’t satisfied with my academic performance,’ ” Greene said. “You know, they’re not saying, ‘I hated the school’ or ‘My teachers were terrible.’ ”

What grades often actually show, said Turcotte, “is if someone is food insecure or comes from a home without the support that other individuals have. There are a lot of educators out there and parents and people involved in education who are wondering how can we better help our students while also recognizing the complexities of their lives.”

Students who work while in school are also “less likely to do the extra work to get things done perfectly, or they may have had to take an extra shift at work or they don’t have transportation so they’re late for class,” said Susan Blum, a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and the editor of “Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead).” By comparison, she said, higher-income classmates “had Ph.D. historians teaching them in their fancy high schools.”

When she was a freshman, Olivia Disabatino “saw that I didn’t necessarily have all the resources that other students had when it came to just being prepared for college.”

Disabatino, now a UCSC junior double-majoring in psychology and anthropology and also the first in her low-income family to go to college, said: “I kind of felt like a deer in the headlights.”

None of that is conducive to learning, said Joshua Eyler, director of faculty development at the University of Mississippi, who is also working on a book about grades, called “Scarlet Letters.”

“Grades inhibit students’ creativity and their desire to take intellectual risks,” Eyler said.

Instead, they’ve become “a magnet for student anxiety,” said Adam Light, an assistant professor of physics at Colorado College. “ ‘I only got a 93? Why didn’t I get a 94?’ ”

Light enters into contracts with his students about what tasks need to be learned. “ ‘Here are the things I think are important for you to get out of this class,’ ” he tells them. “And I ask, ‘What are your goals for this class?’ And we come up with consensus. Students know exactly what has to get checked off to get a better grade.”

UCSC, which was opened as an experimental progressive campus built among a dense forest of redwoods, bay laurels and California oaks, previously let students choose whether or not to get letter grades. As the public university grew, it made grades mandatory in 2000. But some of its faculty have continued to promote un-grading.

Instead of grades, for instance, psychology professor Barbara Rogoff’s students get narrative evaluations that assess their work as, among other things, “impressive,” “extremely well developed” or “uneven.” Only at the end of the quarter does she assign required letter grades.

“I can say, ‘This student did really well in their contributions to the class, but they struggled with their writing.’ If it’s a grade, you have to average those two,” said Rogoff, who specializes in cultural variations in learning. “It makes the teachers, the professors, look at themselves more as guides rather than evaluators.”

As for the students, they learn better if they’re not focused on grades, she said. Grades “make students concerned about how they look rather than dealing with the material.”

That’s to say nothing of students who can game the system, said Talbert, at Grand Valley State. “When you see a grade on an assignment or report card, it tends not to convey a lot of information about what a student actually has learned. The grade itself has turned into the target. Learning is just a vehicle by which to earn a grade.”

But while he likes the idea of un-grading, Talbert’s own experience has made him question whether it’s necessarily a solution to inequity. Since the students in the algebra class in which he tried it were required to evaluate their own performance, he said, “What I found is that un-grading as a system is exactly as good as my students’ ability to self-assess. Those from more privileged backgrounds feel more competent to self-reflect, whereas other students struggle with that.”

Other realities also make it hard to change the longstanding tradition of letter grades. It’s how faculty themselves were largely judged as they went through college. Parents, high schools and university admissions offices put a premium on grade-point averages — an even greater one as many institutions make the SAT and ACT optional. Even car insurance companies give “good-grades discounts” to student-age drivers.

“It’s built into the system,” Rogoff said. “These are big forces that are working against getting rid of grades.”

But grades may not be the real problem, said Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. He pointed out that only 25 percent of high school students who took the ACT test last year met all four college-readiness benchmarks, which gauge the likelihood that they’ll succeed in first-year college courses; 38 percent met none. The composite score was the lowest in more than a decade.

By getting rid of grades, “I really fear that we’re shooting the messenger because we don’t like what we’re hearing,” Poliakoff said. It’s just setting up students “to slam into the wall, ultimately,” and end up with a “ticket-to-nowhere diploma that doesn’t represent the mastery of skills that will equip the person for success.”

Colleges and universities are already losing the confidence of the country, said his colleague Jackson. “To the extent that they take away standards and take away these objective indices of performance and reliability, they’re going to decrease the value of their own degrees.”

But Greene, the UCSC special adviser to the provost, said that grades “are terrible motivators for doing sustained and deep learning. And so if we were to shift our focus on to learning and away from grades, we would be able to tell whether we were graduating people with the skills that we say we’re graduating them with.”

Rogoff compares this to her own hobby: dancing.

“I got stiffer when I thought I was being watched and evaluated for how I was dancing,” she said. “It’s that sort of performance anxiety when you think people are watching you, and especially if you think you’re probably going to be judged badly.”

She added: “I learned how to get past the self-judgment and the judgment of other people and just enjoy the dancing for the dancing. And I think that’s what my students experience in my class, where I’m helping them see that there is something important about what we’re learning in this class and that that’s a bigger thing” than grades.

This story about un-grading was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, in collaboration with KQED in San Francisco. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

Also promising: The retention rate for first-year teachers, who typically leave the profession in high numbers, was up 5 points over the past year, to 83%. The diversity of the state’s teacher workforce also rose 2 points, to 29%.

By no means are the bumps cause to declare Louisiana’s teacher shortage — which long predates COVID-19 — resolved, Brumley told The 74 in a follow-up interview. But they suggest that the state’s multi-pronged efforts to keep teachers in classrooms and increase the number of potential educators are beginning to bear fruit.

While some of the initiatives are several years old, others began as recently as last summer, which Brumley says makes him optimistic that growth will continue. 

“We can’t view the teacher workforce in the same way that we viewed it 30 years ago — not even the same way we viewed it five years ago,” he says. “We have to appreciate that this is a much more dynamic environment.

“The notion that teachers are going to go through a college of education, buy a house by the school and teach there for 30 years, that’s unrealistic,” he adds. “That may happen in some instances, and we’re all blessed if it does, but we need to be more creative in meeting the moment and thinking about the workforce in new ways.”

Here are five strategies Brumley is especially excited about. 

Therapy for teachers

During the pandemic, more than a third of educators met the threshold for a diagnosis of depression or anxiety, with 1 in 5 exhibiting significant symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. Not only do unmet mental health needs make it harder for teachers to respond to student stress, but feeling overwhelmed is among the top reasons cited for quitting the classroom.

Louisiana used some of its federal COVID recovery funds to pay one of the state’s largest hospital systems to provide free teletherapy for every faculty and staff member in early childhood education and K-12 schools. Brumley sees the benefit as a long-term retention tool. 

Mentor pay

Turnover among inexperienced teachers has long run high. By some estimates, as many as 44% of new educators quit within their first five years — with year one particularly brutal. Brumley attributes the number of brand-new teachers who returned for a second year last fall in part to an initiative that pairs every new educator with an experienced teacher. Starting this year, the mentors receive an annual $2,000 stipend.

A boost in compensation all around doesn’t hurt, either. Last year, lawmakers voted for pay increases of $1,500 for teachers and $750 for support staff throughout the state, effective this year.

New licensure pathways

In most places, the smoothest — if not the only — route to a teaching license has traditionally been to earn a credential from a traditional college of education. This has inhibited career changers, people who want to move to a new state and low-income district staffers, such as classroom aides, from obtaining teaching licenses. It has disproportionately worked against people of color and nontraditional candidates. 

Of the nearly 6,700 teachers hired in Louisiana schools in 2021-22, just 1,300 were recent graduates of teacher preparation or certification programs. Many were transplants or former teachers who were lured back. 

A new law allows anyone with a master’s degree in any field to teach in a classroom so long as they work with a mentor and participate in weekly teacher collaborations in their school. If they receive five years of positive evaluations, these degree holders will automatically receive teaching licenses.

Also new are procedures allowing retirees who held licenses in areas where teachers are in critically short supply to return to work at full pay and without losing their retiree benefits, as well as an easier path to a Louisiana license for a teacher trained or experienced in another state. 

Priming the pipeline

From 2016 to 2021, the number of students enrolling annually in traditional teacher colleges in Louisiana fell from 13,400 to 12,000. Meanwhile, two of the largest districts alone, NOLA Public Schools and the Jefferson Parish district, need an estimated 900 new teachers a year each. Faced with this supply-and-demand conundrum, education officials examined a host of barriers keeping would-be educators from training.

Unique among higher ed programs, Louisiana colleges of education have required applicants to pass an entrance exam that demonstrates teaching knowledge — never mind that they have not yet received the instruction needed to take the test. 

“What we found is that sometimes college students would face the entry-level test to get in, pay the couple hundred dollars fee to take it and maybe not pass,” says Brumley. “And they would say, ‘Well, I’ll just go into a different field, because they’re not asking me to take a test and pass it before I even have an access to learn the field.’ ”

Starting this year, entrance exams have been eliminated. Already, the state’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities are reporting increased student interest. Graduates must still pass exams in order to get their licenses.

Geaux big or geaux home

Some aspiring teachers are getting an early leg up. Students in 60 Louisiana high schools are now able to take entry-level teacher-training classes before they even get their diplomas. Last year, the legislature came up with $5 million for a scholarship, dubbed Geaux Teach. That, plus Louisiana’s other scholarships for residents who attend colleges in the state, comes close to a full ride for students who want to go into the field of education.

It’s 9:05 a.m. at Hendley Elementary School in southeast Washington, D.C. when Isabel Chae meets her first tutee of the day. The American University student pulls the first grader, who she describes as “so bubbly, so bright,” out of his classroom and the youngster asks to get a drink of water. 

He sprints backward down the hallway to the fountain. “Please walk,” Chae calls from behind, unfazed by the boy’s surplus energy.

“I’m like, ‘OK, great. You seem like you’re in a frame of mind where you just want to be extra engaged with the lesson.’ ” 

The college sophomore then appoints the student “Mr. Page-Turner” and makes sure to pause regularly during her read-aloud to let him decode words. During the writing portion of their lesson, she challenges him to print each word in a different color.

She’s honed these strategies over two semesters and a summer of work as a participant in American University’s Future Teacher Tutor program, a partnership between the college and DC Public Schools that seeks to boost below-grade-level readers. The 59 tutees who currently work with her and her peers progress about 25% faster in reading than the national average, according to pre- and post-tests administered by the university.

It’s a model experts say has the potential to help millions of K-12 students recoup learning lost during COVID. Researchers point to tutoring, either one-on-one or in small groups, as among the best proven methods for academic recovery. But school leaders looking to roll out such programs have often been hindered by educator shortages and pandemic fatigue.

Recruiting university students who, like Chae, are considering careers in education could “unlock” a huge new pool of human capital for the efforts, said Kevin Huffman, CEO of Accelerate, a nonprofit organization working to scale tutoring nationwide.

“There are more than half a million people at any given time who are studying to become a teacher in this country and very few of them tutor,” he said. At the same time, “you’ve got districts that need people and it just feels like a match that needs to be made.”

A win-win

Accelerate has distributed $10 million in grants to 31 tutoring initiatives across the country this school year, including $750,000 to Deans for Impact, a nonprofit working to bring teacher candidates into high-needs schools as tutors. American University’s Future Teacher Tutors initiative is one of the 22 programs in the group’s network, which altogether account for 900 tutors serving approximately 2,500 students across 13 states.

The model is simultaneously a way to “meet the very real needs of students and families [and] an opportunity to strengthen the way we prepare future teachers,” said Patrick Steck, policy advisor at Deans for Impact.

David Murray, program manager for the tutoring initiative at American, agrees that bringing pre-service teachers into local classrooms has yielded a “synergy” that has “been super beneficial, both for the tutors and the students.” 

Normally, students in the school’s college of education would not gain classroom experience until their junior or senior year. But after a recent change, a course typically taken by underclassmen now requires tutoring as a service learning requirement. The majority of students in the Future Teacher Tutors program, which employed 21 undergrads this fall, come from that course, said Ocheze Joseph, director of education undergraduate programs.

“We decided that at American we wanted to … begin to engage our students in hands-on experiences working with students as early as their freshman and sophomore years,” the administrator explained. “The earlier that they are working with children, getting acclimated to the classroom environment, the stronger their confidence grows.”

To Chae, the idea of working as a lead teacher fresh out of college without the in-depth experiences she’s gained as a tutor seems “terrifying.” Now, having spent so much time working with students, she has realistic expectations. It will still be “somewhat terrifying,” she said, “but I know what I’m in for.”

All tutors earn over $20 per hour for their work and the program gives a stipend for transportation via Uber or Lyft, helping undergrads access K-12 campuses that are on the opposite side of the city. American University foots the bill thanks to literacy grants it received from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education via the agency’s CityTutor DC partnership and from the Benedict Silverman Foundation, who also provides the curriculum used by the tutors.

Most tutors work about four hours per week, but Chae works as many as 12, spending all day at Hendley Elementary on Tuesdays and Fridays. All told, the college sophomore feels she’s “paid very well” and is “given a lot of support.” She and her peers engage in regular training sessions to hone their tutoring skills and meet weekly with a program coordinator. 

Scale and sustainability

Still, the program at American University only reaches a tiny fraction of the D.C. students in need of tutoring, a difficulty that’s plagued similar initiatives in other districts and states as well.

Youth nationwide saw historic backslides in reading and math during the pandemic, with some of the most severe losses for students living in poverty. Researchers say academic recovery efforts have not yet matched the scale of missed learning.

“The puzzle is how you take [tutoring interventions] to a large scale,” Huffman said.

He thinks that’s where Deans for Impact can step in, figuring out how to replicate initiatives like the one at American. The 22 tutoring initiatives already in the organization’s network exist within a universe of roughly 2,100 educator preparation programs nationwide. It’s the “most obvious, glaring hole in the human capital pipeline for tutors,” said the Accelerate CEO.

“People who already want to become teachers, they should all be tutoring students as part of that work. … It would reach millions of kids,” he said.

It’s a vision that Steck, at Deans for Impact, sees as especially urgent on the heels of the pandemic, but also necessary for the long term. Though many districts are now funding learning recovery efforts with federal stimulus dollars, his organization is seeking to lift up financially sustainable models that can operate even after relief funds dry up in 2024.

A central question is: “How do we make high-quality tutoring something that doesn’t just exist in the context of COVID relief efforts … but something that is a standard part of how we support students and communities?” he said.

At Hendley Elementary, Chae sees the benefits in real time for her six tutees.

One of the first graders she works with began the year not knowing all the letters of the alphabet. She would tune out of her literacy lessons because she was frustrated. Now, the girl “lights up” when it’s time for tutoring and persists even when she has difficulty sounding out the words — a trait Chae knows can spell gains far into the future.

“She will sit there and plug away at it. … And I’m like, ‘You’re super close.’ And she consistently gives that little extra bit of effort just to get the word, which is fantastic to see.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to Deans for Impact, Accelerate and The 74. The Overdeck Family Foundation provides financial support to Accelerate and The 74. The Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and the Joyce Foundation provide financial support to Deans for Impact and The 74.

AUSTIN, Texas — By his mid-20s, Tommy Andrade was tired of working dead-end jobs. With a young child at home, he realized he needed more than a high school diploma to support his family. When he heard about a new, advanced manufacturing program at Austin Community College (ACC), Andrade was intrigued.

Some of the jobs that graduates would be trained for carried salaries well into the six figures, enough to give Andrade financial security, he figured, even in a city like Austin where the cost of living was spiking fast. 

But first Andrade would have to take a pay cut: The 14-week program required him to participate in an internship that paid $17 an hour, less than he’d earned in his previous jobs as a salesman and bookkeeper. He worried he wouldn’t be able to afford rent, bills and afterschool care for his son.

Then came some unexpected good news: ACC was launching a new guaranteed income pilot program for student parents, and program officials wanted him to join. Participants would receive $500 a month for two years with a few conditions: They must enroll in nine credits each semester and attend monthly meetings with other student parents.

Buoyed by the extra income, Andrade signed up. “Five hundred isn’t anything to live off of, but it’s enough to make a difference,” he said. “I have some flexibility to take some risk.” Now, a year after enrolling in the program and on track to graduate, Andrade, 29, is living in Seattle with his partner and son, having recently accepted a full-time job as a contractor at a large technology company. 

Andrade’s story points to the potential of guaranteed-income programs. These programs, which provide consistent financial support to participants over a period of time, were placed on the national radar in 2020 by former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who called for a monthly income for all U.S. residents. The idea exploded in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic, as state and local governments, philanthropists and even some colleges like ACC sought to support people experiencing financial distress. More than 48 guaranteed income programs have been started in cities across the country just since 2020. Advocates and researchers say this approach holds promise as a long-term anti-poverty strategy as well – especially for families with young children.

More than 48 guaranteed income programs have been started in cities across the country since 2020, at least 11 initiated in 2021 alone.

Indeed, a growing body of research shows cash transfer programs can have a particularly big impact on young kids by providing family stability during children’s first few, formative years. This is likely due, in part, to a reduction of parental stress. Studies show that when parents experience high levels of distress, it trickles down to their kids, who exhibit higher levels of emotional distress as well. Constant stress or exposure to adverse childhood experiences like food and housing insecurity can lead to trauma and even cause changes to young children’s brains, making them less able to cope. But that harm can be mitigated if children’s basic needs are met and their parents have financial security.

“That’s what it’s about, really empowering parents to parent and having the resources,” said Michael Tubbs, a former mayor of Stockton, California, and a father of two, who launched a basic income program in 2019 and later founded Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, a network of mayors advocating the idea. “My kids,” he said, “are dependent on me for their sustenance, security, for a level of support. I’m able to do that when I’m not anxious, when I’m not stressed, when I’m not worried about how things are going to be paid.” 

Parents in Stockton’s guaranteed income program, for example, reported being more involved in their children’s lives and better able to provide for them. A survey of low-income families in Chicago during the pandemic found that parents were more likely to engage in positive interactions with a child if they retained some income after losing a job, such as through federal or state aid, while parents who lost their income were more likely to lose their temper or yell at a child.

Financial support for parents can even lead to changes in infant brain activity associated with the development of thinking and learning, according to findings from the Baby’s First Years project, which provided monthly payments of $333 to low-income mothers in four U.S. cities for a year. Another recent study found that kids whose families received federal tax credits following the birth of the parents’ first child went on to do better in school and earn more money as adults.

“At least for low-income people, the period after childbirth seems to be a period of low financial resources and high stress,” said Andrew Barr, a professor at Texas A&M University’s department of economics and co-author of the study. Having some reliable income, he said, “allows the family to stay on a better path.”

While critics say such programs could encourage recipients to stop working or to spend money on alcohol or drugs rather than on basic needs, the data largely disputes that. “The world is full of these racist and classist tropes about ‘What those people will do if you give them money,” said Mayor Melvin Carter of St. Paul, Minnesota, who launched a guaranteed income program in 2020. “When low-income folks have money, they pay for groceries and pay rent.”

In many European countries, a guaranteed income in the form of a family allowance is standard. Denmark, Sweden and Norway, for example, all give parents funds at regular intervals to help with the cost of raising children. Canada also gives low-income families money for each child under the age of 6. 

During the pandemic, America briefly experimented with giving families a guaranteed income, in the form of an expanded child tax credit. For six months, beginning in spring 2021, families below a certain income threshold received monthly tax refunds, up to $300 per child under the age of 6. The money had positive effects: Recipients reported improved nutrition, reduced reliance on credit cards and increased investments in education, such as child care and tutors, without reducing their employment.

Black and Hispanic families saw the sharpest decline in their poverty rates. And, briefly, the country’s rate of monthly child poverty tumbled by nearly a third, from 15.8% to 11.9%.

But with the expiration of that aid, many parents are struggling again to make ends meet. Pandemic aside, raising children in the U.S. has become exorbitantly expensive. Rising inflation, high gas prices and astronomical housing prices have maxed out family budgets. The cost of child care rose 41% during the pandemic, but it has consumed a large portion of family incomes for years. And while the cost of raising children has been steadily rising, America’s federal minimum wage has stagnated at $7.25 per hour since 2009. This year, it reached its lowest value in 66 years.

That’s why advocates for guaranteed income say such programs are urgently needed. Families often face multiple financial stressors and barriers. “A really small amount of cash can help unlock an entire universe of economic potential for families,” said Carter of St. Paul.

Andrea Coleman, 41, a single mother of three in St. Paul, said the $500 a month she received through the city’s program following the birth of her youngest child was a huge comfort. With the money, she was able to buy winter coats, shoes and Christmas presents for her children. She got the brakes fixed and the oil changed in her car, which she relied on for her job as a private nurse.

Coleman was also able to postpone returning to work to bond with her infant daughter, something she’d missed out on with her middle child. “I’m grateful,” she said. When she started the program, she had been experiencing depression, but after several months with the extra income, she noticed the depression begin to subside. “That was just me not being able to provide for my family,” Coleman said. But with the additional income, she was able to “keep the stress level at a minimum.”

Experts say small-scale pilots like the one in St. Paul could set the stage for state and federal action, by normalizing the idea of universal guaranteed income and generating data on the benefits of such programs.

“The general way that good public policy has developed in the country is that states have adopted really strong policy and eventually that’s led to the federal government adopting it,” said Jeremy Rosen, director of economic justice at the nonprofit Shriver Center on Poverty Law. “I suspect that’s what’s going to happen here too.”

Some states have already invested in such programs. Last year, California allocated $35 million to guaranteed income pilot programs over five years. And Alaska already has a guaranteed income program of sorts, paid for with money the state generates from oil, mines and gas reserves, which has provided Alaskans an average of $1,600 each year since 1980. That program has cut extreme poverty and contributed to disadvantaged youth staying in school, among other benefits.

Andrade, the Austin student and parent, used the monthly funds he received through Austin Community College’s guaranteed income program for bills, insurance and car payments, and for tutoring, clothes and after-school activities for his son, now 8. With the extra money, he didn’t need to pick up odd jobs to make ends meet; he could use that time for his son and his studies.

He could also afford to take risks, like accepting a pay cut in the short term with the knowledge he would eventually make more money. In May, his leap of faith began to pay off.

Fifteen credits shy of graduating with associate degrees in engineering technology and construction management, he was offered a job at a Seattle-based company that develops vehicle crash test systems. He and his partner packed up their home and drove more than 2,100 miles northwest where they settled into a 2-bedroom apartment in West Seattle with their son. Andrade enrolled in online classes with ACC to finish his degrees. Two months later, he got an even better opportunity: as a contractor earning two and a half times what he made before starting at ACC.

This upward mobility is what the founders of the ACC guaranteed income program hoped to see when they launched the experiment in fall 2021 as part of a larger initiative to support student parents. A partnership between ACC and United Way for Greater Austin, the guaranteed income program is funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Dallas Fed and federal pandemic relief dollars from the City of Austin.  The program is meant to support student parents as they pursue a degree, often while juggling a job and parenting, said Becca Bice, director of family pathways at United Way for Greater Austin. “They just have a higher load on them than some other students might have.”

Participants have used the stipend for medical emergencies, car repairs and other unexpected expenses that can sometimes force students to drop out, Bice said. Some students used it to cover rent or child care, and to cut down on their work hours so they could focus on their studies and have more time with their kids. Program officials are tracking outcomes to see if the money affects college persistence and graduation rates, and informally collecting data on participant stress levels and overall college experience.

 But while guaranteed income programs like ACC’s are spreading and producing benefits for individual participants, they remain limited in scope. Programs run by cities often receive thousands of applications for a couple hundred spots, or fewer. There can also be challenges for participants: The added income can disqualify families from other public support, like food stamps and child care assistance. Guaranteed income programs are also immensely expensive to support and sustain: A second round of St. Paul’s guaranteed income program, slated to start this year, will cost $5 million to support 333 residents for two years. The program is funded with a mix of federal coronavirus funds and private donations.

The many challenges of running these programs are why experts say a larger, more permanent way to bolster families’ income is needed. Ideally, this could be accomplished by expanding existing programs such as the child tax credit, something President Joe Biden said he is pushing for as part of a national strategy to cut child poverty and curb hunger. If approached as tax policy rather than extra income, the money wouldn’t cause participants to lose other benefits.

Andrade doesn’t see such programs as a handout. Rather, he sees them as a way to give people who start from behind a temporary leg up. “We have the opportunity now, where we don’t have to struggle,” Andrade said one recent evening. “In the end, if I put my son in a better position, I’ve succeeded.”

This originally appeared at The Hechinger Report and is published here in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Exchange.

On a quiet side street tucked back in an industrial section of West Baltimore, Damon Ray Harrison revs the engine of his red dirt bike. He sits askew, unable to reach the ground with both feet. The street is empty except for a few other dirt bikes and riders. Harrison lowers the visor on his helmet and takes off down the street lined with industrial buildings that are set back from the road. Then he pops a wheelie. With the front wheel still in the air, he jumps off the back of the bike, runs a few steps, then jumps back on, continuing his ride down the stretch of empty road.

The teen has been a dirt bike guy since well before his uncle bought him his first bike. “My mother says I loved bikes, immediately.”

But in Baltimore, as in most major cities in the U.S., owning and riding a dirt bike is illegal and can mean jail time and fines for those caught. Government officials from Atlanta to Oakland point to crashes and deaths involving dirt bikes as the reason for the non-violent offense laws established in their cities. In 2016, Baltimore launched a Dirt Bike Police Task Force to handle the “noise and nuisance” problem; last year, it was disbanded.

Still, dirt bikes remain a hobby for enthusiasts in Charm City. “Dirt bikes are as much a part of Baltimore as the [Inner] Harbor, as SnoCones. And when I think about being Black in the city, [dirt bikes are] part of my blackness,” says Brittany Young. An engineer who worked with both NASA and McCormick Spice Co., she has been working for seven years to change how the city perceives riding and riders.

In 2017, Young returned to her roots in West Baltimore and launched a nonprofit called B-360. The name itself calls on people to “be the revolution” – that is, a 360-degree angle. Through a partnership with police, youth can legally ride dirt bikes as part of B-360’s educational programming. And through hands-on training and workforce development, they can develop their skills and find their way into careers in science, technology, engineering and math. Already, they’ve worked with over 8,500 young Baltimoreans.

“It’s not just about dirt bikes; it’s about Black freedom,” says Young, 33, of her mission. “So, literally, be part of a change, be part of a revolution, be part of systemic change beyond dirt bikes, for Black people across the country.”

Young, who grew up watching riders at Druid Hill Park, says legislators get it wrong when they ban a sport that’s part of Black and Brown culture instead of using it to improve lives through education and open doors to opportunity. Those are two of the key problems that Young says B-360 aims to fix: “The opportunity divide for Black and Brown people, and the need for programmatic solutions instead of incarceration for Black and Brown people.”

B-360 is using dirt bikes to teach STEM to kids of color and hosts events that show off a style of riding that she says has, so far, been ignored by the $42 billion motocross industry. It’s an attitude that confounds Young: Motocross, she argues, could be a $100 billion dollar industry if it didn’t neglect the talent and drive of Black and Brown riders.

According to a Baltimore Sun report on the history of the city’s dirt biking community, back in the 1970s dirt bikes were not ridden on city streets but on state park trails and dirt roads, which is what their lighter bodies and treaded tires were designed for; but, within a decade, laws against the use of dirt bikes outside of the city had passed. “That’s when — local dirt bike riders say — they moved to the city streets,” the Sun reports. Soon after, dirt bikes became illegal to use on streets in Maryland’s cities, too.

By criminalizing dirt bikes, Young says, the city has spent decades ignoring rather than tapping into unrecognized potential. “A dirt bike police task force is not a strategy or a game plan,” says Young. “Programmatic solutions that unlock potential is a much better approach.” As a “solutionist,” she says, her approach has been using dirt bike culture to help end the cycle of poverty, disrupt the prison pipeline and build bridges in communities.

This month, the mayor’s office announced its second round of the American Rescue Plan Act to nine nonprofit grant recipients. B-360 was awarded $1.25 million in funding to support its STEM education programming and workforce development.

It’s all about perspective, Young says. The Black men and women who ride dirt bikes are seen as the problem, but for her, it’s exactly the opposite. Riders can be the solution, and B-360 is showing how.

Some of the teachers B-360 hires are riders paid to teach students everything from mechanics to stunts, “acknowledging their assets,” Young says. According to the group’s own assessment, B-360 has employed 57 former dirt bike riders, decreased dirt bike arrests by 81% and saved the city $1.2 million in taxpayer dollars by employing locals at risk of incarceration.

Other teachers, like 23-year-old Shavone Mayers Dixon, heard about the program and wanted to get involved. Born and raised in Baltimore, Mayers Dixon graduated from Arizona State with a degree in biomedical engineering. Now, she works full time as a software engineer and part time at B-360’s summer camp.

“We definitely need more young Black people in science, and this is a bridge to do that,” says Mayers Dixon. “It’s doing something that’s fun for them – dirt bikes – to get them engaged and incorporating the education aspect to help them go into careers…That’s all up my alley, just helping out kids, science. It was perfect and I thought, ‘sign me up.’”

When Young was in first grade and “Bill Nye the Science Guy” was her favorite show on TV, her teacher told her that she would never grow up to be an engineer. Despite being fascinated by science, despite her math and reading levels being beyond her classmates, and despite the lab she’d built for herself in the basement of her West Baltimore home, Young recalls that her white teacher told her that she couldn’t be an engineer. Why? Because she is Black, female and her parents didn’t go to college.

As Young describes it, she was ready for the world of science, but the world wasn’t ready for her. In corporate America, she was usually the only Black female in a room of engineers, mistaken for a secretary more times than she can count. “The problem is the receiving side,” says Young. “We can be equipped, prepared, intelligent, but if the work isn’t done to better the reception, it’s always going to be the same issue.”

Her adult experiences were a culmination of the uphill battle she’d fought since childhood. The advanced public middle school into which she’d tested meant a five-hour round-trip commute on up to five buses to the other side of Baltimore, starting at the age of 10. The commute continued when she was accepted into The Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, a top STEM-oriented high school.

Educating Baltimore’s Black and Brown youth and providing better experiences than she had to endure are huge drivers for B-360. Though she was working at Key Technology, Inc. doing prototyping for medical devices and, at the same time, working at EMG in asset management for the construction and engineering firm, Young decided it was time to leave corporate life to become a catalyst for change to her city and beyond.

Baltimore at that moment was still reeling from the death of Freddy Gray at the hands of police. “I knew there were a lot of people going through challenges like me, being from this city and not being heard and not being acknowledged,” she says. “Sometimes when it comes to Black societies and Black voices the easiest thing to do is silence us, or police us, or to make the things that we like to do criminal.”

“Everyone in Baltimore that rides dirt bikes has dealt with the task force in some capacity,” says Young. Too many people in the city see dirt bike riders as criminals because that’s the policy, she says.

Michael Chesser, a B-360 teacher who has been with the program since its founding, has had run-ins with the law. “I just think that they don’t understand where we’re coming from – why we ride, what’s our cause,” says Chesser, 24, who started riding when he was five.

“I just think they see us as individuals who…want to do harm,” he says. But for Chesser and others learning or teaching at B-360, dirt bikes are “my outlet. I feel free. I feel like all my problems go away…It clears my mind.”

While Chesser has taught more than 1,000 students through B-360, the program has also been a fork in the road for him and he wants to stay with Young’s foundation. “I want to help build B-360 everywhere, so everyone can understand the opportunities that it has. It can actually change a kid’s life.”

Wheelie-popping Harrison didn’t realize that he was learning science and math while riding until he joined B-360 four years ago. “I want to be a mechanical engineer when I get older,” he says.

Harrison is one of 8,500 youth with whom B-360 has worked since 2017. Young says if the money from dirt bike task forces around the country were channeled into initiatives like hers, it could affect positive change for hundreds of thousands of youth who are being criminalized for enjoying a hobby. Young wants to take her program and expand to other cities where there is an urban dirt bike culture, including D.C., Cleveland, Oakland and Detroit.

“It really needs to get started in cities before it’s too late, before we have more hashtags,” says Young of her programmatic approach. “And so I think cities have hopefully learned some hard lessons. You don’t want to put officers in positions to enforce policies that can cause turmoil. But you also have to maintain public safety,” says Young. “We have to hit the reset button.”

“B-360 exists at the unlikely intersection of three lanes; unrecognized potential, dirt bike culture and STEM education,” says Young. And to that intersection, Young has brought together government officials and riders. “We literally created a table for them to talk,” says Young of the figurative space she’s carved out in Baltimore. Her goal is “to build safe spaces, create better practices, and make sure [officials] are thinking about dirt bikes solutions holistically.”

Safety starts with a helmet and riding off main roads, as well as learning how to maintain a safe bike. But it extends beyond the bike itself.

For Young and those she mentors, it means embracing one of the mantras of dirt bike riders: “Bikes up, guns down.” It’s about feeling safe within one’s own city, within one’s own community. It’s about having access to a safe outlet and not falling victim to street life, she says.

Young knew that for her educational programming to work with Baltimore’s youth, she needed to make STEM more relevant. So she teaches science through dirt bikes — basically, applied learning. Popping a wheelie becomes a physics equation, tuning an engine is a class in engineering, finding the gas-to-oil ratio to make sure your engine doesn’t explode is a chemistry experiment.

“A rider has to think about how much time it will take to pop a wheelie, get down a street at whatever speed they are going and make sure they don’t crash,” explains Young. That can be solved through D = V x T, or distance equals velocity times time. “That’s the type of math they can do in their head, and that is the type of math they just know naturally.”

Since her STEM programs require skilled teachers, B-360’s workforce programs also give riders a formal home for teaching — everything from dirt bike mechanics to stunts.

Beyond the classroom, B-306’s advocacy is paving new strategic avenues for dirt bike riders, both literally and physically. As the Baltimore Police Dirt Task Force disbanded in spring of 2021, Young teamed up with the Baltimore City’s State’s Attorney’s office to create a diversion program for those arrested for riding dirt bikes on the street. As part of the program, which kicked into gear in March 2021, when someone is arrested for a dirt bike offense they have the opportunity to complete 20 hours of programming at B-360. Once their hours are fulfilled, their case is dismissed. According to Young, many of the individuals who enter B-360 through the new diversion program stay on, voluntarily, to learn even more about STEM and entrepreneurship.

“We literally are making sure people don’t go to jail. We are changing people’s lives,” says Young. “One, we want to make sure these young men, 17, 18, 19 year olds, have career and job opportunities, transferable skills, like fixing and repairing bikes and cognitive reasoning. Two, that all charges get dropped which will change their trajectory. And then three, making sure that they know that the skills they possess will give them a new outlook on life.”

One young man in the diversion program is a 19-year-old who had faced a slew of charges ranging from dirt bike possession to traffic violations. After taking part in B-360’s program, he graduated high school and recently found his first job in manufacturing, based on the skills he learned with B-360. Another young man who faced criminal charges is still with B-360. After completing the program, the 20-year-old chose to stay on board. Now he’s working as an instructor at the group’s summer camp every day, teaching the city’s youth on everything from rider safety to bike repair.

“What Brittany’s program does is completely counter to what the criminal justice system does with an individual. We’ll lock somebody up for 120 days and that can ruin your life,” says Michael Collins, Strategic Policy and Planning Director for the Baltimore City’s State’s Attorney. “As a country we deal with nuisance problems and ‘quality-of-life offenses’ almost exclusively through a criminal justice lens. But we recognize that most of the people riding dirt bikes and being arrested are people of color. They’re riding for fun. It’s not malicious, per se.”

Collins says that what B-360 was offering was a solution outside the criminal justice system – “a safe middle ground where we are getting individuals off the street and putting them on the right track,” as he puts it, particularly for individuals with no other offense except the possession of a dirt bike.

While this new diversion program is just over a year old, Collins said there is much to be done to support groups like B-360. The city of Philadelphia, which has long struggled to deal with its dirt bike subculture, has already reached out to him to learn more about Baltimore’s model.

“At the end of the day we’ve tried the approach of incarceration and that didn’t work,” says Collins. “We are in a moment in the country where we are trying to reimagine policing…We are trying to limit people going into the criminal justice system unless they are a discernible safety threat.”

There has been talk of building a dirt bike park in Baltimore for years — a place to ride safely and legally. There’s been similar chatter in Cleveland. Neither city has been able to get their ideas off the ground. The irony of these failed efforts is not lost on Young, who points out how White hobbies are incorporated into cityscapes. When skateboarders become nuisances on city sidewalks, communities build skateparks; when cyclists are endangered, cities build bike lanes and teach motorists to ‘share the road,’ and when motorized scooters become the go-to transport of choice for thousands, rideshare companies launch money-making ventures. “None of these activities are criminalized,” says Young.

Rather than waiting for stagnating efforts to bring a dirt bike park to Baltimore, Young is moving forward, fostering relationships with city businesses. Last year, the B&O Railroad Museum gifted B-360 the use of 2.5 acres of the museum’s land in Southwest Baltimore for safe riding. Along with the gated, empty parking lot, B-360 used the site trailers for classroom space.

“She can literally be saving lives,” the B&O Railroad Museum’s Executive Director Kris Hoellen says of Young and her program. “Putting kids in ‘the system’ that are trying to overcome so many challenges that they face already, is not going to be helpful…But if you can spark a kid with a passion and use that passion for learning, then you’ve got them.”

This year, B-360 is housed at an unused recreational center in Southwest Baltimore. Surrounded by 10 acres of land, it serves as an example of how vacant buildings can be given new life. Young’s goal is to raise $10 million by 2024 and secure about 20 acres of land and a permanent campus, which would be the first of its kind anywhere in the country. Her aim is to create an auto body shop, an educational space for STEM programming, and an indoor and outdoor dirt bike riding course.

“Initiatives like B-360 absolutely save the public money and frees up resources which we can use to invest in our young people and to catalyze their future,” says Fagan Harris, CEO of Baltimore Corps, which works to recruit and retain social impact leaders to Baltimore. Harris, who is the chairman of B-360’s advisory board, says Young’s “ideas and solutions, for our communities, are big.” Young was one of Baltimore Corps’ inaugural Elevation Awardees.

Last year B-360 was awarded a $300,000 grant through Microsoft’s community skills program, which promotes racial equity in the U.S. It was one of 50 Black-led nonprofits selected nationally.

“We need your funding, but we want people to trust us with our own ideas,” says Young. “I’m a person changing from being in survival mode my entire life…a fight-or-flight mentality, to the person that can now think about sustainability.”

This originally appeared at Next City and is published here in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Exchange.

The little girl was 6 years old, and life hadn’t been kind to her. 

When Catherine Meek walked into a homeless shelter for their tutoring session, she found the child hiding under a desk. 

No questions asked, the volunteer joined her on the floor and began reading to her. For an hour a week, the session would allow the girl to be just a kid, getting the assistance she needed, and for at least a moment forgetting about the circumstances that put the girl educationally behind by about a grade. 

The space remained their meeting spot for six sessions until, one day, Ms. Meek walked in to find the girl sitting at the desk waiting for her. 

“I had, I remember, the biggest smile on my face, and she did too,” Ms. Meek says. “I think even at that young, vulnerable age she understood that something had changed, that there was a set level of trust, that she could trust me.”

Ms. Meek lights up recalling that moment – one of her greatest success stories as a volunteer tutor for School on Wheels, a nonprofit addressing educational needs of children K-12 who are experiencing homelessness. She and the girl worked together for about two years until the child moved out of state and they lost touch. 

Recently, Ms. Meek – now executive adviser to the organization – attended that no-longer-little-girl’s wedding after they reconnected through social media. 

A brainchild of the late Agnes Stevens, a retired schoolteacher, School on Wheels began in 1993 when she started tutoring kids living in shelters on Skid Row, an area of Los Angeles known for its large homeless population. In the next few years, she formalized her efforts, recruited more volunteers, and grew the organization with the help of Ms. Meek, who joined in 1999. 

“She was the inspiration and teacher and had the education background, and I had the business and financial background,” says Ms. Meek. “The need was there in 1993, and it’s just grown astronomically since then. One in 30 kids in California in a classroom is homeless.”

The organization grew steadily, partnering with shelters, school districts, motels, libraries, anywhere homeless families could be – even reaching those living in cars, in foster homes, and on the streets. With year-round operations in six counties, prior to the pandemic, the organization reached more than 3,000 homeless children a year, and it recruited and trained more than 2,000 tutors annually. During the pandemic, the number served dropped to about 2,000, and tutors were down to 1,300. Annual funding reached $3.5 million in 2020.

“Students experiencing homelessness move on average about three to four times a year, and with each move, it’s estimated that they fall behind four months academically,” says Charles Evans, the organization’s executive director. “Our whole goal as an organization is to really try to fill in those academic gaps.”   

School on Wheels doesn’t get into the students’ backgrounds but focuses solely on assessing the kids’ educational needs – like a fourth grader who is two grades behind in reading or a 10th grader who’s struggling with pre-algebra and biology – and matching them with tutors. 

“We’re really here to just support the child, and I think a lot of our families like and appreciate us and what we do for them,” says Mr. Evans. “We don’t pry and try to figure out why a family became homeless.”

The children are assessed every few weeks to make sure they’re improving. Ms. Meek says that in 2021, K-4 students improved their literacy skills by 21%; in the past six months, fifth through eighth grade students increased math skills by almost one grade level, and self-efficacy surveys showed a 40% increase in confidence in ninth through 12th graders. 

Leavening the community

Before the pandemic, tutors would meet students wherever they were – motels, shelters, libraries. But tutoring sessions have been remote – via donated Chromebooks and laptops – in the past couple of years. The drastic change had benefits and drawbacks. On one hand, students could stay in touch with tutors even on the move. On the other, School on Wheels had to pivot from handing out backpacks and school supplies to figuring out how to get digital equipment into kids’ hands and making sure they had Wi-Fi access. 

The digital transition was already in progress when COVID-19 hit, says Mr. Evans. Now, the organization is returning to in-person sessions, particularly for younger kids. But it will keep the hybrid model.   

The School on Wheels’ Skid Row Learning Center, which closed and was completely made over during the pandemic, is getting ready to welcome kids again. Many clients of the center come from one of the biggest shelters in California, the Union Rescue Mission just down the street. 

Mr. Evans, who runs the learning center, describes its leavening place in the community: Staff used to pick up about 25 children at the Union Rescue Mission as they got off the school bus and walk them to the learning center for after-school programs. They’d sing along sidewalks where people sitting on the ground would put away drug paraphernalia or anything inappropriate for young eyes. Later, the organization worked with the school district to have students dropped directly at the learning center’s front door and is likely to return to that system in the coming school year. 

Erasing stigma

Outside of tutoring, School on Wheels is out to erase the stigma of homelessness. Many of the families the organization works with found themselves homeless through no negligence of their own – victims of domestic violence or economic hardship, doing their best to get back on their feet.

For example, one single mother in her 20s, who for security reasons asked not to be named, left an abusive relationship, and ended up in a shelter with her four young kids. When she noticed her children falling behind in school, she connected with School on Wheels.

“It’s been the best thing ever, because my kids love their tutors,” says the young woman, who works and goes to school. She now gets reports from school that her kids are doing much better: “The teacher did see a lot of improvement in [my daughter’s] math and her spelling.” That motivates her to do better herself, says the mother.

Angela Sanchez gets it. The School on Wheels board member experienced homelessness during her last two years of high school, after her father lost his job and couldn’t afford rent. 

“Once we went homeless, I wasn’t sure what my options would be or if I would even be able to go to college,” she says, adding that she hid her circumstances to avoid the stigma. School on Wheels changed her outlook: Ms. Sanchez’s math tutor was a grad student in astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology who didn’t see her as a homeless kid, but understood her dreams and aspirations. 

“I literally had a rocket scientist helping me with my math homework,” she says. 

He gave her a tour of Caltech, the first college she ever visited. The experience opened her eyes to possibilities and got her thinking about career options. She says it also gave her the confidence she needed to get her undergraduate history degree and master’s in education. Now in her 30s, she’s an equity consultant, a published author, and homeowner. 

Aside from a literacy program for the youngest kids and tutoring specific subjects for older students, School on Wheels helps high schoolers plan their futures – getting into college, getting a house, and becoming independent. 

“Homelessness keeps you locked in a mentality of day-to-day survival. But that shouldn’t stop anyone from thinking about what it means for life afterward, and I think we forget a lot about that,” Ms. Sanchez says.

This originally appeared at The Christian Science Monitor and is published here in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Exchange.

Toyin Anderson is a mom looking for solutions to what she sees as a crisis of youth crying out for help with their mental health. 

“Our kids are still struggling. From the pandemic, the lack of being able to socialize, from losses of family members due to COVID or to violence in the community, that stuff has not been addressed,” says Ms. Anderson, who advocates for hiring more mental health professionals in her Rochester, New York, school district.

People across the country are searching for ways to support many of America’s children and young adults, who say they’re facing stress, anxiety, and depression. Remote school, shuttered activities, and family job losses during the pandemic often changed their lives – and their sense of well-being. 

Even before the pandemic began, more than 1 in 3 high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. Now, despite nearly all K-12 schools and colleges being open for in-person learning in the most recent school year, many students are still struggling: 

• 70% of public schools reported that since the start of the pandemic, the percentage of students who sought mental health services increased, according to an April survey from the Institute of Education Sciences. 
• The U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory warning of a youth mental health crisis in December 2021, following a declaration earlier that fall of a “national emergency in child and adolescent mental health” by a coalition of pediatric groups.
• 88% of college students polled in a January 2022 survey by TimelyMD, a higher ed telehealth provider, said there’s a mental health crisis at colleges and universities in the United States.  

There are also increased efforts to find solutions. In partnership with the Solutions Journalism Network, seven newsrooms across the U.S. set out to examine efforts that are working for addressing students’ mental health needs, such as peer counseling, college re-enrollment programs, and district mental health services coordinators. The initiatives might not be effective in all ways, or for all students, but there are encouraging signs of success that others could replicate. The approaches also add to the conversation happening around the country. 

Third grader Alexis Kelliher points to her feelings while visiting a sensory room at Williams elementary school, Nov. 3, 2021, in Topeka, Kansas. The rooms are designed to relieve stresses faced by students as they return to classrooms amid the ongoing pandemic.

People “from middle America to the coasts” are talking more about care for adults and children, and are seeking help from faith communities, schools, neighbors, and professionals, says Sharon Hoover, co-director of the National Center for School Mental Health and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “That wouldn’t have happened 20, 30 years ago in the same kind of way – even five years ago – so that gives me hope.” 

The Hopeful Futures Campaign, a coalition of mental health advocates, including Dr. Hoover, published the first national school mental health report card in February. The report card grades states on eight policies identified by the campaign as solutions to the crisis. It finds that most states are far off recommended ratios of school counselors and psychologists to students in K-12 schools. 

Solutions identified by the Hopeful Futures Campaign include hiring more school mental health professionals, training teachers and staff in mental health and suicide prevention, and establishing regular well-being checks – also known as universal screeners – to identify students and staff who may need support. 

Those types of solutions are attracting attention from lawmakers. “We’re seeing more state legislatures and executive branches trying to figure out what more can we do,” says Hemi Tewarson, president and executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP), a nonpartisan policy organization. 

Between March 2020 and December 2021, 92 state laws were enacted to help youth mental health through efforts in schools, according to a NASHP analysis. Those efforts ranged from North Carolina establishing a grant program for schools to hire psychologists to Texas requiring schools to include crisis line and suicide prevention lifeline contact information on identification cards for secondary students. Connecticut, meanwhile, permits K-12 students to take two mental health days per year. 

Even as new ideas rollout, challenges remain. Not all stakeholders are on board with expanding support in schools, which some say could burden educators and encroach on parent rights. When the superintendent in a small Connecticut town recently proposed opening a mental health clinic at a high school, for example, the school board rejected the plan. 

Schools themselves are also pondering how effective they can be in the current environment, given shortages of mental health professionals and funding. In the 2020-2021 school year, 56% of public schools “moderately or strongly agreed that they could effectively provide mental health services to all students in need,” according to the National Center for Education Statistics.  

The reporting from the collaboration newsrooms suggests that educators are trying to reconcile the roadblocks and the solutions by addressing questions like: How do we reach more young people, even in the midst of limited resources? How do we make sure what we are doing for students is actually meeting their needs and includes their input? 

Back in Rochester, Ms. Anderson – who holds leadership roles with the local group Children’s Agenda and with United Parent Leaders Parent Action Network – is also forging a path forward. She has led a community march and attended school board meetings to urge the district, where her son will remain in the fall, to better implement its current wellness plans and use pandemic relief money to expand mental health support. She plans to move her daughter to a private Catholic school, in part because it offers more mental health resources.

“The country needs to be proactive, not only in my community,” she says. “This is everyone’s business to make sure the kids in this country are well.”

This originally appeared at The Christian Science Monitor and is published here in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Exchange.

The healthiest meal students typically receive during the day isn’t at their dining room table — it’s in their school cafeteria.

That finding from Tufts University researchers is just one reason child nutrition experts have urged Congress to pass legislation that would enable schools nationwide to provide free meals for all students. Pandemic-era waivers that made universal free school lunch a reality the past two years have expired, and this fall, students will once again have to qualify for free, reduced or full-priced meals based on need.

That prospect is raising concerns among child nutrition experts who predict that once the school year begins more kids will go hungry amid an uptick in food insecurity in households with children.

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

“There are going to be many struggling families next fall who don’t apply for meal programs or who don’t qualify for benefits,” said Lori Adkins, president of the School Nutrition Association, a nonprofit representing 50,000 school nutrition professionals nationwide. “The ones that do qualify for benefits, our programs will continue to provide that safety net, but for those that are on the cusp, I’m worried about them. Sometimes it is that single-parent household with children, and they have limited resources, and sometimes they can fall through that safety net.”

Starting in 2020, Congress gave schools waivers that allowed them to provide free meals to every student, regardless of income. But Republicans opposed extending these provisions, arguing they’re no longer needed now that pandemic-related school closures have ended.

Single-parent households are particularly prone to food insecurity, or lacking consistent access to the nutrition needed to maintain one’s health. Nearly 29 percent of households headed by single mothers were food insecure in 2019 compared to 15.4 percent of households headed by single fathers, according to the Food Research and Action Center, which advocates for people experiencing poverty-related hunger.

Universal meal waivers can help. A report from the Food Research and Action Center analyzed how these provisions benefited 62 large school districts across the country. Ninety-five percent of the districts said meal waivers decreased hunger among their students, 89 percent said the waivers made it easier for parents and guardians, and 85 percent said they erased the stigma associated with free school meals.

“Hungry children shouldn’t have to worry about meal applications or whether they have money in their account so they can eat,” said Adkins, who is also a child nutrition consultant for Oakland Schools in Michigan. “It shouldn’t be a privilege; it should be available as part of the school day for all students along with textbooks and the ride to school on the bus and everything else.”

The federally funded National School Lunch Program (NSLP) operates in almost 100,000 public and private schools and other institutions, helping them serve well-balanced and cost-efficient breakfasts and lunches. School meal prices vary across the country but have cost up to about $3 for lunch and $2 for breakfast in recent years, though pandemic-related inflation has caused food costs to spike. Participating schools are reimbursed for providing meals to students by the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service, which administers the program. In fiscal year 2020, the NSLP served meals to about 22.6 million children each school day, and more than three-quarters of these lunches were offered for no or reduced cost. The meals have been linked to higher academic achievement, improved behavior and better health for students. They have also been found to reduce food insecurity, with youth from households lacking consistent access to nutritious foods meeting most of their dietary needs at school.

“School breakfast and school lunch are meeting the nutritional needs of millions of kids across the country who rely on them,” said Crystal FitzSimons, director of school and out-of-school programs for the Food Research and Action Center.

In June, President Joe Biden signed the Keep Kids Fed Act, a bipartisan bill that gives child nutrition programs at schools and similar environments more funding to cover food costs and additional support and flexibility as they feed students during disruptions to the food supply chain.But the legislation does not continue universal free school meals.

Low-income families, especially those enrolling their children in school for the first time, may not realize that they need to apply for free meals. Other eligible families, due to stigma, fear or language barriers, don’t apply, only to struggle to cover the cost of lunch. Parents with household incomes that qualify their children for reduced-price meals but not free ones often find it hard to keep up with lunch fees as well.

Despite the benefits of school meals, some low-income families may not apply for their children to receive free or reduced-priced meals due to the perception that doing so amounts to taking a government handout, said Jennifer Gaddis, author of “The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools” and an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Human Ecology.  Ending universal free school meals may increase this notion, she said.

“I think it’s definitely going to be a change that pushes some people out who just can’t get over that feeling of, like, ‘Oh, I’m taking something,’ or ‘I’m being dependent on the government,’” Gaddis said.

During the upcoming school year, a family of four earning $36,075 or under would qualify for free meals, while a family of the same size earning $51,338 would qualify for reduced-price meals. Eligibility is based on the federal poverty line. The children of some families, such as those enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, will be registered for free breakfast and lunch automatically.

But some school district officials have objected to the idea of children from economically disadvantaged families getting universal free lunch. School board members in Waukesha, Wisconsin, initially turned down the opportunity to provide free school meals during the pandemic for fear that doing so would “spoil” students. After public outcry, the board changed course and opted into the federal program.

“There’s been a lot of work to try to educate people on how, as long as this is a program that’s not universal, there are a lot of kids and families who might feel stigmatized by their participation in the program,” Gaddis said. “… One of the big barriers is that a lot of decision makers don’t really think of school meals as education, and we’re really having to kind of push against this to say this is actually a really necessary thing for the well-being of all students.”

Universal free meals don’t just benefit students, according to the School Nutrition Association. As school nutrition departments face supply chain and personnel shortages, free meals relieve them of the responsibility of determining which students qualify for free, reduced or full-priced meals.

Plus, free meals for all students mean that schools don’t have to work to collect lunch debt from families who have not provided their children with enough money to cover meal costs.

“It is a lot of pressure on the school districts, because they have to absorb those fees if they don’t get paid,” FitzSimons explained. “So it’s not an ideal situation for anybody involved, and being able to offer meals to all kids is critical.”

When meal debt begins to accumulate at a school, the money used to cover it comes out of the school’s general fund for classroom expenses. So schools aim to keep meal debt low. In recent years, some schools have drawn criticism for using aggressive or humiliating tactics to recover lunch debt from families, including stamping students’ hands, not letting them attend school events, providing them with meals noticeably different from what their peers are served or sending bill collectors after their families. Lunch shaming, as these practices are known, garnered so much attention that in 2017 the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued guidance to schools about how they can resolve lunch debt in a way that doesn’t demean youth. In 2019, 75 percent of school districts said they had accrued debt related to unpaid meals.

As federal action on providing universal free lunch has stalled, some school districts and states are taking matters into their own hands, helping children in a way that enjoys broad public approval.

Through the federal community eligibility provision, school districts with large numbers of low-income youth can offer free meals to all students without requiring families to submit paperwork. In addition, California, Maine and Vermont are among the states that have passed legislation to provide free lunch to all students. Massachusetts legislation to do so awaits a signature from its governor.

“A growing number of states have really understood the value of being able to offer free meals to all the kids in the state and are kind of lifting that up,” FitzSimons said. “Some of the state campaigns take a little bit longer than you would hope. But there does seem to be a lot of …interest and momentum at the state level.”

FitzSimons added that the House passed a budget reconciliation last fall that would allow more school districts to provide free school meals through the community eligibility provision and make it easier for states to do the same. Those provisions are also included in the Healthy Meals, Healthy Kids Act that Rep. Bobby Scott, chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, introduced last month. The House is expected to soon review this Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill through which Congress updates the NSLP and other child nutrition programs.

“I’d love to see some more long-term, sustainable solutions towards making meals available for all kids each day,” Adkins said. “We’re just hoping that perhaps with the Childhood Nutrition Reauthorization, that bill could include something about meals for all or there could be a new bill asking President Biden and the Congress to extend meals to all students into the future. We’re definitely going to continue to lobby for and work towards meals for all students at no cost.”

This originally appeared at The 19th News and is published here in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Exchange.

President Joe Biden announced last month the government will forgive $10,000 in debt for college loan borrowers earning under $125,000, with Pell grant recipients eligible to have $20,000 forgiven. And while Americans are at loggerheads over that, they are in almost full agreement about fixing the root cause: the high cost of a college education.

Asked to choose between the government forgiving student debt or making college more affordable for current and future students, an astounding 82% of respondents in a recent NPR/Ipsos poll opt for the latter. Even among those with outstanding loans, long-term affordability wins out.   

Getting there is not easy. But at Purdue University, an ambitious price freeze with tuition at just under $10,000 a year has held for a decade, offering innovative — if not always flawless or popular — cost-cutting models for holding the line on student bills.

Students taking a break in the cool, wood-paneled spaces of Purdue Memorial Union on a recent scorching summer day will pay no more than Boilermakers did 10 years ago — and many will likely get their bachelor’s debt-free, as some 60% did in May.

“If an institution prioritizes affordability, you’d be surprised — we’ve been surprised — by how much progress can be made,” says Mitch Daniels, the former Indiana governor who announced the tuition freeze in the spring of 2013, just months after he became Purdue’s president.   

The freeze meant forfeiting some $40 million from a regular increase in price. When the university managed to absorb it just by tightening its belt, the board greenlighted a second year, then a third. As applications soared, enrollment grew, and proud alumni opened their wallets, the “freeze” itself became a large source of income. 

It started as a “gesture”

Sitting in his office by the campus bell tower, Mr. Daniels — who retires at the end of the calendar year with a résumé that includes big-business CEO and director of the Office of Management and Budget for President George W. Bush — traces the freeze idea back to his state governorship. A persistent question he heard then, he says, was, “Isn’t there someplace to get a quality education that won’t put us deeply in debt?”  

What has a split Congress accomplished? A surprising amount.

He initially proposed the freeze “as a gesture, a one-time acknowledgment that we understood.” The average cost in real dollars of a bachelor’s degree in the United States had jumped by 41% between 2000 and 2012. Even Purdue, a public, land-grant institution, had consistently raised its price for more than 30 years.

When Andy Pavlopoulos enrolled in the aviation department in 1986, in-state tuition for the year at the flagship West Lafayette campus was $1,870. With fees, room and board, books, and the like, his total bill “was like $8,000,” says the father of three who, in his second career, owns and runs a family restaurant in Saint Joseph, Michigan.

By the time Mr. Pavlopoulos’ eldest child was scrolling through college websites as a high school junior in 2013, prices had soared. In-state tuition reached $9,992, and the full cost of attending — commonly referred to as the sticker price — was $22,782. For out-of-state students like his son, this meant $28,794 in tuition for a total annual bill of $41,614. 

Something to remember about sticker prices is that only a minority of students nationwide actually pay them. As each of his three children enrolled at Purdue, Mr. Pavlopoulos expected them to do what he’d done: get grants and scholarships that knock down the total they owe.  

“The sticker price is damaging misinformation,” says Phillip Levine, a Wellesley College economics scholar with a specialty in higher education. It can cause “people to make decisions that are not appropriate for them.” As a result, many who would thrive in a four-year college decide it isn’t for them. 

“People have no idea what colleges cost,” he says. “They tend to cost a lot less than people think.”

Like an effective meme, Purdue holding “tuition under $10,000” broadcasts affordability. 

“There’s a nice message off of a low tuition,” Mr. Levine says. “Particularly for lower-income families, we know based on research that the ability to simplify the problem increases their likelihood of attending.”

Another way Purdue does this is by applying the freeze to the full cost of attendance. Institutions that have similarly suspended tuition hikes often increase other charges. At Purdue, on the other hand, the sticker price, too, doesn’t budge.

As the freeze entered its second year, the number of applications to the undergraduate program jumped by 28%. That has since climbed steadily by more modest percentages. By 2021, the admissions office was processing almost twice as many applications as it had in 2012.

Aditi Barla’s was among them. A resident of Illinois, she only analyzed her choices once acceptances were in. 

“Purdue is a great school for CS,” she reasoned, referring to her computer science major. “It’s a great STEM school. And, oh, it also has a tuition freeze.” Other contenders included the University of Michigan and the University of Washington in Seattle, but their sticker prices were in the $60,000-to-$70,000 range with no offers of scholarships or grants. With a younger brother in the wings and plans to go to graduate school, the choice was clear.

Today, she is a rising sophomore with no debt.

More students means more revenue 

Even after enrollments nationwide began to decline, Purdue’s freshman and transfer admissions grew on average by about 500 a year. Last fall, matriculations hit a new and unexpected high, with more than 10,000 freshmen arriving on campus. 

The number of postgraduate students has also grown, helping to raise the university’s total enrollment from 39,256 in 2012 to 49,639 in 2021. With more than half paying out-of-state or international prices, tuition revenue increased by a third during the freeze, from $629 million in 2012 to $832 million in 2021. 

But the surge in students has also posed problems. The university has had to add dorms and temporarily house students in cubicle-like lodgings created in dorm basements and study lounges.

Ms. Barla knew guys who started the year in cramped, windowless quarters: “Yeah,” she says, “not ideal, especially when you’re coming into college for the first time.” By fall break, everyone was in permanent housing, and in the spring, the university was purchasing an on-campus housing complex.

“We’re pressing up against limits,” admits Mr. Daniels. To mitigate this, the university has introduced some hybrid classes and has helped students who are so inclined to graduate in three years. 

But an important feature of Purdue’s success is that it has ensured its foundation remained solid. “We don’t run a deficit. We don’t borrow any money. We don’t raid the cookie jar,” Mr. Daniels says, referring to having reduced the spending distribution of the nearly $2.5 billion endowment from 5% to 4%. “We don’t ever let it affect quality.” 

Department of Education statistics indicate that, from 2012 through 2020 (the last year for which this data is available), Purdue kept up its spending on instruction at the same pace as peer institutions. Even as enrollment galloped, its student ratio is a very respectable 14-to-1. And it enhanced its campus. Among other improvements, it opened the $79 million, 164,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art Wilmeth Active Learning Center and, last year, renovated its iconic Memorial Union.   

As a research university, it has increasingly leveraged grants and contracts to bring students in on groundbreaking innovations and technologies at little to no cost to the university’s bottom line. This has helped it attract students without resorting to a widely used tactic. It’s not uncommon that at institutions that charge up to $60,000, says Mr. Levine, “virtually every single student’s getting a $20,000 or more merit scholarship to bring the number back to $30 or $40,000 — which, not coincidentally, happens to be in the range of what public institutions charge.” 

As for the “dos” of keeping prices down, Mr. Daniels is “bashful about ever prescribing anything we’ve done here,” he says. “The decisions, we believe, fit this place.” 

However, not a month goes by, says Chris Ruhl, the chief financial officer, without a counterpart from another school getting in touch wanting to know what worked and how the campus reacted. 

Successful but not without challenges 

Not every cost-cutting measure has proved universally popular. Some faculty, for instance, voiced discontent when the university changed employees’ benefits. In line with a prevailing trend in higher ed, it adopted health savings accounts with high deductibles. It also changed over to defined contribution retirement plans, favored mostly by private colleges. When it contracted out its food service, Purdue Student Government formally condemned its choice of corporate giant Aramark, on the grounds that the company had incurred food and safety violations at another Indiana campus. 

And when Purdue pioneered its own income share agreement — in which students pledge to share a portion of future income — as an alternative to traditional student loans, some accused the university of breaking the law. Purdue has since suspended future contracts in the program, which is similar to a federal income-based repayment loan that also ran into trouble in its implementation. *

Other steps seem not to have caused waves. Mr. Ruhl points to such things as dismantling Purdue’s transportation system and contracting with the city to extend transit routes onto campus; outsourcing printing and photocopying services; and consolidating the university’s data centers, information technology departments, and maintenance and custodial staffs. 

“As the student body has grown,” he says, “we’ve been able to maintain staffing levels” without hiring more people.

Making affordability an institution-wide mission, he says, has been crucial not just in cutting costs but in improving the quality of the institution.

Statistics on retention and graduation rates, rankings, and fundraising support Mr. Ruhl’s claim that “all sorts of key metrics have improved substantially during this period of time.” Likewise, the percentage of undergraduates earning their bachelor’s without incurring debt marched upward. In 2012, the proportion leaving campus with the bachelor’s diploma and no loan was 49.5%. Fifty-four percent did by 2016, and 60% did in 2021.

But Purdue’s performance in one metric proves cautionary in terms of students being able to afford, as Mr. Levine puts it, “the place where they belong.” In a conversation over Zoom, he crunches some numbers on the university’s net price calculator, a feature that institutions that receive money from the federal government are required to post on their website. 

He invents a young Indiana resident with a 3.5 GPA, solid SAT scores, and a family income well below $50,000. Asked how much the family can contribute, he types in $0. Within seconds, the calculator estimates that even with a $6,459 Pell Grant, various scholarships, and $5,500 in federal student loans, the family would have to “come up with $5,087 a year that they have no ability to pay for in cash,” Mr. Levine reports. The student can earn $3,000 of that through a work-study program or campus job. 

The exercise, he says, shows that for a family “that has nothing,” borrowing even $2,000 to $5,000 a year “is not affordable.” 

“Despite the fact that college costs a lot less than people think, it’s still too expensive,” he says. But not if the Pell Grant were doubled. “That would eliminate the gap completely,” in which case, Mr. Levine says he’d “be on board with low tuitions.” As it is, though, he believes freezes benefit wealthier students to the detriment of those of lower-income backgrounds. If the former paid the full sticker price, the university would have extra income to channel into financial aid.

The amount Purdue has spent on merit and need-based scholarships, fellowships, and awards has fluctuated over the course of the tuition freeze. In 2017-18, it gave 21% more aid than it had in 2012, but in 2018-19 the amount it disbursed fell below the 2012 levels. 

“We do have limited dollars,” says Heidi Carl, Purdue’s executive director of financial aid, whose office prioritizes helping Indiana families with $70,000 or less in adjusted gross income. For some with $50,000 or less, it succeeds in meeting their full need. 

“We see this pattern of public institutions increasing tuitions and then also increasing aid,” says economics professor Emily Cook of Tulane University, referring to a recent study on college pricing she co-wrote. The theory is that they are channeling the extra revenue into scholarships and grants that benefit both low-income students and middle-income families who often bear the burden of student debt. 

“Our study,” says Mrs. Cook, “is overall encouraging in that we are heading in the direction of making college affordable.” 

As Mr. Daniels packs up his office, it is anybody’s guess whether the tuition freeze will extend beyond 2023 or what that would mean for students.

But whatever happens next, freezing the sticker price has done more than hit the reset button for one institution: Its leaps as well as its stumbles offer a decade’s worth of lessons on affordability.

Editor’s note: This story has been changed to clarify that only new contracts in Purdue’s income share agreement program have been suspended. 

This originally appeared at The Christian Science Monitor and is published here in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Exchange.

When education students from Kentucky’s Morehead State University entered a virtual classroom with guest lecturer Chea Parton to discuss rural literature, many felt ashamed of the rural communities where they grew up—and where many of them would return to teach after graduation. 

By the end of Parton’s guest lecture, some of those opinions had started to change. 

“Even though she only spoke to my students for an hour, she already blew their minds,” said Alison Hruby, Ph.D., an associate professor of English education at MSU. 

The stories that the students read and heard as children told them that rural folk were backward and ignorant. That the land they were raised on was just flyover country. And that to find success, they must leave their hometowns and move to larger cities.

Parton, Ph.D., spoke to the students about her project, Literacy In Place, which promotes expanding literature curriculums to include works that speak directly to young rural students in middle school and high school classrooms.  

By teaching stories like Wilson Rawls’s Where the Red Fern Grows, about a boy and his two hunting dogs in rural Oklahoma, or Julie Murphy’s Dumplin’, about a self-proclaimed “fat girl” conquering her small town Texas beauty pageant, students are able to see themselves represented in their school work.

Parton’s lesson seemed to stick, Hruby said. The future school teachers viewed their hometowns more favorably, reflected critically on how literature can affect students’ views of where they are from, and began to think about how to incorporate Parton’s work in their own future English lessons.

“[The students] really wish they had read more literature that represented their home towns in a more positive light,” Hruby said.

Literacy In Place is an online repository of rural literature resources. Parton, a rural language and literacy scholar, launched the website to provide book lists, lessons, and activities to students, English teachers, education professors, and anyone else interested in discovering how place (specifically rural place) affects the way stories are told.

Parton said that she based Literacy in Place on three principles: 

1. Rural stories are worth telling.
2. Rural stories are worth reading and worthy of study.
3. And rural cultures (imperfect as they may be) are worth sustaining.

“I realized that rural culture is a culture and that it’s different,” Parton said. “I started thinking about me as a teacher and how my rurality affects the way I teach. Nobody was doing that work. That’s when I started Literacy in Place.”

Parton said many middle and high school classrooms use culturally sustaining pedagogies, or teaching practices, that integrate community history and culture into lessons and activities. That approach teaches students core academic skills through their own unique identities. 

She realized that while this practice successfully uplifts many urban and suburban stories, rural schools there are many important rural narratives left untold. And that the absence of these stories allows negative rural stereotypes to persist.

“In teacher education programs, when we teach what culturally sustaining pedagogy is,” Parton said. “We teach from an urban perspective because that’s where it came from. So no one’s really learning how to sustain rural cultures in their teaching—even teachers who come from rural places.”

Parton—who traded soybean fields in rural Indiana for city streets in Austin, Texas—sees herself as a prime example of what happens when rural life is not celebrated or sustained.

“Growing up, I ingested all of the negative things that people say about rural people and I believed those things,” Parton said. “I believed them about myself.”

Parton’s relationship with rural life and her passion for literature have affected her teaching methods. She believes that most people don’t recognize the value or complexities of rural people and small town life. 

The key, she said, is that it’s not just city folks who make this mistake, but rural folks as well. And people make these discoveries about themselves and others through literature, she said.

“I think that literature is so powerful in helping people understand their own identities and understanding identities different from theirs,” Parton said. “Because story is identity and identity is story.”

Stephanie Reid, Ph.D., an assistant professor of literacy education in the Phyllis J. Washington College of Education at the University of Montana, incorporated Parton’s program into her spring 2022 young adult literacy and literature class.

Reid and her students found that Parton’s work also highlights the complexity that exists within rural identity.

“My students paid especially close attention to their own assumptions and definitions regarding rural life and living and to how those assumptions were shaped by where they are from and the communities in which they have spent time,” Reid said. “I believe it also heightened their appreciation of the importance of place and the diversity of rural identities and experiences that exist across rural contexts and communities.”

When Reid’s students begin teaching in their own classrooms, she hopes the future educators “know and value their students and that they take the time to learn the people and communities that comprise the teaching context.”

The influence of Parton’s program on students encourages Hruby and Reid.

“I’m really excited that she’s doing what she’s doing,” Hruby said. “Because it seems like such a small thing, but it’s really going to have a huge impact.”

They also hope Parton’s work marks a shift in the education field—one that amplifies important rural perspectives and voices from their current spot at the back of the line. 

“Rural educators and students have constructed incredible knowledge, and university personnel should seek to create spaces for these folks to share their knowledge and expertise,” Reid said. “Those from non-rural backgrounds will benefit from listening, reading, and learning.”

For Parton, the work continues. She hopes to re-write and correct the meaning of “rural” in the hearts and minds of young folks across the country.

“This is what culturally-sustaining teaching in a rural capacity would look like,” Parton said. “Being critical of rural places and not looking at them through rose-colored glasses, but at the same time helping the things that are really special and unique and important about rural places flourish.”

This originally appeared at The Daily Yonder and is published here in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Exchange.

Wednesdays were usually Justin Alamo’s favorite day of the week. 

As a third-grader at Conte West Hills Magnet School in New Haven, Connecticut, Alamo always looked forward to swimming classes on Wednesdays. Except for one week that sticks out in Alamo’s memory.

“I remember being so angry that day because they canceled swimming,” Alamo, now a student at the University of Connecticut, said. “Our teacher told us we had to go to the auditorium and listen to people talk about a program called New Haven Promise.”  

Alamo remembers receiving a packet during the assembly outlining how to qualify for the college promise program scholarship that covered up to 100 percent of tuition to colleges and universities in Connecticut. 

He also remembers thinking he still had plenty of time before seriously considering college and figuring out how to pay for it. When he got home, still upset about missing swim class, he handed the packet over to his mother and didn’t think about it again until he got to middle school.

By the time he was in seventh grade, Alamo, who is Puerto Rican, said he felt comfortable in his mostly Hispanic neighborhood of Fair Haven but began noticing the lack of opportunities in his low-income community. His parent’s home had also gone into foreclosure, and Alamo’s family was struggling financially. They weren’t alone—the city of New Haven averages one of the highest unemployment rates in the state, and more than 25 percent of residents live in poverty. 

“School was always interesting and easy for me, so there was no question that I was going to college,” Alamo said, “but that’s when I realized, ‘oh, I may not have another opportunity to go to college if I don’t have the money.’” 

A model from Michigan

College promise programs offer scholarships to high school graduates that cover tuition and fees to higher education institutions in the graduate’s home state. There are more than 400 programs in thirty-three states and Washington, D.C. 

According to a 2016 study, these programs aim to reduce poverty and crime, increase employment, and improve a region’s overall economic development. 

However, despite the positive reaction to promise programs, there is little research showing if promise programs actually reduce poverty, and crime rates vary because outcomes depend on how programs are implemented. However, recent studies show that promise programs offering coaching and other methods of financial support have the largest impact on low-income students’ graduation rates.

Each promise scholarship has different eligibility requirements, including a residency requirement in a specific school district and a minimum grade-point average. Promise scholarships usually follow one of three payout structures: Students receive ‘first-dollar promise scholarships’ before other types of financial aid, ‘middle-dollar scholarships’ are applied after other grants or scholarships are awarded, and ‘last-dollar scholarships’ fill tuition gaps after all other forms of financial aid are applied.

Kalamazoo, Michigan, implemented the first promise program in 2005. The Kalamazoo Promise was funded by a group of anonymous donors and launched by Kalamazoo’s former school superintendent. The scholarship was open to all graduates of Kalamazoo Public Schools residing and enrolled in their school district for a minimum of four years. 

Kalamazoo, like New York City, Chicago, and several other cities, has been historically impacted by “white flight” first experienced in the 1930s. The Kalamazoo Promise model aimed to invigorate the city by incentivizing residents to stay in their school district and possibly inspire others to move in. 

In Kalamazoo, 61 percent of students who used the scholarship were of free or reduced lunch status from 2006 to 2021. During that same time period, 82 percent of eligible Asian students, 66 percent of Latino students, and 63 percent of Black students used their promise scholarship within six months of graduating. 

Researchers, politicians, and even President Barack Obama considered the program a success. The first kindergarten class to benefit from the Kalamazoo Promise graduated from high school in 2019. By that time, nearly 7,000 Kalamazoo students had benefited from a promise scholarship. Since 2006, about 90 percent of graduating high school students have qualified for a promise scholarship which could help finance attendance to 58 Michigan colleges and universities, and 80 percent actually used the scholarship. 

Soon after the early successes in Kalamazoo, other promise programs, often with similar missions to increase school completion rates and improve regions, launched in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Denver, Colorado, and throughout New England, Connecticut hosts three promise programs, including the New Haven promise program, and like other similar programs across the nation, each has additional eligibility requirements and varying funding structures from public and private sources. Recently, state-funded promise programs in states like Oregon and Nevada have seen budget cuts, making scholarships contingent on available funds.

Response to rising college costs

While the popularity of promise programs has increased, so has the cost of attending higher education institutions. In the last twenty years, the average tuition to private and public universities has nearly doubled, and in-state tuition has almost tripled.

The rising costs have led students to finance their education through loans. However, recent studies have shown that student loan debt disproportionately impacts students of color, further widening the income gap between racial groups. 

In 2021, President Biden, recognizing the inequitable access to degree-granting institutions, added nationwide free community college to his spending bill. However, the proposal was dropped from the bill, making financial aid programs like promise scholarships more attractive for high school students, like many living in New England, where some of the most expensive colleges and universities are located.

No two programs are the same, and that lack of uniformity can often be confusing for students and families and impact participation from the students most in need. Rachael Conway, a researcher for the New England Board of Higher Education, decided to investigate New England’s promise programs after working as a college access coach in Oregon, helping students learn how to finance their college education.

“Oregon Promise was instituted in 2015 as a free community college scholarship, and I was seeing many of my students being really excited about it, and really drawn in by it,” Conway said. 

She said her students who opted to enroll in community colleges often did so to take advantage of the promise scholarships, regardless of whether the school was a good fit or offered as a desirable field of study.

“Many of my students already had the Pell Grant and the Oregon Opportunity Grant, which is Oregon’s need-based scholarship, that pretty much covers tuition and fees at community colleges in the state,” Conway said, “so what they were actually getting from the Oregon Promise at the time was maybe minimal.”

Examining results in New Haven

Conway admits she was skeptical about seeing if New England promise scholarships offered different results, but after surveying all nine promise programs in New England, she said she was impressed to see that the scholarship programs, like New Haven Promise, were striving to be much more than a scholarship.

“New Haven Promise has been around since 2010, so they’re just deeply rooted in the community at this point,” Conway said. “Some of their practices go beyond just making college more affordable.”

According to Conway’s findings, New Haven Promise, the oldest promise program in the region, is also one of the most equitable and proved to have a more holistic approach by providing additional services like tutoring, mentoring and alumni networking sessions, and internship placement opportunities for students. 

Yale University funds the New Haven Promise scholarship and other initiatives, such as tutoring and mentoring, are funded by donations. New Haven Promise is the only program in Connecticut that uses a ‘middle-dollar’ format, allowing students to use the scholarships after receiving financial aid, such as a Pell Grant, to fill in any financial gaps or pay for non-tuition related expenses. 

New Haven Promise scholars are 90 percent students of color, and 70 percent are first-generation to attend college. The program has few but strict eligibility requirements, including a cumulative 3.0-grade point average, a 90 percent attendance rate throughout high school and 40 hours of community service. The requirements alone narrow the pool of qualified students, but according to data collected by New Haven Promise, the results justify the requirements. 

A 2022 donor briefing states that in the first five years of implementing the scholarship, New Haven Public School graduation rates increased from 58% to 80% and college enrollment for the district went from 56% to 64%. Since its inception, New Haven Promise has handed out scholarships to 2,300 students and distributed $25 million. As of 2021, more than 600 students have earned a bachelor’s degree from colleges including UConn, Quinnipiac University, and Yale.  

“One of the things that make New Haven Promise successful is our commitment to seeing our scholars to, through, and back,” New Haven Promise President Patricia Melton said. 

It’s a refrain that Melton regularly uses, emphasizing the program’s mission to ensure that students attend local colleges or universities and galvanize them to return to their communities after graduating from college. 

As a high school student, Melton left her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, after earning a scholarship to attend a boarding school in New England. Through the years, Melton said, she has thought a lot about leaving behind all the connections she had in her community at a young age just to get a better education.

“People say ‘you made it out,’ but that’s the wrong way to think about it. The beauty of promise programs is that you don’t have to leave,” Melton said. “Colleges are supposed to be partners, but oftentimes they drain the talent out of the community.”

Melton said that New Haven Promise tries to inspire its students to stay in their communities by offering mentoring programs, community service opportunities and internship placement at local businesses.

“By helping them create a network in their own community, we make it so they don’t need to make that choice to leave. There doesn’t have to be a trade-off,” Melton said.

Jorgieliz Casanova, the K-12 program manager for New Haven Promise, said she didn’t need to make that trade-off. It’s one of the reasons why she decided to join New Haven Promise once she graduated from Albertus Magnus College as a New Haven Promise scholar. Casanova said she also wanted to offer students the same level of support she had as a scholar.

“I have the very unique experience of being a recipient, and now I’m able to help with the development of the program,” Casanova said. “New Haven Promise has been one of the most solid and consistent things that I’ve ever had.”

Justin Alamo can relate. He also credits New Haven Promise with inspiring him to become a high school teacher after graduating from UConn, completely debt-free next year.

“I’ll be honest, I probably would be on a different career path if I had to pay off student loans because I would be so stressed out about making money,” Alamo said. “But New Haven Promise gave me a chance to pursue education, as a Puerto Rican male, in a world where educational equity isn’t always the thing.”

This originally appeared at Prism and is published here in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Exchange.

Logan Welch, 18, sat in the back of a high school English class typing on his laptop, but he wasn’t taking notes on the poem like everyone else.

Instead, he recorded observations of the teacher, noting the way she quieted a disruptive boy, used sarcasm to relate to students, and engaged students by asking them to rank poems.

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

And he gained new perspective on what it might be like for him to be at the front of that classroom someday — as a teacher, with his own group of high school English students.

“When you’re in school it seems like teachers just give a lesson, but there’s so much that goes into it, so much thinking they have to do about different learning styles,” said Welch, a senior at East Kentwood High School in the suburbs of Grand Rapids.

Welch is one of 20 students in Educators Rising, a national program offered as an elective for high school juniors and seniors considering careers as teachers. The hope is that some of them go on to study education in college, then return to teach in East Kentwood.

State Superintendent Michael Rice sees such grow-your-own recruitment programs as an important part of his multi-pronged strategy to expand the teaching pool in Michigan. The state faces a teacher shortage at a most inopportune time: when students need more educational resources to catch up academically after two years of pandemic-related disruptions.

Although Michigan’s teaching force is larger than it was a decade ago, and the student population is smaller, administrators struggle to get fully certified teachers in classrooms where they’re most needed,  especially in disciplines such as special education and world languages.

Another challenge: Diversifying the pool of future teachers so it’s more representative of the student population.

The grow-your-own strategy can help with that, too, Rice said in an interview Tuesday.

“Our student body is more diverse than our teaching staff, so not only does this help in terms of recruitment, it provides the opportunity to diversify the workforce as well,” he said.

Helping students see themselves as teachers

Jasmine Ramahi has been teaching East Kentwood’s Educators Rising course for two years. She believes more people would enter the education field if they could picture themselves as teachers. Sometimes, she said, someone else has to see them that way first.

What makes a good teacher is not just about academic achievement, she said. “Teaching is about: Do you understand empathy? Do you like to be around people? Do you like to empower people?”

For senior Shawn White, the answers were yes, yes and yes.

Ramahi, who had been White’s Spanish teacher, saw promise in him. She encouraged him to sign up for the Educators Rising course.

“When she told me this class revolved around teaching, I didn’t really see myself in that field,” he said, adding: “I didn’t think I would have the nerve” to teach.

That was a year ago.

Two weeks ago, he was teaching a lesson about common grammar mistakes to a high school class of English language learners. It was the culmination of a year of observing other teachers and studying learning styles during Ramahi’s course.

Now White can envision himself leading class discussions, crafting lesson plans, and building relationships with students.

“This class opened another door, another opportunity,” White said. “Teaching is something I could see myself going into.”

As graduation approaches, White has been thinking a lot about the teachers he’s had over the years. Only one looked like him: male and Black.

That thought makes the idea of going into teaching — particularly at a diverse school like East Kentwood — feel even more impactful.

“Being able to see someone like me, the students might get a deeper connection,” White said. “If they have that trust, if they have that relationship, it motivates them to learn more and really enjoy the class.”

Equity, diversity, and representation are topics that come up often in Ramahi’s class.

“We talk very openly about the need for our teaching staff to look like our hallways,” Ramahi said. “We talk about the power it has to have students who look like you.”

Statewide, 17.7% of students are Black, but only 6.6% of teachers.

Rice, the state superintendent, wants to do better.

Programs like Educators Rising could help. Nationally, 52% of students in Educators Rising courses are people of color.

The growth of Educators Rising

The grow-your-own concept isn’t new, but programs have proliferated over the last few years as a response to the teacher shortage.

Eighty-five years ago, Future Teachers of America chapters began cropping up in high schools to help inspire promising students to become teachers. The group morphed into the Future Educators Association in 1994 when the professional organization Phi Delta Kappa International took it over from the National Education Association.

Seven years ago, Phi Delta Kappa relaunched the program under the name Educators Rising. Seventeen schools used the curriculum that first year. Now, 11,180 high schools across the country use it. Thirty-one of them, including East Kentwood, are in Michigan.

Participating districts pay $6,500 for each classroom using the curriculum.

In addition to the classroom observations, the curriculum includes lessons on professionalism, bias and equity, small group instruction, classroom management, lesson sequencing, culturally responsive teaching, and assessing learning.

About half of Educators Rising’s students have always had teaching on their minds — the kinds of kid s who used to line up their stuffed animals and play school, said Joshua Starr, executive director of Phi Delta Kappa and former superintendent in Maryland and Connecticut. The other half are teenagers who didn’t consider the profession until they learned their school was offering a course on it.

So far, 103,000 students have completed Educators Rising courses. It’s unclear how many of them enrolled in college education programs or have become certified teachers. Starr said it has been difficult to track students once they’ve graduated high school, but Phi Delta Kappa is hoping to work with states to collect data.

Sixty percent of teachers already end up working within 20 miles of where they went to high school, according to Educators Rising.

Starr urges districts to reaffirm the grow-your-own philosophy by guaranteeing jobs to their Educators Rising students who become certified teachers. “We’d like to have signing days with graduates signing letters of intent to come back,” he said.

His organization also is working to connect graduates of the program once they arrive on college campuses. About three dozen chapters of Educators Rising Collegiate have cropped up in the last year as student organizations, Starr said.

“We offer some programming and support, but it’s really student-driven,” he said. “It started because our kids actually asked us after they graduated. They said, ‘Hey, we’re in college now, and we’d love to network.’”

Other grow-your-own programs take root in Michigan

The Michigan Department of Education last year awarded $10,000 grants to help 44 schools develop opportunities for students to explore careers in education.

And more support could be coming.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s budget recommendation included $150 million to support district grow-your-own programs for support staff who want to become teachers. The House budget proposal added $74 million and added eligibility for programs aimed at high school students. The final budget is subject to negotiations between Whitmer and legislative leaders.

Separately, state Rep. Sarah Anthony, a Lansing Democrat, has introduced legislation that would require the MDE to develop or adopt a model “teacher cadet” program that districts could choose to offer to students.

Many schools already are using other curricula or developing their own.

This fall, Detroit Public Schools Community District will launch its Rise to Teach initiative to encourage students to pursue careers in education. The district plans to develop the initiative into a formal pathway to teacher preparation programs. Rise to Teach students who go on to become certified teachers will be guaranteed jobs in the district, said Assistant Superintendent Ben Jackson.

Wyoming High School near Grand Rapids started offering an exploratory class this school year to 17 students who expressed an interest in teaching.

And Charlevoix-Emmet Intermediate School District plans to launch its Future Educator Academy in September. Teacher Erin Luckhardt’s goal is to help students in Charlevoix and Emmet counties determine early on whether the educator profession is a fit for them, to provide them opportunities to observe high-quality teachers in their own districts, and to encourage those who go on to receive education degrees to return to teach in the area.

Luckhardt is working with districts within the ISD to guarantee job interviews for students who take her class and go on to become certified teachers.

Not all graduates of the program will wind up pursuing teaching, and that’s OK with Luckhardt.

Starr agreed.

“The ideal is that every student who goes through the program is inspired and says, ‘Yes, I’m going to be an educator,’ but the reality is some of them will say this isn’t for them,” he said.

The curriculum is designed to give prospective teachers an idea of what the profession would be like — “warts and all” — Starr said. “We try to make sure their eyes are wide open.”

In East Kentwood and Wyoming high schools, that has meant frank classroom discussions and opportunities to interact with guest speakers who include experienced teachers, principals and superintendents.

What students noticed when they observed teachers

But a big part of the curriculum is delivered through observation.

One afternoon in April, each of Ramahi’s 20 prospective teachers observed a different freshman class. They took note of the way teachers managed behavior, built relationships, developed lessons that incorporated different cultures, and used alternative instructional methods to reach students with different learning styles.

Welch visited a class tasked with identifying imagery in slam poet George Masao Yamazawa’s piece about growing up as a child of immigrants. Students worked at their desks while their teacher, Jessica Baker, circulated and spoke with them individually.

Welch zeroed in on one such interaction.

“There was a student who kept interrupting and giving answers that were obvious,” Welch recalled. “Instead of telling him to be quiet, she acknowledged him and then moved on.”

It worked, Welch said, because the teacher had already established a rapport with the student earlier in the school year. That’s something he might not have realized before taking Educators Rising, he said.

“I see now that there’s so much that goes into being a teacher and just how heavy the responsibility is for teachers,” he said. “My eyes have definitely been opened to that.”

Another student, Lisa Ha, who is considering a career in special education, visited a class of students who have developmental disabilities. She held freshman Tyson Johnson’s hand to reassure him during an occupational skills activity.

In the band room, Abigail Best noticed how a music teacher sat next to students to be at eye level during one-on-one conversations.

Rodnika Dickens observed an English class full of well behaved freshmen reading at their desks while quiet nature sounds played on a speaker in the background. She attributed their behavior to classroom management skills.

“It wasn’t like the teacher was strict, but they knew when they came in the classroom what they were supposed to do,” Dickens said the next day in a small group discussion with Educators Rising classmates. “They knew the routine.”

Ramahi said her class’s learning objectives are so closely aligned with introductory college education courses that some universities in Michigan are considering granting college credit for the East Kentwood course.

Most of the students in her program still haven’t decided for sure what their majors will be, but Welch has made up his mind.

He’s headed to Michigan State University to begin training to be a high school English teacher.

Educators Rising has prepared him well, he said.

“I’m glad for this class,” Welch said, adding: “There aren’t always a lot of classes where you actually get to do something that you’re passionate about and that could help you in the future.”

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

The bell rang a little after a gloomy dawn. As a trickle of A.P. Spanish students settled into their wooden desks, teacher Zachary Daniels powered up his smartboard. Behind him, the classroom wall was covered with translated verbs – Explico (explain), Escribe (write) – written on a large, white scroll. 

For this morning’s lesson, Daniels asked the students to use a different kind of language, to look within and name a feeling. Did they walk through the doors feeling humiliated? Guilty? Peaceful? Were their outlooks tainted by hopelessness or brightened by hope?

It was late March and the world outside Paw Paw High School, located in a rural stretch of western Michigan, seemed increasingly threatening. The war raging in Ukraine was dominating airwaves and news feeds. A school shooting in Oxford, Michigan, had left four students dead. And Covid continued its inexorable march.

As Daniels spoke, he passed out a worksheet filled with 29 colorful, cartoon images of children’s faces, each expressing a unique mood. The worksheet guided the students to rate the intensity of their feelings on a scale of 1 to 10, and they jotted down their answers quietly. 

“The way we think and feel and act affects the next situation that comes up,” Daniels told the class. “And that creates a cycle that can really impact the way that our days go.”

The mindfulness check has become a weekly ritual for the 650 or so students at Paw Paw High. Daniels wants his students to interpret their thoughts and feelings in a non-judgmental way. Mastering this skill will take consistent practice.

A mental health crisis intensifies

Teachers have been trained in the subjects they teach, but not in ways of helping students control their emotions or rewrite the stories they tell themselves. But since the mid-1990s, multiple studies have shown the benefits of social-emotional learning (SEL), a strategy that trains educators to nurture student wellness by helping them feel connected, engaged and supported while cultivating skills in self-management, social awareness and responsible decision-making. 

As the Covid-19 pandemic brought shutdowns and quarantines, making students’ lives less stable and connected, it intensified a long-festering youth mental health crisis and left schools searching for answers. Making matters worse was a longstanding shortage of counselors and social workers. As the pandemic began, Michigan had the second worst student-to-counselor ratio in the country, with 671 students for every counselor, more than double the recommended caseload. 

To address the problem, many Michigan schools adopted a homegrown social-emotional learning curriculum created by TRAILS – Transforming Research into Action to Improve the Lives of Students – a program that borrows techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy and was developed at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2013. In the aftershock of the pandemic, its popularity has grown and is now being taught in over 600 schools statewide. 

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has included funding of $150 million to expand the TRAILS program in her proposed budget for the 2022-2023 fiscal year. The legislature is now debating the budget and typically tries to pass the education portion by July 1, when the fiscal year begins for school districts.

The program includes a three-tiered approach. Twenty brief lessons, geared toward K-12 students and rooted in the techniques of mindfulness, focus attention on thoughts and feelings to help a child choose to act with care. Elements of cognitive behavioral therapy help students disrupt the cycles of negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors they go through when confronting a difficult situation.

The second tier is focused on small group, skill-building sessions led by school mental health professionals, and the third tier offers suicide risk-management training to school staff members.  

Decades of scientific research has shown an emotionally healthy learner is a better learner. But school leaders, well before the pandemic, lacked the tools and capacity to tackle a student mental health crisis head on. “They did not feel they were equipped to manage the sort of severity and volume of mental illness that was coming through the doors of counselors, social workers and school psychologists,” said Elizabeth Koschmann, a former school psychologist and adjunct faculty member at the University of Michigan Medical School who founded the program. 

The goal of TRAILS, said Koschmann, who serves as its executive director, is not for teachers to dole out unwanted therapy to students. Nor is to replace counselors and social workers. Rather, it’s a way to help foster wellness inside schools and coordinate care for students who need extra help or treatment. 

TRAILS’ lessons about feelings and self-management are supportive and often fun. But across the nation, a campaign against social-emotional learning has fomented anger among a vocal sector of parents, state lawmakers and conservative groups with ties to dark money, as MindSite News reported last month. 

These groups have labeled SEL a masquerade for critical race theory (CRT), another culture war flashpoint, even though CRT is almost never part of a K-12 curriculum. The opposition led a school district in Utah to end its SEL initiatives earlier this year. Florida’s top education officials rejected over 50 math textbooks because their pages made references to SEL and what they describe as CRT.  And a Minnesota group lambasted the district’s SEL lessons as a “child-indoctrination scheme.” 

In Michigan, some parents have spoken out at school board meetings against the teachings of SEL skills, and one teachers’ union in Hartland is fighting the pushback. 

“It’s a complicated moment in American education,” said Koschmann. “There’s a larger debate about how are we educating young people about questions like race and racism, and privilege and power in the country, at the same time, that schools are saying, ‘We also need to take care of students’ mental health.’” 

Despite the backlash, educators and parents overwhelmingly support the teaching of SEL skills, one recent poll found. 

In the past few months, however, a growing number of Paw Paw parents expressed fears over the teaching of social-emotional learning. Some worried the curriculum pushed critical race theory. In response, the district has hosted in-person and virtual community forums to clarify the curriculum’s purpose. Last month’s in-person forum attracted over a dozen parents. District leaders are not planning to abandon TRAILS and are being proactive as fears arise, said Corey Harbaugh, director of curriculum for the Paw Paw Public School District. 

“There is a high level of concern from people who tie social-emotional learning to certain political agendas, even though we know that politics is not our business. Our business is taking care of the needs of students,” Harbaugh said. “Our parents and our community have to be at ease and support what we’re doing; otherwise, we’re fighting about it rather than working together.” He wants parents to understand, he said, that SEL “isn’t tied to any political agenda beyond giving kids what they need to feel connected, engaged, cared for.”

TRAILS training in the Upper Peninsula

Kristy Alimenti, a mental health services coordinator with the Delta-Schoolcraft Intermediate School District in the Upper Peninsula, said her district has facilitated training for over 60 teachers in TRAILS since last year. The limited preparation time required, ease of applying SEL skills to academic lessons and strong research base of the curriculum made it appealing to administrators.

In a rural area where access to mental health services is low and rates of anxiety and depression among students are rising, Alimenti said TRAILS gave staff more tools to tackle challenges before they escalate and may require deeper intervention. 

“It allows us to also de-stigmatize the conversation around mental health and provide lessons that address a lot of what the students may be facing or experience in a more proactive and preventative way,” she said. 

Visits to two districts, Paw Paw Public School District in rural western Michigan, and Ypsilanti Community Schools, an urban district, offer a sense of what these programs look like in practice.  

Learning from Simon Says 

It was a quiet, rainy morning at Erickson Elementary School in Ypsilanti, a diverse, low-income city near the Huron River that has shed thousands of manufacturing jobs. In room 127, the fifth-graders were getting a lesson on thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Halfway through, they stood up as teacher Nikki Krings laid out the rules of a reverse game of Simon Says. 

“Simon Says, move forward!” Krings directed. 

The students shuffled a few steps backward. 

“Simon Says, thumbs up!” 

The students flashed their thumbs down. 

“Simon Says, make a really happy face!”

Some students grimaced, while one couldn’t help but give a goofy grin. 

Krings and other Ypsilanti teachers were trained in TRAILS at the onset of the pandemic in 2020, at a time when they were fretting over whether they could preserve close connections with their students over computer screens from home. 

Krings said the tools she learned helped her deescalate some students’ mental health problems, instead of relying on a social worker in the building. It also helped build a culture of empathy and understanding in her classroom, giving kids space to navigate their feelings.

As Covid risks eased and students flocked back to classrooms this year, Krings and other teachers at Erickson saw their students’ fears of the unknown grow. 

In a city where people need more money, jobs, and affordable housing, many of the students were already in survival mode. The students at Erickson are predominantly Black, and most are economically disadvantaged. Some don’t always have food at home. Others bounce from home to home because their families can’t afford to stay where they are. 

Black children disproportionately endure the pains of poverty and illness, and the mental health impacts that result. More than a third of high school students said in a national survey that they’ve been treated poorly or unfairly because of their race or ethnicity. Even before the pandemic, the mental health crisis plagued Black youth. Over the past decade, the firearm suicide rate more than doubled among Black, Latino, and Asian teenagers.

Krings has made room 127 a place where students can try to escape their troubles and be themselves. In addition to TRAILS, she teaches students about race and encourages discussion and acceptance of diverse gender identities. “It’s important for me, for them, to feel safe,” she said. 

Alayah, a girl with tight cornrows and dangly braids, and Alex, wearing green and black glasses, gleefully followed each step of the reverse Simon Says amid a sputtering of giggles. (MindSite News is identifying them by their middle names to protect their confidentiality).

The two are good friends. Alayah likes Alex because he’s fun. Both want to get good jobs when they grow up. Alayah said her mom believes in her dream of starting a business. One day, Alayah said, she hopes to buy her mom a house and a car.  

“People say they don’t want to go to school,” Alayah said later. “But I’m like, ‘You need school, so you can get a better education and a better job. So you can get somewhere in life.’”

After a few more commands, Alayah, Alex and the rest of the class sat down at their desks and listened closely. 

“I want to challenge you,” Krings said. “When you’re feeling a really big emotion, something really bad, really frustrating, really scared, really embarrassed, I want you to think, ‘I’m going to pause real quick, and…recognize my feelings…I’m going to take it back and say, let me see (if)  I can do the opposite.’”

Learning to avoid ‘thinking traps’

In a classroom off of Paw Paw High School’s long main hallway, English teacher Allan Blank was delivering a rapidfire lesson on the perils of “thinking traps” – the moments when our minds jump to the wrong conclusions or ignore the good. On a wall, posters with memes of the teacher’s likeness include a headshot superimposed on the body of a surfer. The teacher relishes the light-hearted, Gen Z humor.  

Blank asked the students to work in groups and come up with everyday dilemmas that foster thinking traps. 

“Your friend stops texting you back,” one student said, then sketched out the negative thoughts that coursed through his mind: “They don’t want to be my friend. They didn’t text me back. They don’t like me.”

Blank gave each group two minutes to identify the feelings they outlined in their scenarios, and how those feelings inspire less loving actions. For example, thinking someone doesn’t like you can trigger feelings of sadness or tiredness.

“We don’t want to be stuck in the traps,” he told them. “We want to be able to reframe stuff positively, so we’re getting to a better place. And maybe our behaviors are changing as well.” 

Then he gave them 30 seconds to reframe these hypothetical situations in an affirmative light. 

Perched on a winding street, Paw Paw High School is located in a small town of mostly white, middle-class families. Lakes and small farms dot the countryside outside of town, and a historic winery stands in Paw Paw’s center square.

Despite the bucolic scenery, the district has been accused of fostering a culture of racial hostility. Six years ago, a group of local Native American activists called for the renaming of “Redskin,” the school mascot. Some in the community reacted angrily, even as accusations about a history of racist incidents in the schools emerged. In 2019, the ACLU filed a federal civil rights complaint against the district. A year later, the district dropped the controversial mascot name, eventually changing it to “Red Wolves.” 

In the aftermath, the tensions over the mascot renaming created some rifts within the school community. 

“During the divided times of the mascot change, one of the things we learned was that we don’t always know how to talk to one another, across divisions,” said curriculum director Harbaugh. He said social-emotional learning can also strengthen communication and relationships between the district and families.

Paw Paw public schools implemented TRAILS district-wide for the first time in the school year that ends this week. The lessons go beyond mindfulness to teach empathy and understanding of each student’s unique identity and background. 

As curriculum director, Harbaugh has overseen the implementation of TRAILS and hopes it can transform Paw Paw schools. He encourages staff members, including janitors, secretaries and cafeteria workers, to buy into the concept, and the district pays stipends to those who get additional training. He believes the approach demands a team effort and must be consistent in order to be effective. 

“Every adult (that) any child comes into contact with has been trained and has been asked to prioritize students’ social-emotional learning and health,” he said.

The need is real. Last year, Tammy Southworth, Paw Paw High’s principal, talked with her staff about social-emotional learning after reviewing data that revealed an alarming truth: Students were more anxious and overwhelmed than ever, stuck in a realm of discomfort reinforced by social media. 

“The way they were relating to each other, as well as to us, was different,” Southworth said. “When I was a teacher, I would say, ‘Whatever’s going on outside, whatever is happening at home, this is your safe space. Come to school, leave those things at the door.’” But now, she said, “they can’t get away from texts, alerts on their phones, reminders of what’s happening. So I think that just puts a whole different pressure on kids.”

So far, the rollout of TRAILS has meant working through some important challenges.

For some teachers, the lessons went beyond the scope of their jobs and the curriculum felt jarring. A few told Southworth they weren’t comfortable with TRAILS and didn’t want to take classroom time away from academics. Others were afraid.

“Honestly, there’s a fear, even for adults, to feel like you have to share your feelings with  a group of kids,” Southworth said. “There was definitely a fear that kids were going to start opening up and sharing too much personal information, and the teacher was going to be like ‘I don’t know what to do.’” 

Southworth told teachers they don’t have to encourage students to vent all of their emotions but could share their personal rating on a scale of one to 10. 

Getting teachers to help students navigate their troubles and manage their emotions represents a vital shift, said Paw Paw Superintendent Rick Reo. 

“It’s just a different way to think about things,” he said. “We assume kids are on board and ready to go, or at least, ‘they can put their mind to it.’ You know, it’s not necessarily true. We need to do some things to make sure we’re giving them the best opportunity to succeed.”

The district is figuring out how to track the lessons’ impact on academic outcomes. Southworth hopes TRAILS will help improve student attendance. Harbaugh said the lessons have already helped bolster students’ self-efficacy. In a recent district survey, more students said they “believed in their ability to tackle difficult school work.”

Blank, the English teacher, said the focus on mental health has helped him connect with students more intimately. Recently, he noticed a student being quiet and disengaged. After class, he asked the student if they needed any help. 

“This is just another way to let kids know that you’re here. You care for them,” he said. “And when you can build those foundational relationships, and let them know that ‘I got your back’ sort of thing, they’re gonna be more willing to work with you, open up with you about things that may be happening in their lives.” 

Learning to stop when you’re mad

Back in Ypsilanti, Alayah, Alex, and their teacher, Nikki Krings, left room 127 and walked to the school’s library, where colorful books line the shelves and windows offer a view of the playground. The three sat at a brown table to talk more about what they learned. 

The exercise in reframing taught Alayah and Alex to rethink things, they said. “It’s helped me quite a bit,” Alex said. “Like when I’m mad, sometimes I just feel like I want to hit something or someone.” Now, he is able to stop himself. 

Alayah said she better recognizes her frustrations and powers through. The other day, she started doing her math homework and got stumped on a problem. She didn’t know what to do. 

“I came to school and asked for help instead of saying, “I’m not going to do it,” Alayah said. Before this year, she probably would’ve stayed quiet and answered the questions randomly. 

Alayah and Alex are new to the school and to social-emotional learning. Alex said he has been moving and changing schools for as long as he remembers, each time starting over. 

“It’s just hard for me to socialize,” he said. It’s also hard for him to keep friends “because I know I’m probably never going to see that person again.” He compares the experience to characters dying and coming back to life in a video game.  

Attendance turbulence often leads to more behavioral challenges, which can affect all students trying to learn. 

For both Alayah and Alex, the weight of grief has already taken hold, even before they’ve reached their teen years. “A lot of stuff happens in my family,” Alex said. “Like, I’ve lost two people.” His beloved dog also passed away. 

“It’s just hard for me because I can’t think about the present,” he said. “I think about the future and I know the people I love will be gone.” 

Alayah lost her father when she was 9. Last year, just before the school year started, her older brother passed away.

“It was hard for me to do, like, anything,” she said. Recently, she wanted to celebrate another brother’s birthday, to be there for him, bright-eyed and enthusiastic. She didn’t want to cry, remembering the other men in her life who were gone. 

“I did cry on his birthday because it was so hard,” she said. “I’m pretty sure my brother and my dad didn’t want me to still be crying. They want me to go on.”   

As they talked about these losses, their soft voices broke and tears streamed down their cheeks. School is a place where Alayah and Alex feel safe. When he’s there, Alex said, he tries to forget about home and be nice to everyone. For Alayah, it’s hard to open up, but she’s still trying to make friends. 

The two fifth-graders grab some tissues to wipe their tears, and then walk with their teacher to the social worker’s office. On that quiet, rainy morning, naming feelings may have surfaced memories of trauma. But as they work through those memories, they know their teacher will be there for them.

This originally appeared at MindSite News and is published here in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Exchange.

Like so many of her peers returning to classes after two years of pandemic isolation, Crockett High School senior Klyrissa Porter often feels overwhelmed.

But the Austin, Texas, teen noticed when she would reach out to her friends to share that her mental health was suffering, the replies she received were not exactly what she’d hoped for. 

“They’d just be like, ‘LOL, same,’” Porter said.

The hallways are full of teens struggling, she said, but no one seems to be able to help anyone else move forward. “Everyone is going through a lot, and because of that we’ve forgotten how to be friends,” she said, “…to be there for each other, support each other, love each other.”

That’s particularly difficult for Porter who has been part of Students Organizing for Anti-Racism (SOAR) since her freshman year to help confront the systemic racism at school. But confronting such large troubling issues on campus requires stamina people seems to have lost during the pandemic, said students in SOAR, which meets as a regular class at Crockett. 

To honor diverse perspectives, they first have to relearn how to hear and see beyond themselves. 

“There is not a person in the world who doesn’t have something they’re going through,” Porter’s classmate, senior Lilly Swearingen said. 

Now, the same skills they use to ground their anti-racist work are helping the SOAR students rebuild the basic social skills and healthy relationships they lost during the pandemic. 

Specifically, they said, circles have helped them repair their relationships and see themselves in the context of community again. 

When the students in Crockett High School in Austin gather to address conflict or deepen their connection to each other, they usually gather in a circle and pass a talking piece from student to student while answering a question or responding to a prompt. 

These circles, familiar fixtures in social and emotional learning and restorative discipline, have sacred roots, said Iztac Arteaga, the restorative practices specialist at Crockett. Circles have been healing and grounding for Indigneous communities for centuries, and their power is more vital than ever in the middle of a nationwide teen mental health crisis.  

“When people feel held and seen and valued as humans, there’s just so much more that can be done as you’re navigating difficult situations,” Ateaga said. 

Difficult situations abound.

As Arteaga teaches students and teachers how to participate in and eventually facilitate circles, she is adamant that the practice not become perfunctory or sloppy. While it’s tempting  to just, for instance, grab a dry-erase marker to serve as a talking piece, she said, for a circle to be most effective, it also has to be, in some sense, sacred.

“If we knew the history and how indigneous people literally died and lost their lives to maintain these practices we’d probably treat it with a little more respect,” Arteaga said. 

Instead of a dry-erase marker for a talking piece, the group should choose something to convey respect, and remind them of their shared values. Same with the centerpiece, where students can rest their eyes if looking at each other becomes uncomfortable or painful. 

In her position, Arteaga facilitates and teaches “community-building” circles, which start out light, giving people the opportunity to know each other. Cross-talk and phones are not allowed. She also does trauma-informed “mediation” circles when a conflict has occurred between students or between students and teachers. 

When they returned to school, the first emotion Porter noticed was anger. Fights broke out, people lost their tempers daily. “It got to the point that we were scared to come to school,” she said, as other students nodded along with her. 

Circles at Crockett are uniquely suited for these complicated dynamics. While punitive discipline might address the behavior, restorative practices like those students learn in SOAR, speak to the pain behind the outbursts. 

“SOAR gives us a place to express ourselves, and a space where everyone can just say what they need to say,” said junior Daniella de Guzman. 

Community circles gather students to address harm done and feelings hurt, but instead of doling out punishments according to a policy handbook, each member of the circle can say what they need. Even the offending party gets the chance to express the unmet needs or pain that led to their hurtful actions. Addressing the pain keeps them in the community, and accountable to it. 

Arteaga knows the power of circles to sustain community, not just as a facilitator in schools, but as a participant.  As an Indigenous person whose ancestors were colonized out of their home and identity, ceremony is critical to her understanding of her own heritage. She participates in circles with the broader Indigenous community in Austin, and confers with the people there about how to best facilitate the practice in schools. 

It’s a careful balance, she said. Some aspects of ceremony need to be exclusive to Indigenous communities, because of the long history of cultural appropriation. 

Circles are a sacred part of the governance, community preservation, and identity of Indigenous groups, Arteaga explained, and were part of the religious and cultural practices outlawed for most of the history of the United States until the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act.

While she recognizes the circles happening at school will be inherently less authentic to Indigenous culture—the circles in the SOAR class are named after the houses in the Harry Potter series—Arteaga wants them to be respectful of it as they gather around a centerpiece—often a fire—and designating a talking piece to pass from person to person.

“If we knew the history and how Indigenous people literally lost their lives to maintain these practices, we probably would treat it with a little more respect,” Arteaga said.  

While she sometimes has to educate students and teachers simultaneously, the teacher for the SOAR class had the kids well-versed and acclimated to circles, Arteaga said. With the additional grounding in history and tradition, the SOAR students have been able to facilitate on their own. Her goal is for more students and adults on campus to be able to do the same, so that circles become a regular and reliable resource. Skilled listeners and communicators can strengthen the entire support network of the school.

Freshman Will Haskell actually did learn a lot about himself during the pandemic, he said, and he knew that what he’d learned about his own mental health would help his friends, but after two years online, starting the conversation in person is challenging. “SOAR has helped me to be able to actually talk about it,” Haskell said. 

Knowing how to offer help is one skill the kids are developing, so is asking for help. Circles teach them the importance of asking for consent in both roles.

A lot of kids seemed totally dissociated— disconnected from their thoughts, feelings, and emotions, Swearingen said. They shove the feelings down to make it through the day, and some then overshare with their friends online. She calls it “trauma-dumping” and says it’s almost a trend now. 

When one person posts about a mental health challenge, she said, their comments will often fill with others echoing the complaint, or even seeming to “one-up” the severity of the original poster’s distress. “If we can at least tone it down a little bit, it would help a lot.”

Even when it’s not competitive, she said, rarely do teens ask for consent before sharing their burdens via social media or direct messages. They don’t check to see if the recipient is in the right place to receive the extra weight. For two years students were isolated from each other in real life, she said, but grew accustomed to constant, around-the-clock access to one another on social media.

“It’s an expectation that has been set and it’s very uncomfortable,” Swearingen said.

Circles provide a structured way for students to listen, to see that others are going through their own struggles, without immediately hopping on board to trauma-dump. When the talking piece moves to their hands, they will have a turn. 

That predictable, structured place to safely share is critical, especially for students who want to take on society’s bigger challenges, Swearingen said. “It puts us in a spot where we can be vulnerable with each other, and because we can be vulnerable together we can be productive.”

As teenage boys in Austin, Texas, returned to school last fall after more than a year learning remotely at home, counselors were alarmed to see how many were talking about suicide. 

“We’ve definitely seen an increase in suicidal ideation,” said Roxie Frederick, a counselor at Austin Independent School District’s Alternative Learning Center who often meets the boys after their emotions have boiled over into an angry confrontation resulting in disciplinary action. 

The teens are then sent to the alternative campus after a disciplinary incident, where Frederick gets them talking about what’s really going on — and it’s not always easy to get them beyond the monosyllabic answers.

But once she does, Frederick discovers just how many of them are losing hope — like many youth across the country who are battling mental health issues after two years of isolation, fear, and struggle.

 “Young males who seem tough are opening up about it,.” she said, adding it often means the teenage boys are pretty far into crisis.

The teen boys in Austin are part of a larger and terrifying trend. In 2021, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Children’s Hospital Association issued a joint statement declaring children’s mental health, especially children of color, a national emergency; and a Centers for Disease Control survey found 20 percent of teens had contemplated suicide, and nearly 10 percent had attempted it. 

But that same research offered a solution: Students who felt more connected to their peers had better mental health, and were less likely to report contemplating or attempting suicide. 

So even though the desperation at the heart of the mental health crisis is largely beyond Frederick and her colleagues’ control—they can’t bring back family members who died during the pandemic, loss of parents’ jobs, or social confidence— they are committed to making sure the young men can keep talking. To share their fears and frustrations before they either lash out and end up expelled, or worse, succumb to hopelessness.

A lot of the problems start in middle school, and this year’s 12-14 year-olds are in a particular bind.

The 7th grade boys from Covington Middle School missed a critical transition year, and they’ve felt it. It’s always been tempting to act tough instead of asking for help, the boys said, but the pandemic worked against them from several directions. It made them feel distant from their classmates, it deepened their anxiety and frustration, and it created a sense that the entire world was too fragile to handle whatever burdens they were carrying. 

Parents worried about jobs and health didn’t always have the bandwidth for the emotions of a kid missing their friends, or struggling with school. Friends were accessible online, but the crises in their homes often kept them from having much to offer by way of support.

“From the pandemic, you know, we forgot how to talk to people,” said Tremain Purnell, one of the kids in the Project MALES group.   

Frederick knows the reality: there’s not always a licensed counselor around when a boy is in crisis, especially for families who cannot afford a private therapist. Schools rarely have the student to counselor ratio they would need to meet the demand. Knowing that mental health resources will be hardest to access for young men of color, who disproportionately experience poverty and underfunded schools, she often connects them with Project MALES (Mentoring to Achieve Latino Educational Success), a mentoring program primarily for Black and Latino young men.

The group setting makes it seem normal to talk about tough feelings. It gives them language to describe their struggles. And when the boys are done with their stint at the alternative center, usually just a couple of weeks, there’s likely already a Project MALES group on their home campus where they can continue getting that support. 

Serving around 200 boys on 13 Austin campuses, Project MALES is preventative as much as it is responsive. The mentors want to help as many boys as possible before something happens that would land them in alternative school, disrupting their academic progress. They do that by helping them understand the social and emotional challenges at the heart of their behavior. 

After two years of pandemic pressure kids need someone to talk to about challenging emotions more than ever. But it’s not easy to tell people how you feel, admitted Jordan Kennedy, a seventh grader at Covington Middle School in Austin. Vulnerability and seeking support can be the opposite of the tough, unaffected personas young men are trying to project.

​​“It’s honestly kind of hard, and sometimes we try to hide our feelings,” Kennedy said. Though he says he’s naturally pretty outgoing and jovial, “there is a kind of pressure, I’m not gonna lie. 2020 and 2021 has been a lot.”

It’s different when he goes to Project MALES. There Kennedy and seven other boys gather to talk through the ups and downs of their week, and practice both asking for and offering support to each other. Their mentor, a student at the University of Texas, offers support based on over a decade of research on improving academic and life outcomes for Black and Latinx young men.

“We want to provide space and opportunity for men to have these conversations they may not be able to have anywhere else,” said Emmet Campos, the director of Project MALES and the Texas Education Consortium for Male Students of Color. Sessions often start with the boys sharing their “happies and crappies” from the week, he said, and using those experiences to work on social and emotional skills. These “power skills” have always been necessary, he said, but the pandemic made it even more so. Whatever challenges they had were exacerbated by isolation. 

But staying connected over Zoom was almost impossible, the boys at Covington said, especially as they started middle school with a bunch of kids they had not met before. 

“I would barely talk. I don’t really like to talk over computers,” Purnell said. 

 Most kids, sick of online learning, weren’t as engaged with online mentoring, Campos said. “You can’t replace the in person engagement for young men” 

A year online didn’t give them much to build on when they came back this year, either. 

“I wouldn’t be able to know people over the computer, because I might not know what they looked like,” Kennedy said. Since they’ve been back,“there has been some kind of awkwardness.” 

The Project MALES group has helped ease that awkwardness, especially for the members who were the most uncomfortable coming back, he said. “When I joined the group there were more people to talk to, more team work things, more collaboration.”

It’s also a place where talking about your feelings isn’t just allowed, but encouraged and modeled by the mentor, Purnell said. It makes it easy to follow suit. “If someone’s feeling down, you can ask them ‘what’s up, how you doing?’”

It feels natural and casual, but the Project MALES mentorship is heavily intentional. Housed in the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin, the mentorship is one pillar of a larger intercollegiate initiative to study the experiences of young men of color in educational settings. As they researched outcomes, particularly for Latinx males, Campos said, the founders of the initiative saw the value in mentorship, and decided to put their research into practice accordingly.

“Mentoring is a powerful intervention strategy,” Campos said, “Everybody can point to a mentor in their life that has made a difference.” 

The Project MALES staff is made up of paid doctoral students and undergraduate volunteers who receive stipends and take a two-semester class to prepare them to mentor the middle school and high school boys. The mentorship is aligned with Austin Independent School District’s social and emotional learning curriculum, and uses what Campos calls “critical mentoring” and restorative justice. The boys chosen to be in the program are often those who need a mid-level behavioral intervention, Campos explained. Instead of punishment, a grant from the Department of Justice has allowed Austin ISD to expand its restorative justice efforts with programs like Project MALES. 

For those students who do end up at the Alternative Learning Center after an expulsion, Austin ISD has not given up restorative and therapeutic discipline, said Frederick. 

Having groups like Project MALES on the campus at ALC allows the licensed professional counselors to focus on individual needs, she said. For some kids this will be their first and last access to professional mental health services. “There’s definitely a shortage of therapists in Austin.” 

Many would benefit from more focused therapy, but a lot can be done if those students are willing to talk to a caring adult and peers about their feelings. “If I can just show you that it’s okay to talk about your feelings,” Frederick said, she can connect them with support, often Project MALES or Communities in Schools, on their home campus.

Given the prevalence of the crisis, she added, every school would benefit from a full time presence to be there when the need arises, whether that’s school staff, mentors, or nonprofit case managers from Communities in Schools. A scheduled check in with a counselor or mentor is great, she said, but kids can’t always schedule their crises around adults’ availability. The biggest impact will be in the moment, she said. “The real work happens when they slam the door and walk out of class.”

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

He picks current events to discuss with his high school students – on a recent Monday morning, it’s the war in Ukraine and the Grammy awards. He gathers books and materials for the day, loading it all into a cart to wheel from room to room.

But the most essential piece of the morning hangs on a bulletin board in the teachers’ lounge: an intake list of the teenagers brought to the Lancaster County Youth Services Center over the weekend.

On this early April Monday morning, there are three new names – three kids entering the juvenile detention center. 

“Every single day in detention is different,” Beatty said. “There’s no Groundhog Day here.” 

A Lincoln Public Schools teacher, Beatty is one of the five teachers in the Pathfinder Education Program, based in the Lancaster County Youth Services Center, tasked with educating Nebraska youth while they’re detained and awaiting court decisions.

Every year,hundreds of teens move through Nebraska’s four juvenile detention centers in Douglas, Lancaster, Madison and Sarpy counties.

At all four detention centers, teachers like Beatty educate teens from 7th to 12th grade. Depending on their cases, they stay anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.

The constantly changing group of kids bring different levels of trauma and learning challenges into the classroom. 

Beatty and teachers like him at Nebraska’s three other juvenile detention centers serve as one of the last lines of defense against that trauma and those learning challenges. Against sometimes long odds, they try to keep students learning.

“A lot of our students have, for some reason or another, not had a successful school history,” said Randall Farmer, educational director of the program. “I have to get them to want to learn and love learning again, if that’s not part of who they are already.”

Between swigs of coffee, Beatty reads each file for the new students brought in over the weekend, familiarizing himself with their academic and social emotional needs. 

By 8 a.m., he gathers his books, projector and dry erase board and wheels them all to the first of four housing units he teaches.  

There’s the quarantine unit, where the incoming teens spend 10 days secluded in rooms to prevent the spread of COVID-19 before being put in a housing unit. Beatty and his co-teacher hold lessons through closed glass doors. 

There’s the high-security boys’ unit, where the boys come out of their rooms to sit at plastic desks spaced around the common area.

There’s the resource area, used by the two other lower security units. It’s the part of the building that most resembles a classroom, complete with books, computers and posters on the walls. 

Each unit is like a one-room schoolhouse. In a 50-minute class period, one student could be learning 7th-grade math while another works on a senior research paper. One student could be eager to earn school credit, while another struggles to crack a book. 

Nearly 9 out of every 10 students enter juvenile detention with credits that put them below grade level, said Dave Collins, principal of the education department at the Douglas County Youth Center. Thus, credit recovery – trying to get students back on track to graduate – is a main focus for program teachers. 

“A lot of times, some of these kids were the unteachables,” librarian Susan Helming said. “People just pass them on because they can. When you see a senior that comes in here with a first-grade reading level, you’re wondering, how did you get through 12 years of public school? How is that possible?”

For many students, their time in a juvenile detention center could be the first time they get one-on-one attention from their teachers, she said. It’s often the first time a teacher has focused specifically on that student’s learning challenges.

Helming became a teacher at the Douglas County Youth Center after six years working as a guard in the same units where she now teaches. 

When teens need more individual attention, or time to focus and read in a quiet space, they get sent to her in the library. 

Sometimes, that time isn’t just for extra help with reading. When students are struggling to behave in class, one-on-one time with Helming in the library can help calm them down. 

Some days, that time to cool down goes smoothly. Others, she ends up with ripped up books. 

Some kids are angry, Collins said. Some are defiant. Some are mad at the police. And others are nearly silent.

“A lot of them look scared,” Collins said. “Never been here before.”

Helming has to count her pencils at the start and end of the day to make sure they aren’t being used as weapons. Teachers carry walkie talkies to communicate both with each other and detention officers. Kids in rival gangs can’t be kept in the same unit, and moving students through the halls has to be timed to avoid encounters that could turn into fights. 

But the classroom is a judgment-free zone, teachers said. 

“I’ve been given a task by the state of Nebraska to teach them. And that’s what I’m going to do,” Helming said. “Some of the most respectful kids I’ve worked with have been in here for murder.” 

In both the Lancaster and Douglas County detention centers, students come from all over. Their families have fled violence from countries like Sudan, Syria and El Salvador, ending up in Nebraska. Or they’re locals – some have never set foot west of 72nd Street in Omaha, Helming said.  

“If anything is going to link them together, it’s going to be survival,” Helming said. “Some kids are the parents of a family. They’re the ones who are taking charge of their siblings. There’s a lot of survival going on.”  

Helming once had a student tell her his mother said she’d wished she’d gotten an abortion. 

“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” she replied. 

Another girl said she had to choose between staying home and getting raped by her mother’s boyfriend, or running away and having the police called. 

“She just looked at me, and she says, ‘I just didn’t feel like getting raped,” Helming said. 

Pathfinders staff care for the kids year after year, but they all fall into a certain amount of compassion fatigue, Farmer said. To see a teen leave detention seemingly on the right path and excited about learning – only to have them return a year later – takes a toll on both students and teachers. 

“These kids are incredibly valuable,” Beatty said. “They’re going to be productive members of society. But they’ve hit a speed bump in their early life.” 

After teaching five classes and grading work, Beatty and his fellow teachers leave for the day. But it isn’t unheard of to walk out to the parking lot and meet a former student, now a grown adult with a spouse and children, Farmer said.  

“They’ll say, ‘I wanted to bring them back here to show them where I decided to change my life, and I wanted to thank all of you,’” Farmer said. 

This originally appeared at The Flatwater Free Press and is published here in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Exchange.

“Residents told me they were really nervous, they didn’t know what to do,” said Varma, a resident advisor at the dorm. “I validated their feelings and told them you’re not alone in feeling scared. I told them I appreciated that they trusted me and wanted to come to me.” She then assured them that she could refer them to the counseling center once the danger was over. 

The tool that Varma used, which goes by the acronym VAR – validate, appreciate, refer – was created by a national mental health organization for students called Active Minds. The group teaches thousands of students the crisis intervention technique each year in 600 campus chapters. 

Varma, who spent two years as the UCLA Active Minds education committee director, first heard about the group when she was so deep in mental distress that she wasn’t sure she was going to get out. “I didn’t see a point to living,” she recalled. 

A native of Burbank, California, Varma became extremely depressed in high school and began self-harming, then formed a plan to die by suicide just before her 18th birthday – a plan she never went through with. “I almost didn’t make it to 18, but I’m grateful that I’m here right now,” said Varma, who will turn 22 in April. 

Varma is one of a growing group of college students who are struggling with their mental health. Recent headlines about college suicides, from star soccer player Katie Meyer at Stanford to clusters at St. Louis University, West Virginia University, Vanderbilt University and others, have stunned the country. Suicide is now the second most common cause of death on college campuses, and more than 1,000 college students kill themselves each year – triple the rate from the 1950s. 

The mental health crisis on campus was growing long before Covid-19. Data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that levels of persistent sadness and hopelessness, as well as suicidal thinking, planning and attempts among adolescents rose steadily from 2009 to 2019. Then came online classes and school closures, campus lockdowns, and the disruption of normal college social life, exacerbating the problem. 

The 2021 Healthy Minds Study report, an online survey of more than 103,000 college students, found that over the previous year, 41% reported clinical levels of depression, 34% showed symptoms of anxiety, 13% considered suicide, and 1% attempted suicide. But this spike in despair was not just a product of the pandemic, said Sarah Lipson, one of the report’s principal investigators.

“Really high levels of depression and anxiety” were present before the pandemic, and had climbed 2% to 3% every semester since 2015, said Lipson, an assistant professor of health law policy and management at Boston University School of Public Health.

The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on the youth mental health crisis, issued in December, reported that pre-pandemic, “an alarming number of young people struggled with feelings of helplessness, depression and thoughts of suicide.” With the stress of COVID-19, the report said, “the effect on their mental health has been devastating.” 

College administrators have scrambled to expand mental health services, with some adopting a “web of care” approach that tries to prevent students from reaching a crisis point. Many are developing innovations that reach beyond the counseling center, including telehealth therapy, mental health check-in apps, advisor and faculty training on suicide prevention, and peer support groups – as well as simple but important changes, such as printing the Suicide Prevention Lifeline phone number on the back of student ID cards.

On the ground, however, students say their experience with mental health support is mixed. Caroline Knowles, a senior at Vassar, got a quick appointment at the school’s counseling center when she needed to see a therapist for persistent anxiety. But a friend who requested a safety check on a student believed to be self-harming got a meager response. “The school sent someone to knock on her door, and a complete stranger asked, ‘Are you OK?’” Knowles said. “Of course, the girl said, ‘Yes I’m fine, leave me alone,’ and that was that. It’s a flawed system.”  

In addition, some campus counseling centers close down over the holidays, stranding students without a trusted place to call for help.

Enlisting faculty and staff to prevent suicide

Melody Moezzi is an Iranian-American writer, professor and mental health activist with three books under her belt, including Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life, and The Rumi Prescription. But in graduate school, she had a severe encounter with mental illness that almost stilled her voice forever. 

In Moezzi’s last semester of graduate school at Emory University, she was severely stressed. She’d been diagnosed with major depressive disorder – a diagnosis that turned out to be wrong – and was given antidepressants as she worked to complete degrees in law and public health. Then an administrator suggested she might not graduate according to her desired timeline, and she decided, as she put it, “to check out.” Fortunately, she survived.

“Looking back on it, I think, what a stupid reason to kill yourself,” she told MindSite News. “I have a wonderful husband, I have a wonderful life. Things were not objectively going wrong.”  

Now an author, attorney and visiting professor of creative writing at University of North Carolina Wilmington, Moezzi tells her students to ask for help if they are in crisis, something she was too proud to do. She also advocates giving faculty and staff better tools to recognize a student in distress. 

In an op-ed for Inside Higher Ed, Moezzi wrote that evidence-based suicide prevention training like QPR – question, persuade, refer – should be mandatory for university staff. 

The technique is meant to help a professor or staff member recognize the signs of a student in crisis and ask critical questions at a moment when it may be lifesaving. She uses the technique frequently, and has offered to take students to the emergency room or the university counseling center. She ended up driving one student to the emergency room after they answered “yes” to the question, “Are you thinking of hurting yourself?”

Yet suicide prevention programs like QPR are not mandatory at Moezzi’s university – nor at many others. Active shooter drills are mandatory – a fact she finds ironic, since mass shootings account for 1% of gun casualties and suicides for 60%. In Inside Higher Ed, Moezzi concludes: “Failing to mandate suicide prevention training at colleges and universities in spite of these statistics isn’t just misguided or negligent. It’s ignorant and reckless.” 

Nine hundred miles from Moezzi’s school, a team of psychologists at Loyola University in Chicago are piloting another approach. The goal: to reach students before they get to a crisis point by enlisting academic advisors to connect with students about their state of mind. 

Colleen Conley and her team at Loyola designed a short “motivational interviewing” curriculum that advisors can use during a routine meeting. Advisors help students reflect on their goals and ask if they might benefit from any changes: Are they getting enough sleep or drinking too much? Is it affecting their mental health? How might the student make a change? 

Early results show a promising trend, Conley said. Students interviewed in this way are more likely to seek counseling services, and motivational interviewing is linked to behavior change. Plus, she said, it gets students to discuss mental health at an appointment they’re already attending. 

“We found that if we could work even five to ten minutes of talking about well-being into a meeting that was already happening, that was so much easier than relying on students to schedule a separate appointment,” Conley said.

In Winston-Salem North Carolina, Wake Forest University uses an app called Timely Care to provide 24/7 access to a mental health professional for students in crisis. The app also makes it easy for students to schedule non-urgent counseling appointments and provides coaching on diet, nutrition, exercise and sleep. 

As colleges work to support student mental health, there’s still a lack of evidence on what works best, said Boston University’s Lipson, partly because each campus is different. 

“While a public health approach is the starting point for addressing mental health at colleges and universities, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach,” she said. “What works for one campus may not work for another.” 

One approach that seems both popular and effective, however, is peer support. 

When peers are the ‘first line of defense’

When a friend told Kelly Maguire, a senior at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, about a crisis they were experiencing, she knew how to respond: “Thanks for telling me about this,” Maguire said. “Could I walk with you to the counseling center right now?”

Maguire, now president of the campus chapter of Active Minds, went through her own mental health crisis during freshman year. Anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation became unmanageable. Now Maguire wants to make it normal for friends to talk about struggles. 

Peer recognition is often the first line of defense, said Amy Gatto, senior manager of higher education and evaluation at Active Minds. Research has shown that peers may be “the single most potent source of influence” during college. 

Active Minds was founded by Alison Malmon, whose brother had kept his deepening depression and psychosis a secret for years and committed suicide during his senior year of college. 

Now Active Minds reaches students through mental health fairs and student liaisons, spreading the message that talking to friends when you’re struggling is no sign of weakness. The group’s “Send Silence Packing” campus events events include more than 1,000 backpacks – one for each of the roughly 1,000 campus suicides that occur each year. The backpacks include personal stories from families and friends of suicide victims and encourage students to reach out if they need help. 

When a suicide does occur, more schools are adopting research-backed postvention strategies, with the aim of preventing further suicides in a new, high-risk group: suicide loss survivors. When two suicides rocked the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill campus last year, senior Ethan Phillips – who knew of more than a dozen kids’ suicides in his county while he was in middle school – helped spread the word about counseling resources for students. 

For many college students, parents are often the last to know if they are suffering from mental health issues or failing academically. Gina Burton only found out after her son, Graham, committed suicide in 2018 that he had been in great distress and failing four classes at Hamilton College, according to a story in the New York Times.  

“Would you care to shed some light on this?” Ms. Burton asked in an angry email to the academic dean, according to the Times. “If this is what drove Graham, I don’t think I’ll be able to cope.”

Many parents don’t know they can be left out of a student’s mental health treatment entirely due to due to health and education privacy laws – HIPAA and the Family Education Right and Privacy Act – that afford privacy to adult students, said B. Janet Hibbs, an adolescent clinical psychologist in Philadelphia. Hibbs recommends that parents and students sign these crucial forms before students head to school so families can have access to health information. 

In her experience, few college counselors include the family in students’ therapy, Hibbs said – a major missed opportunity. “The familial context can be a tremendous resource,” she said.

In fact, when Hibbs’ own son had a severe depression during his freshman year that ultimately led him to take a medical leave of absence, the counseling office and faculty were unable to communicate with each other because of privacy protections.

Many students are unaware of available mental health resources, according to university counselors contacted by MindSite News. 

“The challenge with a larger campus is just letting students know what’s available to them,” said Aesha Uqdah, a clinical psychologist and director of the Counseling Center at the University of Louisville. “The word has to spread a lot farther to reach 23,000 people – there are students who probably don’t know where the counseling center is. Students can walk in and talk to someone that day if they’re in a crisis. But people hear we have a waitlist – which we don’t for urgent care – so they don’t even try.” 

As more struggling students seek care, universities are scrambling to add resources – but money and staff alone will not solve the crisis, said Marcus Hotaling, president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors. 

“This is not a problem we can hire our way out of,” Hotaling said. “For many students, we need to solve a problem. The goal of therapy is not to need therapy, but to develop the coping skills and the life skills to address anxiety and depression. We need to be leaning into solutions.” 

Expanding suicide prevention education 

Meera Varma, the UCLA senior who helped calm the nerves of her dorm’s rattled undergraduates, is spreading the word about mental health on campus.

When Varma was first diagnosed with anxiety and depression, her immigrant family had a difficult time understanding her diagnosis and treatment. “There isn’t even a word in Hindi for ‘stigma,’” she said. Now she’s got her whole family, even her grandparents, using the VAR technique and talking openly about their mental health. 

Risks are not the same across demographic groups. The suicide rate for Black children younger than 13, according to the CDC, is almost twice that of white children. Other groups, like the LGBTQ community, also suffer higher rates of suicide risk. 

Lily Brown, director of the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, is part of a new research group aimed at studying those disparities and developing more targeted interventions. While Penn’s INSPIRE Center will look at all age groups, Brown and her colleague José Bauermeister will focus on college students in particular. 

They’re working on a low-cost intervention for college students that is brief and technology-based – a life-skills app for students who are a sexual or gender minority.

“People who identify as LGBTQ tend to report that, when they’re struggling with isolation, they get really depressed,” Brown said. “Finding ways to cope with discrimination, finding ways to build a social network, and finding ways of building positive emotions are the core targets of this project.” 

Meanwhile, Varma, who is graduating in May, will stay on at UCLA to get a master’s degree in social welfare and mental health policy. Her involvement with Active Minds, the JED Foundation and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, has her looking toward a career in mental health. 

“I feel like people are intimidated to start conversations about suicide,” she said. “As a person who has been suicidal, and who almost lost their life to suicide, I know what it’s like to be nervous to talk about it. I want to work to create policy changes around suicide prevention. Because it is something that’s preventable.”

This originally appeared at MindSite News and is published here in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Exchange.

The new mom was suffering from postpartum depression. She had just resigned from her security job of seven years, unable to take the stress. To make extra money, she began driving for ride-sharing companies, but she had to take her infant daughter along. As she struggled to make ends meet, she faced eviction from her home.

“I was overwhelmed. I knew I couldn’t give up, but I knew I didn’t have the energy to keep putting on a brave face,” said Gilbert, 32. “I didn’t have the fight in me.”

Then a friend told Gilbert about a new program from Atlanta-based nonprofit Women in Technology (WIT) that could help her launch a career in information technology. The application was due in four days so Gilbert called her contacts with an urgent request for recommendations and submitted the application in time.

During the interview, she was sure the panel would not take her seriously.

“How will you do this when you just walked away from your job?” one panel member asked.

“I am going to show my daughter that she can do whatever she wants to do,” Gilbert replied, crying.

A few days later, while she was driving for Uber, Gilbert got the call. She had been offered a spot in the program. “I felt like I had hope,” Gilbert said. “I said, ‘This is your light.’”

In a matter of weeks, the outbreak of a global pandemic would result in unprecedented numbers of women exiting the workforce, giving way to the lowest level of female participation in the workforce in more than three decades. Men have recouped all of their labor force losses since February 2020, but there are still nearly 1.1 million fewer women in the labor force, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly jobs report.

Thirty years ago, a group of women launched Women in Technology because they didn’t see other women in leadership roles. At the time, they were mostly concerned with networking, said WIT board president Patti Dismukes.

As they thought about ways to get more women in the pipeline, they formed programs for girls in middle school and high school with a career interest in science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. Eventually, they would expand to college, but two years ago, they realized that to build on their mission, they would need to rethink how women were entering the field.

Job growth in STEM fields has increased 79% since 1990 while overall employment has grown 34%, based on data from Pew Research. In 2022, women are expected to hold 25% of technical roles at large tech companies despite representing 32.9% of the overall workforce, according to Deloitte Insights. Women seem to be losing out in the world of tech.

“Everyone is fishing out of the same pond and colleges can’t educate and graduate people fast enough in IT,” Dismukes said. “We have to look differently at how we provide talent.”

In partnership with Emory University, WIT launched a program geared toward getting Georgia’s more than 300,000 single mothers out of low paying jobs and into tech. Gilbert was among the first 20 mothers to graduate from the program.

Gilbert’s car had been repossessed because she could no longer afford to make the payments, but she was motivated. Each Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Gilbert would take Uber to Sheltering Arms where caregivers would look after her daughter while she attended class virtually. WIT covered the cost of Uber and daycare. The organization also provided laptops and internet access for all attendees and distributed food vouchers to make sure the women would have a meal.

Sometimes the course was overwhelming, said Gilbert, who had previously been interested in IT but had little formal experience. The teachers and her classmates all collaborated to make sure she understood the concepts they learned. Each week she completed several assignments for homework, and if she was unable to complete labs during class on Saturday, she had to be sure they were turned in by Sunday evening.

A week after completing the 12-week course, she had interviews with a half-dozen companies.

Dismukes said her own entry into IT was a fluke but she was good at problem-solving. At WIT, she knew she could help change lives. The program for single mothers was so successful — 100% of the 40 women who have graduated have been placed in jobs — that they launched a new program that follows a similar format but has a broader reach. The Career Connexions program is virtual and is targeted toward women nationwide who are changing careers, re-entering the workforce, never earned a college degree or want to boost their incomes and leave low-wage jobs.

It starts with a 7-week introductory course on IT basics before moving to 12 weeks of training in cybersecurity or data analytics. Women accepted into the program after a two-step interview process pay $500 for tuition. They must maintain grades of 80% or higher, attend all classes and agree to accept a job. Partner companies pay a $15,000 placement fee which covers additional costs of training. The application deadline for the first class is April 9.

“We are bringing non-traditional candidates and if you don’t start thinking about non- traditional candidates you will be left behind,” Dismukes said. “Finding a job is the hardest thing to do. We want women to understand it is not just getting a certification, it is the guarantee that we are going to connect you with the right companies to get the jobs.”

When Gilbert was paired with Equifax, she called it “divine intervention.” The job aligns with her skill set and her goals, she said, and in 12 weeks she went from barely scraping by to getting a 400% salary increase.

“Sometimes I am in disbelief,” she said. “You don’t think you deserve these blessings but when you get them, you realize you are worthy.”

Her daughter turns 3 next month and Gilbert, who works remotely, has been able to move into her own home and replace her car.

She is moving forward with the firm belief that even when setbacks seem to hold you down, you can find the light that keeps you going.

This originally appeared at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and is published here in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Exchange.

At least three participants describe themselves as “sunny.”

Then, the mediator reads a script.

“The Positive Impact Circle includes those harmed by the offense, those who committed the offense and the community to determine the most effective response to promote healing and safety for everyone,” the mediator begins. 

The underlying philosophy for Piedmont Mediation’s process is restorative justice, said Terri Masiello, Piedmont Mediation’s executive director and the coordinator of the Restoring Youth Coalition of North Carolina. 

Restorative justice is the practice of bringing together affected parties of a crime to discuss what happened and what needs to happen to make things right.

Piedmont Mediation is a diversion program that serves as an alternative to juvenile court for some cases in the Piedmont area of North Carolina, serving Alexander, Iredell, Davie, Davidson and Randolph counties.

Masiello was trained in restorative justice in Colorado about seven years ago. In 2018, she started working with North Carolina’s juvenile system to help expand restorative justice programs in the state. This year, she said she’s seen an uptick of referrals to her programs.

They have advocated for less punitive approaches to juvenile offenses. That will be important as kids return to school post-pandemic. As schools have resumed in-person instruction, advocates for children say they’re starting to see an uptick in juvenile justice complaints. 

I hadn’t heard much about restorative justice in North Carolina, where it still remains the exception instead of the norm. I first heard about restorative justice in a different Piedmont, the  Piemonte region of northern Italy.

Reframing juvenile justice

Juvenile justice is different in Italy, said Michele Miravalle, a researcher at the Università degli Studi di Torino in Turin, Italy. 

In 2019 North Carolina, a state with 10.5 million people, incarcerated an average of more than 300 children 16 years old and under in various facilities on any given day. That was before the Raise the Age law was enacted. 

In contrast, a January 2021 report showed there were 281 children and young adults up to 24 years old incarcerated in Italian penal institutions on any given day for a population nearly six times the size of North Carolina.

The Turin Department of Juvenile Justice. Photo Credit: Elizabeth Thompson.

Diversion is a key part of the system, Miravalle said. Culturally and systemically, Italy’s juvenile justice system thinks differently about offenses by children than in the U.S.

“We have this strong Catholic tradition, even if we are in the postmodern era,” Miravalle said. “You still have this idea that if you are young, at the end, you need one more chance.”

One of the underpinning principles surrounding recent reforms to juvenile justice in North Carolina is that children are still developing behavioral regulation. That has played out in the push for the Raise the Age legislation which spared 16 and 17-year-olds who committed nonviolent crimes from the adult criminal justice system and the more recent efforts to pass Raise the Minimum Age legislation, which changed the minimum age for children to go to juvenile court from six to 10.

Countries such as Italy have begun to move away from thinking about juvenile offenses as crimes, and more like opportunities for rehabilitation.

Italy is at the forefront of implementing restorative justice practices, such as victim-offender mediation, in which the victim and the perpetrator of a crime meet, and with the help of a mediator, reconstruct what happened in the incident.

Victim-offender mediation was first introduced to Turin’s juvenile justice system in the mid-90s. Now, it plays a critical role in the way juvenile offenses are processed.

Restorative justice is often mistakenly perceived as a “weak response” to a crime, said Beatrice Maccarini, a mediator and member of Cooperativa DIKE per la mediazione dei conflitti.

In fact, victim-offender mediation is often very difficult for both the victim and the perpetrator of the crime, Maccarini said.

“There are some questions when you are victim of a crime that nobody can answer but the offender,” Maccarini said. That includes questions such as “why me?”

Maccarini makes the analogy that a crime, at its core, is a breakup of a relationship. The breakup of that relationship can cause fractures in all kinds of social relationships and expectations. Getting those answers can help both parties begin to repair that relationship, Maccarini said. It can help them to start healing, to be restored.

In some cases, Maccarini said she has seen mediation sessions where a victim and perpetrator of different incidents, but similar types of crimes sit down together.

“It works,” she said.

Restorative justice in North Carolina

Piedmont Mediation is one of a number of organizations starting to employ restorative justice practices in North Carolina.

After the state’s Division of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (JJDP) receives a complaint, a juvenile court counselor can make a diversion plan for the youth and their parent or guardian without sending the child to court, said Jerry Higgins, communications officer for JJDP at the North Carolina Department of Public Safety.

“Based on the information at hand, state juvenile court counselors can refer at-risk children and their families to programs funded by local Juvenile Crime Prevention Council programs and other programs,” Higgins said in an email. “JJDP often directs parents to community resources as well as to the local mental health and social service agencies to assist them.”

Some of these programs include clinical evaluation and psychological assessment, home-based family counseling and restorative justice practices such as those employed at Piedmont Mediation.

Just as in Italy, the purpose of employing restorative justice practices is not to adjudicate whether or not a crime occurred.

“We make decisions about how to move forward,” Masiello said, “how to address the harm that was done, and also how to make sure that all the parties that were harmed including the youth move forward in a positive way.”

Crime impacts people in more ways than one, Masiello said. For both parties, the crime is more than just an isolated incident. It impacts them, their families, the way they are viewed by their community. 

That’s why it can be so difficult to sit down and talk about it.

Community investment in children and taking responsibility for the next generation could be the key to making real change, said Barbara Fedders, assistant professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law.

“Maybe that’s part of the reason why it’s better in Italy,” Fedders said. “There’s more of a sense of social cohesion and being responsible for the next generation, even if they’re not biologically related. Because we need more of that.”

At the Positive Impact Circle, members of the community volunteer to participate, to listen to children explain their side of the story — not to judge, but to help them move on.

“We’re all very aware that we have a rare opportunity to play a role in that young person’s life,” Massiello said.

This originally appeared at North Carolina Health News and is published here in partnership with the Solutions Journalism Exchange.

Having worked for five years as an attorney at Bronx Defenders, he would repeatedly see the Administration for Children’s Services, NYC’s child welfare agency, “blatantly violating family’s rights,” he said. 

They would intimidate families to gain entry into their homes, he said, conduct intrusive searches, including asking children to take off their clothes to look for bruises and, in the most dire cases, separate youth from their parents without judicial approval by acting under what’s known as emergency removal powers. Yet in hundreds of instances each year, according to city data, judges would then deem the agency’s use of those emergency powers unlawful.

The attorney last week launched what he says is the nation’s first civil rights organization dedicated to fighting back against such violations: the Family Justice Law Center. 

There’s a long tradition of groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union or the NAACP Legal Defense Fund bringing lawsuits against alleged government wrongdoing, but “there’s no comparison to the child welfare system for when families’ rights are violated,” said Shalleck-Klein.

“This is the first organization in the country that is going to be dedicated to going on the offense and suing government agencies when they violate families’ rights,” he told The 74. “We’re filling a gaping hole in advocacy for parents.”

The Center will bring cases against ACS including alleged Fourth Amendment violations for illegal searches and seizures, he said. It will seek financial penalties to compensate families for their damages and will request injunctions against ACS practices it says are illegal.

“They’re not going to just get a slap on the wrist. They’re very literally going to have to pay for their mistakes,” said Shalleck-Klein.

“These types of lawsuits are hard,” he admits, but said he’s confident that “we’re going to be able to have not just success for individual clients, but also transformative systems change success.”

As many as 73,000 NYC children are the subject of ACS investigations each year, 87% of whom are Black or Hispanic. Although 23% of youth in the city are Black, they make up 56% of children removed from their families and placed in foster care. 

In 2019, out of more than 1,750 emergency family separations, over a quarter were immediately rejected by a Family Court judge and still more were thrown out in the days and weeks to come — meaning hundreds of children were unnecessarily put through the trauma of family separation, which studies show is associated with elevated risks of mental health challenges, incarceration and even early death.

“When ACS removes a child from a parent without a court order, if they did not have legal justification for that [removal], that is a constitutional violation,” said Shalleck-Klein. “We know that it is happening routinely.”

“ACS follows federal, state and city laws, and respects the constitutional rights of parents and children,” an ACS spokesperson said in an email to The 74, adding that the agency “is committed to being responsive to the needs of children and families.” ACS is required by law to investigate all reports it receives, the spokesperson said, noting that the total number of children entering foster care since 2017 has dropped by more than a third. 

Fewer than 2% of ACS investigations in 2021 resulted in child separation, the agency said.

“It is deeply concerning to us,” the spokesperson added, “that, year after year, there are dramatic racial and ethnic disparities in the reports ACS receives from the state.”

The agency is working to provide child care professionals with implicit bias trainings and education on ways to support families without calling the state’s child abuse hotline, it said.

Across the country, Black youth are more likely than not to experience a child welfare investigation, with 53% of all Black Americans undergoing the experience before they turn 18. Even if the investigations find no evidence of abuse or neglect, charges can remain on parents’ records for years, jeopardizing job prospects in fields like education and child care. 

Meanwhile, many white families hardly feel the presence of child protective services at all. A former ACS caseworker spoke with Mother Jones in 2020, relaying that, once, when she was looking for an elusive parent, she saw a white woman nearby and asked if she knew the parent’s whereabouts. The neighbor had never even heard of the caseworker’s agency.

“I never met one single Black family that asked me, ‘What’s ACS?’” the caseworker reflected. “There’s one group of people walking around not knowing that ACS exists, and there’s another group of people walking around living in fear of ACS.”

In fall 2020, Harlem community advocate Joyce McMillan interviewed New York City residents in majority-Black, Hispanic and Asian-American neighborhoods about their experiences with the agency and turned their responses into posters that now hang throughout the city.

“They tore my family apart,” one parent said.

“I felt like the police had come to my house once ACS came because they investigated my household like the police,” said another.

Out of the 500 residents to whom McMillan spoke, all but two or three, she said, knew about the agency. Youth and parents alike were haunted by their experiences, she said.

“For children, ACS is like the boogeyman. They run and hide when ACS knocks on the door. They think they’re going to be taken away from their parents,” explained McMillan, who is executive director of JMacForFamilies. Her organization seeks to abolish what it calls the “family regulation system” and calls for the government to support rather than punish families living in poverty. She now sits on the Family Justice Law Center’s community advisory board.

The new legal organization, she told The 74, will be a game-changer for families, finally giving them the opportunity to fight back when they believe their rights are violated.

“Families will have resources to deal with the harm,” she said. “ACS, we call them the family police for a reason. … Until the cameras started rolling, people didn’t believe that Black people got shot in the back and weren’t actually carrying a gun. And it’s the same thing with ACS. So I hope that this work that’s being done will bring out the truth.”

Attorney David Bloomfield, who represented NYC as an assistant corporation counsel, said “on a case-by-case basis, I think there are winnable situations of improper separation,” but system injunctions against ACS might be a “heavier lift.”

Still, the Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center law professor said “it can have a chilling effect on improper conduct if there’s able counsel for the families.”

The Family Justice Law Center has been selected for in-kind funding and guidance from the Urban Justice Center’s Social Justice Accelerator program. Legal scholars from Stanford, Harvard, New York University and other institutions sit on its academic advisory board.

ACS obtains court permission to enter homes in under 1% of all investigations. In most other searches, parents give the caseworker verbal permission to enter their space. But if a caseworker bangs on the door saying that they will return with the police if the family doesn’t let them in, and if the parents don’t know their legal rights, “Was that really a voluntary entry into the home?” asks Shalleck-Klein.

“[Child protective services] may seek the assistance of the police if CPS determine that immediate protective measures are necessary,” the agency said.

Similarly, 27% of emergency child removals get immediately struck down by a Family Court judge. While the emergency removal power is vital when youth are in imminent danger, said the attorney, its abuse can represent an unconstitutional seizure.

“ACS knows there’s no consequence for them doing something illegal,” he said. “If they violate families’ rights, what happens is that the child is returned home. But there’s nothing in the moment stopping them or giving them any pause from conducting an emergency removal when there’s not just cause.”

“We hope that the [Family Justice Law Center] will inject more accountability into the process,” he continued, “because they are now put on notice that they can’t act with impunity and their illegal actions will be challenged in court.”

Shalleck-Klein hopes the Center’s work will lead to fewer children in the foster care system and shorter durations for those who are, while not worsening, or even decreasing, the rates of child maltreatment. “In other words, keeping as many children home safely with their parents as we can,” he said.

The goal parallels the impacts of other changes in the Family Court system. When the legal team representing defendant parents includes social work staff and parent advocates, foster stays were significantly reduced with no change in child safety outcomes, a 2019 NYU study found. And similarly, pilot programs that boosted legal defense for families led to major savings for municipalities by avoiding costly foster care when poverty-induced issues might otherwise have been mistaken for parental neglect, a 2020 evaluation from Casey Family Programs revealed.

McMillan hopes the plan succeeds, not just for the children who might avoid unneeded family separation, but also for those who indeed are suffering from abuse at home.

If ACS spends less time mistaking poverty-related issues for abusive parenting, “then maybe they will focus on children who actually need help,” said the advocate.

While driver shortages and rising costs for buses and repairs are issues for schools nationwide, in Indianapolis, these challenges have spurred innovations for both the school district and a nonprofit that supports the charter and innovation schools that educate 60 percent of the city’s children.

Because the district’s per-pupil busing costs outpaced that of other districts in the state, “We had to rethink our long-term strategy,” said Zachary Mulholland, Indianapolis Public Schools’s executive director of operations. 

With school choice available to every student in the district, children in Indianapolis travel farther on average than those who attend their neighborhood school. Throw in rising transportation costs, the city’s odd star shape and a massive road construction project downtown that necessitated changing routes, and change was necessary, he added. 

In September, the district started enforcing rules limiting bus service to elementary students who live more than a mile from school and to high schoolers who live more than 1.5 miles away, consolidated school bus stops and offered some high schoolers mass transit passes in lieu of school transportation. This removed about 2,500 students from the bus system, allowing the district to chop 70 routes from the 300 it had been running.

The 31,000-student district expects to save more than $4 million in transportation costs this school year, more than 10 percent of its transportation budget.

Consolidation was also the answer for the city’s innovation and charter schools — but for a different reason. Before the pandemic, each school would arrange transportation for its own students, meaning thousands of kids were criss-crossing the city’s 368 square miles every day. But this unwieldy arrangement was exacerbated when the pandemic started; it became harder to find drivers, bus vendors had less capacity to serve single schools, and as school choice grew, it became more likely that children living on the same street would be attending different schools, said Kateri Whitley, director of communication at The Mind Trust, a nonprofit that supports school choice in Indianapolis. “This created a lot of inefficiency.”

Seeking a solution, Mind Trust officials decided to raise money, hire six bus drivers and partnered with a transportation company to combine service to numerous schools.

When that idea was thwarted by the school bus shortage, the group investigated using vans — but ran into bureaucratic red tape. A state regulation prohibits the use of any vehicle other than a full-size yellow bus to transport children to school, even if the schools need to move only a handful of students.

“It’s really hard for a single school to get good [bus] service,” said Brandon Brown, CEO of The Mind Trust. “We view this as an equity issue. These are some of the most onerous transportation rules in the country.”

Brown took his cause to the state Legislature and persuaded lawmakers to pass a bill that would give schools the flexibility to use smaller vehicles to transport students. The legislation fixes two problems: It allows schools to use vans, and the drivers won’t need a commercial license, making them easier to hire in today’s competitive workforce. Gov. Eric Holcomb signed the bill March 18.

Such attempts to rethink transportation to improve student service while controlling costs are rare, according to a report from Bellwether Education Partners that calls for more schools and governments to consider radical changes. In the last 40 years, the per-student cost of busing a child from home to school has jumped 75 percent, according to the nonprofit’s 2017 report, Miles to Go: Bringing School Transportation into the 21^st Century. This is mainly due to two factors: with more school choice, students are as likely to travel crosstown as across the street, and fewer overall students are using buses to get to school.

Though Indiana is one of only two states that don’t require districts to offer students any transportation to school, the Indianapolis district has been ahead of the curve for a while. The district refurbished its bus fleet in 2016 by buying 100 buses, Mulholland said, and it outsourced its entire transportation system ahead of the 2020-21 school year, shielding the district from the nearly $1-a-gallon increase in gas costs last year.

Still, the district “felt the pinch,” Mulholland said, as it raised salaries and doubled up routes to battle driver shortages. And while existing contracts protected the district from inflationary price increases, that’s a temporary respite until those contracts are renegotiated, he said. 

While Indiana’s prohibition on using passenger vans to transport students may seem outdated, it is far from rare. Twenty-nine states prohibit using vans with students in any way, while another 11 states, including Indiana, allow them only for school-related activities, such as field trips and athletic events.

The change could save millions of dollars for the city’s charters and innovation schools, said Brown. The Mind Trust hopes to serve up to 15 schools this fall using both full-size buses and passenger vans, Whitley said. 

“Parents want a more responsive school transportation system, customized to the choice they are making,” Brown added.

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to The 74.