Schools in North of Boston and southern New Hampshire communities, including Newburyport, are among the largest recipients of grants in the latest round of Clean School Bus Program awards.
As part of its ongoing effort to replace diesel-fueled school buses, the Biden administration said this week it will provide about 530 school districts across nearly all states with an additional $1 billion to help them purchase clean school buses.
Massachusetts school districts are in line for more than $42 million to purchase electric buses as part of an effort to upgrade the state’s aging fleet and reduce emissions from diesel-powered vehicles.
Newburyport is receiving $3 million for 15 buses, according to the Biden administration.
The Derry Cooperative School District in New Hampshire is receiving one of the largest grants in the region – $8.6 million for 25 electric school buses, thanks to an application submitted by First Student Inc., the transportation contractor for the district.
Several North of Boston school districts are also sharing in the e-bus funding, according to a list provided by the White House. Andover is receiving $5 million for 25 e-buses, while Ipswich is getting $5 million for 15.
Salem is receiving $2.6 million for 13 e-buses, the Biden administration said. Other school districts, including Gloucester, Marblehead, Beverly and the Essex North Shore Agricultural and Technical School, are also getting funding to buy new e-buses.
In addition to Derry, eight other New Hampshire districts such as Concord and Nashua will receive some of the funding, according to the White House. The money comes from the latest disbursements of grants through the Clean School Bus Program administered by the U.S. Department of Environmental Protection.
The rebates will help school districts purchase more than 3,400 clean school buses – 92% of them electric – to accelerate the nation’s transition to zero-emission vehicles and produce cleaner air in schools and communities, according to the Biden administration.
EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said in a conference call with reporters Tuesday that the funding will help “transform the nation’s school bus fleet to better protect our most precious cargo – our kids – saving school districts money, improving air quality, and bolstering American manufacturing all at the same time.”
The federal program has awarded nearly $3 billion for 8,500 electric and alternative fuel buses in more than 1,000 school districts, according to the Biden administration.
Low-income, rural and tribal communities – accounting for about 45% percent of the selected projects – are slated to receive roughly 67% of the total funding, per the administration.
Regan noted how “low-income communities and communities of color have long felt the disproportionate impacts of air pollution leading to severe health outcomes that continue to impact these populations.”
As for business and economic opportunities, Regan pointed to the development of well-paying manufacturing jobs and investment in local businesses stemming from the increasing demand for these clean school buses.
“As more and more schools make the switch to electric buses, there will be a need for American-made batteries, charging stations and service providers to maintain the buses supercharging and reinvigorating local economies,” he added.
The program was initially funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed by Biden in November 2021, which includes $5 billion over five years to replace the country’s current school buses with “zero-emission and low-emission models.”
In January, the EPA announced more than $1 billion in funding for 2,700 clean school buses in 280 school districts in 37 states, including Massachusetts.
Federal health officials say exposure to diesel exhaust can lead to major health conditions such as asthma and respiratory illnesses, especially among children.
Despite the Biden administration’s efforts, e-buses still make up a tiny percentage of the buses on the roads nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
The number of e-buses grew by 112% between 2018 and 2021. But with just 1,300 on the roadways in 2021, that represented just 2% of the transit buses in operation, according to DOT data. Of about 500,000 school buses nationwide, only 1,800 were electric in 2021, the federal agency said.
Material from States Newsroom reporter Shauneen Miranda was used in this report.
SPOKANE, Wash. — Before giving birth to her daughter, Kaleeya Baldwin, 19, had given up on education.
She’d dropped out of school as a seventh grader, after behavior problems had banished her to alternative schools. Growing up in foster homes and later landing in juvenile court had convinced her to disappear from every system that claimed responsibility for her.
“I was just really angry with everything,” said Kaleeya.
But in early 2020, during what would have been her freshman year in high school, Kaleeya discovered she was pregnant. At her first ultrasound appointment, a nurse handed her a stack of pamphlets. One, advertising a new school for pregnant and parenting teens, caught her attention.
“Something switched when Akylah got here,” Kaleeya said, referring to her daughter. “I was a whole different person. Now it’s high school that matters. It’s a legacy — and it’s hope for her.”
Kaleeya Baldwin, 19, holds her daughter,3-and-a-half-year-old Aklyah.
Four years ago, and two months pregnant, Kaleeya enrolled as one of the first students at Lumen High School. The Spokane charter school — its name, which means a unit of light, was selected by young parents who wished someone had shone a light on education for them — today enrolls about five dozen expectant and parenting teens, including fathers. Inside a three-story office building in the city’s downtown business core, Lumen provides full-day child care, baby supplies, mental health counseling and other support as students work toward graduation based on customized education plans.
When the Spokane school district authorized the charter school, it acknowledged that these students had been underserved in traditional high schools and that alternatives were needed. Nationwide, only about half of teen mothers receive a high school degree by the age of 22. Researchers say common school policies like strict attendance rules and dress codes often contribute to young parents deciding to drop out. In April, the U.S. Department of Education issued new regulations to strengthen protections for pregnant and parenting students, though it’s unclear whether the revisions, which also include protections for LGBTQ+ youth, will survive legal challenges.
Lumen High School enrolls about five dozen pregnant and parenting teens, including fathers, at its downtown Spokane campus. Executive assistant Lindsay Ainley works the front desk. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Solutions for these young parents have become even more urgent after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling overturning the constitutional right to an abortion. Lumen is located about 20 miles from the Idaho border, which has one of the country’s strictest abortion bans. Recently, representatives from a network of charter schools in the state toured Lumen to evaluate whether they might bring a similar program to the Boise area. Researchers have also visited the school to study how educators elsewhere might replicate its supportive services, not only for pregnant students, but those facing crises like substance use.
“There are some bright spots. Lumen is one,” said Jeannette Pai-Espinosa, president of the Justice + Joy National Collaborative, which advocates for young women, including teen mothers, referring to support in K-12 schools for pregnant and parenting teens. “By and large it’s just not really a priority on the list of many, many things schools are challenged with and facing now.”
Nationally, teenage birth rates have fallen for the past three decades, reaching an all-time low in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That same year, the decline in teen births skidded to a halt in Texas, one year after the state’s Republican lawmakers had enacted a six-week abortion ban. Experts fear Texas’ change in direction could foreshadow a national uptick in teen pregnancy now that adolescents face more hurdles to abortion access in red states.
Decades of research have revealed the long-term effects of adolescent pregnancy and childbearing: The CDC reports children of teen mothers tend to have lower performance in school and higher chances of dropping out of high school. They’re more likely to have health problems and give birth as teenagers themselves.
Shauna Edwards witnessed such outcomes as part of her work with pregnant and parenting teens for a religious nonprofit and in high schools along the Idaho-Washington border. She also learned the limits of trying to shoehorn services for those students into a school’s existing budget. At one campus, where Edwards helped as a counselor, she said the principal assigned just one teacher for all subjects and two classroom aides to handle child care for the babies of 60 students.
Principal Melissa Pettey, center right, meets with Lumen High School support staff to discuss current student needs. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Frustrated, she tried to convince the superintendent of another school district to offer a similar teen parent program, but with more funding. He couldn’t justify the costs, Edwards said. Instead, he suggested she open her own school.
“I could serve all of Spokane, ideally, and wouldn’t have the risk of getting shut down by a school district trying to balance its budget,” said Edwards, executive director for Lumen.
Every morning, students from across Spokane County — at 1,800 square miles, it’s a bit larger than Rhode Island — trek to the Lumen campus downtown. Many take public transit, which is free for youth under 18, and end their rides at a regional bus hub across the street from the school. Once their children reach six months, Lumen students can drop them off at an on-site child care and preschool center, operated by a nonprofit partner, before heading upstairs to start their day. Before then, parents can bring their babies to class.
The baby boutique at Lumen High School includes shelves stacked with baby formula, diapers, milk bottles, nasal sprays and other donated supplies.
Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Lumen High School stocks its on-site baby boutique with clothing and personal hygiene products for students and their children. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Funding for small schools in Washington state helps Lumen afford a full teaching staff — one adult each for English, history, math, science and special education. The charter also has a full-time principal, social worker and counselor. Other adults manage student internships or donations to the school’s food bank and “baby boutique,” where students can “shop” for a stroller, formula, diapers and clothes — all free of charge.
It’s common to see an infant cradled in a teacher’s arm, allowing students to focus on their classwork. On a recent afternoon, two couples traded cradling duties with their newborns during a parenting class on lactation.
“Delivering is something that happens to you. Not so with nursing. You have to do it,” said Megan Macy, a guest teacher, who introduced herself as “the official milk lady.”
Megan Macy, a guest teacher and lactation expert, leads a parenting class that students at Lumen High School attend every afternoon. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Kaleeya shared a bit about her daughter Akylah’s delivery: “I was so depleted. I was her chew toy, her crying shoulder, her feeding bag. Once we got home, she wouldn’t latch at all.”
Her friend Keelah, 17, rocked her newborn in a car seat. (The Hechinger Report is identifying the parents who are minors by first name only to protect their privacy.) “It’s hard, and it’s scary,” she said of the first week home with the baby. “She lost a pound between the hospital and pediatrician.”
Lumen contracts with the Shades of Motherhood Network, a Spokane-based nonprofit founded to support Black mothers, to run the parenting classes. The school reserves space for health officials to meet with mothers and babies for routine checkups and government food programs. And founding principal Melissa Pettey has pushed — and paid for — teachers to make home visits with each student.
For each student, Lumen staff develops an individual graduation plan based on earned and missing credits from previous high schools. The school uses an instructional approach, called mastery-based learning, that allows students to earn credits based on competency in academic skills, often applied in projects. The parenting class, for example, counts as a credit for career and technical education, depending on how the contracted teachers evaluate each student.
Parenting classes at Lumen High School include lessons on lactation. The classes count as a career and technical education credit. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
The learn-as-you-go approach also allows Lumen to work around the instability in the lives of their students, who are often coping with children’s illnesses, day care challenges, housing insecurity and other issues.
But the chaos in a young parent’s life can look like inconsistent attendance or even truancy on state accountability reports. Just a tenth of Lumen students attend school regularly, which the state defines as missing no more than two days of class each month.
Next year, the Spokane school district will review Lumen’s operations and performance to decide whether to renew the school’s charter. State data shows less than a fifth of Lumen’s students graduate on time, while a third dropped out. The state doesn’t publicly report testing data from Lumen, due to its size. But Edwards and Pettey said proficiency on state exams isn’t their main goal.
“One student attended 16 elementary schools. Six high schools before junior year,” Pettey said. “Think of the learning missed. How do we get that student to an 11th grade level?”
Payton, a senior, researches historical conflict around gold for her semester-long project with Trevor Bradley, history teacher at Lumen High School. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Added Edwards: “If you can grow them to read baby books to their kids, that’s a success.”
Lumen’s authorizer, Spokane Public Schools, will modify how it evaluates the charter’s performance to take its nontraditional students into account, according to Kristin Whiteaker, who oversees charter schools for the district.
She noted that about a third of Lumen’s incoming high schoolers test at an elementary level; another third test at middle school levels. But during the 2022-23 school year, 52 percent of students posted growth in math while at Lumen, and nearly two-thirds performed better on English language arts exams, according to the school. All of the students who make it to graduation have been accepted into college; 95 percent actually enrolled or started working six months after graduation.
“They’re serving such a unique population,” Whiteaker said. “If you can provide a pathway for students to the next stage of their lives, that’s accomplishing their goals.”
Lumen High School partners with GLOW Children to provide on-site child care for students on the first floor of the charter school’s three-story campus. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Lumen, she added, removes many of the barriers that pregnant and parenting teens face at Spokane’s traditional high schools. Some struggle to complete make-up work after missing weeks or months of classes for parental leave. Most have no access to child care, and regular schools don’t allow babies in the classroom.
Ideally, some experts say, expecting and parenting teens could remain in their original schools and receive these supports. That’s rarely the case, though, and the social stigma alone can keep young parents from finishing their education.
At the national level, a 2010 law that provided funding to help these students expired in 2019. Jessica Harding and Susan Zief, with the research firm Mathematica, studied the effectiveness of those federally-funded programs and found that successful ones work hard to provide flexibility, for excused absences or adding maternity clothes to dress codes. Others get creative, helping students navigate public transportation and modify their work schedules to meet with students after hours.
“Sometimes,” Harding said, “the solutions are not complicated.”
In 2022, when the Supreme Court upended abortion care nationwide, Edwards expected students without reproductive choice in Idaho to attempt to enroll in Lumen. A handful have inquired with the school, said Edwards, but to enroll they would have to move across the state border to Washington where housing costs are significantly higher.
In fact, Lumen recently lost one student whose father found a cheaper home in Idaho. Average rents across Spokane County have risen more than 50 percent over the past five years. And as of March, about half of Lumen students qualified as homeless. One young mother slept outside during winter break while her newborn stayed with a friend. Three students, asked what they would change about Lumen, cited affordable housing or temporary shelter that could help them.
Across Washington, pregnant and parenting teens account for 12 percent of all unaccompanied youth in the homeless system. But the state has a severe shortage of shelter beds available for youth under 18, with even fewer supportive housing options that allow young families to stay together, according to a February 2024 state report. Edwards, meanwhile, has talked with developers to see if they could reserve affordable units for students or loosen rules that prevent minors from signing a lease.
Rene, a senior at Lumen High School, holds his newborn son, RJ, during class. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
“We missed a whole month of class. It was a long month,” said Mena, a 17-year-old junior who convinced her boyfriend, Rene, to enroll before their son’s delivery, in January.
Rene Jr., or RJ, had already lived with the couple in several homes during his first few months. A restraining order with one set of RJ’s grandparents and guardianship battle with the other pushed Mena and Rene to couch-surf with friends.
“School was the only way we could see each other,” Rene said. “I’m surprised, honestly, they can get me to graduation,” he added, while burping RJ. “He’s going to have a future.”
Later, as Mena suctioned RJ’s stuffy nose in another classroom, Rene struggled to stay awake in math. He had forgotten what he’d learned in some earlier lessons on graphing linear equations, and retreated into social media on his phone. Another student badgered him to “put in some effort,” but Rene resisted.
His teacher, Trevor Bradley, intervened. “What’s special about today? Why don’t you want to try?” he said. “You told me you’re tired because the baby’s keeping you up at night.”
After drawing another set of equations on the whiteboard, Bradley asked Rene and the other student for help with finding the values of x and y. Rene barely whispered his answer.
“That’s it! You do remember,” Bradley said, as Rene yawned.
From the start, Lumen’s founders planned to include fathers in the school. Pai-Espinosa, with the National Collaborative, said it’s unusual for K-12 systems to focus on fathers, since mothers often have custodial rights. And at Lumen, the inclusion of “baby daddies” — as students and staff refer to them — sometimes adds teen drama to the mix of emotions and hormones already present at the school.
Lumen High School’s founder and executive director Shauna Edwards, right, meets with social worker Tracie Fowler. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Lumen’s lack of diversity among adults there has also bothered some students, including Kaleeya. Only 40 percent of her peers identify as white, and all of the school’s teachers and administrators are white. Edwards said it has been difficult to recruit a diverse staff. As a temporary solution the school contracted with the Shades of Motherhood Network for parenting classes.
“It’s hard being in a white space with no Black teachers,” Kaleeya said.
Still, she said she liked the school’s emphasis on engaging students in semester-long projects in different subjects and on real-world problems. Last year, confronted with drug-use problems near the downtown campus, students researched and presented options for the city to consider on safe needle disposal in public places. Each student’s individual graduation plan also includes an internship.
Payton, 17, has wanted to be a school counselor since before giving birth to her daughter in late 2022. Her internship at nearby Sacajawea Middle School convinced her to stay on that career path. Another mother, Alana, started an internship this spring with a local credit union and plans to use the marketing experience to help her advocate for children with disabilities in the future.
Kaleeya Baldwin and her daughter, Akylah, walk home after school. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Kaleeya recently turned her internship, with a downtown restaurant, into a part-time job. She planned to save for college, but no longer needs to. Gonzaga University notified her in March of a full-ride scholarship to study there this fall.
“Lumen didn’t change who I was,” Kaleeya said. “I did this for my daughter. I didn’t want to be that low-income family. So I got my ass up, got into this school and I got an education.”
This story about teen parents was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
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BEIRUT, Lebanon — Living in a tent in rebel-held northwestern Syria, Rudaina al-Salim and her family struggle to find enough water for drinking and other basic needs such as cooking and washing. Their encampment north of the city of Idlib hasn’t seen any aid in six months.
“We used to get food aid, hygiene items,” said the mother of four. “Now we haven’t had much in a while.”
Al-Salim’s story is similar to that of many in this region of Syria, where most of the 5.1 million people have been internally displaced — sometimes more than once — in the country’s civil war, now in its 14th year, and rely on aid to survive.
U.N. agencies and international humanitarian organizations have for years struggled with shrinking budgets, further worsened by the coronavirus pandemic and conflicts elsewhere. The wars in Ukraine and Sudan, and more recently Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip are the focus of the world’s attention.
Syria’s war, which has killed nearly half a million people and displaced half the country’s pre-war population of of 23 million, has long remained largely frozen and so are also efforts to find a viable political solution to end it. Meanwhile, millions of Syrians have been pulled into poverty, and struggle with accessing food and health care as the economy deteriorates across the country’s front lines.
Along with the deepening poverty, there is growing hostility in neighboring countries that host Syrian refugees and that struggle with crises of their own.
Aid organizations are now making their annual pitches to donors ahead of a fundraising conference in Brussels for Syria on Monday. But humanitarian workers believe that pledges will likely fall short and that further aid cuts would follow.
“We have moved from assisting 5.5 million a year to about 1.5 million people in Syria,” Carl Skau, the U.N. World Food Program’s deputy executive director, told The Associated Press. He spoke during a recent visit to Lebanon, which hosts almost 780,000 registered Syrian refugees — and hundreds of thousands of others who are undocumented.
“When I look across the world, this is the (aid) program that has shrunk the most in the shortest period for time,” Skau said.
Just 6% of the United Nations’ appeal for aid to Syria in 2024 has so far been secured ahead of Monday’s annual fundraising conference organized by the European Union, said David Carden, U.N. deputy regional humanitarian coordinator for Syria.
For the northwestern region of Syria, that means the U.N. is only able to feed 600,000 out of the 3.6 million people facing food insecurity, meaning they lack access to sufficient food. The U.N. says some 12.9 million Syrians are food insecure across the country.
The U.N. hopes the Brussels conference can raise more than $4 billion in “lifesaving aid” to support almost two-thirds of the 16.7 million Syrians in need, both within the war-torn country and in neighboring countries, particularly Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.
At last year’s conference, donors pledged $10.3 billion — about $6 billion in grants and the rest in loans — just months after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Turkey and much of northern Syria, killing over 59,000 people, including 6,000 in Syria.
For northwestern Syria, an enclave under rebel control, aid “is literally a matter of life and death” this year, Carden told the AP during a recent visit to Idlib province. Without funding, 160 health facilities there would close by end of June, he said.
The International Rescue Committee’s head for Syria, Tanya Evans, said needs are “at their highest ever,” with increasing numbers of Syrians turning to child labor and taking on debt to pay for food and basics.
In Lebanon, where nearly 90% of Syrian refugees live in poverty, they also face flagging aid and increasing resentment from the Lebanese, struggling with their own country’s economic crisis since 2019. Disgruntled officials have accused the refugees of surging crime and competition in the job market.
Lebanon’s bickering political parties have united in a call for a crackdown on undocumented Syrian migrants and demand refugees return to so-called “safe zones” in Syria.
U.N. agencies, human rights groups and Western governments say there are no such areas.
Um Omar, a Syrian refugee from Homs, works in a grocery store in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli — an impoverished community that once warmly welcomed Syrian refugees.
For her work, she gets to bring home every day a bundle of bread and some vegetables to feed her family of five. They live rent-free in a tent on a plot of land that belongs to the grocery store’s owners.
“I have to leave the kids early in the morning without breakfast so I can work,” she said, asking to be identified only by her nickname, Arabic for “Omar’s mother.” She fears reprisals because of heightened hostilities against Syrians.
The shrinking U.N. aid they receive does not pay the bills. Her husband, who shares her fears for their safety, used to work as a day laborer but has rarely left their home in weeks.
She says deportation to Syria, where President Bashar Assad’s government is firmly entrenched, would spell doom for her family.
“If my husband was returned to Syria, he’ll either go to jail or (face) forced conscription,” she explains.
Still, many in Lebanon tell her family, “you took our livelihoods,” Um Omar said. There are also those who tell them they should leave, she added, so that the Lebanese “will finally catch a break.”
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Living in a tent in rebel-held northwestern Syria, Rudaina al-Salim and her family struggle to find enough water for drinking and other basic needs such as cooking and washing. Their encampment north of the city of Idlib hasn’t seen any aid in six months.
“We used to get food aid, hygiene items,” said the mother of four. “Now we haven’t had much in a while.”
Al-Salim’s story is similar to that of many in this region of Syria, where most of the 5.1 million people have been internally displaced — sometimes more than once — in the country’s civil war, now in its 14th year, and rely on aid to survive.
U.N. agencies and international humanitarian organizations have for years struggled with shrinking budgets, further worsened by the coronavirus pandemic and conflicts elsewhere. The wars in Ukraine and Sudan, and more recently Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip are the focus of the world’s attention.
Syria’s war, which has killed nearly half a million people and displaced half the country’s pre-war population of of 23 million, has long remained largely frozen and so are also efforts to find a viable political solution to end it. Meanwhile, millions of Syrians have been pulled into poverty, and struggle with accessing food and health care as the economy deteriorates across the country’s front lines.
Along with the deepening poverty, there is growing hostility in neighboring countries that host Syrian refugees and that struggle with crises of their own.
Aid organizations are now making their annual pitches to donors ahead of a fundraising conference in Brussels for Syria on Monday. But humanitarian workers believe that pledges will likely fall short and that further aid cuts would follow.
“We have moved from assisting 5.5 million a year to about 1.5 million people in Syria,” Carl Skau, the U.N. World Food Program’s deputy executive director, told The Associated Press. He spoke during a recent visit to Lebanon, which hosts almost 780,000 registered Syrian refugees — and hundreds of thousands of others who are undocumented.
“When I look across the world, this is the (aid) program that has shrunk the most in the shortest period for time,” Skau said.
Just 6% of the United Nations’ appeal for aid to Syria in 2024 has so far been secured ahead of Monday’s annual fundraising conference organized by the European Union, said David Carden, U.N. deputy regional humanitarian coordinator for Syria.
For the northwestern region of Syria, that means the U.N. is only able to feed 600,000 out of the 3.6 million people facing food insecurity, meaning they lack access to sufficient food. The U.N. says some 12.9 million Syrians are food insecure across the country.
The U.N. hopes the Brussels conference can raise more than $4 billion in “lifesaving aid” to support almost two-thirds of the 16.7 million Syrians in need, both within the war-torn country and in neighboring countries, particularly Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.
At last year’s conference, donors pledged $10.3 billion — about $6 billion in grants and the rest in loans — just months after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Turkey and much of northern Syria, killing over 59,000 people, including 6,000 in Syria.
For northwestern Syria, an enclave under rebel control, aid “is literally a matter of life and death” this year, Carden told the AP during a recent visit to Idlib province. Without funding, 160 health facilities there would close by end of June, he said.
The International Rescue Committee’s head for Syria, Tanya Evans, said needs are “at their highest ever,” with increasing numbers of Syrians turning to child labor and taking on debt to pay for food and basics.
In Lebanon, where nearly 90% of Syrian refugees live in poverty, they also face flagging aid and increasing resentment from the Lebanese, struggling with their own country’s economic crisis since 2019. Disgruntled officials have accused the refugees of surging crime and competition in the job market.
Lebanon’s bickering political parties have united in a call for a crackdown on undocumented Syrian migrants and demand refugees return to so-called “safe zones” in Syria.
U.N. agencies, human rights groups and Western governments say there are no such areas.
Um Omar, a Syrian refugee from Homs, works in a grocery store in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli — an impoverished community that once warmly welcomed Syrian refugees.
For her work, she gets to bring home every day a bundle of bread and some vegetables to feed her family of five. They live rent-free in a tent on a plot of land that belongs to the grocery store’s owners.
“I have to leave the kids early in the morning without breakfast so I can work,” she said, asking to be identified only by her nickname, Arabic for “Omar’s mother.” She fears reprisals because of heightened hostilities against Syrians.
The shrinking U.N. aid they receive does not pay the bills. Her husband, who shares her fears for their safety, used to work as a day laborer but has rarely left their home in weeks.
She says deportation to Syria, where President Bashar Assad’s government is firmly entrenched, would spell doom for her family.
“If my husband was returned to Syria, he’ll either go to jail or (face) forced conscription,” she explains.
Still, many in Lebanon tell her family, “you took our livelihoods,” Um Omar said. There are also those who tell them they should leave, she added, so that the Lebanese “will finally catch a break.”
This story was produced by The 19th and is reprinted with permission.
PASADENA, Calif. — After starting elementary school in the late 1960s, Naomi Hirahara and three other girls formed a clique called the C.L.A.N., an acronym that represented each of the girl’s first initials. Hirahara said she and her friends didn’t consider the racial implications of their group’s name until one of their fathers objected: “The Klan is very bad!”
The group consisted of Hirahara, who is Japanese-American, two Black girls and a White Jewish girl. They attended Loma Alta Elementary, a racially diverse school in Altadena, Calif., that stood out from many others in the Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD), especially its high schools, which were more racially homogenous.
“I really treasured the fact that we could form these interracial and intercultural relationships,” Hirahara said of her school, where, she recalled, students acknowledged racial differences, but weren’t fixated on them.
Seventy years after the Brown decision on May 17, 1954, PUSD is still rebounding from the white flight that followed its desegregation order. More than 27,700 school-age youth live in Pasadena, Altadena and Sierra Madre, the communities served by the district, but only about half of them attend public school.
Pasadena High School. Credit: Stella Kalina for The 19th
With 133,560 residents, Pasadena has one of the densest concentrations of private schools in the country, according to school officials. But the moms in the community who support public schools have organized to create a more equitable and diverse educational landscape.
They have teamed up with local educational organizations to advocate for the school district, and by extension, for racially and economically diverse schools. They have reached out to families with preschoolers, joined public school tours and gone door-to-door to reframe the narrative around PUSD. District officials, for their part, have expanded magnet and dual language immersion offerings, among other competitive programs, at schools to attract families from a wide range of backgrounds.
Families and officials have also worked together to educate realtors. It turns out that some of them dissuaded homeowners from enrolling children in PUSD, contributing to the exodus to private schools and, more recently, charter schools.
Changing negative perceptions that date back to school desegregation during the 1970s hasn’t been easy, they said. Back then, the backlash to the busing program occurred almost as soon as it started, with a recall campaign against school board members and a near 12-percentage-point drop in white student enrollment. Ronald Reagan, who was California’s governor at the time, stoked the fire when he signed legislation that prohibited busing without parental consent.
Today, advocating for Pasadena’s public schools is all the more challenging when considering that more than 40 private schools have been established in PUSD’s boundaries; the district has 23 public schools. In interviews, community members told The 19th that the proliferation of private schools has enabled white, middle- and upper-class families to evade public schools in the five decades since court-ordered desegregation.
“We really, truly haven’t recovered from the very pervasive belief in the area that PUSD schools are not up to snuff,” said Brian McDonald, who served as PUSD’s superintendent for nine years before stepping down in 2023.
California is not usually a place associated with segregation, though segregation has historically been a problem in the state. A 1973 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that school segregation there and elsewhere in the West is frequently “as severe as in the South.” A report released last month by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA — “The Unfinished Battle for Integration in a Multiracial America – from Brown to Now” — ranked California as the top state in the country where Black and Latino students attend schools with the lowest percentages of white students.
“California has gone through a major racial transition,” said Gary Orfield, one of the authors of the report and the co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. “It was an overwhelmingly White state in terms of school enrollment at the time of the Brown decision, but it’s now, of course, a state that is overwhelmingly non-White in terms of student enrollment. That’s basically caused by tanking birth rates and immigration.”
Fueling segregation, Orfield said, is the fact that California has largely lacked state policies designed to racially balance schools since the 1960s and 1970s, when court orders brought about change.
In Pasadena, some residents say that the school district’s reputation is improving and more people want to invest and enroll their children in public schools. Although white and Asian-American students remain underrepresented in PUSD, the White student population has slightly increased over the past 20 years despite the drop in the city’s White population during that period.
After failed attempts, Pasadena voters have approved ballot measures to increase funding for local schools in recent years, enabling the district to make millions of dollars in upgrades. The district has also received national recognition for its academic programs, school tours are packed and young parents now tend to view diversity as an asset, its supporters say.
“Most school districts across the country have given up on integration. It’s not on the radar screen,” said Richard Kahlenberg, who has authored studies on PUSD and is director of housing policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. “Pasadena, along with a number of other forward-looking communities, is trying to do something about that. They haven’t reached all their goals, but I’m inspired that there is a critical mass of parents who recognize the benefits of diversity for all students.”
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Pasadena High School. Credit: Stella Kalina for The 19th
During a recent information session for prospective public school parents, Nancy Dufford, executive director of the Pasadena Education Network (PEN), which works to get families involved in district schools, told the audience: “Probably, a lot of you were told when you moved here that you couldn’t send your kids to public school.”
She was stunned to find out that none of the families had actually heard such comments. It was the first time she had spoken to a group of parents who hadn’t been warned away. In Pasadena, Dufford said, it has been tradition for established families not to send their children to public schools. “So many people live here for long periods of time,” she said. “So you have generations of families here who have that message.”
The message ends up making its way to newer Pasadenans. Dufford said she heard it herself after becoming a mother in the 1990s, shortly after relocating to the city. In fact, PEN, the group she runs today, was started in 2006 by a group of preschool parents who had heard the same thing yet refused to listen.
They were among the parents who asked questions like, “Why do people say the schools aren’t good?”
Kimberly Kenne, president of the PUSD Board of Education and one of the founding members of PEN, said that she also wondered about this “pervasive narrative” when she moved to town in the early 1990s. She wasn’t aware of the bias against public schools in Pasadena, though her husband, who was raised in the city, attended private school when the desegregation order came down.
After their first child was born in 1997, Kenne considered enrolling him in the neighborhood public school — only to be admonished by fellow parents. “Are you sure you’re going to share the values of the other parents at public school?” she recalled them asking.
She enrolled her son in a private school, but changed her mind. One reason is that the school wasn’t equipped to meet his needs as a neurodivergent child. Another is that the private school lacked racial diversity in the student body, something that mattered to her.
Jennifer Hall Lee, vice president of PUSD’s Board of Education, also enrolled her daughter, who is now 20, in private school — regretting the decision when she realized her daughter didn’t seem comfortable interacting with people from a wide range of backgrounds.
Lee herself had gone to a public high school in Atlanta in the 1970s that had equal percentages of Black and White students. After switching her daughter to public school, Lee noticed that the child’s worldview changed.
“She would talk to me about the kids in the schools, from first-generation immigrant kids to foster youth,” Lee said. “She began to really understand the differences in socioeconomic status and understand that people lived in apartments and not everybody owned a home. She started understanding the full breadth of her community.”
In a city where the median home sale price is $1.1 million and the median household income is almost six figures, it’s confusing for newcomers to understand why the school system has a poor reputation since affluence in a community typically translates into quality in its public schools.
Pasadena, however, has become known as “a tale of two cities,” a place where the gap between the rich and the poor has only widened and the two groups don’t mingle socially or academically. At $97,818, the median household income is just above the state’s and $23,000 above the nation’s. At the same time, the city’s poverty rate of 13.4 percent is slightly higher than the state and national rate.
When the school district’s critics mention that its test scores are lower than those in surrounding school systems, supporters respond that the city has a wealth gap that’s largely absent from the more homogeneous neighboring suburbs. Many of the detractors, Dufford said, are also unaware that PUSD’s “bad” reputation coincided with the 1970 desegregation order that accelerated the departure of white, middle- and upper-income families from the district.
White flight out of Pasadena has been traced back as far as the 1940s. The reasons include lower birth rates among white families, an economic downturn in the aerospace industry that limited employment opportunities and the restructuring of neighborhoods to make way for freeways. By 1960, the racial demographics of the city were also changing, with communities of color expanding rapidly. The next year, PUSD lost about 400 students when the mostly white community of La Cañada broke away from the district to form its own separate school system, which to this day is ranked as one of the state’s best. In 1976, La Cañada Flintridge became its own city.
“The fact that people are willing to create whole new municipalities, so they don’t have to integrate — that should really wow people,” said Shannon Malone, PUSD’s senior director of principals, who added that her views were not the school district’s but her own. “You would rather create a whole new city than to let your child sit next to a person of color. I don’t think people have a full understanding of that at all.”
Having lived through the desegregation order, Hirahara, who is now an award-winning mystery writer, wishes more people knew about the history of the city’s schools. In 2016, she received a grant from the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division to present “Loma Alta: Tales of Desegregation,” a talk at a public library that featured her and two other district alumni sharing their experiences.
“So many people don’t even know that it was the first West Coast school district to get the order to desegregate, so it’s a very unique and telling experience of why we’re still dealing with issues of race today,” Hirahara said.
When Hirahara was enrolled in Loma Alta, about half of its students were Black. It was one of Pasadena’s top-performing elementary schools, which the 1973 report from the Civil Rights commission attributed to the fact that many of the students came from middle-class households. Other high-achieving schools in the district with large Black populations included Audubon Primary School and John Muir High School. Six students at John Muir were accepted into the elite California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1972, a rare feat that prompted Caltech’s then-president to write about the accomplishment in the local newspapers.
The Brown v. Board decision had the unintended consequence of costing tens of thousands of Black educators their jobs as many white schools did not want to employ these teachers and principals after integration. The consequences have endured for decades. In 2021, about 15 percent of public school students nationwide were Black, but only 6 percent of public school teachers nationwide were, according to a forthcoming report by the Southern Education Foundation, a nonprofit that works to advance equitable education policies.
“We really, truly haven’t recovered from the very pervasive belief in the area that PUSD schools are not up to snuff,”
Brian McDonald, the Pasadena Unified School District, former superintendent
Malone, who is Black and was bused to schools in Los Angeles, underscored the results of studies that show that students of color excel when they have Black teachers, demonstrating better academic and behavioral outcomes. But when Black children attend integrated schools, their support systems don’t usually accompany them, she said.
The achievements of students at racially diverse schools in the district didn’t stop the parents bent on leaving PUSD from doing so, administrators complained to federal officials in 1973. The biggest obstacle preventing the district from truly becoming integrated, the administrators said, was “white flight.” The Civil Rights commission’s report quoted one administrator making a remark that could have come from a PUSD supporter today: “White parents don’t take time to see whether the system is bad or not. They simply listen to people who criticize the district without foundation.”
What’s different is that now the district has an army of moms actively challenging these attitudes. Victoria Knapp is one of them, but it took time and trust in herself before she became a public school crusader.
Victoria Knapp, PUSD mom and volunteer and advocate for the community’s public schools through the Pasadena Education Network, poses for a portrait in the backyard of her home in Altadena on Monday, May 13, 2024. Credit: Stella Kalina for The 19th
When Knapp entered grade school in Pasadena in the 1970s, she heard that children her age were being bused from one neighborhood to another, but she didn’t understand why it was being done or what it was like. Knapp did not attend the city’s public schools.
“My schools were predominantly white, predominantly Catholic and predominantly middle class or above,” she said.
She had some familiarity with public schools because her mother taught for the Los Angeles Unified School District, but she didn’t know that a contentious debate about integrating them had unfolded in her own community. Years later, after the birth of her older son, she felt pressure from fellow moms to send her children to private school. The aversion to public school in her moms’ group made her reflect on her city’s past. She thought to herself: “You mean to tell me that whatever was going on here 40 years ago is still going on?”
Still, her Catholic school upbringing and the nudging from the private school enthusiasts led Knapp, chair of the Altadena Town Council’s executive committee, to rule out PUSD. First, she and her husband enrolled their eldest son in a parochial school. Then they tried a nonsectarian private school. The couple felt that both schools exposed their children to experiences and behaviors they did not appreciate, like the sense of entitlement expressed by some of their classmates. Knapp, for the first time, began to consider an alternative.
“It did seem counterintuitive to me that I was going to have this relatively homogenous group of moms dictate what we were going to decide for our own kid,” she said.
After touring PUSD schools, Knapp questioned the idea that they were inferior to the city’s private schools. She wondered, “What’s not good? Is it that our public schools are predominantly Black and Brown children?”
When some parents raised safety concerns, she responded that elementary schools aren’t typically dangerous and that fights, gun violence and truancy occur at private and public schools alike. “They could never really articulate what safety meant,” Knapp said. “What safety meant was they didn’t want their child in an integrated, diverse school. They just didn’t. And that’s exactly where I wanted my privileged white sons to be.”
Both of her sons, a sixth grader and an 11th grader, have now attended public school for years. Her younger son attended Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson’s alma mater, Cleveland Elementary School.
Knapp became an active PUSD parent, serving as a PTA president at Altadena Arts Magnet, the school her younger son attended next, and an ambassador for the Pasadena Education Network, a role that has her regularly participate in school tours. Going on tours allows her to field questions from prospective parents. What the families see often surprises them, Knapp said.
“They think they’re going to see chaos and mayhem, then they come in,” she said. “Altadena Arts is an inclusion school, so kids of all neurodiversities are included in the same classroom. It’s socioeconomically diverse, it’s racially diverse, it’s gender diverse, it’s very integrated. You walk up there and it’s like, ‘This is what a school should look like.’”
Karina Montilla Edmonds is a PUSD parent and board member of the Pasadena Educational Foundation. Credit: Stella Kalina for The 19th
Karina Montilla Edmonds, who moved to Pasadena in 1992 to attend Caltech, never doubted the city’s public school district. When her now 22-year-old daughter was entering kindergarten, Edmonds and her former husband turned down the chance to send her to the neighboring San Marino Unified School District (SMUSD), which ranks as one of the state’s top 10 school systems. Her then-husband taught for SMUSD, qualifying their eldest daughter for an interdistrict transfer to the suburb where the median household income is $174,253 and more than 85 percent of students are proficient in reading and math.
Edmonds wasn’t interested. “At the time, I was like, ‘That’s not my school. That’s not my community. I have a school two blocks away. Why wouldn’t I go there?’”
The decision appalled many of her fellow parents. “People thought I was nuts,” she said. “Luckily, I have a PhD in aeronautics from Caltech, so they knew I wasn’t stupid, but they definitely thought I was crazy.”
The mom of three from Rhode Island didn’t fear that her children wouldn’t get a good education in Pasadena’s public schools because she excelled in the public education system in her state while growing up in a household of few resources, raised by parents with limited formal education. “I thought I was rich because everybody around me was on public aid,” she said. When she attended a competitive public high school, she learned just how economically disadvantaged her family was. “I was like, ‘Oh, wait, I’m poor.’”
She now serves on the board of the Pasadena Educational Foundation, a nonprofit focused on developing community partnerships to help the city’s public schools excel. The organization also works with the Pasadena-Foothills Association of Realtors to educate real estate agents about the public schools since some realtors had a history of discouraging homebuyers from enrolling their children in PUSD. McDonald, the former superintendent, said that it happened to him when he was buying a home several years ago.
“She advised me to put my kids in every other school and district except for PUSD,” he said. “But I’m happy to say that through the efforts of the district and the Pasadena Educational Foundation, primarily utilizing the realtor initiative, we were able to change a few minds.”
Edmonds agrees that educating realtors is an important step. Her perspective on public schools and the surrounding communities, she added, also comes from the fact that her ex-husband taught in Pasadena before San Marino. Was he suddenly a better teacher because he moved from a less affluent school district to a more affluent one? She didn’t think so. She also didn’t compare the two district’s test scores because their populations are different. Pasadena Unified has significantly more low-income students, foster youth, English language learners and Black and Brown students than San Marino Unified, which is predominantly White and Asian American.
“To me, that’s part of the enrichment of getting to be with and learn from a broader part of our community,” she said, adding that children don’t suffer because they attend school in diverse environments.
The idea of seeking out or avoiding schools based on demographics concerns her.
“I feel like our democracy depends on an educated population,” she said. “I think every child should have access to excellent education and have an opportunity for success because I know the opportunities that I had given to me through the public school system.”
Dr. Brian McDonald, superintendent of Pasadena Unified School District from 2014 to 2023, stands in front of Pasadena High School on Monday, May 13, 2024. Credit: Stella Kalina for The 19th
The year after McDonald became the PUSD superintendent in 2014, he wrote a column in the local paper describing the difficulties the district was experiencing because of the high percentage of parents sending their children to private school. He estimated that the district was losing out on about $14 million because of declining enrollment, money that could help PUSD prevent school closures, teacher layoffs and cuts to student services.
But he also touted the district’s variety of programs for students such as dual language immersion schools and International Baccalaureate, as well as the piloting of a dual enrollment program with the local community college. Since then, the district has expanded its initiatives and created new ones. In addition to Spanish and Mandarin, the district’s dual language immersion tracks now include French and Armenian. From 2013 to 2022, PUSD also received three federal magnet assistance program grants that allow it to bring more academic rigor to its schools.
“We lose enrollment because people have a negative perception of our schools, so I think the idea of a magnet theme, whether it’s arts or early college, or a dual-language program, can really get people excited about something that their students are really interested in or maybe a value that their family has, let’s say, around the arts,” said Shannon Mumolo, PUSD’s director of
magnet schools, enrollment, and community engagement. Schools with themed magnet programs, she added, can sway families who weren’t interested in PUSD to consider at least going on a school tour.
Enrollment at PUSD’s John Muir High School has increased since it became an Early College Magnet in 2019, Mumolo said. Across the board, enrollment of students from underrepresented groups — white and Asian American — have gone up since the school district expanded its academic programs over the past decade.
“But I also want to make sure to emphasize that the schools have maintained their enrollment of their Black and Latino students,” Mumolo said. “We want to make sure that we’re keeping our neighborhood students and maintaining enrollment for those groups.”
The former superintendent also touts PUSD’s Math Academy, which The Washington Post in 2021 lauded as “the nation’s most accelerated math program.” The course allows gifted middle school students to take classes, such as Advanced Placement Calculus BC, that are so rigorous that only a small percentage of high school seniors take them.
Kenne, the school board president, said that her children, now both in their 20s, were gifted math students. The Math Academy was not available when they were in grade school. She and her husband switched them out of PUSD in high school, in part, because at the time they had more opportunities to excel in math in private school, she said, acknowledging that it was a controversial choice for a parent who advocates for public education.
“People do have reasons,” Kenne said of some parents who choose private school. But she also said that private school overall wasn’t especially rigorous for her children. “My son calculated that he didn’t need to do homework for some classes to get a decent grade,” she said.
By introducing a wide variety of academic programs, including in math, PUSD has challenged the gap between what outsiders perceive it to be and what the district actually is, according to McDonald. “I think if we had not implemented those programs, the declining enrollment would have been much more acute,” he said.
Kahlenberg, the researcher, agrees. He said data suggests that when middle-class families get the right incentives to go to a public school, even one that’s outside their neighborhood, they do.
Since the busing integration program did not succeed in the district, Kahlenberg, in his studies of the school district, recommended that PUSD take creative approaches to lure in middle-income families. That includes introducing unique academic programs as well as developing or deepening partnerships with institutions in or around Pasadena — Caltech, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Pasadena Playhouse, Art College Center of Design, the Norton Simon Museum, the Huntington Library.
But the focus on winning parents back has led to some tension, Kenne said.
“Sometimes a message that we’ve heard in the last 10, 20 years is, do we care more about marketing to the people who don’t come to our district, or working hard for the people who are already here?” Kenne said. “Because sometimes the public-facing message seems to be all about getting kids back, and it makes the people in the system go, ‘Am I not important to you? I’m already here.’”
Kahlenberg said schools nonetheless have a duty to continue trying to integrate — if not by race, then by class.
“The children of engineers and doctors bring resources to a school, but so do the children of recent immigrants or children whose parents have struggled,” Kahlenberg said. “The more affluent kids benefit as well from an integrated environment. When people have different life experiences they can bring to the discussion novel ideas and new ways of thinking, and that nicely integrated environment is possible in a place like Pasadena.”
Hirahara, for one, still cherishes her childhood in the school district, back when she befriended the girls in the C.L.A.N. As schools across the nation have largely re-segregated, she fears that too few young people get to experience what she did.
“I’m so glad that I had that kind of upbringing,” she said, “and I think it prepared me better for life.”
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
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I grew up in extreme poverty. The ability to access a free, high-quality education in North Texas changed my life. I benefited greatly from the ways community colleges meet students where they are and wrap their arms around them. Classes were small, and I had a clear sense of belonging, despite being the first in my family to go to college.
I still remember having deep discussions with my English professor about author Larry McMurtry. I am a first-generation Latina from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, where everyone looked and sounded like me. But this professor and I both loved McMurtry. It was the first time I connected with someone based on shared academic interests despite entirely different lived experiences.
I did not have the remediation needs or learning gaps that many of today’s pandemic students are experiencing, but I did need support and direction. The tiny community college I attended put me on a path toward a successful and purpose-driven life, and I’m grateful.
I believe that every community college, and every higher education institution, can do the same for their students — and in doing so, help close pandemic learning gaps. It starts with effective strategies and investment of resources.
However, it won’t be easy. Although enrollment at community colleges is on the rise after steep drops during the pandemic, these schools are facing more challenges than ever before. That’s largely due to the pandemic upending education as we knew it — including at San Jacinto College, where I serve on the board of trustees. Students are showing up with serious needs across academic and nonacademic areas, and community colleges, which are often under-resourced, aren’t always equipped to address them.
The pandemic led to sweepingachievement declines in core content areas, and recovery efforts have beenuneven and unfinished. Millions of students left high school with large knowledge and skill gaps that may negatively impact their futures, including their earning potential, according to forecasts by leading economists.
Students who learned virtually or in hybrid settings largely missed out on the critical thinking that develops through classroom conversations. Their teachers were focused on keeping them engaged in an online environment and on providing fundamental instruction. They missed hearing their peers and teachers reason, explain and express. This has made the transition to higher education that much more challenging.
To address such students’ needs, community colleges typically enroll them in noncredit, remedial or developmental classes so that they can gain and demonstrate proficiency in areas they didn’t master in K-12.
At the same time, community colleges are struggling to meet thegrowing mental health needs of today’s students. Past funding models created resource challenges in this area; during the pandemic, employee turnover rates created much higher than normal advisor-to-student ratios. Thankfully, many community colleges were able to bolster mental health support through pandemic relief funding, but we must invest in this critical area in more sustainable ways, such as by focusing on a holistic set of policies and practices that others might learn from.
Higher education also hasn’t mastered how to have important conversations with students about what’s going on in their lives. We have to know them better to effectively support them. Regular surveys and focus groups are essential, and we need to act on the information they provide.
Schools should do a basic needs assessment for each student —at least once a year. Schools that do not run a food pantry, a coat closet or a partnership with local shelters should start doing so. When students don’t have basic needs met, they are unable to focus on academics as much as other students can.
We also need better academic data on incoming students. Higher education and K-12 systems typically don’t collaborate, but we should have two-way conversations to ensure that we understand who is going to need developmental support in college and in which areas.
And finally, we should adjust our teaching practices to better support students. As a former developmental education faculty member, I always did a first-day writing assessment that allowed me to learn more about my students personally and about their writing strengths and weaknesses. To help students develop their writing, I also broke essay assignments into smaller pieces so students could get quicker feedback — and I could make quicker assessments of their needs.
That approach should be extended to other courses post pandemic. Providing college students with developmental coursework means creating and delivering compact and efficient lessons to help them fill their K-12 learning gaps. It also means dealing with insecurities about reading and writing deficiencies.
We also need to recognize that many college students are also working part-time jobs and being caregivers. Taking an empathetic stance is vital.
We must get students on their desired higher education pathway as quickly as possible, and avoid holding them in high-school level, remediation courses for extended periods.
In higher education today, a lot is happening to make school leaders feel both energized and daunted. But it’s vital that we focus on the most critical tasks before us. Community colleges must get to know and understand their students so they can meet their needs.
Michelle Cantú-Wilson is a member of the San Jacinto College Board of Trustees, where she previously served in faculty and administrative roles. She also serves on the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn't mean it's free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
HAZARD, Ky. — Haley Autumn Dawn Ann Crank thinks she might like to become a teacher. There’s a shortage of teachers in this corner of Kentucky, and Crank, who has eight siblings, gets kids.
“I just fit in with them,” Crank said during a shift one February day at the Big Blue Smokehouse, where she works as a waitress.
For now, the recent high school graduate is taking some education courses at the local community college. But to pursue a teaching degree at a public, comprehensive university, she’ll need to commute four hours roundtrip or leave the town she grew up in and loves.
Haley Autumn Dawn Ann Crank thinks she’d like to be a teacher, but she’s hesitant to leave home for college. Credit: Kelly Field for The Hechinger Report
Neither of those options is feasible — or even conceivable — for many residents of Hazard, a close-knit community of just over 5,000 tucked into the hills of Southeast Kentucky. Like many rural Americans, the people here are place-bound, their educational choices constrained by geography as much as by cost. With family and jobs tying them to the region, and no local four-year option, many settle for a two-year degree, or skip college altogether.
Until fairly recently, that decision made economic sense. Mining jobs were plentiful, and the money was good. But the collapse of the coal industry here and across Appalachia has made it harder to survive on a high school education. Today, just under half the residents over the age of 16 in Perry County, where Hazard sits, are employed; the national average is 63 percent. More than a quarter of the county’s residents are in poverty; the median household income is $45,000, compared to $75,000 nationally.
Now, spurred by concerns that low levels of college attainment are holding back the southeastern swath of the state, the Kentucky legislature is exploring ways to bring baccalaureate degrees to the region. The leading option calls for turning Hazard’s community and technical college into a standalone institution offering a handful of degrees in high-demand fields, like teaching and nursing.
The move to expand education here comes as many states are cutting majors at rural colleges and merging rural institutions, blaming funding shortfalls and steadily dwindling enrollments.
If successful, the new college could bring economic growth to one of the poorest and least educated parts of the country and serve as a model for the thousands of other “educational deserts” scattered across America. Proponents say it has the potential to transform the region and the lives of its battered but resilient residents.
But the proposal carries significant costs and risks. Building a residence hall alone would cost an estimated $18 million; running the new college would add millions more to the tab. Enrollment might fall short of projections, and the hoped-for jobs might not materialize. And if they didn’t, the newly-educated residents would likely take their degrees elsewhere, deepening the region’s “brain drain.”
“The hope is that if you build the institution, employers will come,” said Aaron Thompson, president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, which has studied the idea on behalf of the legislature. “But it is somewhat of an experiment.”
Still, Thompson said, it’s an experiment worth exploring.
“To say you need to move to be prosperous is not a solution, and that’s pretty much been the solution since many of the coal mines disappeared,” he said.
At the airport in Lexington, Kentucky, there’s a sign greeting passengers that reads, “You’ve landed in one smart city.” Lexington, the sign proclaims, is ranked #11 among larger cities in the share of the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher.
But drive a couple hours to the southeast, and the picture changes. Only 13 percent of the residents of Perry County over the age of 25 hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, well below the national average of 34 percent.
Downtown Hazard, with one of several colorful murals added in recent years Credit: Austin Anthony for The Hechinger Report
Michelle Ritchie-Curtis, the co-principal of Perry County Central High School, said the problem isn’t convincing kids to go to college, it’s keeping them there. Though nearly two-thirds of the county’s high school graduates continue on to college, just over a third of those who enroll in public four-years graduate within six years, compared to close to 60 percent statewide, according to the Council on Postsecondary Education.
In Hazard, as in many rural places, kids grow up hearing the message that they need to leave to succeed. But many return after a year or two, citing homesickness or the high cost of college, Ritchie-Curtis said. Sometimes, they feel ashamed about abandoning their aspirations. They take off a semester, and it becomes years, she said.
Those who make it to graduation and leave tend to stay gone, discouraged by the region’s limited job opportunities. This exodus, and the lack of a four-year college nearby, have hampered Hazard’s ability to attract employers who might fill the void left by the decline of coal, said Zach Lawrence, executive director of the Hazard-Perry County Economic Development Alliance.
Ritchie-Curtis said that having a local option would solve the homesickness problem and could save students money in room and board. It could also help stem the region’s brain drain and alleviate a teaching shortage that has forced the school to hire a growing number of career changers, she added.
Hazard Community and Technical College president Jennifer Lindon is excited about the possibility of the college offering four-year degrees. Credit: Austin Anthony for The Hechinger Report
To Jennifer Lindon, the president of Hazard Community and Technical College, “it all boils down to equity.”
“If we can provide a [four-year] education, and make it affordable, perhaps we can break the cycle of poverty in Southeast Kentucky,” she said.
Converting Hazard’s two-year college into a four-year institution wasn’t among the options initially considered by the Kentucky General Assembly. When lawmakers asked the state’s Council on Postsecondary Education to study the feasibility of bringing four-year degrees to Southeast Kentucky, it offered three approaches: building a new public university; creating a satellite campus of an existing comprehensive university; or acquiring a private college to convert into a public one.
But the council concluded in its report that each of those alternatives was “in some way problematic.” A new university would be prohibitively expensive and might fail; a new branch campus could suffer the same enrollment challenges as existing satellites; and acquiring a private college would be legally complicated.
The council considered the possibility of allowing the community college to offer baccalaureate degrees — something a growing number of states permit — but worried that doing so would lead to “mission creep” and “intense competition” for the state’s dwindling number of high school graduates.
Students in the commercial truck driving program identify parts of a tractor trailer truck. Credit: Kelly Field for The Hechinger Report
Instead, the council recommended that the legislature study the idea of making Hazard’s community college a standalone institution offering both technical degrees and a few bachelor’s programs “in line with workforce demand.” Starting small, the council suggested, would allow policymakers and college leaders to gauge student demand before building out baccalaureate offerings.
That approach makes sense to Sen. Robert Stivers, the president of the Kentucky Senate, and the sponsor of the bill that commissioned the council’s study.
“I don’t think you can just jump off the cliff into the lake,” he said. “You need to be a little more measured.”
But Andrew Koricich, executive director of the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges at Appalachian State University, said the region’s residents deserve a comprehensive college. He likened the limited offerings envisioned by the council to former President George W. Bush’s “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
“There’s this idea that rural people should be happy they have anything,” he said.
Koricich pointed to the recent merger of Martin Methodist University, a private religious college, with the University of Tennessee system as proof that the legal hurdles to acquiring a private college aren’t insurmountable.
But Thompson, the CPE president, said that the private colleges in southeast Kentucky are located too far from most residents and the schools weren’t interested in being acquired, anyway. He argued that while a comprehensive university might be “ideal,” it wasn’t realistic.
“In an ideal world, I’d be young again with a great back,” he said. “But in reality, I work with what I’ve got. And that’s what we’re doing here.”
When Stivers was growing up in southeastern Kentucky in the 60’s and 70’s, coal was king. A high school graduate could get a job paying $15 an hour — good money at the time — without ever setting foot in a college classroom, he said.
With mining jobs so abundant, “there wasn’t a value placed on education,” Stivers recalled.
Coal production peaked in eastern Kentucky in 1990, and has been on the decline ever since. Today, there are just over 400 individuals employed in coal jobs in Perry County.
The shrinking of the sector has had ripple effects across Appalachia, hurting industries that support mining and local businesses that cater to its workers. Many residents have migrated to urban centers, seeking work, and once-thriving downtowns have been hollowed out.
Colton Teague, 11, receives a guitar lesson from Luke Davis, the director of operations of the Appalachian Arts Alliance, an anchor of the revitalized downtown. Credit: Austin Anthony for The Hechinger Report
By the middle of the last decade, most of the buildings in downtown Hazard were either empty or occupied by attorneys and banks. The only place to gather was a hole-in-the-wall bar called the Broken Spoke Lounge, recalled Luke Glaser, a city commissioner and assistant principal at Hazard High School. When the Grand Hotel burned down, in 2015, a sense of resignation settled in, Glaser said.
The region has also been hard hit by opioids, which were aggressively marketed to rural doctors treating miners for injuries and black lung disease. In 2017, Perry County had the highest opioid abuse hospitalization rate in the nation.
Then, in 2021, and again in 2022, the region suffered severe flooding, which washed away homes and took the lives of almost 50 residents of Southeast Kentucky.
Yet Hazard is also in the midst of what Glaser calls an “Appalachian Renaissance,” a revival being led by 20- and 30-somethings who have come home or moved to the area in recent years. Though Appalachian Kentucky lost 2.2 percent of its population between 2010 and 2019, Hazard grew by 13 percent.
A decade ago, a group of long-time residents and young people began meeting with a mission to revitalize Hazard’s main street. The group, which called itself InVision Hazard, hired a downtown coordinator and brought free Wi-Fi and improved signage to the downtown area.
Over the past four-and-a-half years, close to 70 new businesses have opened within a three-mile radius of downtown, and only eight have closed, according to Betsy Clemons, executive director of the Hazard Perry County Chamber of Commerce. There’s an independent bookstore, an arts alliance that will put on seven full-length productions this year, and a toy store — all run by residents who grew up in Hazard and returned as adults.
A sign at Hazard Community and Technical College welcomes students. Credit: Austin Anthony for The Hechinger Report
The Grand Hotel, which stood as a burned-out shell for years, has finally been torn down, making way for an outdoor entertainment park with space for food trucks and a portable stage, and plans for live entertainment on Friday nights.
As the downtown has transformed, collective feelings of apathy and resignation have given way to a new sense of possibility, Glaser said. Brightly colored murals reading “We Can Do This,” and “Together” adorn the sides of two downtown buildings.
To Mandi Sheffel, the owner of Read Spotted Newt bookstore, the creation of a four-year college feels like a logical next step for a place that was recently dubbed “a hip destination for young people” (a description that both delights and amuses people here).
“In every college town I’ve been to, there’s a vibe, a pride in the community,” she said.
On the vocational campus of Hazard Community and Technical College in February, Jordan Joseph and Austin Cox, recent high school grads, stood alongside a tractor trailer truck, pointing out its parts. In as little as four weeks, they could become commercially licensed truck drivers, a career that pays close to $2,000 a week.
Both men followed dads and grandads into the profession and said they couldn’t imagine sitting in a classroom for four years after high school. Like the sign on the side of the truck they were working on said, they want to “Get in, Get Out, and Get to Work.”
Inside one of the campus’ labs, a pair of aspiring electricians said they doubted many local residents would be able to afford a four-year degree.
“I don’t think you’d get a lot of people,” said Walker Isaacs, one of the students.
Their skepticism underscores a key risk in creating a four-year college in a place that’s never had one: There’s no guarantee students will enroll. Larger forces — including a looming decline in the number of high school graduates, an improved labor market, and public doubts about the value of higher education — could dampen demand for four-year degrees, forcing the college to either cut costs or seek state funding to cover its losses.
Recognizing this risk -and the possibility that employers won’t show up, either – the Council declined to give an “unqualified endorsement” of the idea of turning the community college into a four-year institution, saying further study was needed. In February, Sen. Stivers introduced a bill that calls on the council to survey potential students and employers about the idea and to provide more detailed estimates of its potential costs and revenues.
Converting the college could also cause enrollment to fall at the state’s existing public and private four-years. Eastern Kentucky University, the hardest hit, could lose as many as 250 students in the seventh year after conversion, the council estimated in its report. While the council did not examine the possible effect on private colleges in the region, the president of Union College, Marcia Hawkins, said in a statement that, “Depending on the majors added, such a move could certainly impact enrollment at our southern and eastern Kentucky institutions.”
But on the main campus of Hazard Community and Technical College, there’s growing excitement about the prospect of the two-year college becoming a four-year.
Ashley Smith, who is studying to become a registered nurse, said the proposed conversion would make it easier for her to earn the bachelor’s degree she’s always wanted. With three kids at home, she can’t manage an hours-long commute to and from class.
Another nursing student, Lakyn Bolen, said she’d be more likely to continue her education if she could do so from home. She left Hazard once to finish a four-year degree, and is reluctant to do so again.
“It’s not fun going away,” Bolen said. “We definitely need more nursing opportunities here.”
Dylon Baker, assistant vice president of workforce initiatives for Appalachian Regional Healthcare, agrees. His nonprofit, which operates 14 hospitals in Kentucky and West Virginia, has struggled with staffing shortages and spent millions on contract workers. The shortages have forced the system to shutter some beds, reducing access to care in a region with high rates of diabetes, cancer and heart disease.
“We are taking care of the sickest of the sickest,” Baker said. “We have to give them access to quality healthcare.”
Hazard’s community college already offers some higher-level degrees, such as nursing, through partnerships with four-year public and private colleges in Kentucky. But most of the programs are online-only, and many students prefer in-person learning, said Deronda Mobelini, chief student affairs officer. Others lack access to broadband internet or can’t afford it.
If the conversion goes through, the college will continue to offer online baccalaureates and a wide range of certificates and associate degrees, said Lindon, the HCTC president. She envisions a system of “differential tuition” where students seeking four-year degrees would pay less during the first two years of their programs.
Though the college would still cater to commuters, a residence hall would attract students from a wider area and alleviate a housing shortage made more acute by the recent floods, Lindon said.
Ultimately, the future of the institution will rest with the Kentucky legislature, which must decide if it wants to spend some of its continuing budget surplus on bringing four-year degrees to an underserved corner of the state.
But Lindon is already imagining the possibilities, and the Appalachian culture course that she’d make mandatory for students seeking bachelor’s degrees.
“For too long, we’ve been taught to hide or even be ashamed of where we’re from,” she said. “We want to teach young people to be proud of our Appalachian heritage.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Texas’ attorney general filed a lawsuit on Tuesday seeking to stop a guaranteed income program set to start this month for Houston-area residents.
The program by Harris County, where Houston is located, is set to provide “no-strings-attached” $500 monthly cash payments to 1,928 county residents for 18 months. Those who qualified for the program must have a household income below 200% of the federal poverty line and need to live in one of the identified high-poverty zip codes.
The program is funded by $20.5 million from the American Rescue Plan, the pandemic relief law signed by President Joe Biden in 2021.
Federal pandemic funding has prompted dozens of cities and counties across the country to implement guaranteed income programs as ways to reduce poverty, lessen inequality and get people working.
In his lawsuit filed in civil court in Houston, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton dubbed the program the “Harris Handout” and described it as a “socialist experiment” by county officials that violates the Texas Constitution and is “an illegal and illegitimate government overreach.”
“This scheme is plainly unconstitutional,” Paxton said in a statement. “Taxpayer money must be spent lawfully and used to advance the public interest, not merely redistributed with no accountability or reasonable expectation of a general benefit.”
State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from Houston who had asked Paxton to look into the county’s program, called it an “unbelievable waste” of taxpayer dollars and “Lottery Socialism.”
Harris County officials pushed back on Paxton’s lawsuit, which is asking for a temporary restraining order to stop the program. The first payments were set to be distributed as early as April 24.
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the county’s top elected official, said guaranteed income is one of the oldest and most successful anti-poverty programs, and she feels “for these families whose plans and livelihoods are being caught up in political posturing by Trumpian leaders in Texas.”
“This lawsuit from Ken Paxton reads more like a MAGA manifesto than a legal document,” said Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who spearheaded the program, known as Uplift Harris.
Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee said the program “is about helping people in a real way by giving them direct cash assistance — something governments have always done.”
The lawsuit is the latest legal battle in recent years between Harris County, Texas’ biggest Democratic stronghold, and the GOP-dominated state government.
Elections in the nation’s third-most populous county have been scrutinized for several years now. The Texas Legislature passed new laws in 2023 seeking more influence over Harris County elections.
Last year, Texas took over the Houston school district, the state’s largest, after years of threats and lawsuits over student performance. Democrats assailed the move as political.
Austin and San Antonio have previously offered guaranteed income programs in Texas. El Paso County is set to roll out its own program later this year. No lawsuits have been filed against those programs.
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People who read college applications are a lot like detectives. Without having been there for the event (the student’s K-12 education and life), they must find clues in documents (high school transcripts and student essays) and eyewitness accounts (letters of recommendation) to solve the case (decide whether a student might be able to thrive at the college).
But even with the extensive applications that each student submits, the detectives (college application readers) have to do a lot of reading between the lines, said Tim Brunold, dean of admission at the University of Southern California.
The clues they have on how students spend their time outside of school are typically limited to a list of sports teams they’ve captained, clubs they joined, volunteer work they’ve done and awards they’ve won. But the application readers often lack key information on other responsibilities or life circumstances students may have, such as caring for siblings or sick family members, working part-time jobs to help pay family bills, or living in a home without a stable internet connection.
And those missing clues often mean a student’s application doesn’t get a fair shake. If a student is getting good grades in spite of being responsible for siblings from after school until bedtime, that could mean the student is even more academically talented than a peer with no such burdens.
In order to fill this gap, and signal to prospective students that these responsibilities matter, a set of 12 colleges participated in an experiment in which they asked every applicant to go through a list of extenuating home life circumstances or responsibilities and check off which ones they spend four hours or more per week doing.
“We want these kids to essentially get credit for these things that are taking a lot of skills and a lot of time, in the same way that kids who are doing traditional, school-based extracurricular activities are getting credit,” said Trisha Ross Anderson, the college admission director of the Making Caring Common project at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, which helped develop the questions with Common App. (The idea was in development before the Supreme Court ruled that race could not be considered in admissions decisions.)
“We want to make it easier for students to report this information and talk about it. If students don’t want to have to write their essay about this, for instance, they shouldn’t have to.”
In order to make it fast and simple for prospective students, and to prevent application readers from having to play detective as they try to figure out, “Is there something else going on with this kid?,” they added this optional question to the Common App:
Sometimes academic records and extracurricular activities are impacted by family responsibilities or other circumstances. We would like to know about these responsibilities and circumstances. Your responses will not negatively impact your application. You may repeat some information you already provided in the Common App Activities section.
Please select which activities you spend 4 or more hours per week doing:
Assisting family or household members with situations such as doctors’ appointments, bank visits, or visa interviews
Doing tasks for my family or household (cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc.)
Experiencing homelessness or another unstable living situation
Interpreting or translating for family or household members
Living in an environment without reliable or usable internet
Living independently or living on my own (not including boarding school)
Managing family or household finances, budget, or paying bills
Providing transportation for family or household members
Taking care of sick, disabled and/or elderly members of my family or household
Taking care of younger family or household members
Taking care of my own child or children
Working at a paid job to contribute to my family or household’s income
Yard work/farm work
Other (please describe)
None of these
Across the 12 colleges, 66 percent of the students who applied to these colleges using the Common App checked at least one box, according to Karen Lopez, who manages this project at Common App. A quarter of the prospective students checked four or more boxes.
In the fall of 2022, these 12 colleges included the question in the Common App: Amherst College, Caltech, Cornell University, Harvey Mudd College, St. Olaf College, Transylvania University, University of Arizona, University of Dubuque, University of Maryland-Baltimore County, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
In the fall of 2023, these 23 colleges added the question: Allegheny College, Amherst College, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Boston College, Caltech, College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, College of the Holy Cross, Cornell University, Earlham College, Elon University, George Washington University, Harvey Mudd, Haverford College, Immaculata University, Lafayette College, Maryland Institute College of Art, Nazareth University, Providence College, University of Pennsylvania, University of Richmond, University of Rochester, University of Southern California and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Ross Anderson said that the second-year data will begin being processed in the coming months. She said they also plan to look at how this question affected admissions and enrollments, but they won’t be able to examine that until late summer. Lopez said these are among the factors that will help decide if this question should become a regular part of the Common App.
Brunold, from USC, said that the people who read college applications are trying to get a “360-degree view of this young person who’s often baring their soul to you,” without knowing them personally. Giving students the opportunity to share information about their lives in this way helps colleges make a more thorough assessment.
“For us, at a place that unfortunately doesn’t have the capacity to admit anywhere near the number of students who want to come here, we take great care in this process,” Brunold said.
Whitney Soule, vice provost and dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, said that asking this question and capturing a wider view of students’ lives can help level the playing field for applicants of different backgrounds.
“What we are trying to do is understand how a student is moving throughout their lives, what their commitment of time is and their responsibility is, and their awareness of themselves relative to other people,” Soule said. “Because that’s going to be incredibly important in our environment when they arrive on our campus, and they’re living and learning within the community of our school.”
This story about student home life was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
SAN FRANCISCO — It was two days before the start of the school year, and Lauren Koehler shrugged off her backpack and slid out of a maroon hoodie as she approached the blocky, concrete building that houses the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Enrollment Center. Koehler, the center’s 38-year-old executive director, usually focuses on strategy, but on this August day, she wanted to help her team — and the students it serves — get through the crush of office visits and calls that comes every year as families scramble at the last-minute for spots in the city’s schools. So when the center’s main phone line rang in her corner office, she answered.
8:04 AM
Four people waiting in the lobby, 12 callers
“Good morning! Thank you for waiting,” Koehler chirped, her Texas accent audible around the edges. “How can I help you?”
On the line, Kelly Rodriguez explained that she wanted to move her 6-year-old from a private school to a public one for first grade, but only if a seat opened up at Sunset Elementary School, near their house on San Francisco’s predominantly white and Asian west side. Koehler told her the boy was fourth on the waitlist and that last year, three children got in.
“We will keep our fingers crossed,” Rodriguez said, sounding both resigned and hopeful.
Stanford professor Thomas Dee predicted this. Not this specific conversation, of course, but ones like it. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, public school enrollment in the United States had been trending downward, thanks to birth-rate declines and more restrictive immigration policies, but the decreases rarely exceeded half a percentage point. But Dee said, between fall 2019 and fall 2021, enrollment declined by 2.5 percent.
At the leading edge of this national trend is San Francisco. Public school enrollment there fell by 7.6 percent between 2019 and 2022, to 48,785 students. That drop left SFUSD at just over half the size it was in the 1960s, when it was one of the largest districts in the nation.
Declining enrollment can set off a downward spiral. For every student who leaves SFUSD, the district eventually receives approximately $14,650 less, using a conservative estimate of state funds for the 2022–23 school year. When considering all state and federal funds that year, the district stood to lose as much as $21,170 a child. Over time, less money translates to fewer adults to teach classes, clean bathrooms, help manage emotions and otherwise make a district’s schools calm and effective. It also means fewer language programs, robotics labs and other enrichment opportunities that parents increasingly perceive as necessary. That, in turn, can lead to fewer families signing up — and even less money.
It’s why Koehler is trying everything she can to retain and recruit students in the face of myriad complications, from racism to game theory, and why educators and policymakers elsewhere ought to care whether she and her staff of 24 succeed.
Answering calls in August, Koehler had a plan — lots of little plans, really. And she hoped they’d move the needle on the district’s enrollment numbers, to be released later in the year.
Lauren Koehler, executive director of San Francisco Unified School District’s Enrollment Center, invites a family from the waiting room to a counseling session in a sunny conference room two days before the start of the 2023-24 school year. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
Koehler arrived at SFUSD in May 2020, which also happens to be when most believe the story of the district’s hemorrhaging of students began. During Covid, the district’s doors remained closed for more than a year. Sent home in March 2020, the youngest children went back part-time in April 2021; forthe vast majority of middle and high school students, schools didn’t reopen for 17 months, until August 2021. In contrast, most private schools in the city ramped up to full-time, in-person instruction for all grades over the fall of 2020.
It was the latest skirmish in a long-standing market competition in San Francisco — and the public schools lost. The district’s pandemic-era enrollment decline was three times larger than the national one.
“My husband and I are both a product of a public school education, and it’s something we really wanted for our children,” said Rodriguez, the first caller. But her son ended up in private school, she explained, because “we didn’t want him sitting in front of a screen.” It was a conversation that has played out repeatedly for Koehler these past few years. But public schools staying remote for longer is not the whole story, not even close.
Remote schooling accounted for about a quarter of the enrollment decline nationally, Stanford’s Dee estimates. The bigger culprit, especially in San Francisco, is population loss. Even before the pandemic, the city had the fewest 5-to-19-year-olds per capita of any US city, about 10 percent of the population, which is roughly half the national average.
Posters on the wall of the Enrollment Center feature photos of smiling students alongside the names of the SFUSD schools and colleges they attended. It’s part of a larger marketing push to improve the district’s reputation and reverse its enrollment declines. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
Then, starting around the time Koehler arrived, fewer new kids came than usual and more residents moved to places like Florida and Texas. A recent Censusestimate found 89,000 K-12 students in San Francisco, down from about 93,000 in 2019. That decline represents more than half of SFUSD’s pandemic-era drop.
It’s difficult to pinpoint how many children migrated to private school in response to SFUSD’s doors’ staying closed, since many did, but at the same time, some private school students also moved away. But Dee’s research shows that private schooling increased by about 8 percent nationally. (Homeschooling numbers also grew, although the number of kids involved remains small.)
And these aren’t the only reasons Koehler’s task can seem Sisyphean.
“You guys should be able to find out how many spots are open!” a father sitting outside Koehler’s office said, frustrated after visiting the enrollment center once a week all summer.
Koehler nodded sympathetically and told him his son was sixth on the waitlist for Hoover Middle School and that three times that many got in last year.
Since 2011, families have been able to apply to any of the city’s 72 public elementary schools, submitting a ranked list of choices. The same goes for middle and high school options. When demand exceeds seats, the enrollment center uses “tiebreakers,” mandated by the city’s elected school board, that try to keep siblings together, give students from marginalized communities a leg up, and let preschoolers stay at their school for kindergarten. After that, living near a school often confers priority. A randomized lottery for each school sorts out the rest, which leads to the entire system being referred to locally as “the lottery.”
Sixty percent of applicants got their first choice in the lottery’s “main round” in March 2023. Almost 90 percent were assigned to one of their listed schools. That makes for a lot of happy campers. It also makes for parents like the father with a wait-listed son, holding out for a better option.
Though she responded to him with unwavering calm, Koehler was frustrated too. She knew a seat would be available for his son, but state law prohibited her from letting the boy sit in it until an assigned student told the Enrollment Center they wouldn’t attend or failed to show up in the first week of school.
“I appreciate your patience,” she said, scrawling her cell number on a business card.
Lauren Koehler, executive director of San Francisco Unified School District’s Enrollment Center, counsels a parent hoping to enroll her child in a district school, but only if the charter school she applied to doesn’t extend an offer first. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
To avoid this bind, Koehler and her team have been experimenting with over-assigning kids, the way airlines overbook flights. New, too, is Koehler’s transparency about wait-list standing. In fact, at the beginning of August, every wait-listed family received an e-mail sharing its child’s standing, plus how many kids on the list got in last year. Koehler and her staff hope promising data will encourage parents to hang in there, while a disappointing forecast will open their minds to another school in SFUSD.
Overbooking and transparency represent incremental change. “I annoy some people on my team to no end by being like, ‘Well, I don’t know if we’re ready for this really large step, but let’s take a small step,’” Koehler said. “Let’s put as many irons in the fire as we can.”
Koehler’s next caller said, “The students are not getting their schedules until 24 hours before school starts, which is completely absurd!” Her voice fraying, the mother shared her suspicion that this was true only for kids coming from private middle schools, like her son. Koehler explained that the policy applied to all ninth graders, but still, she said, “I’m sure that’s stressful and annoying.”
Another caller had her heart set on Lincoln High School, down the block from the family’s home. But her son had been assigned to a school lower on the family’s list and an hour-long bus ride away. Koehler suggested several high schools that would have been a short detour on the woman’s way to work south of the city, but the mother began to cry. She had no interest in “Mission High or whatever,” even when Koehler pointed to Mission’s having the highest University of California acceptance rate in SFUSD.
Family and friends are most influential in shaping people’s attitudes about schools, research specific to SFUSD shows. So if they’ve heard bad things, Koehler’s singing a school’s praises often does little to change their minds. Parents also turn toschool-ratings websites, which studies say push families toward schools with relatively few Black and Hispanic students, like Lincoln, which currently scores a 7 on GreatSchools.org’s 1-10 scoring system, while Mission rates a 3.
As the mother on the phone grew increasingly distressed, Koehler responded simply, “I hear you.” And then, “I know this is really hard.”
She learned these lines from her therapist husband. Before they met, Koehler was an AmeriCorps teacher at a preschool serving kids in a high-poverty community. By her own admission, Koehler was “a totally hopeless teacher,” and she couldn’t stop thinking about “all these systems-level issues.” When her pre-K class toured potential kindergartens, she said, “The schools were just so different from each other.” She realized, “Where you are assigning kids — and what their resourcing level is — matters.”
Applications in Chinese, Spanish and English wait for counselors at SFUSD’s Enrollment Center to grab as parents flock to the office two days before the start of the 2023-24 school year. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
After getting a master’s in public policy at Harvard, Koehler took a planning job with Jefferson Parish Public School System in New Orleans and then became a director of strategic projects with the KIPP charter school network in Houston. She moved to the Bay Area in 2018 to work for a different charter network, and that’s when she met the handsome, “uncommonly honest” school counselor. When she joined SFUSD in 2020, her husband struck out into private practice. “I feel like I get training every day,” quipped Koehler of his reassurances at home.
Now, she has her staff role-play parent counseling sessions, practicing skills picked up during trainings on de-escalation, listening so that people feel heard, and other forms of “nonviolent communication.” They try to make families feel understood and give them a sense of autonomy and control.
Often, they succeed. Often, they fail.
9:38 AM
43 people served in the office, 170 calls answered
When phone lines quieted, Koehler began to call parents from the waiting area back to a sunny conference room featuring two massive city maps dotted by district schools.
The first family told her they live in Mission Bay, a rapidly redeveloping area where a new elementary school isn’t scheduled to open until 2025. They were excited about a school one neighborhood over, until they tested the two-bus commute with a preschooler. Then they realized that the city’s recently opened underground transit line goes straight from their home to Gordon J. Lau Elementary. Koehler wasn’t optimistic about there being openings; it’s a popular school.
When the computer revealed one last spot, she squealed à la Margot Robbie’s Barbie, “You are having the luckiest day!”
On August 14, 2023, the Enrollment Center for San Francisco Unified School District welcomed families trying to sort out their children’s school assignments two days before the start of the academic year. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
But the next parent, Kristina Kunz, was not as lucky. “My daughter was at Francisco during the stabbing last year,” she told Koehler. The sixth grader didn’t witness the March 2023 event, but when the school was evacuated, she thought she was about to die in a mass shooting. Once home, she refused to go back. Kunz told Koehler the family would have left the district, but they’d already been paying Catholic school tuition for her brother after he’d felt threatened at another middle school a few years earlier. “That was literally the only option,” Kunz said, “and we absolutely can’t afford it this year.”
Koehler read Kunz the list of middle schools with openings, all in the city’s southeast, which has a higher percentage of Black and Hispanic residents than other parts of the city. “Huh uh,” Kunz said, “none of those.” She’d take her chances waiting for a spot to open at Hoover on the west side.
The next parent, a woman who’d recently sent a vitriolic e-mail to the superintendent, said, “There’s no seats open in middle schools.” When Koehler rattled off the schools in the southeast that still had openings, the mother shrugged, as if those didn’t count.
Koehler closed her eyes and quickly inhaled. What she didn’t get into, but was perpetually on her mind, is what she’d read in“Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools,” by Rand Quinn, a political sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
San Francisco segregated its schools from its earliest days. In 1870, students with Asian ancestry were officially allowed in any school, but often weren’t welcome in them, leaving most Asian American kids to learn in community-run and missionary schools. In 1875, the district declared schools open to Black students too, but nearly a century later, in 1965, 17 schools were more than 90 percent white and nine were more than 90 percent Black. A large system of parochial schools thrived alongside a handful of nonreligious, exclusively white private schools.
Public school desegregation efforts began in earnest in 1969 with the Equality/Quality plan, which, though modest, involved busing some students from predominantly white neighborhoods. An uproar followed, and the district, which had more than 90,000 students at its 1960s zenith, saw its numbers drop by more than 8,000 students between the spring and fall of 1970 as families fled integration. Over the next dozen years, SFUSD’s rolls decreased by more than 35,000, owing to white flight and also to the last of the baby boomers aging out and drastic public school funding cuts in the wake of a 1978 state proposition that largely froze the property tax base.
A family looking for an elementary school two days before the start of the school year has earmarked a page in San Francisco Unified School District’s Enrollment Guide. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
After 1980, enrollment bounced back a little, but then for years it plateaued at roughly 52,000 students. During the 1965–66 school year, more than 45 percent of the district’s students were white. By 1977, just over 14 percent were. Today, that number is just under 14 percent. All of which is to say, when white families left in droves, they never really came back.
There have been about half a dozen similar initiatives since Equality/Quality — with names like Horseshoe and Educational Redesign — and each time, some west-side parents mounted opposition. Quinn quoted a former superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, who said at the outset of one of those “neighborhood schools” campaigns in the early 2000s: “They’ve said racist things I hadn’t heard since the late ’60s…talking about ‘in that neighborhood, my child might be raped!’”
It’s not just white families who object to their kids being educated alongside a significant number of Black children, said longtime Board of Education Commissioner Mark Sanchez. “You see that in the Latinx population and Asian population as well.”
In nearby Marin County, home to some of the nation’s most affluent suburbs, private schools opened one after the other in the 1970s. At least another 10 independent schools popped up in San Francisco proper, stealing market share from both SFUSD and the city’s parochial sector and pushing overall private school enrollmentabove 30 percent for the first time. Today, approximately 25 percent of San Francisco’s school-aged children attend private school, compared to 8 percent in the state of California and similar shares in many large cities. A November San Francisco Chronicleinvestigation found that at least three independent schools have applied for permits to expand or renovate their campuses in order to make room for more students. At one private school, enrollment is projected to more than double.
When Americans think of segregation academies, they think of the South, said Sanchez, but San Francisco has long had its own. In part because the city didn’t offer quality schooling to children of color. “You’ll see a lot of second-, third-, fourth-generation Latinos that will just only put their kids in Catholic school.”
Lauren Koehler, executive director of San Francisco Unified School District’s Enrollment Center, points out district schools that a family has yet to consider in a counseling session two days before the 2023-24 school year begins. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
These personal decisions have a ripple effect beyond decreasing SFUSD’s budget. Research has shown that advantaged, white families’ turning away from public schools sends a signal to others about their quality. Other studies reveal that when private schools are an option, recent movers to gentrifying neighborhoods are more likely to opt out of public schools. And it is well-established that segregated environments breed people who seek comfort in segregated environments.
“It’s kind of a chicken-and-the-egg thing,” Sanchez said: Private schools are there in part because of racial fear, and racial fear is perpetuated in part because private schools are there.
In 2015, in the southeast part of the city, SFUSD opened Willie Brown Middle School,a state-of-the-art facility that includes a wellness center, a library, a kitchen, a performing arts space, a computer lab, a maker space, biotech lab, a health center, and a rainwater garden, in addition to light-filled classrooms. With small class sizes, bamboo cabinets, few staff vacancies, and furniture outfitted with wheels, it could easily be a private school.
But Willie Brown remained under-enrolled, year after year, even after the school board passed a policy giving its graduates preference for Lowell High School, known as the “crown jewel” of SFUSD. Last year, enrollment jumped when Koehler’s Enrollment Center overbooked the school in the first round, parents decided to give it a shot, and kids ended up happy. About 20 percent of the student body is now white, yet still, spots remained open two days before the start of school this past fall.
To some observers, Willie Brown is just the latest iteration of a failed “if you build it, they will come” narrative in San Francisco. In the second half of the 1970s, the district created new programs and “alternative schools,” akin to other cities’ magnet schools, to attract back families that had fled. Later, Superintendent Ackerman promised a flood of investment in schools in the southeast, including new language programs. There was a small effect on enrollment, Quinn said, but only on the margins.
So when the parent said, “There’s no seats open in middle schools,” Koehler understood that lots of factors influence which schools work for a family and which don’t. But there was also an echo of 1960s anti-integration parent groups.
“I’m sorry,” she replied, “I know this is really stressful.”
1:07 PM
127 served in the office, 390 calls answered
A 17-year-old newcomer to the US entered the Enrollment Center and sat across the conference room table from Koehler. She asked when he’d arrived in San Francisco.
“Domingo.”
“Ayer?” Koehler asked. (Yesterday?)
“No, domingo pasado.” (Last Sunday.)
In New York City and other large cities, an increase in asylum-seeking familieshas been credited with stopping public school enrollment declines. Migrant childrenhave come to San Francisco too, and Koehler’s team has tried to reduce thepaperwork hurdles they and other families face when trying to enroll.
But Koehler would need to meet many more kids like this one to stave off school closures forever.
A family member sitting in the waiting room of SFUSD’s Enrollment Center has filled out an application two days before the start of the 2023-24 school year and waits to speak with an enrollment counselor. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
She’d also need charter school enrollment to stop increasing.
The next parent, also a recent immigrant, stepped into the conference room with a stack of papers issued by the Peruvian government and the conviction that her son needed to be placed in a different grade than the one specified by his age. She made it clear to Koehler that the family would jump at the first appropriate placement offer: SFUSD’s or at Thomas Edison Charter Academy. Koehler scrambled to get the boy assessed and recategorized.
Charter schools were first authorized in San Francisco in the 1990s. Though their share of the education market is smaller here than in places like New Orleans, charter enrollment hassteadily increased, with new schools often inhabiting the buildings of schools SFUSD had to close. Now, approximately 7,000 students attend charter schools rather than district ones.
On August 30, 2023, SFUSD families received an e-mail from the superintendent saying, “We are going to make some tough decisions in the coming months and all the options are on the table.”
Each time a student leaves the district, SFUSD has less money to operate that student’s old school. But the heating bill does not go down. The teacher must be paid the same amount. A class of 21 first graders — or even a class of eight — is no cheaper than a class of 22.
It stands to reason that closing under-enrolled schools and reassigning their students and the funds that go with them to different schools, as many districts across the country arecurrently poised to do, should produce better educational outcomes for all. But it often doesn’t, as experiences in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans illustrate. Sally A. Nuamah, a professor at Northwestern University, has described school closures as “reactive” and urged policymakers to focus instead on the root causes of declining enrollment, like the lack of affordable housing that drives families out of cities.
Koehler can control those things about as readily as she can dig a new train tunnel or decrease school-shooting fear. But she might be able to improve the district’s reputation.
Her team started by modernizing marketing efforts, like going digital with preschool outreach, producing a video about each school, and rebooting the annual Enrollment Fair, a day when principals and PTA presidents sit behind more than 100 folding tables. Parents used to push strollers through the throngs to grab a handout and snippet of conversation; now, schools play videos and offer up QR codes too.
Parents and caregivers, some of whom don’t yet have a school assignment for their child, wait to speak with counselors at SFUSD’s Enrollment Center two days before the 2023-24 school year begins. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
For two years, SFUSD has also worked with digital marketing companies. One “positive impression campaign” included social media posts pushed out by the San Francisco Public Library and the Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families. Images feature photos of smiling students alongside the names of the SFUSD schools and colleges they attended: For example, “Jazmine – Flynn Elementary School – Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 – O’Connell High School – Stanford University.” In addition to online ads, the district has purchased radio spots and light-pole ads. It’s mailed postcards.
Koehler would like to increase the current outlay of about $10,000 a year, but it’s hard to spend on recruitment when instruction remains underfunded, even if increased enrollment would more than offset the cost. Especially since, at some point, marketing becomes futile. With a finite number of kids in the city, initiatives to increase market share become “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Dee likes to say. (Private school-board members and admissions directors in San Francisco are also expressing alarm at population declines.)
And in San Francisco, any PR campaign contends with two major sources of bad PR: the press and parents. Koehler understands why journalists report on what’s going wrong in SFUSD: It’s their job. But she sees loads of negative headlines and very few accounts of the many things that are going right. Readers are left with the impression that private schools in the city are objectively better at serving students, which just isn’t true.
Some parents have left SFUSD or refused to enroll their kids because of substantive complaints, like with the district’s decision not to offer Algebra I in eighth grade (starting in 2014). There is also some real scarcity in the process, as in Rodriguez’s case: There simply isn’t enough room on Sunset’s small campus for everyone who wants to be there. And individual families have unresolvable logistical constraints, and in very rare cases, truly legitimate safety concerns. But a lot of it has to do with timing — and fear.
3:23 PM
177 served in the office, 540 calls answered
When David, a father of two, rang the Enrollment Center, it was with the air of a man who just wanted to do the right thing.
After touring SFUSD’s George Peabody Elementary, David and his wife decided the school would be a great fit for their incoming kindergartener. There was something special about it, and they wanted her to learn in a diverse setting.
But they also wanted a backup plan, having heard horror stories of the lottery’s vagaries. “We had two number-one choices,” he said: Peabody and a Jewish private school. They applied to both. In March, their daughter was offered a spot at the private school — and one at a different SFUSD school they liked less. “If we got into Peabody in the first round, we would have gone to Peabody,” said David, who asked that his full name be withheld to protect his privacy. Instead, they signed a contract with the private school. “We put our daughter on the waitlist” for Peabody, he said, “and then kind of forgot about it.”
A family speaks with SFUSD Enrollment Center counselor Raquel Miranda two days before the 2023-24 school year begins. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
When the family got an e-mail offering a spot, on the Saturday before school started, they were excited enough to click “accept,” even though they would have lost their private school deposit. Then they learned that Peabody’s after-school program was full. “There was just no way that we could have made it happen without aftercare,” David said. So he called the Enrollment Center to offer the spot to another family.
Hearing David’s story, Koehler sighed. If she had been able to place his child at Peabody in the first round, aftercare would have been available there, but in August the only programs with openings were located offsite. Because that didn’t work for David’s family, Koehler was left with a seat sitting open at a high-demand school.
Private schools can require open houses, interviews, and a tuition deposit to help screen out all but the most interested families and reveal information about their likelihood of accepting an offer. But SFUSD has tried to do away with hurdles like that, since they disadvantage the already disadvantaged. With no way of gauging intention to enroll, Koehler has to hold seats from March until August for thousands of students who ultimately won’t use them. And she can’t just overbook aggressively, because there are always outliers. This year, one of the city’s biggest middle schools saw every single child who was assigned in March, save one, show up in August. Private schools can more easily absorb extra kids if they overdo it with admissions a little, but Koehler risks a massive fiscal error under the district’s union contract. And overbooking risks leaving other SFUSD schools under-enrolled, something single-campus private schools don’t have to worry about.
It leaves SFUSD an unpredictable mess able to enroll fewer families than it otherwise would. And because the process is a mess, more families apply to multiple systems to hedge their bets and end up holding on to multiple seats, making it all more of a mess.
But change is coming. In 2018, the school board passed a resolution to eventually overhaul SFUSD’s school assignment system. Starting in 2026, citywide elementary school choice will be replaced by choice within zones tied to students’ addresses. The task of sorting out the details has fallen to Koehler’s team, along with a group at Stanford co-led by Irene Lo, a professor in the school of engineering who has been trained to design and optimize “matching” markets like this one.
If Lo could start anywhere, she’d centralize the application process so that families would rank their true preferences: public, private, and charter. One algorithm could then assign the vast majority of seats in a single pass, largely eliminating delays like the one David’s family experienced. But private schools stand to lose ground by agreeing to that, and many public school supporters would argue that this condones and uplifts private and charter schools. So instead of centralization, Lo will start with prediction.
She’ll use AI and other modern modeling tools to anticipate what parents will like. Then there’s “strategy-proofing,” a term from game theory. Essentially, it means trying to set up a system that incentivizes parents to be truthful. Over the decades, families have taken advantage of loopholes allowing students to attend a different school than the one designated by their address. And not just a few families. In the late 1990s, it was more than half. To gain an advantage, they’ve also lied about their student’s ethnicity, “race-neutral diversity factors” such as mother’s education level, and their zip code. Any way each system could be gamed, it was gamed.
Lo said the new six or seven zones will be drawn so each comes close to reflecting the district’s average socioeconomic status. Layered on top of that will be “dynamic reserves” at each school, basically set-asides giving lower-income students first dibs on some seats to make sure diverse zones don’t segregate into schools with wealthier students and others with concentrated poverty. City blocks will be used as a proxy for students’ level of disadvantage.
It all sounds great. It also all sounds familiar. In the early 1970s, Horseshoe featured seven zones and assignment to schools so as to create racial balance. Educational Redesign relied on quotas to make sure no ethnic group exceeded 45 percent. The current lottery uses “microneighborhoods” to capture disadvantage.
What makes Koehler and Lo think the outcome could be different this time?
Lo admitted that they’re trying “another way of putting together the same ingredients.” It’s still guesswork, but with her cutting-edge tools it should be more accurate than the guesswork of the past. And while parents still won’t have complete predictability, they’ll have more than before.
“I understand this is really difficult,” Koehler said to the last parent of the day.
4:47 PM
183 served in the office, 590 calls answered
With the waiting room empty and back offices quiet, Koehler approached each member of her staff: “Go home, because I know this is going to be a really long week.”
It’s likely to be a very long year—and decade—for the enrollment center.
San Francisco was 40 percent white as of the last Census, but only 13.8 percent of its public school enrollment was. Even if Lo works the unprecedented miracle of getting schools to reflect the district’s diversity, there is no hope that they will reflect the city’s without a major change in the way parents have behaved for decades. The data is clear: Without a critical mass of white students in a school, a significant number of parents won’t consider it.
Lauren Koehler, the executive director of SFUSD’s Enrollment Center, listens as a man explains in Spanish that he’d like to enroll a 17-year-old in school despite not being listed on the adolescent’s birth certificate or any other record. The student arrived in the United States as an unaccompanied minor just days before the start of the 2023-24 school year. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
Still, many families are choosing SFUSD, including some of those Koehler talked to in August. Kunz’s daughter got into Hoover off the waiting list. A few months into the school year, her mother said, she is thriving. Her older brother, the one who was pulled out of public middle school, chose SFUSD’s Ruth Asawa School of the Arts over a well-regarded Catholic high school.
Rodriguez, the mother who wanted to send her first grader to Sunset, learned a few days after her call with Koehler that everyone assigned had shown up, and her son wouldn’t be offered a spot. But Koehler’s team had another suggestion near the family’s home: Jefferson Elementary School. Rodriguez almost rejected it in favor of private school, but she’s relieved she didn’t.
“The community’s been very, very welcoming,” she said in October. “His teacher’s wonderful; she has almost 20 years of experience. It has a beautiful garden. The principal is really involved.” A few months later things were still going well: “Jefferson is just fantastic,” she said in December: “We’ve been really, really pleased.”
But Rodriguez said she’s still “recovering” from the enrollment process. “I also worry about the future of it, as we hear potential school closures, budget deficits,” she said. The family is considering selling their house, in favor of a place somewhere else in the Bay Area “where there aren’t so many of the issues that SFUSD is running into.”
In October, David said he and his wife wouldn’t necessarily send their second child to the Jewish private school: “I think we probably will look at Peabody again.” And if that happened, he said, they may even move their oldest over to SFUSD. But by December, his outlook was different. David said his family has been very happy with the private school experience.
Koehler knew about each of these outcomes and thousands more like them, and she hoped they would amount to a turned tide, with enrollment starting to creep up rather than down.
This fall, she and her team learned of SFUSD’s preliminary numbers: Enrollment increased from 48,785 to 49,143. That said, hundreds of those kids are 4-year-olds, sitting in “transitional kindergarten” spots newly added to a statewide specialized pre-K program. In essence, enrollment had flatlined.
Koehler felt nonetheless undaunted. The stable numbers mean “that our outreach is working,” she said. “We are not losing people at the rate that we otherwise might.”
And not all of her plans, her incremental tinkering, have come to fruition yet. “One of my random dreams is that we could do aftercare at the same time as we do enrollment,” she said. She also pointed to SFUSD’s efforts to realign program offerings with what parents want most, spread more success stories, better compensate teachers, and get a bond measure on an upcoming ballot. For the 2025–26 application cycle, her team would like to automatically assign families to multiple waiting lists, “which we hope will make at least the process seem less cumbersome and frightening,” she said. Add in Lo’s changes, Koehler said, and “we’ll draw people back who right now are frustrated by our process.”
“I have a sense that the future will be positive.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
It can be easy to think of school closures, remote learning and masked classrooms as part of the pandemic past.
But educators across the country know better. They see the learning loss that persists, despite their best efforts to provide some measure of consistency amid all the disruption.
While new data suggest students are making a “ ‘surprising’ rebound,” findings also show math and reading levels for elementary and middle school students are nowhere near pre-pandemic levels.
Worse yet, systemic inequality has actually worsened, with students in the poorest communities falling even further behind their more affluent peers.
Recognizing near the start of the pandemic that U.S. public schools required vast support, federal and state government officials appropriated historic levels of help via elementary and secondary school emergency relief funds.
As a recently retired superintendent of schools, I’ve watched, with immense frustration, as state and federal officials followed up their initial funding with blindly conceived appropriations tied to inflexible and short-sighted deadlines.
Now that funding is drying up at precisely the wrong time; districts will be left trying to fund nascent positions and programs on top of their normal operational costs.
In the aftermath of the pandemic, educators have been switching focus from acute short-term challenges to the chronic and stubborn ones poised to become generational pain points. Novel educational impacts of the pandemic are still emerging while others persist.
Classroom teachers and school administrators are seeing more challenging student behaviors and family distress on top of the learning gaps.
That’s why federal funding must not end. We would never ask doctors to treat their patients before they began exhibiting symptoms. So why would we ask our educators to essentially do the same?
As deadlines for the expenditure of federal dollars loom and intersect with next year’s budget development, school districts once again face the uncertainty of not having sufficient resources for challenges that they do not yet fully understand.
Short-term funding will not be sufficient for navigating out of a once-in-a-century global public health problem that fundamentally changed the way the U.S. educates our youth.
We need a more logical, reasonable and, most importantly, sustainable approach to combat pandemic-induced learning loss, in whatever form it appears. Although federal and state funding is typically allocated yearly, future funding should be targeted and guaranteed for multiple years.
Without taking a different funding approach, we will only guarantee that the impacts linger or worsen. Right now, well-intentioned federal funding may actually be widening the achievement gap. We are seeing economically disadvantaged communities starting to lag in their rate of learning as measured by standardized testing.
Leaders holding the power of the purse will need to recognize that the new playing field is still unequal, and that economic disparities among communities will continue to yield different learning outcomes. Leveling the playing field means better distribution of funds.
The federal funding that is set to expire in 2024 cannot wipe away the adverse learning impacts of the pandemic. While it can be tempting and politically expedient to declare the pandemic over, turning the page prematurely leaves students and teachers behind and potentially exacerbates existing challenges.
We can and must do better.
Hamlet Michael Hernandez is an assistant teaching professor of education and director of the Educational Leadership program at Quinnipiac University.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Javier Milei campaigned with a chainsaw, promising to cut the size of government.
Argentina’s leftists had so clogged the country’s economic arteries with regulations that what once was one of the world’s richest countries is now one of the poorest.
Inflation is more than 200 percent.
People save their whole lives—and then find their savings worth nearly nothing.
Milei understands that government can’t create wealth.
He surprised diplomats at the World Economic Forum this month by saying, “The state is the problem!”
He spoke up for capitalism: “Do not be intimidated by the political caste or by parasites who live off the state…. If you make money, it’s because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general well-being. Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution.”
Go, Milei! I wish current American politicians talked that way.
In the West, young people turn socialist. In Argentina, they live under socialist policies. They voted for Milei.
Sixty-nine percent of voters under 25 voted for him. That helped him win by a whopping 3 million votes.
He won promising to reverse “decades of decadence.” He told the Economic Forum, “If measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, competition, price systems, trade, and ownership of private property, the only possible fate is poverty.”
Right.
Poor countries demonstrate that again and again.
The media say Milei will never pass his reforms, and leftists may yet stop him.
But already, “He was able to repeal rent controls, price controls,” says economist Daniel Di Martino in my new video. He points out that Milei already “eliminated all restrictions on exports and imports, all with one sign of a pen.”
“He can just do that without Congress?” I ask.
“The president of Argentina has a lot more power than the president of the United States.”
Milei also loosened rules limiting where airlines can fly.
“Now [some] air fares are cheaper than bus fares!” says Di Martino.
He scrapped laws that say, “Buy in Argentina.” I point out that America has “Buy America” rules.
“It only makes poor people poorer because it increases costs!” Di Martino replies, “Why shouldn’t Argentinians be able to buy Brazilian pencils or Chilean grapes?”
“To support Argentina,” I push back.
“Guess what?” Says Di Martino, “Not every country is able to produce everything at the lowest cost. Imagine if you had to produce bananas in America.”
Argentina’s leftist governments tried to control pretty much everything.
“The regulations were such that everything not explicitly legal was illegal,” laughs Di Martino. “Now…everything not illegal is legal.”
One government agency Milei demoted was a “Department for Women, Gender and Diversity.” DiMartino says that reminds him of Venezuela’s Vice Ministry for Supreme Social Happiness. “These agencies exist just so government officials can hire their cronies.”
Cutting government jobs and subsidies for interest groups is risky for vote-seeking politicians. There are often riots in countries when politicians cut subsidies. Sometimes politicians get voted out. Or jailed.
“What’s incredible about Milei,” notes Di Martino, “is that he was able to win on the promise of cutting subsidies.”
That is remarkable. Why would Argentinians vote for cuts?
“Argentinians are fed up with the status quo,” replies Di Martino.
Milei is an economist. He named his dogs after Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Lucas, all libertarian economists.
I point out that most Americans don’t know who those men were.
“The fact that he’s naming his dogs after these famous economists,” replies Di Martino, “shows that he’s really a nerd. It’s a good thing to have an economics nerd president of a country.”
“What can Americans learn from Argentina?”
“Keep America prosperous. So we never are in the spot of Argentina in the first place. That requires free markets.”
Yes.
Actually, free markets plus rule of law. When people have those things, prosperity happens.
Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Higher Education newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Thursday with trends and top stories about higher education.
Dear Reader,
Saying it’s been a wild year in higher education news seems like the understatement of the century. (I think even non-education nerds would agree!) Thank you for sticking with The Hechinger Report as we tried to make sense of it all.
The court ultimately ruled against student loan forgiveness and against the consideration of race in college admissions.
Shortly thereafter, led by Jon Marcus and Fazil Khan, our team began working on The College Welcome Guide, a tool that helps students and families go beyond the rankings and understand what their life might be like on any four-year college campus in America. Jon’s reporting made it clear that the culture wars are beginning to affect where students go to college, and we wanted to help ensure people had the many types of information they needed to make the best choice, regardless of who they are or what their political orientation is.
In 2024, we will continue to cover equity and innovation in higher education with nuance, care and a critical eye. Is there a story you think we should cover? Reply to this email to let us know.
For now, we hope you have a warm and restful break. See you in the new year.
Olivia
P.S. As a nonprofit news outlet, The Hechinger Report relies on readers like you to support our journalism. If you want to ensure our coverage in 2024 is as extensive and deeply reported as possible, please consider donating.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
From ‘Bah, humbug!’ to redemption: Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ unfolds as more than just a festive fable, offering profound insights into self-discovery, kindness, and rewriting one’s life story.
Charles Dickens’ timeless classic, “A Christmas Carol,” isn’t just a heartwarming tale of holiday spirit; it’s a profound exploration of human psychology and the power of personal transformation.
Many of us have heard the story before through countless movie and TV adaptations, especially the infamous Scrooge, whose name has now become a common insult toward those who fight against the holiday spirit of joy, kindness, and charity.
If you’re interested, you can read the original 1843 novella A Christmas Carol for free at Project Gutenberg. There are also many free audiobooks you can find and listen to.
The story opens the day before Christmas with Ebenezer Scrooge at work, a strict businessman who is described as miserable, lonely, and greedy, without any close friends or companions. His nephew visits, wishes him a cheerily “Merry Christmas!” and invites him to spend dinner with his family, but Scrooge rudely brushes off the kind gesture and responds with his trademark phrase “Bah humbug!”
Scrooge’s cynical and negative attitude is on full display in the opening chapter. “He carried his own low temperature always about with him.” In one instance where he is asked to donate money to help the poor, the wealthy Scrooge asks, “Aren’t there prisons? Aren’t there workhouses?” and then complains about the “surplus population.”
It’s clear that Scrooge’s only concerns and core values in life are money and wealth. If it doesn’t help his profits or bottom line then he doesn’t care about it, especially the well-being of others which he claims is “none of his business.”
The archetype of Scrooge is more relevant today than ever, especially in our corporatized world where rich elites isolate themselves from the rest of society while income inequality, crime, and economic woes continue to rise for the average person. Dickens observed early signs of increased materialism, narcissism, and greed almost two hundred years ago, but these unhealthy instincts have only grown rapidly since then. Social media has particularly warped people’s perceptions of wealth, status, and fame, which has in turn blinded us to many other important values in life.
In many cases people like Scrooge live lonely and miserable lives until they die, clinging to their money as they are lowered into their graves. However the story of “A Christmas Carol” provides hope and inspiration that people can change their paths in life if they are given the necessary insight and wisdom.
As the well-known tale goes, Scrooge is haunted by 3 benevolent spirits on consecutive nights (The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future), each teaching him an essential lesson on what really matters in life.
This breakdown of past, present, and future creates a complete picture of one’s life. It’s a powerful framework to spark self-growth in any person. Once we reevaluate where we’ve been, where we are, and where we want to go, we have a much clearer idea on what the right path forward is.
Keep in mind you don’t need to be religious to reap the benefits of this story. Its lessons are universal. While there are supernatural and spiritual elements, the wisdom is real and tangible.
Introduction: The Ghost of Marley
Before Scrooge is visited by the three spirits, he encounters the ghost of his former business partner Marley who had died seven years ago.
The ghost of Marley is shown to be in a type of purgatory, aimlessly roaming the town, entangled in many heavy chains with cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses made out of steel, representing a lifetime of greed and selfishness:
“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”
“Or would you know,” pursued the Ghost, “the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!”
The ghost lets Scrooge know that his actions have far-reaching consequences too. He will suffer a similar fate if he doesn’t change his ways, but there’s still hope for redemption! He then leaves, announcing to Scrooge that he will soon be visited by three spirits that will guide him to a better path.
Marley’s ghost serves as a warning, but also a sign of hope.
The Ghosts of the Past: Forgiving Your Former Self
Scrooge’s first encounter is with the “Ghost of Christmas Past,” who serves as a poignant reminder that we must confront our history to understand our present.
The Ghost of Christmas Past transports Scrooge through various memories he had as a child and young adult, showing his psychological development over time.
The first scene brings Scrooge back to his childhood town, where he is immediately rushed with feelings of nostalgia, cheerfulness, and joy. These positive memories depict a very different Scrooge from present, revealing his once optimistic and hopeful disposition. What happened to him since?
The memories begin to grow darker. Multiple scenes show Scrooge spending Christmas alone as a young child, one time being left by himself at boarding school while his friends were celebrating the holidays with family, and another time sitting solitarily by the fire reading. Scrooge begins to shed tears and show sympathy toward his former, abandoned self.
One of the most pivotal memories is when young adult Scrooge is speaking with his past lover. She notices a fundamental change in him that has become a dealbreaker in their relationship.
“You fear the world too much,” she answered, gently…”I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one-by-one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you…”
She sees that money has become Scrooge’s God which he puts above all other values, including love. The young woman continues…
“Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were both poor and content to be so, until, in good season, we could improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You are changed. When it was made, you were another man.”
Here we begin to see Scrooge’s hardening into the man he is in the present.
His pursuit of wealth as his main source of comfort and satisfaction has damaged his relationship beyond repair. The lover sees no other option but for them to go their separate ways. The memory deeply pains Scrooge and he cries out for the ghost to show him no more.
In truth we are all a product of our past, including our environment and the choices we make in life. Scrooge has clearly gone through hardships and taken wrong turns that have influenced where he finds himself today; but it’s not too late.
The Ghost of Christmas Past forced Scrooge to remember events that he had long forgotten, neglected, or ignored because they were too painful to think about. While these old memories cannot be altered, you have to accept your past, be honest with yourself, and forgive yourself if you want to learn, grow, and change for the better.
One of the main lessons here is that you need to take responsibility for the past before you can take power over the future. Scrooge is suffering, but he’s learning.
Making the Most of the Present: Opportunities for Joy and Kindness
Scrooge’s next encounter is with the “Ghost of Christmas Present,” who teaches Scrooge all the opportunities for good that cross his path every single day.
The spirit is colorfully dressed with holly, mistletoe, berries, turkeys, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit, and punch surrounding him, a representation of the simple pleasures in life we can all learn to appreciate, savor, and be grateful for.
First, the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge for a walk outside in the town during Christmas Day, observing all the happiness, zest, and cheer overflowing through the streets. Everyone from all backgrounds is enjoying the festivities.
When two people bump into each other and start a small fight, the ghost sprinkles a magical substance on them which instantly ends the argument and brings both back to a more joyful demeanor.
“Once or twice when there were angry words between some dinner-carriers who had jostled each other, he shed a few drops of water on them, and their good humour was restored directly. For they said, it was a shame to quarrel upon Christmas Day. And so it was! God love it, so it was!”
On Christmas, all fights are optional.
The ghost then leads Scrooge to the home of Bob Cratchit, his current employee who he often treats poorly. Here Scrooge is introduced to Bob’s sick and disabled son Tiny Tim, who despite his illness is still excited to spend holiday time with the family. The poor family makes the most of the limited food and time they have together, including a fake “goose” dinner made out of apple sauce and mashed potatoes.
Scrooge looks on in sympathy and wishes he could do more to help them. He asks the spirit about the current state of Tiny Tim’s health:
“Spirit,” said Scrooge, with an interest he never felt before, “tell me if Tiny Tim will live.”
“I see a vacant seat,” replied the Ghost, “in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.”
In another scene, Scrooge is transported to the home of his sister’s family, the same party his nephew invited him to the previous day. Everyone in the household is enjoying the Christmas holiday while singing, dancing, and playing games. Several times Scrooge is brought up in conversation and everyone can only laugh and shrug at Scrooge’s relentless misery and gloom.
“A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to the old man, whatever he is!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “He wouldn’t take it from me, but may he have it nonetheless. Uncle Scrooge!”
Scrooge knows that these events and perceptions by others are part of his own doing.
At every turn, Scrooge denies taking advantage of daily opportunities for happiness, including rejecting a group of children singing carols, responding rudely to acquaintances (“Bah humbug!”), and refusing to give to charities or help others when it’s fully in his power.
These events are small, but they build up over time. Whenever Scrooge is given a choice between kindness vs. coldness, he chooses to be cold. After enough tiny social interactions, Scrooge has cemented his reputation around town as being the miserable miser.
Can he still change it?
The Shadows of the Future: Shaping Tomorrow Today
The final spirit Scrooge meets is the “Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come” or the “Ghost of Christmas Future.” This ghost blends in with the darkness of the night, wearing a long black robe that covers their entire face and body, except for a boney hand it uses to silently point.
The ghost begins by showing men on the streets joking and laughing about someone who has just passed away. At a pawn shop, robbers are selling stolen property they recently seized from the dead man’s estate, saying it’s for the best since the items will no longer serve any use to him. Scrooge, perplexed by the meaning of these scenes, intently watches on. Another man jokes:
“It’s likely to be a very cheap funeral, for upon my life I don’t know of anybody to go to it.”
Scene by scene, people show ambivalence toward the death. Scrooge grows frustrated and asks:
“If there is any person in the town who feels emotion caused by this man’s death, show that person to me. Spirit, I beseech you!”
Now they see a family that was in debt to the dead man, and they are feeling humble gratitude and quiet glee that they no longer have to worry themselves about such an evil creditor:
“Yes. Soften it as they would, their hearts were lighter. The children’s faces, hushed and clustered round to hear what they so little understood, were brighter; and it was a happier house for this man’s death! The only emotion that the Ghost could show him, caused by the event, was one of pleasure.”
Already having suspicions on who this man is, Scrooge begs the ghost to finally reveal where his future lies. The ghost travels to a graveyard and points at a tombstone that upon inspection reads: Ebenezer Scrooge
Scrooge’s heart sinks. Next it’s shown that Tiny Tim hasn’t recovered from his illness and has also passed away, and at such a young age. Feeling completely hopeless at this point, Scrooge desperately begs:
“Answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?”
“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”
As long as you’re alive and breathing, you have the power to change.
When we think about death, it puts everything about life into perspective. Our time is finite in this world and we must make the most of it without being distracted by trivialities and lesser values. If you were laying on your deathbed right now, what would your main regrets be?
When Scrooge reflects on his own death and what influence he’d leave on the world, it shakes him at his core – but also transforms him.
The Power of Redemption: Transforming Scrooge’s Tale into Our Own
After the visitations of the three ghosts, Scrooge wakes up a changed man ready to start his new life. He rises from bed excited, hopeful, and giddy that he’s still alive and still has a chance to change his current course.
Upon finding out it’s still Christmas Day, he buys a prize turkey to send to the Cratchit family and begins giving generous amounts of money to children and the poor. He continues to walk around the town square, giving everyone warm greetings and a hearty “Merry Christmas!”
When he sees Bob Cratchit the next day at work, he immediately gives him a raise in salary and promises to take care of Tiny Tim and assist the family in anyway possible. He becomes a lifelong friend to the family.
This sudden change in Scrooge’s behavior confused the townsfolk at first, including many who made fun of this rapid transformation that was so uncharacteristic of Scrooge. But these words and gossip didn’t bother him:
“Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter[…] His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.”
At its core, “A Christmas Carol” is a story of redemption and heroism. Scrooge’s journey from miserly recluse to benevolent samaritan exemplifies the human capacity for change.
By reflecting on his past, present, and future self, Scrooge discovered the best path forward – a process that applies to all forms of self-improvement.
This story has insightful lessons that can apply to anyone’s life, no matter what situation they find themselves in. We can’t change the past chapters, but we can change how our story ends.
Never forget you have the power to rewrite your life story at any time.
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ATLANTA – It’s unclear to Tameka how — or even when — her children became unenrolled from Atlanta Public Schools. But it was traumatic when, in Fall 2021, they figured out it had happened.
After more than a year of some form of pandemic online learning, students were all required to come back to school in person. Tameka was deeply afraid of COVID-19 and skeptical the schools could keep her kids safe. One morning, in a test run, she sent two kids to school.
Her oldest daughter, then in seventh grade, and her second youngest, a boy entering first grade, boarded their respective buses. She had yet to register the youngest girl, who was entering kindergarten. And her older son, a boy with Down syndrome, stayed home because she wasn’t sure he could consistently wear masks.
After a few hours, the elementary school called: Come pick up your son, they told her. He was no longer enrolled, they said.
Around lunchtime, the middle school called: Come get your daughter, they told her. She doesn’t have a class schedule.
Tameka’s children — all four of them — have been home ever since.
Thousands of students went missing from American classrooms during the pandemic. For some who have tried to return, a serious problem has presented itself. A corrosive combination of onerous re-enrollment requirements, arcane paperwork and the everyday obstacles of poverty — a nonworking phone, a missing backpack, the loss of a car — is in many cases preventing those children from going back.
“One of the biggest problems that we have is kids that are missing and chronic absenteeism,” says Pamela Herd, a Georgetown University public policy professor. She studies how burdensome paperwork and processes often prevent poor people from accessing health benefits. “I’m really taken aback that a district would set forth a series of policies that make it actually quite difficult to enroll your child.”
In Atlanta, where Tameka lives, parents must present at least eight documents to enroll their children — twice as many as parents in New York City or Los Angeles. One of the documents — a complicated certificate evaluating a child’s dental health, vision, hearing and nutrition — is required by the state. Most of the others are Atlanta’s doing, including students’ Social Security cards and an affidavit declaring residency that has to be notarized.
Tameka’s kids have essentially been out of school since COVID hit in March 2020. They have had a consistent place to live, but nearly everything else in their lives collapsed during the pandemic. Credit: Bianca Vázquez Toness/ Associated Press
The district asks for proof of residency for existing students every year at some schools, and also before beginning sixth and ninth grades, to prevent students from attending schools outside of their neighborhoods or communities. The policy also allows the district to request proof the student still lives in the attendance zone after an extended absence or many tardy arrivals. Without that proof, families say their children have been disenrolled.
“They make it so damned hard,” says Kimberly Dukes, an Atlanta parent who co-founded an organization to help families advocate for their children.
During the pandemic, she and her children became homeless and moved in with her brother. She struggled to convince her children’s school they really lived with him. Soon, she heard from other caregivers having similar problems. Last year, she estimates she helped 20 to 30 families re-enroll their children in Atlanta Public Schools.
The school district pushed back against this characterization of the enrollment process. “When parents inform APS that they are unable to provide updated proof of residence, protocols are in place to support families,” Atlanta communications director Seth Coleman wrote by email. Homeless families are not required to provide documentation, he said.
Tameka’s kids have essentially been out of school since COVID hit in March 2020. She and her kids have had a consistent place to live, but nearly everything else in their lives collapsed during the pandemic. (Tameka is her middle name. The Associated Press is withholding her full name because Tameka, 33, runs the risk of jail time or losing custody of her children since they are not in school.)
Tameka’s longtime partner, who was father to her children, died of a heart attack in May 2020 as COVID gripped the country.
His death left her overwhelmed and penniless. Tameka never graduated from high school and has worked occasionally as a security guard or a housecleaner for hotels. She has never gotten a driver’s license. But her partner worked construction and had a car. “When he was around, we never went without,” she says.
Suddenly, she had four young children to care for by herself, with only government cash assistance to live on.
Schools had closed to prevent the spread of the virus, and the kids were home with her all the time. Remote learning didn’t hold their attention. Their home internet didn’t support the three children being online simultaneously, and there wasn’t enough space in their two-bedroom apartment for the kids to have a quiet place to learn.
Because she had to watch them, she couldn’t work. The job losses put her family even further below the median income for a Black family in Atlanta — $28,105. (The median annual income for a white family in the city limits is $83,722.)
When Tameka’s children didn’t return to school, she also worried about the wrong kind of attention from the state’s child welfare department. According to Tameka, staff visited her in Spring 2021 after receiving calls from the school complaining her children were not attending online classes.
The social workers interviewed the children, inspected their home and looked for signs of neglect and abuse. They said they’d be back to set her up with resources to help her with parenting. For more than two years, she says, “they never came back.”
“He wasn’t in school, and no one cared.”
Candace, mother of a seventh grader with autism
When the kids missed 10 straight days of school that fall, the district removed them from its rolls, citing a state regulation. Tameka now had to re-enroll them.
Suddenly, another tragedy of her partner’s death became painfully obvious. He was carrying all the family’s important documents in his backpack when he suffered his heart attack. The hospital that received him said it passed along the backpack and other possessions to another family member, Tameka says. But it was never found.
The backpack contained the children’s birth certificates and her own, plus Medicaid cards and Social Security cards. Slowly, she has tried to replace the missing documents. First, she got new birth certificates for the children, which required traveling downtown.
After asking for new Medicaid cards for over a year, she finally received them for two of her children. She says she needs them to take her children to the doctor for the health verifications and immunizations required to enroll. It’s possible her family’s cards have been held up by a backlog in Georgia’s Medicaid office since the state agency incorrectly disenrolled thousands of residents.
When she called for a doctor’s appointment in October, the office said the soonest they could see her children was December.
“That’s too late,” she said. “Half the school year will be over by then.”
She also needs to show the school her own identification, Social Security cards, and a new lease, plus the notarized residency affidavit.
Some of the enrollment requirements have exceptions buried deep in school board documents. But Tameka says no one from the district has offered her guidance.
Contact logs provided by the district show social workers from three schools have sent four emails and called the family 19 times since the pandemic closed classrooms in 2020. Most of those calls went to voicemail or didn’t go through because the phone was disconnected. Records show Tameka rarely called back.
The only face-to-face meeting was in October 2021, when Tameka sent her kids on the bus, only to learn they weren’t enrolled. A school social worker summarized the encounter: “Discussed students’ attendance history, the impact it has on the student and barriers. Per mom student lost father in May 2020 and only other barrier is uniforms.”
The social worker said the school would take care of the uniforms. “Mom given enrollment paperwork,” the entry ends.
The school’s logs don’t record any further attempts to contact Tameka.
“Our Student Services Team went above and beyond to help this family and these children,” wrote Coleman, the district spokesperson.
Inconsistent cell phone access isn’t uncommon among low-income Americans. Many have phones, as Tameka’s family does, but when they break or run out of prepaid minutes, communication with them becomes impossible.
So in some cities, even at the height of the pandemic, social workers, teachers and administrators checked on families in person when they were unresponsive or children had gone missing from online learning. In Atlanta, Coleman said, the district avoided in-person contact because of the coronavirus.
Tameka says she’s unaware of any outreach from Atlanta schools. She currently lacks a working phone with a cell plan, and she’s spent long stretches over the last three years without one. An Associated Press reporter has had to visit the family in person to communicate.
The logs provided by Atlanta Public Schools show only one attempt to visit the family in person, in Spring 2021. A staff member went to the family’s home to discuss poor attendance in online classes by the son with Down syndrome. No one was home, and the logs don’t mention further attempts.
The details of what the district has done to track down and re-enroll Tameka’s children, especially her son with Down syndrome, matter. Federal laws require the state and district to identify, locate and evaluate all children with disabilities until they turn 21.
One government agency has been able to reach Tameka. A new social worker from the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, the same agency that came years earlier, made another visit to her home in October.
The department offered to organize a ride for her and her children to visit the doctor. But without an appointment, Tameka didn’t see the point.
The social worker also shared a helpful tip: Tameka can enroll her children with most of the paperwork, and then she would have 30 days to get the immunizations. But she should act fast, the social worker urged, or the department might have to take action against her for “educational neglect.”
To many observers, Tameka’s troubles stem from Atlanta’s rapid gentrification. The city, known for its Black professional class, also boasts the country’s largest wealth disparity between Black and white families.
“It looks good from the curb, but when you get inside you see that Black and brown people are worse off economically than in West Virginia — and no one wants to talk about it,” says Frank Brown, who heads Communities in Schools of Atlanta, an organization that runs dropout-prevention programs in Atlanta Public Schools.
Atlanta’s school board passed many of its enrollment policies and procedures back in 2008, after years of gentrification and a building boom consolidated upper-income and mostly white residents in the northern half of the city. The schools in those neighborhoods complained of “overcrowding,” while the schools in the majority Black southern half of the city couldn’t fill all of their seats.
The board cracked down on “residency fraud” to prevent parents living in other parts of town from sending their children to schools located in those neighborhoods.
Tameka’s 8-year-old daughter ties her shoe before running out to play in Atlanta on Dec. 5, 2023. Credit: Bianca Vázquez Toness/Associated Press
“This was about balancing the number of students in schools,” says Tiffany Fick, director of school quality and advocacy for Equity in Education, a policy organization in Atlanta. “But it was also about race and class.”
Communities such as St. Louis, the Massachusetts town of Everett and Tupelo, Mississippi, have adopted similar policies, including tip lines to report neighbors who might be sending their children to schools outside of their enrollment zones.
But the Atlanta metro area seems to be a hotbed, despite the policies’ disruption of children’s educations. In January, neighboring Fulton County disenrolled nearly 400 students from one of its high schools after auditing residency documents after Christmas vacation.
The policies were designed to prevent children from attending schools outside of their neighborhood. But according to Dukes and other advocates, the increased bureaucracy has also made it difficult for the poor to attend their assigned schools — especially after the pandemic hit families with even more economic stress.
The Associated Press spoke to five additional Atlanta public school mothers who struggled with the re-enrollment process. Their children were withdrawn from school because their leases had expired or were month to month, or their child lacked vaccinations.
Candace, the mother of a seventh grader with autism, couldn’t get her son a vaccination appointment when schools first allowed students to return in person in Spring 2021. There were too many other families seeking shots at that time, and she didn’t have reliable transportation to go further afield. The boy, then in fourth grade, missed a cumulative five months.
“He wasn’t in school, and no one cared,” said Candace, who asked AP not to use her last name because she worries about losing custody of her child since he missed so much school. She eventually re-enrolled him with the help of Dukes, the parent advocate.
“One of the biggest problems that we have is kids that are missing and chronic absenteeism. I’m really taken aback that a district would set forth a series of policies that make it actually quite difficult to enroll your child.”
Pamela Herd, a Georgetown University public policy professor
Many parents who have struggled with the enrollment policies have had difficulty persuading schools to accept their proof of residency. Adding an extra burden to those who don’t own their homes, Atlanta’s policy allows principals to ask for additional evidence from renters.
Shawndrea Gay was told by her children’s school, which is located in an upper-income neighborhood, that her month-to-month lease was insufficient. Twice, investigators came to her studio apartment to verify that the family lived there. “They looked in the fridge to make sure there was food,” she says. “It was no joke.”
Then, in Summer 2022, the school unenrolled her children because their lease had expired. With Dukes’ help, Gay was able to get them back in school before classes started.
Tameka hasn’t reached out for help getting her kids back in school. She doesn’t feel comfortable asking and doesn’t trust the school system, especially after they called the child welfare department. “I don’t like people knowing my business,” she says. “I’m a private person.”
On a typical school day, Tameka’s four children — now 14, 12, 9 and 8 — sleep late and stay inside watching television or playing video games. Only the youngest — the girl who’s never been to school — has much interest in the outside world, Tameka says.
The girl often plays kickball or runs outside with other kids in their low-income subdivision. But during the week, she has to wait for them to come home from school at around 3 p.m.
The little girl should be in second grade, learning to master chapter books, spell, and add and subtract numbers up to 100. She has had to settle for “playing school” with her three older siblings. She practices her letters and writes her name. She runs through pre-kindergarten counting exercises on a phone.
But even at 8, she understands that it’s not the real thing.
“I want to go to school,” she says, “and see what it’s like.”
This story was produced by the Associated Press and reprinted with permission. The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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The U.S. Census Bureau released the 2022 American Community Survey this week. The survey, which looks at demographic data in five-year increments, introduced several new detailed tables and demographic breakdowns. We looked at some trends in the data.
Nearly 6 million people 65 and older live in California, a figure that is slowly growing. In the last five years, 716,000 people became senior citizens in the state. That number will nearly double by 2030. Los Angeles County is home to roughly a quarter of the senior citizens in the state.
As the cost of living increases, the number of Golden State senior citizens in poverty is also rising, with nearly 14% of Los Angeles County senior citizens living below the poverty line. The national poverty rate declined significantly to 12.5% during the five-year period from 2018-22.
Across the country, housing costs continue to rise. Financial planners advise that no more than 30% of household income be spent on housing costs. The latest data show that is far from the reality for 41% of homeowners with a mortgage in Los Angeles County. For homeowners without a mortgage, roughly 16% are house burdened. It’s also not easy for renters. More than half of renters spend more than 30% of their household income on housing costs.
The data also point to how the pandemic changed the way people work. In Los Angeles County, the number of people working from home tripled from more than 270,000 to 810,000 in just five years. That number tracks with the rest of the state’s pool of people working from home, which tripled from 1 million to more than 3.2 million. For those having to commute into the office daily, the mean travel time to work has stayed the same with most L.A. County residents getting to work in 30 minutes (although most L.A. city residents would laugh at this figure.) The number of unemployed people in the county has gone down by 4% since 2017 with roughly 300,000 without work.
The new American Community Survey includes updated race data. They show the county has grown in its Asian and Latino population. Roughly 1.4 million people identified as Asian in Los Angeles County, up 2.4% from a decade ago. Those who identify as Latino and Hispanic account for nearly half of the population of the county. The county lost 80,000 Black people over the last decade.
GRAND ISLAND, Nebraska — In recent years, city leaders in Grand Island, Nebraska, observed that many workers and students were walking or biking long distances to their jobs or schools. So when city administrator, Laura McAloon, learned of an opportunity to study the development of a bus system to meet those transportation needs, she jumped at it.
The opportunity was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in collaboration with the International City/County Management Association, a network of local government administrators. And it sent McAloon to Washington along with other local leaders to learn about strategies and policies to lift people in their community out of poverty.
The Gates Foundation announced Thursday that it will donate $100 million to expand its work on economic mobility — a move that the country’s largest foundation says is a change in how it operates, putting more power in the hands of grantees and looking to accelerate the speed at which its gifts have impact. The commitment is part of the $460 million the foundation said in 2022 it would donate over four years to this part of its portfolio.
Ryan Rippel, the founding director for the Gates Foundation’s economic opportunity and mobility strategy, said the grants represent an important and deliberate change in how it works, with large grants going to organizations that will have a great deal of autonomy in directing their own work and the work of subgrantees.
The strategy, he said, is a result of feedback they heard from speaking with others in the field and the people they hope to help.
“I went to a conference in Washington and was very proudly talking about a data investment that we had made that we think could actually help governments make very different decisions about allocating resources,” he said. “And a woman stood up in the back of the room and she shouted, ‘I just need a tank of gas.’ And that really stuck with me. And it stuck with our team as a profound lesson that these are very concrete, daily needs.”
The portfolio is a small portion of the foundation’s overall budget, which was $7 billion last year, but it’s grown significantly. Rippel said that is because they’ve learned so much about the strategies, interventions and organizations that can lift people out of poverty. The continued expansion of their work, he said, depends on whether they meet their goal of improving economic mobility for 50 million people in the U.S. who earn 200% of the poverty level or less, which is $29,160 in annual income for an individual.
The foundation will fund organizations working to expand support for local government implementing evidence-based policies, connecting people with skills but without college degrees to jobs, helping people claim government benefits and influencing small- and medium-businesses to adjust working conditions to help people balance personal and work commitments. The grantees include Opportunity@Work, Families and Workers Fund, Prosperity Now, Pacific Community Ventures, Results for America and the Urban Institute.
It was at a meeting in Washington in May where the Urban Institute introduced the tools and research they’ve developed to help cities and counties understand barriers to economic mobility that McAloon from Grand Island realized that her city of 53,000, located about 150 miles west from Omaha, needed to collect more information.
“We looked at each other and said, we don’t know that we have the data, the metrics, to show that this problem exists that we said we were going to come up with a solution for,” said McAloon, of her colleagues from the local community college and public school district who were with her.
By the end of the conference, they’d altered their objectives and launched a data collective and analysis project, which included surveying local residents with the help of translators at a summer festival and consulting with the human resources departments of major local employers.
What they learned is that transportation had been a problem for workers but when the meatpacking plant and other manufacturers raised wages during the period of low unemployment after the pandemic, many households were able to afford cars. Now the issue, the employers said, was housing.
“It’s a multi-pronged approach to actually creating opportunities for economic growth and personal income growth,” McAloon said. “There’s just no one silver bullet. There’s no one problem. You have to address all of it in order to make really significant change.”
The Gates Foundation is far from alone in this field with large funders, like philanthropist MacKenzie Scott and Blue Meridian Partners, also making multimillion dollar commitments, sometimes to the same organizations, in recent years.
Last week, Blue Meridian Partners announced it was granting $50 million each to three municipalities, San Antonio and Dallas County in Texas, and Spartanburg County, South Carolina, who each also raised at least $50 million from other sources, to support specific interventions like doubling the number of young adults making a living wage and increasing the percent of high schoolers who enroll in further education.
Jim Shelton, president and chief investment and impact officer at Blue Meridian Partners, said that while the interrelated issues that hold people in poverty are complex, there is a growing body of evidence for policies and programs that can have an outsized impact on people’s life trajectory.
“Once you start to disaggregate the problem that way, you start to recognize that there are all over the place, pieces of solutions that actually work,” he said. “But what we lack is the coherence to bring it all together in a way that consistently change people’s lives.”
When asked whether growing inequality in the U.S. played a role in its decision to increase funding for economic mobility, the Gates Foundation said, “Our increased investment is based on promising work from partners in the early years of the strategy and our belief that the foundation can play a unique role in improving systems that help people get back on their feet in times of need and get ahead economically.”
At the close of Grand Island’s research study this fall, McAloon said they determined it won’t be possible to set up a bus system, in part because of federal funding rules. Instead, they are exploring a van pool that is partially funded by employers and with state funds.
But, because of the new communication and coordination across agencies, schools and local organizations prompted by the study, her office heard that a lack of plumbers and electricians was holding up new housing developments. She reached out to the community college, which is now setting up a technical training program to funnel high school students into those trades.
“It was a matter of a couple of emails,” she said. “And they’re already working on developing the curriculum and creating an apprenticeship program that hopefully will start making an impact on that issue that’s keeping us from building more houses.”
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Next year will mark seven decades since the U.S. Supreme Court declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional. Even the current Supreme Court’s conservatives have embraced that Brown vs. Board of Education decision.
Yet, 70 years after Brown, a key obstacle to racial equality in education continues to be white resistance to racial integration and to adequate funding for the education of Black and Latino children.
In the 1950s and 1960s, white resistance took the form of a revolt against integration and busing.
Private “white academies” — also known as segregation academies — sprang up to preserve the advantages held by the previously white-only public schools.
Today, one form of ongoing resistance is what scholars label “hoarding opportunities.” By using zoning and districting to create and perpetuate overwhelmingly white spaces and declining to share resources with Black and Latino children, white Americans limit the reach of integration and perpetuate inequality.
Not surprisingly, in 2022, the Government Accountability Office declared that school segregation continues unabated. The agency reported that even as the nation’s student population has diversified, 43 percent of its schools are segregated, and 18.5 million students, more than one-third of all the students in the country, are enrolled in highly segregated schools (75 percent or more of the students identify as a single race or ethnicity).
The Midwest — with 59 percent of all schools classified as segregated — is the leader in segregation.
The same GAO study showed that when new school districts are formed, they tend to be far more racially homogeneous than the districts they replace.
A key obstacle to racial equality in education continues to be white resistance.
Direct evidence of white resistance to racial equity in education can be seen in a survey experiment my co-authors and I conducted in 2021 that closely replicated findings from earlier periods. The study shows that white Americans continue to be reluctant to support increased funding for schools for Black children.
In our experiment, 552 white Americans were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The first group was asked: “Do you favor or oppose expanding funding for pre-kindergarten programs so that it is available for poor children nationwide? The $24 billion a year cost would be paid for by higher taxes.”
The second group was asked the same question, except that “poor children” was replaced by “poor Black children.”
About 75 percent of respondents in the first group said they favor spending tax dollars for such a program. However, in the group asked about “poor Black children,” just 68 percent were in favor. This is a significant gap in support.
The experiment suggests that among white Americans, support for public education funding for poor children is robust. But less so for poor Black children.
White resistance to desegregation and school funding for Black students has severe consequences for racial equality and the economy.
Research published this month shows that Black students who attended Southern desegregated schools in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s experienced positive lifelong cognitive effects.
And data from the U.S. Department of Education still shows “substantial” racial gaps in reading and math competencies, high school graduation rates and, inevitably, college entry.
A recent Brookings report estimated that if the racial gap in education and employment had been eliminated, the U.S. GDP from 1990 to 2019 would have been $22.9 trillion larger. This would benefit us all.
The great promise of Brown was one of equal access to high-quality education. The hope was that income and other social disparities among white, Black and Latino people would dissipate over time. White resistance contributed to America not keeping this promise.
Policymakers, funders and education advocates must overcome white resistance to strengthen support for programs geared toward Black and Latino children.
This will help America’s quest to fulfill the promise of Brown. It’s time.
Alexandra Filindra is an associate professor of political science and psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago and a Public Voices Fellow through The OpEd Project. She is also the author of “Race, Rights and Rifles.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
ATLANTA — Young Thug is the ruthless leader of a violent street gang that terrorized Atlanta neighborhoods or he’s an inspiring success who pulled himself out of poverty to rap stardom through hard work and determination. Those are the competing narratives presented to the jury as the rapper’s trial got underway this week.
The Grammy winner, whose given name is Jeffery Williams, was charged last year in a sprawling indictment that accused him and more than two dozen others of conspiring to violate Georgia’s anti-racketeering law. He also is charged with gang, drug and gun crimes and is standing trial with five of the others indicted with him.
Fulton County prosecutor Adriane Love didn’t dispute that Young Thug is a talented artist, but she said he exploited his gift for a darker purpose, using his songs, clout and social media posts to promote and establish the dominance of his gang, Young Slime Life, or YSL.
“Through that music, through that blessing, the evidence will show, Jeffery Williams led that group of people who wreaked utter havoc on Fulton County,” Love told jurors during her opening statement Monday.
Defense attorney Brian Steel acknowledged that his client’s songs mention killing police, people being shot, drugs and drive-by shootings, but he said those are just the words he rhymed and a reflection of his rough upbringing and not a chronicle of his own activities.
“They want you to fear music that talks about killing, drugs,” Steel told the jury in his opening statement Tuesday. “It is art. You don’t like it, you don’t have to listen to it. This is America. It is art.”
Steel mentioned Young Thug’s collaborations with high-profile artists, appearances on television and numerous awards and riches that came with it. The rapper is so busy and successful that he wouldn’t have the time or motivation to lead a gang, Steel said.
“He is not sitting there telling people to kill people,” he said. “He doesn’t need their money. Jeffrey’s worth tens of millions of dollars.”
Steel noted that YSL is the name of Young Thug’s successful record label, but Love said the actions outlined in the indictment “have nothing to do with a recording label.”
The gang began about a decade ago in Atlanta’s Cleveland Avenue neighborhood, born of an internal rift in a preceding gang, and Young Thug emerged as its leader, Love said. The gang’s members were “associated in fact” — using common identifiers, language, symbols and colors — and they “knew who their leader was and they knew the repercussions of not obeying their leader,” she said.
The people who have been affected directly and indirectly by the gang’s violence represent the lives “swallowed up by that crater created by YSL in the Cleveland Avenue community,” Love said.
Young Thug was born into poverty in a crime-ridden housing project where he developed a strong distrust of the criminal justice system, Steel said. His family moved to the Cleveland Avenue area when he was 16, and he got out through hard work and talent, Steel said. But he didn’t forget his roots and has been extremely generous with his good fortune, Steel said.
“He’s not the crater. He’s trying to pull people out of poverty,” Steel said.
The indictment charges all the defendants with conspiring to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. Love acknowledged that may sound complicated but told the jurors it’s actually quite simple.
The members of the gang committed crimes, including murder, armed robbery, aggravated assault and theft to further the gang’s mission, she said. Those actions and others that aren’t crimes — rap lyrics, social media posts, flashing gang signs — combined to form a pattern of illegal activity, she said.
“They endeavored to do some illegal stuff to get a bunch of stuff that didn’t belong to them,” Love said.
Prosecutors have made clear that they intend to use rap lyrics from songs by the defendants to help make their case. This is a controversial tactic, but Fulton County Superior Court Chief Judge Ural Glanville earlier this month said he’d conditionally allow certain lyrics as long as prosecutors can show they’re linked to the crimes alleged in the indictment.
Prosecutors have said they’re not pursuing Young Thug and others because of violent lyrics.
“We didn’t chase the lyrics to solve the murders,” Love said. “We chased the murders and, as the evidence will show, in the process, we found the lyrics.”
One of those murders that is expected to feature heavily during the trial is the January 2015 killing of Donovan Thomas, who prosecutors say was a major figure in a rival gang and whose death is said to have sparked an escalation in violence. Two of the six people currently on trial are charged with murder in his killing, and Young Thug is accused of renting the car used in the drive-by shooting.
Many of the lyrics, social media posts, text conversations and online messages cited in the indictment have been taken out of context and misrepresented to seem sinister when they are not, Steel said.
He and other defense attorneys tried during opening statements to poke holes in the state’s case, saying that police relied on jailhouse informants who had every reason to tell them what they wanted to hear. They also hammered the state’s use of song lyrics, saying the art that helped their clients better their circumstances is now being improperly used against them.
Opening statements began Monday and continued Tuesday before a jury that took nearly 10 months to select. The trial is expected to last months. Only six of the original 28 defendants are on trial after others either took plea deals or were separated to be tried later.
Among those who took a plea deal was rapper Gunna, whose given name is Sergio Kitchens. He was charged with a single count of racketeering conspiracy and entered an Alford plea last December, meaning he maintains his innocence but recognizes that it’s in his best interest to plead guilty.
