Mireya Barrera no quería pelear.

Durante años, se sentó en las reuniones con los docentes de educación especial de su hijo, luchando por mantener una sonrisa mientras entendía poco de lo que decían. En las ocasiones poco comunes en que se pedía ayuda a otros docentes que hablaban el idioma de Barrera, el español, las conversaciones seguían siendo vacilantes porque no eran intérpretes calificados.

Pero cuando su hijo Ian entró en la escuela secundaria, Barrera decidió invitar a un voluntario bilingüe de una organización local sin ánimo de lucro para que se sentara con ella y recordara sus derechos al equipo escolar.

“Quería a alguien de mi lado”, dijo Barrera, cuyo hijo tiene autismo, a través de un intérprete. “Durante todo este tiempo, no nos estaban facilitando las cosas. Eso provocó muchas lágrimas”. 

Independientemente del idioma que hablen los padres en casa, tienen el derecho civil de recibir información importante de los educadores de sus hijos en un idioma que entiendan. En el caso de los estudiantes con discapacidad, la ley federal es aún más clara: las escuelas “deben tomar todas las medidas necesarias”, incluidos los servicios de interpretación y traducción, para que los padres puedan participar de forma significativa en la educación de sus hijos.

Pero, a veces, las escuelas de todo el país no prestan esos servicios.

Las familias que no hablan inglés se ven obligadas a asistir a las reuniones sobre el progreso de sus hijos sin poder opinar ni preguntar a los educadores cómo pueden ayudar. Las diferencias culturales y lingüísticas pueden convencer a algunos padres de no cuestionar lo que ocurre en la escuela, un desequilibrio de poder que, según los defensores, hace que algunos niños se queden sin un apoyo fundamental. En caso de ser necesario, no es infrecuente que las escuelas encarguen a los estudiantes bilingües la interpretación para sus familias, poniéndolos en la posición de describir sus propios defectos a sus padres y tutores.

“Eso es totalmente inapropiado, en todos los sentidos posibles, y poco realista”, dice Diane Smith Howard, abogada principal de la Red Nacional de Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad. “Si al niño no le va especialmente bien en una asignatura académica, ¿por qué confiaría en que su hijo adolescente se lo contara?”.

Los distritos escolares culpan a la falta de recursos. Dicen que no tienen dinero para contratar a más intérpretes o a agencias de servicios lingüísticos y que, aunque lo tuvieran, no hay suficientes intérpretes calificados para hacer el trabajo.

En Washington y en algunos otros estados, la cuestión ha empezado a recibir más atención. Los legisladores estatales de Olympia presentaron este año una ley bipartidista para reforzar los derechos civiles federales en el código estatal. Los sindicatos de docentes de Seattle y Chicago negociaron recientemente, y consiguieron, servicios de interpretación durante las reuniones de educación especial. Y los distritos escolares se enfrentan a una creciente amenaza de demandas de los padres, o incluso a una investigación federal, si no se toman en serio el acceso lingüístico.

Aun así, los esfuerzos por ampliar el acceso lingüístico en la educación especial se enfrentan a una ardua batalla, debido al escaso número de intérpretes capacitados, la falta de cumplimiento a nivel estatal y el escaso financiamiento del Congreso (a pesar de que en 1974 prometió cubrir casi la mitad del costo adicional que supone para las escuelas proporcionar servicios de educación especial, el gobierno federal nunca lo ha hecho). El proyecto de ley bipartidista de Washington para ofrecer más protecciones a las familias fracasó repentinamente, después de que los legisladores estatales lo despojaran de disposiciones clave y los defensores retiraran su apoyo.

El sistema de educación especial puede ser “increíblemente difícil para todos”, dijo Ramona Hattendorf, directora de defensa de The Arc of King County, que promueve los derechos de las personas con discapacidad. “Luego todo se agrava cuando se introduce el idioma en la mezcla”. En todo el país, aproximadamente 1 de cada 10 estudiantes que califican para recibir servicios de educación especial también se identifican como estudiantes de inglés, según datos federales de educación, y esa proporción está creciendo. Cerca de 791,000 estudiantes de inglés participaron en educación especial en 2020, un aumento de casi el 30 % desde 2012. En más de una docena de estados, incluido Washington, el aumento fue aún mayor.

A medida que crece su número, también aumenta la frustración de sus padres con los servicios lingüísticos.

Durante el año escolar 2021-22, la defensora del pueblo en materia educación del estado de Washington recibió casi 1,200 quejas de los padres sobre las escuelas. Su principal preocupación, en todos los grupos raciales y demográficos, fue el acceso y la inclusión en la educación especial. La defensora del pueblo principal en materia de educación, Jinju Park, calcula que entre el 50 % y el 70 % de las llamadas que recibe la agencia son sobre educación especial, y que el 80 % de ellas son de clientes que necesitan servicios de interpretación.

Mientras que la mayoría de los estados conceden a las escuelas un máximo de 60 días desde que se remite a un estudiante a los servicios de educación especial para determinar si califica, las escuelas de Washington pueden tardar hasta medio año escolar. Y si un padre necesita servicios de interpretación o traducción, la espera puede durar aún más.

“Las leyes actuales no apoyan la participación plena de los padres”, escribió Park a los legisladores estatales en apoyo a la primera versión del proyecto de ley 1305 de la Cámara de Representantes, propuesta que finalmente fracasó. “Los padres para los que el inglés puede que no sea su lengua materna”, añadió, “a menudo, se ven abrumados por la información e incapaces de participar de forma significativa en el proceso”.

Barrera, cuyo hijo asistió al distrito escolar de Auburn, al sur de Seattle, dijo que, a menudo, se sentía excluida de su aprendizaje.

En el kínder, tras el diagnóstico de autismo de Ian, su equipo de educación especial llegó a la conclusión de que necesitaba un paraeducador asignado a tiempo completo, dijo Barrera. Recurrió a Google Translate y a otros padres para que la ayudaran a redactar correos electrónicos preguntando por qué no recibió ese apoyo hasta tercer grado. Sus solicitudes de copias traducidas de documentos legales quedaron en gran parte sin respuesta, mencionó, hasta que un director le dijo que la traducción era demasiado costosa.

Cuando Ian entró en la escuela secundaria, el acoso escolar y su seguridad se convirtieron en la principal preocupación de Barrera. Una vez llegó a casa sin un mechón de pelo, cuenta. A pesar de las repetidas llamadas y correos electrónicos a sus docentes, Barrera dijo que nunca recibió una explicación.

Además, cuando pidió ir a la escuela para observar, un docente le dijo: “Ni siquiera habla inglés. ¿Qué sentido tiene?”. Vicki Alonzo, portavoz del distrito de Auburn, afirma que el auge de la población inmigrante en la región en los últimos años ha llevado al distrito a destinar más recursos a ayudar a las familias cuya lengua materna no es el inglés. Casi un tercio de sus estudiantes son multilingües, dijo, y hablan alrededor de 85 idiomas diferentes en casa.

En el año 2019-20, el distrito gastó alrededor de $175,000 en servicios de interpretación y traducción, dijo; el año escolar pasado, esa cifra fue de más de $450,000.

Alonzo señaló que el distrito no recibió financiamiento adicional para esos servicios, que incluyeron alrededor de 1,500 reuniones con intérpretes y la traducción de más de 3,000 páginas de documentos.

El problema del acceso lingüístico es “un fenómeno nacional”, dijo Smith Howard, de la Red Nacional de Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad. “Es un problema de recursos y también una cuestión de respeto, dignidad y comprensión, que todos los padres deberían recibir”.

Los docentes también están frustrados.

El sindicato de docentes de Seattle protestó y retrasó el inicio de las clases el año pasado por unas demandas que incluían servicios de interpretación y traducción en educación especial. El contrato final, que dura hasta 2025, exige que los miembros del personal tengan acceso a diversos servicios que proporcionen traducción telefónica (un intérprete en directo) o de texto (en el caso de documentos escritos). El objetivo de esta disposición es garantizar que no se pida al personal bilingüe que traduzca si no forma parte de su trabajo.

Los docentes dicen que estas herramientas han sido útiles, pero solo en cierta medida: en ocasiones poco comunes hay intérpretes telefónicos disponibles para los idiomas menos comunes, como el amárico, y son frecuentes los problemas técnicos, como la interrupción de las llamadas.

La disponibilidad de intérpretes “no es tan constante como nos gustaría”, afirma Ibi Holiday, docente de educación especial de la escuela primaria Rising Star de Seattle.

También hay una cuestión de contexto. Es posible que los traductores no tengan experiencia en educación especial, por lo que las familias pueden salir de una reunión sin entender todas las opciones, lo cual puede ralentizar el proceso significativamente.

“Para muchas familias, la escuela de su país funciona de forma completamente diferente”, explica Mari Rico, directora del Centro de Desarrollo Infantil Jose Marti de El Centro de la Raza, un programa bilingüe de educación temprana. “Traducir no bastaba; tenía que enseñarles el sistema”.

Muchas escuelas del distrito de Seattle cuentan con personal multilingüe, pero el número y la diversidad de idiomas hablados no es constante, afirma Rico. Y existe un mayor riesgo de que el caso de un estudiante se pase por alto o se estanque debido a las barreras lingüísticas. Dijo que ha tenido que intervenir cuando las familias han pasado meses sin una reunión del programa de educación individualizada, incluso cuando su hijo estaba recibiendo servicios.

Hattendorf, de The Arc del condado de King, dijo que las soluciones tecnológicas más económicas, como las que utiliza Seattle, ofrecen cierta ayuda, pero su calidad varía mucho. Y los servicios pueden no ofrecer a los padres tiempo suficiente para procesar información complicada y hacer preguntas de seguimiento, explicó.

Al sur de Seattle, los Barrera decidieron cambiar a Ian de escuela secundaria.

Se graduó este año, pero la ley federal garantiza sus servicios de educación especial tres años más. Ian asiste ahora a un programa de transición para estudiantes con discapacidad, donde aprenderá habilidades para la vida, como conseguir un trabajo.

“Sabemos que, con ayuda, puede hacer lo que quiera”, dijo Barrera.

Ya, añadió, “todo es diferente. Los docentes intentan encontrar la mejor manera de comunicarse conmigo”.

Este artículo sobre los servicios de interpretación fue elaborado por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente y sin ánimo de lucro centrada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación, en colaboración con The Seattle Times.

The post Los padres de estudiantes de educación especial que no hablan inglés se enfrentan a otro obstáculo appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Last year, Arizona became the first state in the nation to offer universal school choice for all families.

State leaders promised families roughly $7,000 a year to spend on private schools and other nonpublic education options, dangling the opportunity for parents to pull their kids out of what some conservatives called “failing government schools.”

But now, some private schools across the state are hiking their tuition by thousands of dollars. That risks pricing the students that lawmakers said they intended to serve out of private schools, in some cases limiting those options to wealthier families and those who already attended private institutions.

Critics of Arizona’s empowerment scholarship accounts, or ESAs, cite the tuition increases as evidence of what they’ve warned about for years: Universal school choice, rather than giving students living in poverty an opportunity to attend higher-quality schools, would largely serve as a subsidy for the affluent.

“The average amount of tuition is going to be more than the actual voucher, not to mention transportation and uniform costs,” said Nik Nartowicz, state policy counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a legal advocacy group. “This doesn’t help low-income families.”

A Hechinger Report analysis of dozens of private school websites revealed that, among 55 that posted their tuition rates, nearly all raised their prices since 2022. Some schools made modest increases, often in line with or below the overall inflation rate last year of around 6 percent. But at nearly half of the schools, tuition increased in at least some grades by 10 percent or more. In five of those cases, schools hiked tuition by more than 20 percent – much higher than even the steep inflation that hit the Phoenix metro area and well beyond what an ESA could cover.

Nationally, a dozen other states now offer ESAs, also known as education savings accounts, that incentivize parents to withdraw their kids from the public K-12 system. Another 14 states offer vouchers, which allow families to direct most or all of their students’ per pupil funding to a private school. As the programs grow in number, they offer a test of subsidized school choice — a longtime goal of the political right — and its effectiveness in serving kids from all backgrounds.   

Related: Florida just expanded vouchers — again. What does that really mean?

As of September, nearly 62,000 students in Arizona have received an ESA — more than twice the number that received the aid in the same month last year. Participating students receive 90 percent of what the state would spend to educate them at a public school; children with disabilities can access much higher funding. Recent state data pegs the median ESA award at just under $7,200. Families can spend their ESAs on almost any education-related expenses, such as private school tuition, tutoring and homeschool supplies. 

Before Arizona expanded eligibility for ESAs last year, proponents of the program argued the median award would cover median tuition at private elementary schools and about three quarters of the median rate at private high schools. Now, the recent rise in tuition may price more Arizona families out of the nation’s most expansive experiment in school choice.

For example, the cost of enrollment for seventh and eighth graders at Arrowhead Montessori, in Peoria, soared to $15,000, an increase of $4,200. In Mesa, tuition at Redeemer Christian School rose by nearly a quarter across most grades; families of high schoolers now pay $12,979, approximately $2,500 higher than the year prior. Similarly, at Desert Garden Montessori, in Phoenix, middle and high school tuition is now $16,000, nearly 24 percent higher than last year’s tuition rate of $12,950. And Saint Theresa Catholic School, also in Phoenix, reserved its biggest price hike – of about $1,800, or nearly 15 percent – for non-Catholic students in the elementary grades. Tuition for those students is now more than $14,000.

The Arrowhead, Desert Garden, Valley Christian and Redeemer Christian schools did not respond to requests for comment. ESA proponents, meanwhile, dismissed any tuition inflation as early growing pains.

Lisa Snell, a senior fellow of education at Stand Together Trust, a libertarian think tank, said that over time more private schools and educational providers will open in the state, creating greater market competition and pushing down costs. Already, Arizona has registered more than 4,000 vendors for ESAs — including retailers, tutors and even traditional school districts — a jump of 35 percent over last year.

“There’s obviously more risk with experimentation, but the only way to improve quality is to allow people to experiment,” Snell said. “We’re at the very early days.”

Related: COLUMN: Conservatives are embracing new alternative school models. Will the public?

ESAs gained prominence with Arizona’s passage of the nation’s first such program in 2011.

The state initially reserved participation to children with disabilities, but lawmakers later expanded the program to other populations, including children of active-duty military members and those attending a school that earned a D or F on state accountability report cards. Originally, most eligible students had to attend a public school for the first 100 days of the prior school year before applying for an ESA.

Then, in 2022, state leaders expanded eligibility to all K-12 students and removed the requirement of initial public school attendance. The Arizona Department of Education, which administers the program, estimated nearly half of students with an ESA have never attended public school — suggesting the state is sending millions of dollars to families who’d previously covered private school tuition out of their own pockets.

For some families, including those already enrolled in private school, the tuition hikes have caused sticker shock.

Pam Lang previously received an ESA for her son, who has autism, to attend a private school for students with disabilities. A real estate agent in the Phoenix area, she confirmed tuition at his program rose nearly $4,000. She said families received no prior notice of the increase, which showed up in an invoice before the start of a new academic year.

“Parents are faced with the possibility of having to drop other things they use ESAs for, like tutors — an expense that also increased for my son,” Lang said.

Meanwhile, some private schools encourage currently enrolled families to secure an ESA to cover the higher tuition rates, according to Beth Lewis, executive director of Save Our School Arizona, a group that advocates for public education.

“It makes complete economic sense,” Lewis said. “If a family was already able to pay $11,000, what’s stopping the school from increasing tuition by the average ESA?”

Advocates of the program, however, argued families of varying income levels will make room in their budget for private schools.

Matt Ladner, a fellow with the nonprofit group EdChoice, said low-income parents might find second or third jobs to afford tuition for their kids. And, he added, even children whose families pay for private school on their own dime deserve some portion of state funding for education.

“Their parents pay taxes too,” Ladner said. “Everyone pays into the system, and everyone with a child should be entitled to an equitable share. We publicly fund education for all kids.”

Related: School choice had a big moment in the pandemic. Is it what parents want in the long term?

Of the 13 states with some version of ESA legislation, five — Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Utah and West Virginia — followed Arizona’s lead in granting eligibility to 100 percent of students, regardless of income level. The Grand Canyon State, though, stands apart in almost hands-off approach to the private school market.

Existing state codes set no requirements for the accreditation, approval, licensing or registration of private schools in Arizona. No public agency tracks the creation of new private schools in the state or what they charge for tuition. The state departments of education and treasury did not respond to repeated public records requests for vendor data on how families have spent their ESA awards.

“It’s a black box by design,” said Lewis.

“The average amount of tuition is going to be more than the actual voucher, not to mention transportation and uniform costs. This doesn’t help low-income families.”

Nik Nartowicz, state policy counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a legal advocacy group

In contrast, Iowa requires parents to use their ESA at an accredited nonpublic school — a requirement that Snell, of the Stand Together Trust, described as limiting and rigid.

She and other fans of Arizona’s law said its looser structure will open the door to many more choices for families. One option: microschools, where families bring their children together in smaller learning communities, with or without a licensed teacher. 

“It’s kind of a great thing about demand-driven systems,” Ladner said. “We don’t know what families will value and what directions they will take things.”

He also pointed to a new report from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, showing that increases in private school tuition over the last 10 years were smaller in states that passed school choice policies than in those that didn’t.

Dan Hungerman, an economics professor at the University of Notre Dame who has studied the impact of vouchers on private school finances, noted that the Heritage report’s main finding lacked the common elements of rigorous academic research: statistical significance and standard error.

Hungerman’s own research, conducted in partnership with an economist at the U.S. Census Bureau, found that voucher programs significantly boost the bottom line of churches that operate private schools and likely prevent church closures and mergers.

That concerns Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. He said that high-tuition private schools were already out of reach for most students and will remain so, regardless of ESA programs. More distressing, Cowen argued, were the public campaigns — including one from a foundation backed by former U.S. education secretary Betsy Devos — aimed directly at saving Catholic education through school choice.

“Vouchers are at least partly about bailing out financially distressed church schools,” Cowen said. “Once school vouchers come to town, taxpayers become the dominant source of revenue for churches.”

In Chandler, the Seton Catholic high school sets two tuition rates: A $18,775 general rate for students enrolling in the 2023-24 academic year, and a discounted rate of $14,100 for Catholic students. The college prep academy requires families to secure verification from their parish to receive the discount.

“As a Catholic school, we work with people of all faiths, but our ministry exists to serve the Catholic church,” said Victor Serna, the school’s principal.

“If you want this to be a shining example for the country, you gotta change some things. Because right now, we’re on the fast track to disaster.”

Beth Lewis, executive director, Save our Schools Arizona

Nartowicz, with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said he suspects that as more states pass ESA legislation like Arizona’s, the number of church-based schools offering discounts based on religion will also increase, allowing the use of public funds, in effect, to advantage those with particular religious views.

“We’ve never really encountered this before,” Nartowicz said.

Earlier this year, the Arizona department of education projected the expansion of ESAs would cost the state about $900 million — well above an original estimate of just $65 million. The ballooning price tag prompted Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to call on lawmakers to repeal the program’s universal eligibility. Republicans in control of both legislative chambers rejected the idea. 

ESA critics had hoped a bipartisan deal to create an oversight committee would lead to reforms of the program. But earlier this month, the committee ended its work with no proposed changes. 

Lewis, with Save our Schools Arizona, had previously said that the deal indicates even some Republicans may be worried about the financial impact of school-choice-for-all.

“If you want this to be a shining example for the country, you gotta change some things,” she said. “Because right now, we’re on the fast track to disaster.” 

But the state speaker of the House, Ben Toma, a Republican who chaired the ESA oversight committee, seemed to buck expectations that the program would significantly change soon.

“School choice is here to stay,” he wrote on social media.

Amanda Chen contributed reporting.

This story about Arizona school choice was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Arizona gave families public money for private schools. Then private schools raised tuition appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

SEATTLE — Mireya Barrera didn’t want a fight.

For years, she sat through meetings with her son’s special education teachers, struggling to maintain a smile as she understood little of what they said. On the rare occasions when other teachers who spoke Barrera’s language, Spanish, were asked to help, the conversations still faltered because they weren’t trained interpreters.

But by the time her son, Ian, entered high school, Barrera decided to invite a bilingual volunteer from a local nonprofit to sit with her and to remind the school team of her rights.

“I wanted someone on my side,” Barrera, whose son has autism, said through an interpreter. “All this time, they weren’t making things easy for us. It’s caused a lot of tears.”

Regardless of what language parents speak at home, they have a civil right to receive important information from their child’s educators in a language they understand. For students with disabilities, federal law is even more clear: Schools “must take whatever action is necessary” — including arranging for interpretation and translation — so parents can meaningfully participate in their kid’s education. 

But schools throughout the country sometimes fail to provide those services.

Families who don’t speak English are forced to muddle through meetings about their children’s progress, unable to weigh in or ask educators how they can help. Cultural and linguistic differences can convince some parents not to question what’s happening at school — a power imbalance that, advocates say, means some children miss out on critical support. In a pinch, it’s not uncommon for schools to task bilingual students with providing interpretation for their families, placing them in the position of describing their own shortcomings to their parents and guardians.

“That’s totally inappropriate, in every possible way — and unrealistic,” said Diane Smith-Howard, senior staff attorney with the National Disability Rights Network. “If the child is not doing particularly well in an academic subject, why would you trust your teenager to tell you?”

“Parents for whom English might not be their primary language are often overwhelmed with information and unable to participate meaningfully in the process.”

Jinju Park, senior education ombuds, Washington State 

School districts blame a lack of resources. They say they don’t have the money to hire more interpreters or contract with language service agencies, and that even if they did, there aren’t enough qualified interpreters to do the job.

In Washington and a handful of other states, the issue has started to gain more attention. State lawmakers in Olympia earlier this year introduced bipartisan legislation to bolster federal civil rights in state code. Teachers unions in Seattle and Chicago recently bargained for — and won — interpretation services during special education meetings. And school districts face an escalating threat of parent lawsuits, or even federal investigation, if they don’t take language access seriously.

Still, efforts to expand language access in special education face an uphill battle, due to the small pool of trained interpreters, lack of enforcement at the state level and scant funding from Congress. (Despite promising in 1974 to cover nearly half the extra cost for schools to provide special education, the federal government has never done so.) Washington’s bipartisan bill to add more protections for families suddenly failed, after state lawmakers stripped it of key provisions and advocates pulled their support.

The special education system can be “incredibly difficult for everybody,” said Ramona Hattendorf, director of advocacy for the Arc of King County, which promotes disability rights. “Then everything is exacerbated when you bring language into the mix.”

Related: Special education’s hidden racial gap

Nationwide, roughly 1 in 10 students who qualify for special education also identify as English learners, according to federal education data, and that share is growing. About 791,000 English learners participated in special education in 2020, a jump of nearly 30 percent since 2012. In more than a dozen states, including Washington, the increase was even higher.

As their numbers grow, their parents’ frustration with language services is rising too.

During the 2021-22 school year, the Washington State education ombudsman received nearly 1,200 complaints from parents about schools. Their number one concern, across all racial and demographic groups, was access and inclusion in special education. Senior education ombuds Jinju Park estimates that between 50 and 70 percent of calls the agency receives are about special education — and 80 percent of those calls are from clients who need interpretation services.

While most states allow schools up to 60 days once a student is referred for special education services to determine if they qualify, Washington schools can take up to half a school year. And if a parent needs interpretation or translation, the wait can last even longer.

“Our current laws do not support full parent participation,” Park wrote to Washington state lawmakers in support of an early version of House Bill 1305, the proposal that ultimately failed. “Parents for whom English might not be their primary language,” she added, “are often overwhelmed with information and unable to participate meaningfully in the process.”

Barrera, whose son attended the Auburn School District, south of Seattle, said she often felt cut out of his learning.

In kindergarten, after his diagnosis for autism, Ian’s special education team concluded he needed a paraeducator assigned to him full time, Barrera said. She relied on Google Translate and other parents to help her compose emails asking why he didn’t receive that support until the third grade. Her requests for translated copies of legal documents largely went unanswered, she said — until a principal told her that the translation was too expensive.

When Ian entered high school, bullying and his safety became Barrera’s top concern. He once came home with a chunk of hair missing, she said. Despite repeated calls and emails to his teachers, Barrera said she never received an explanation.

Barrera said that when she asked to come to the school to observe, a teacher told her, “You don’t even speak English. What’s the point?’ ”

“That’s totally inappropriate, in every possible way – and unrealistic. If the child is not doing particularly well in an academic subject, why would you trust your teenager to tell you?”

Diane Smith-Howard, senior staff attorney with the National Disability Rights Network

Vicki Alonzo, a spokesperson for the Auburn district, said that the region’s booming immigrant population in recent years has prompted the district to commit more resources toward helping families whose first language isn’t English. Nearly a third of its students are multilingual learners, she said, and they speak about 85 different languages at home. 

In the 2019-20 year, the district spent about $175,000 on interpretation and translation services, she said; last school year, that figure was more than $450,000.

Alonzo noted the district received no additional funding for those services, which included about 1,500 meetings with interpreters and translation of more than 3,000 pages of documents.

“Families are our partners,” she said. “We need them to have student success.”

Related: Students with disabilities often left out of popular ‘dual language’ programs

Lawmakers in other states have tried to address language access issues.

Proposed legislation in California would set a 30-day deadline for schools to comply with parents’ requests for a translated copy of their child’s individualized education program, or IEP, which details the services a school will provide for a student with disabilities. Similarly, lawmakers in Texas introduced a bill earlier this year to expand translation of IEPs if English is not the native language of the child’s parent (the bill died in committee).

“It’s a nationwide phenomenon,” said Smith-Howard of the National Disability Rights Network. “It’s a resource problem and also a matter of respect and dignity and understanding — that all parents should receive.”

In New York City, parents turned to the courts in pursuit of a solution.

Four families there filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in 2019, claiming the nation’s largest school district failed to provide translation services for families that don’t speak English. Like Barrera, one of the New York City parents asked for a Spanish interpreter at an IEP meeting; their school provided one who spoke Italian, according to M’Ral Broodie-Stewart, an attorney representing the families for Staten Island Legal Services.

In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into New Bedford Public Schools in Massachusetts after students and families who speak K’iché, an Indigenous Mayan language, complained about discriminatory practices. 

A settlement reached last year commits the Massachusetts district to using professionally trained interpreters — and not students, relatives or Google Translate — to communicate essential information to parents.

Related: Is the pandemic our chance to reimagine special education?

Teachers are frustrated too.

In Washington state’s largest school district, the Seattle teachers union picketed and delayed the start of school last year over demands that included interpretation and translation in special education. The eventual contract, which lasts through 2025, requires that staff have access to various services that provide telephonic (a live interpreter) or text-based translation (for written documents). The provision was to ensure that bilingual staff weren’t being asked to translate if it wasn’t a part of their job description.

Teachers say these tools have been helpful, but only to a degree: There are rarely telephone interpreters available for less common languages, such as Amharic, and technical issues like dropped calls are common. 

The availability of interpreters is “not as consistent as we would like it to be,” said Ibi Holiday, a special-education teacher at Rising Star Elementary School in Seattle.

There’s also an issue of context. Translators may not have a background in special education, so families may come away from a meeting not understanding all the options. This can slow down the process significantly. 

“For a lot of the families, they attended a school in their country that functions completely differently,” said Mari Rico, director of El Centro de la Raza’s Jose Marti Child Development Center, a bilingual early education program. “Translating wasn’t enough; I had to teach them about the system.”  

Many Seattle district schools have multilingual staff, but the number and diversity of languages spoken isn’t consistent, Rico said. And there is a greater risk of a student’s case getting overlooked or stagnating because of language barriers. She said she’s had to step in where families have gone months without an IEP meeting even as their child was receiving services.

Hattendorf, with the Arc of King County, said that cheaper tech solutions like those Seattle is using do offer some assistance, but their quality varies widely. And the services may not offer parents enough time to process complicated information and ask follow-up questions, she said.

South of Seattle, the Barreras decided to move Ian to a different high school.

He graduated earlier this year, but federal law guarantees his special education services for another three years. Ian is now attending a transition program for students with disabilities, where he will learn life skills like getting a job.

“We know, with help, he can do whatever he wants,” Barrera said. 

Already, she added, “it’s all different. The teachers just try to find the best way to communicate with me.”

This story about interpretation services was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, in partnership with The Seattle Times.

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By the close of this century, at least half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken today will become extinct – and that’s according to the rosiest of linguistic forecasts.

Already, about 2,900 languages, or 41 percent, are endangered. And at current rates, the most dire projections suggest that closer to 90 percent of all languages will become dormant or extinct by 2100.

The global linguistic crisis is most stark in the predominantly English-speaking countries of the United States, Australia and Canada. Between 67 and 100 percent of Indigenous languages in those three countries will disappear within three generations, according to a 2019 analysis of 200 years of global language loss by researcher Gary Simons.

The three countries share more than a common language: For several decades, their governments forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families and relocated them to distant boarding schools. Children there regularly encountered humiliating, and sometimes violent, treatment as a means to suppress their Native American identity.

In the U.S., federal Indian boarding schools renamed children with English names and discouraged or prevented the use of Indigenous languages. “Rules were often enforced through punishment, including corporal punishment such as solitary confinement; flogging; withholding food; whipping; slapping; and cuffing,” according to the first-ever federal investigative report, released last year, into the traumatic legacy of boarding schools.

To help Native communities heal from that trauma, the report recommends an explicit federal policy of cultural revitalization, one that supports the work of Indigenous peoples and tribes to preserve and strengthen their languages and cultures. Late last year, the White House announced it would put that idea into action, and soon will launch a 10-year plan to revitalize Native languages, under the umbrella of a new initiative to advance educational equity and economic opportunity for Native Americans.

Between 67 and 100 percent of Indigenous languages in those three countries will disappear within three generations, according to a 2019 analysis by researcher Gary Simons.

That plan, set for release later this year, will focus on schools – run by the same government that attempted to strip Native children of their identity – as a critical partner to preserve and restore tribal sovereignty for the future. Details of the plan remain scant, but a draft framework calls for the revitalization of Native languages across all “ages, grade levels, and ability levels, in formal and informal places and settings.” The plan will cover early childhood, K-12 and higher education, but also extend to “academic settings throughout adulthood and a person’s entire lifetime.”

“We’re past the stage of education being done to us,” said Jason Cummins, an enrolled member of the Apsaalooke Nation and deputy director of the White House initiative.

Naomi Miguel, citizen of the Tohono O’odham Nation and the initiative’s executive director, added that the pandemic fueled an urgency to develop the language plan. “A lot of tribes lost their last language speakers and elders,” she said.

With nearly 600 federally recognized tribes, no single solution will satisfy every tribal community, the draft framework states. Potential barriers to reversing language loss include striking a balance between honoring Native elders and implementing professional standards for language teachers and creating classroom materials and dictionaries without sacrificing tribal ownership of language; and even public relations.

The plan also must outlast the current presidential administration. But Miguel said she is not worried. “This is the one area left in the federal government, unfortunately, that is very much bipartisan,” she said of Native American issues.

Related: States were adding lessons about Native American history. Then came the anti-CRT movement

In March, Miguel and Cummins started holding tribal consultation and listening sessions to collect feedback on the framework. They said they found inspiration for ideas they could use in the plan in places like Montana, where high schoolers can earn a seal of biliteracy on their diplomas for proficiency in Indigenous languages. And tribes across the board stressed the importance of connecting young people with Native elders and knowledge keepers.

“When a student can see themselves in their educational environment, when they see their own story … it’s very engaging. It’s very empowering,” said Cummins, who previously ran Crow language programs in schools in Montana.

Meanwhile, some tribal communities have already forged ahead with new school partnerships to reclaim and restore their heritage languages, which could serve as models for the White House effort.

“In America, you’re seen as less than, as lower if you don’t know English. We have to replace that with a mentality in our young people that the language is theirs. They can reclaim it and put it in the spaces they exist in.”

Alex Fire Thunder, deputy director of the Lakota Language Consortium

Navajo Technical University, in Crownpoint, New Mexico, will start accepting students this fall for a new doctoral program – the first among tribal colleges and universities – in Diné culture and language sustainability. On the other side of the country, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe of Massachusetts, meanwhile, starts much earlier with a language immersion program for preschoolers. And for nearly 40 years, the state of Hawaii has offered K-12 immersion programs in Hawaiian language that now enroll students on six of the eight major Hawaiian islands.

“That’s kind of our vision: preschool to PhD,” said Alex Fire Thunder, deputy director of the Lakota Language Consortium, an educational nonprofit that since 2004 has worked toward a goal of Lakota being spoken in every Lakota household.

He spoke on a recent Thursday, after finding a spot of good cell phone service on his drive from a tribal elder’s home. Fire Thunder spends much of his time in the living rooms of older Lakota speakers, recording long interviews to document the language of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The consortium also uses the recordings for a language podcast and a third edition of the New Lakota Dictionary, which now includes 41,000 words.

“It’s the largest Native American dictionary in the world,” said Wilhelm Meya, executive director of the Language Conservancy, a Bloomington, Indiana-based nonprofit that works to preserve Indigenous languages.

“We’re past the stage of education being done to us.”

Jason Cummins, an enrolled member of the Apsaalooke Nation and deputy director of the White House initiative.

Meya cited the work in South Dakota as one of the best global examples of how to preserve and revitalize an endangered language. Exhibits A and B for Meya: the Lakota Berenstain Bears Project, which captured the popular children’s book and TV show into the first Native American language cartoon series, and the Red Cloud Indian School, a private Catholic school that Fire Thunder once attended.

While the White House hasn’t put a price tag on how much it will spend on the revitalization effort, Meya points out that the federal government spent roughly $2 billion in today’s dollars on its Indian boarding school policy.

For his part, Fire Thunder is already raising his young son entirely in Lakota. “In America, you’re seen as less than, as lower if you don’t know English,” he said. “A lot of our elders adapted that mentality from boarding schools. We have to replace that with a mentality in our young people that the language is theirs. They can reclaim it and put it in the spaces they exist in.”

This story about Native languages was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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VANCOUVER, Wash. — When her bill for overdue rent topped five digits, Resly Suka decided it was time to tell her kids they might lose their home.

A bout with Covid in late 2020 had forced Suka, a single mother of seven, to take time off from her job as a home hospice caregiver. That triggered a series of financial setbacks and, by October 2021, she owed more than $10,000 in back rent. Washington state’s eviction moratorium was set to expire the next month.

Suka feared what a notice-to-vacate would mean for her children. Her two youngest, both attending Vancouver’s Washington Elementary School, had struggled with remote learning and still lagged their peers in basic math and reading. Her older kids loved their high school sports teams and she couldn’t imagine uprooting them.

“‘Oh no, Mom. Please don’t make us go to another school. We like our teacher. We love our school,’” said Suka, recalling the conversation. “All I was thinking: ‘That’s true.’”

After her primary employer cut her hours — and her health insurance — Suka ended up in the emergency room for a heart attack. As she began to recover, Suka started making calls from her hospital bed to a local housing hotline seeking assistance. She never got a reply.

Then a cousin suggested she call her kids’ school. A woman she’d never met asked a few questions about Suka’s living situation and suggested she could get help with her utility bill. Within an hour, the woman called back and shared news of a second check — to cover up to $11,000 in overdue rent.

The assistance came thanks to a Washington state program — one of the first of its kind in the country — that aims to help children who aren’t considered homeless, and unqualified for help, under a strict federal definition.  

In response to rising numbers of homeless youth here, state legislators passed a bill in 2016 that freed up money to enable schools to identify more students as homeless and get them into stable housing — even if they aren’t viewed as homeless by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In other parts of the country, though, the picture for homeless students is starkly different. Public schools identified 1.1 million kids as homeless in 2020-21, the most recent school year for which data was available. But roughly 85 percent of these children didn’t qualify for public housing assistance. While the federal Department of Education considers kids homeless if they are living in motels or doubled up with other people, HUD, which controls the purse strings for federal housing aid, requires that recipients live in shelters or on the street. That forces parents to move their families into cars or risk more dangerous living situations before they’re eligible for aid.  

For years, advocates for homeless youth have tried to convince HUD and lawmakers to expand the agency’s definition to include anyone who can’t afford to put a roof over their children’s heads. Research continues to show the harmful impact of housing instability on kids’ learning: Each time students switch schools, for example, they are more likely to fall behind academically and less likely to graduate.

Homeless youth advocates succeeded in getting a bill to change the law’s language before Congress last year, but the legislation never got a hearing. And they must restart the legislative process with this year’s new congressional term.

“We do nothing to prevent the ‘hidden homeless,’” said Darla Bardine, executive director of the National Network for Youth, a nonprofit that works to end youth homelessness. “You have to sleep on the street for 14 days — you have to put yourself in danger for two weeks — before you’re eligible” for federal aid, she added. “That’s actually mandating long-term suffering before you extend a helping hand.”

A spokesperson for HUD said the agency does not support a broader definition to determine who’s eligible for housing aid, which the official described as “programs of last resort.” He said the law obligating schools to identify homeless kids was designed to help children who needed more stability at school, not who necessarily need immediate support to find a home.

“Our targeted homeless programs are grant funds, subject to annual appropriations from Congress. It’s not an entitlement program,” said the spokesperson, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Related: A school created a homeless shelter in the gym and it paid off in the classroom

The nation’s patchwork of solutions to homelessness dates to the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, Congress’s first significant response to the problem. But beyond declaring that homeless children should have access to the same public education as other kids, the McKinney-Vento Act contained few protections for elementary and secondary students experiencing homelessness.

The law has since been amended several times; school districts now must identify and enroll any student experiencing homelessness. The education provisions of the law’s definition of homeless — “individuals who lack a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence” — encompasses unaccompanied and unsheltered youth, students in homeless shelters, kids living at a hotel or motel and children staying with friends or family due to economic hardship or similar reasons.

Once a school identifies a student as homeless, the federal government requires districts to pay to transport the student to their preferred school, regardless of cost or distance. Districts also can compete for federal funds — about $80 per homeless student — to cover the cost of clothes, prescription glasses and other school supplies, although funding is scant and only a fraction of districts receive the aid.

Federal law prohibits schools from spending any of that money on housing. Instead, educators direct families to local housing providers, which often rely exclusively on HUD funding and have few or no resources for students the agency does not consider homeless.

The discrepancy in defining homelessness can leave families, educators and housing providers with few satisfying, or safe, options. A shelter manager in Bozeman, Montana — where a population boom has priced many locals out of housing — lied on a housing application so a young mother of three who’d spent her tax refund on a hotel room wouldn’t have to move her family into their car. In Vancouver,a shelter provider had to inform callers to its housing hotline that they might have to stay in their car for two weeks before they could get help. 

Families “have to get into more desperate situations in order to qualify for services,” said Vivian Rogers Decker, who manages the homeless student stability program for Washington state’s education department. “They won’t be able to just get it while doubled up. They would have to progress into the car and onto the streets or have one night of what others might call ‘literal homeless’ in order to get those services.”

One reason the requirements haven’t changed is opposition from some national homeless organizations. The National Alliance to End Homelessness, an influential Washington, D.C., nonprofit, has lobbied since at least 2015 against expanding HUD’s definition, arguing it would further strain the nation’s system of housing providers, which already struggle to serve the millions who count as “literal” homeless.

“That would add millions of families with no additional funding,” said Steve Berg, the group’s vice president for programs and policy. “It sort of calls on the homeless programs to have more people eligible without being able to help them. It just means saying no to a lot more people.”

Unless the government allocates more funding for homeless aid, Berg added, the increased competition for already limited services could leave chronically homeless individuals without help.

“People in more stable situations have an easier time getting help,” he said. “They can keep appointments. They can get to them. So, it’s not just saying no more often. I’m afraid it would mean people who need help the most would be squeezed out.”

And some educators worry about further extending the role of schools to include housing navigator. Many districts are already struggling to comply with the federal mandate to employ a homeless liaison, and that duty is often given to school or district administrators who don’t have time for it. Mike Carr, a retiring liaison in the Washington County School District in southern Utah, said it’s hard not to worry at night about all the families he can’t help. “Every emergency cannot always be my emergency,” he said.  

Related: 420,000 homeless kids went missing from schools’ rolls last year. They may never be found

Similar debates played out in Washington state in 2016, when the bill to help alleviate student homelessness was before the state legislature. Lawmakers questioned whether it made sense to spend public dollars on kids who could finish their homework at a friend’s kitchen table or in a hotel lobby, rather than on children living in a homeless shelter or on the street.

But research suggests any housing instability — whether that means sleeping in a tent or a cousin’s basement — harms the ability of young people to learn. Regardless of how and where homeless students find a place to sleep each night, their academic performance suffers equally, according to a 2019 analysis of state education data by the homeless advocacy group Building Changes. The Seattle-based group found students experiencing any form of homelessness posted lower rates of attendance, graduation and academic proficiency. Low-income housed students, meanwhile, performed much better.

“Homeless is homeless is homeless,” said Liza Burrell, managing director of programs for Building Changes. “These definitions don’t matter. When it comes to academic outcomes, any instability takes up so much of our young peoples’ brain energy. That doesn’t create a great moment for learning.”

That message resonated with state lawmakers, and the 2016 bill passed with bipartisan majorities in both chambers. The program financially incentivizes housing providers and school districts to partner on homeless prevention. School districts also receive state grants to boost what little, if any, money they get from the federal government to find and support unhoused kids. Funding for housing providers, meanwhile, can cover rental assistance, emergency shelter, case management and other services for all students identified as homeless — including those who live in hotels or couch-surf.

Early findings suggest the program has provided stability to some families and students, although it’s not a panacea. According to a Building Changes evaluation for the state, two-thirds of households that participated in the program in 2020 and 2021 stayed in or secured permanent housing, while a quarter ended up in less stable situations, such as shelters. Housing providers primarily used the grant money they received — roughly $460,000, combined — to help families cover past due rent, landlord fees and other forms of rental assistance or move-in costs like security deposits and application fees.

Related: Hidden toll: Thousands of schools fail to count homeless students

In Vancouver, the homeless student stability program covered the entirety of Resly Suka’s overdue rent. Her kids didn’t have to relocate across the city — or across state lines, a common move along the Columbia River here — and had the chance to stay in their schools.

“It’s hard on homeless kids,” said Suka. “But at least we can help them focus on school if they have a place to stay.”

When Suka took her cousin’s advice to call her kids’ school for help, Elizabeth Owen picked up the phone. Owen works as the community resource coordinator at Washington Elementary, helping families navigate services, like housing aid. The school identified 16 students as homeless — out of a total enrollment of 250 — during an annual count for the 2021-22 school year. The district as a whole counted nearly 750 homeless students, up from about 620 students during the 2020-21 school year. 

Owen has the local housing providers on speed dial: She knows which receive the state grants that can actually help those families. If circumstances forced her families into neighboring Oregon, it’s a gamble whether Owen’s counterparts in school districts there will have the same ability to help. 

“We live in a system that’s extremely hard — it was set up to be difficult,” she tells parents and guardians. “But we’ll figure this out.”

This story about student homelessness was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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MESA, Ariz. — A teacher in training darted among students, tallying how many needed his help with a history unit on Islam. A veteran math teacher hovered near a cluster of desks, coaching some 50 freshmen on a geometry assignment. A science teacher checked students’ homework, while an English teacher spoke loudly into a microphone at the front of the classroom, giving instruction, to keep students on track.

One hundred thirty-five students, four teachers, one giant classroom: This is what ninth grade looks like at Westwood High School, in Mesa, Arizona’s largest school system. There, an innovative teaching model has taken hold, and is spreading to other schools in the district and beyond.

Five years ago, faced with high teacher turnover and declining student enrollment, Westwood’s leaders decided to try something different. Working with professors at Arizona State University’s teachers college, they piloted a classroom model known as team teaching. It allows teachers to voluntarily dissolve the walls that separate their classes across physical or grade divides.

The teachers share large groups of students — sometimes 100 or more — and rotate between big group instruction, one-on-one interventions, small study groups or whatever the teachers as a team agree is a priority that day. What looks at times like chaos is in fact part of a carefully orchestrated plan: Each morning, the Westwood teams meet for two hours to hash out a personalized program for every student on their shared roster, dictating the lessons, skills and assignments the team will focus on that day.

By giving teachers more opportunity to collaborate and greater control over how and what they teach, Mesa’s administrators hoped to fill staffing gaps and boost teacher morale and retention. Initial research suggests the gamble could pay off. This year, the district expanded the concept to a third of its 82 schools. (Westwood uses the model for all freshmen classes and is expanding it to the upper grades soon.) The team-teaching strategy is also drawing interest from school leaders across the U.S., who are eager for new approaches at a time when the effects of the pandemic have dampened teacher morale and worsened staff shortages.

“The pandemic taught us two things: One is people want flexibility, and the other is people don’t want to be isolated,” said Carole Basile, dean of ASU’s teachers college, who helped design the teaching model. “The education profession is both of those. It is inflexible, and it is isolating.”

Team teaching, she said, turns these ideas on their head.

Related: Teacher shortages are real, but not for the reasons you’ve heard

ASU and surrounding school districts started investigating team teaching about six years ago. Enrollment at teacher preparation programs around the country was plummeting, as more young people sought out careers that offered better pay, more flexibility and less stress.

Team teaching, a concept first introduced in schools in the 1960s, appealed to the ASU researchers because they felt its unusual staffing structure could help revitalize teachers. And it resonated with school district leaders, who’d come to believe the model of one teacher lecturing at the front of a classroom to many kids wasn’t working.

“Teachers are doing fantastic things, but it’s very rare a teacher walks into another room to see what’s happening,” said Andi Fourlis, superintendent of Mesa Public Schools, one of 10 Arizona districts that have adopted the model. “Our profession is so slow to advance because we are working in isolation.”

Fourlis and others also see team teaching as a way to set their schools apart as a new universal voucher program in Arizona goes into effect, potentially drawing more families and teachers away to private schools. And proponents of the classroom model say it empowers educators at a time when Republicans in Arizona and other states are targeting schools in a growing culture war, passing legislation to restrict what teachers can say about topics such as gender identity and race.

Peggy Beesley, a math teacher now in her fifth year with Westwood’s team, recalled feeling that parents and politicians gave little consideration to her health and safety as they debated school closures. “It’s almost like we have to give up our humanity to become a teacher,” she said. The team, however, made it easier to tune out what was happening outside classroom walls. And her teammates offer built-in, daily training on new ways to teach.

“I’m, what, 16 or 17 years in and I’m still struggling,” Beesley said. “Without my team, I would have quit — long ago. My teammates make me better.”

Of course, revamping teaching approaches can’t fix some of the biggest frustrations many teachers have about their profession, such as low pay. But early results from Mesa show team teaching may be helping to reverse low morale. In a survey of hundreds of the district’s teachers last year, researchers from Johns Hopkins University found that those who worked on teams reported greater satisfaction with their job, more frequent collaborations with colleagues and more positive interactions with students. Data on the impact on teacher vacancies, however, remains limited.

School districts that have adopted the model are meanwhile beginning to collect data on its impact on students. A district in southeastern Arizona randomly assigned children to classrooms with the team-teaching model, to test whether it improves student performance. Early data from Westwood show on-time course completion — a strong predictor of whether freshmen will graduate — improved after the high school started using the team approach for all ninth graders. ASU has found that students in team-based classrooms have better attendance, earn more credits toward graduation and post higher GPAs.

The model is not for everyone. Beesley has tried to recruit other math teachers to volunteer for a team, but many tell her they prefer to work alone. Team teaching can also be a scheduling nightmare, especially at schools like Westwood where only some staff work in teams, and principals have to balance their time and needs with those of other teachers. School leaders in Mesa stress they would never force teachers to participate on a team; the district only plans to expand the model to half of its schools.

Related: To fight teacher shortages, some states are looking to community colleges to train a new generation of educators

On a recent morning at Westwood High, the four teachers and 135 freshmen on the team settled into a boisterous routine.

They ignored the Halloween music that blared from the school speakers, marking a new period for older students at the school. As their peers in the higher grades shuffled to another 50-minute class, the freshmen continued into a second hour of their work. Most students busied themselves with the day’s assignments, alone or in pairs, while others waited for a specific teacher’s help.

The team regularly welcomes other educators into the classroom, for bilingual or special education services and other one-on-one support. But substitute teachers are rare, since teachers can plan their schedules to accommodate their teammates’ absences.

Another benefit of teams, teachers say, is that they can help each other improve their instruction. During the planning session earlier that morning, English teacher Jeff Hall shared a critique with science teacher Kelsey Meeks: Her recent lecture, on something she called “the central dogma of biology,” had befuddled him and their other teammates.

“If the science is too confusing for me, can you imagine the frustration you feel as kids?” Hall said. “She would never know that on her own.”

Hall, who moonlights as an improv comic, had quit teaching right before Covid. He worked odd jobs during his time out of the classroom and realized what those jobs offered that teaching didn’t: a chance to work alongside other adults and collaborate. The need for a steadier paycheck convinced Hall to return to the classroom last year, but he only applied for positions to teach on a team.

“Why don’t we do this for every teacher?” Hall said. “Why was I — a student teacher with zero experience teaching English — handed the keys to an entire class of kids on day one? All alone? That doesn’t work for anyone.”

At nearby Whittier Elementary School, the team teaching model looks somewhat different.

In some cases, teams span grade levels. A group of more than 100 fourth and fifth graders, led by a team of seven educators, was spread out across two classrooms one recent weekday. Teacher Karly LaOrange sat in a circle with three English learners who were struggling with phonics, while a student teacher paged through the same workbook as LaOrange with a larger group of readers, already on grade level. A third instructor nudged another set of kids toward the proper pronunciation of difficult words in another book, “All about Manatees.” Across the hall, another group of students worked with a second set of teachers.

Principal Andrea Lang Sims said she likes the model because she doesn’t have to worry much about new teachers; they can learn from the mentors on their teams. The team approach also allows teachers to pool their skills and work more effectively with students and their parents, she said. A quarter of the school’s families don’t speak English as their primary language, so Lang Sims tries to place a bilingual educator on each team. 

“Not every teacher’s good with parents on day one, or ever,” said Lang Sims. “Not every teacher can speak Spanish or Mandarin or Vietnamese. Not every teacher can do everything every day.”

Proponents of the ASU model acknowledge it doesn’t work perfectly in a system built around the assumption that every classroom has one teacher. The model presents thorny questions, for example, about how to evaluate four teachers on the performance of 135 students. And teachers on the Westwood team argue they receive too little training on the model.

Students, however, have noticed a difference.

Quinton Rawls attended a middle school with no teams and not enough teachers. Two weeks into eighth grade, his science teacher quit — and was replaced by a series of subs. “I got away with everything,” recalled the 14-year-old.

That’s not the case in ninth grade, said Rawls. He said he appreciates the extra attention that comes with being in a class with so many teachers at once.

“There’s four of them watching me all the time,” he said. “I think that’s a good thing. I’m not really wasting time.”

This story on team teaching was produced by The Hechinger Report as part of the ongoing series Tackling Teacher Shortages, a collaboration between Hechinger and Education Labs and journalists at The Associated Press, AL.com, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News in Texas, The Fresno Bee in California, The Seattle Times and The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Ruth Taddesse, now a senior at Richard Montgomery High School in Montgomery County, Maryland, celebrated the March 2021 announcement that her school district would be the first in the state to pull police from its schools.

She’d watched as school districts around the country removed officers from campuses after student-led protests for racial justice following the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

But the celebration was short-lived: Just over a year after the county’s no-police-in-schools declaration, the school district and local police department reached a new agreement that restored armed officers — now known as “community engagement officers” — to schools. While the officers wouldn’t be permanently stationed on campuses, they would have an office inside each high school and would participate in events like career days, school assemblies and study circles.

“They’re actually encouraged to engage with elementary kids,” said Taddesse, now an organizer with the student-led MoCo Against Brutality campaign. She joined the group after researching the disproportionate rates at which Black, Latino and special education students face increased discipline and referral to law enforcement when armed officers work at their schools.

“They’re not social workers,” Taddesse said of police. “They’re not restorative justice coaches. They never will be. Expecting them to help young people, that’s dangerous.”

Dozens of school districts across the country severed their relationships with local police or committed to removing armed officers from campus in the wake of the 2020 racial justice protests. Youth leaders hoped to build on that momentum and get more schools and districts to follow suit, while replacing the money they spend on policing with mental health and other support services for students.

But now, some school districts have changed their minds, often in response to calls from parents to ramp up school security as student misbehavior surged last fall when kids returned to campuses. In the Montgomery County district, for example, the decision to bring back armed officers followed demands from parents for greater security after a January 2021 shooting of a student in a high school bathroom. In an email, Christopher Cram, the district’s spokesperson, said the school system put in “immense effort” to seek input from families, students and others before bringing back police, and the new agreement supports school safety while trying to ensure that Black and Hispanic students are not disproportionately targeted.

The calls for increased security intensified after the massacre in May of 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Meanwhile, the bipartisan gun safety bill signed into law by President Joe Biden in the wake of the Uvalde shooting more than doubled federal funding for schools to train teachers on violence prevention, purchase security hardware and hire school resource officers, or SROs, as school police are often called. At the same time, some Republican-controlled state legislatures have introduced or advanced bills to override local school board and city council decisions and mandate armed officers in schools.

“There was obviously a big push shortly after George Floyd, and a lot of momentum around police reform generally, including on the issue of police in schools, and clearly there’s been a backsliding,” said Marc Schindler, executive director of the nonprofit Justice Policy Institute. “The unfortunate reality is that although police in schools may sound appealing, may seem an appropriate response,” he added, “we see no evidence of policing making schools safer.”  

Related: What happens once school resource officers leave schools?

Police first started patrolling American schools in the 1940s and ’50s, often as part of racist resistance to the integration of white neighborhoods and schools. But in recent decades, several high-profile school shootings fueled the expansion of federal grants to boost the ranks of police in schools: In 1975, just 1 percent of schools reported having a police officer on campus; that share rose to 58 percent by 2018, according to research from the University of Connecticut. Students in high school are more likely to see police than kids in early grades; so are those in schools with higher shares of Black and Hispanic students, the Urban Institute found.

The campaign for police-free schools, meanwhile, started over a decade ago with the formation of local groups such as the Black Organizing Project in Oakland, California, and the Urban Youth Collaborative in New York City. Those groups’ fights received national attention as civil unrest roiled the country following the 2020 police killings of Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Student organizers joined, and often led, demonstrations to remove police from their schools. And at first, school boards seemed to listen.

“It was a really hard battle, but at the end of the day, students had their voices heard,” said Sindy Carballo, a 2020 graduate of Alexandria City Public Schools in Virginia who helped campaign for the removal of police from that district.

“It’s a community-based policing approach. It is very important to know that relationship-building with parents and students and with [school] staff has to be the number one goal of a school resource officer.”

Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers

The effort was successful: In May 2021, the Alexandria City Council voted to end its funding for school resource officers. But then parents overrode their children, holding protests and pleading with city council members to restore funding for campus police. Five months later, the council heeded their pleas and voted 4-3 to place SROs back in middle and high schools.

“Fast forward to when students went back to school, and suddenly there’s all this backlash from parents saying so much trauma happened during the pandemic and teachers weren’t prepared and we definitely need police in schools again,” said Carballo, now a youth organizer with the group Tenants and Workers United.

Researchers with Education Week identified at least 50 school districts that removed police from schools or cut budgets for policing programs from May 2020 through June 2022. Eight districts, including Alexandria City Public Schools, have since added police back, the news outlet found. 

An uptick in violence and misbehavior is one reason. Nationally, a full third of U.S. public schools reported an increase in physical attacks or fights between students due to Covid and its complications. More than half of schools reported a pandemic-related rise in classroom disruptions and student tardiness, and physical attacks by students against a teacher or staff member increased at 1 in 10 schools.

Related: Some kids have returned to in-person learning only to be kicked right back out

Arleen Yaz Alonso, director of youth organizing for Gente Organizada, a nonprofit in Pomona, California, said the pandemic exacerbated mental health challenges among students, which contributed to behavior problems in schools. But she said a solution would be to invest in student mental health — not police officers.

The Pomona Unified School District appeared to be embracing that idea when, in June 2021, it announced it would no longer employ SROs and would instead hire proctors trained in de-escalating conflicts. But only a few months later, the district said it was bringing back SROs, following an October shooting near Pomona High School. (The district did not respond to interview requests.)

“It is absurd and unnecessary to bring an armed officer to a campus where there are minors,” said Alonso. “Schools are a place for education and a place for students to learn about themselves, about academics, to dream big, and having an armed police officer on campus is not the route to go.”

Proponents of school resource officers say they bring stability to schools. Because they are stationed in school buildings over the long term, SROs can build relationships with students, unlike local police who might be called in to respond to an emergency. “It’s a community-based policing approach,” said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers. “It is very important to know that relationship-building with parents and students and with [school] staff has to be the number one goal of a school resource officer.”

But experts who have studied police in schools note a lack of evidence to suggest that police improve safety. A review of the research on school police released in May by the education nonprofit WestEd found no link between placing police at schools and prevention of crime. Meanwhile, the bulk of the research on the topic revealed that school-based officers actually contribute to higher rates of student discipline, without improving school safety. The WestEd review found no connection between school-based law enforcement and learning outcomes, including attendance.

“If the U.S. was spending money on a drug trial and they kept finding it wasn’t working and it wasn’t working, and actually had bad side effects, then we would have stopped funding that drug trial ages ago,” said Ben Fisher, associate professor of civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author of the WestEd study, citing an analogy used by the sociologist Aaron Kupchik. Instead of continuing to throw money at an ineffective security strategy with unintended consequences, schools should instead be investing in proven strategies, like counseling, Fisher said.

In some cases, school districts that seek to remove police may now find they can’t do so because of state-level decisions. Kentucky earlier this year passed legislation that requires a police officer on every school campus in the state, except when schools lack the funding to hire an officer. In Wisconsin, Republican legislators introduced a bill to require school districts to appoint an SRO on every campus that meets a threshold for arrests and violent incidents.

“Fast forward to when students went back to school, and suddenly there’s all this backlash from parents saying so much trauma happened during the pandemic and teachers weren’t prepared and we definitely need police in schools again.”

Sindy Carballo, a 2020 graduate of Virginia’s Alexandria City school district, who campaigned for the removal of police from that district

Young people, meanwhile, are adjusting their strategies, too.

In Alexandria, students plan to keep asking school board members “every chance we get” about why they continue to police student behavior, said Carballo. “But we’re also asking, ‘Are you willing to implement more resources for restorative justice, for mental health?’ ”

All the board members have said yes, Carballo said, but no one has committed to a specific amount. She suggested: “How about let’s start somewhere? What about $500,000?”

In Pomona, California, Gente Organizada and the students who work alongside it are still in talks with the district, too, Alonso said. Currently, they are pushing for the creation of school-based mental health centers where students could go for support.

In Denver, where the school district canceled its contract with local police but later expanded its staff of armed security officers and gave them authority to issue tickets to students, youth organizers with the community group Movimiento Poder spent their summer drafting a plan to take their fight statewide and override district leaders.

And in Montgomery County, Ruth Taddesse and other members of MoCo Against Brutality created an online “police sighting form” that people can fill out when they see armed officers on campus. The idea, she said, is to let police know that students don’t want them there.

“They think if students start seeing cops walking around, we’ll start complaining — which is obviously what we plan on doing.”

Caroline Preston contributed reporting to this story.

This story about police in schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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The Bureau of Indian Education has a mission to provide a quality education to Native American students.

Enrolling about 45,000 students from tribal communities across the U.S., the BIE today runs 183 schools in 23 states. And aside from military schools, the agency offers a rare glimpse at what happens when the federal government directly oversees education from afar.

We want to know: Has the federal government kept its promise to Native American students?

The Hechinger Report would like to hear from tribal elders, parents, students, teachers, bus drivers, paraeducators, principals, tribal council leaders, government officials — anyone with a story to share about the BIE. We want to hear the good, the bad and everything in between. How can the BIE better educate your children? Where do you see signs of success? What kind of education do you want for your tribe?

If you have a story to tell, please fill out the form below to share your contact information, which will remain private. We will reach out to you, or you can get in touch with us by emailing reporter Neal Morton at morton@hechingerreport.org.

This story about the BIE was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Tell us your story about the Bureau of Indian Education appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Our reporters have spent the last 10 months speaking with students, parents, teachers and school district leaders around the country about what this pandemic school year has been like.

Few are sad to see it end. This school year was a rocky one, marked by a tough transition back to buildings after months of virtual learning and Covid outbreaks that continued to disrupt learning.

But as spring arrived, some of the difficulties began to ease. In Fayetteville, Arkansas, field days and large, in-person graduation ceremonies returned. In Philadelphia, assessment tests showed that older students had more or less caught up to where they were pre-pandemic, although younger students still lagged behind, said William Hite, the outgoing superintendent of the city’s schools.

“We’re ready to have a really difficult year in the books,” said Eric Gordon, who leads the high-poverty Cleveland Metropolitan School District. “We’re closing the year with a combination of optimism that things are getting better but also an exhaustion of, Wow, this was a really tough year.”

While the educators, parents and students we spoke with predict next year will be easier, they also worry pandemic stresses will leave a lasting mark. Tensions are high, and rancor is spilling into school board meetings, classrooms and hallways. “The people who you thought were nice, normal people suddenly have all these nasty things to say,” said Betsy Bloodworth, a parent in Greenville, South Carolina.

Still, many people we talked to said the last two years had changed them for the better and brought some positives to the education system. More devices got into the hands of students. There was also a greater openness to moving away from outdated attendance rules and curriculum requirements that don’t necessarily engage students, school leaders told us. 

Here are some voices from our third round of interviews, in which we asked people involved with their local public schools for their reflections on how the past year had shaped them, and their predictions for the next school year, among other topics. The interviews have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

Katina Harris, middle school English teacher and president of the local teachers’ union

Next year will be a better year, definitely. We had this year to support our students, and we’ll have summer to support our students academically.

Our district has realized some of our challenges. They have put extra support in place to support us. I wouldn’t say it’s easier, but maybe it’s more digestible for staff. … We have classroom tutors now. Every day there are more adults. Reading coaches hold small groups as well. If the district continues to advise safety precautions and provide mental health support to staff and students, next year will be a year of growth. 

A lot of the damage of Covid, though, you will see for the next 10 years. Some of our students lost both parents or they lost grandparents. The health problems, the inflammation in our children who are exposed to it. We’ve had staff who’ve had Covid, and now they have effects from long Covid. We are going to see the effects for a while. As we open everything back up and start to remove masks, we will still be impacted by it. It’s out there, it’s still present.     

Jason Kamras, superintendent

Honestly, students aren’t in a great place. The social and emotional toll of the pandemic and now of this horrific shooting in Texas, the massacre in Buffalo, we’ve seen rates of suicidal ideation go up, bullying go up, abuse, referrals to child protective services go up, shootings in our own community go up. It’s a very tough time.

Going into next year our focus is really about providing stability to our kids, some sense of routine, some sense of normalcy. … We’re spending about $3 million of our federal stimulus on that, and then of course we will continue to be extremely focused on our academic efforts, in particular early literacy. We feel that for really the next 10 years that’s very important.

I think there’s a funding cliff that comes with the federal money that’s going to be a massive problem for public education. … I’ve said previously that out of the pandemic our schools need a Marshall Plan-like investment, and I just don’t see it. I don’t see the political will. 

REDMOND, OREGON

Ben Lawson, band and choir director at Redmond High School

Things are back to normal. Like, we’re acting like things are normal. There’s no masks, there’s no restrictions. We can plan events like we always had before. But it’s just kind of weird trying to put the year back together. We’re trying to make up for lost time. And I think we’re kind of working ourselves to exhaustion trying to return to normalcy, and not really remembering: “Well, the first six months was just obscene.”

I’m definitely worried about mental health, and there’s a lot of kids that have depression and they joke about it a lot: “Oh, yeah. You know, my depression, my anxiety, my ADHD meds.” It almost becomes like a normal occurrence.

I’ve seen an improvement in the [students] that are around me, but there are definitely multiple kids that were in my program two years ago, and they kind of just trickled along and then they just disappeared. I have no idea where they’re at or what they’re doing. …

Those are the type of kids that really needed to be in high school and be in that community and have something like band to get them through. And I don’t know where they went. I can’t speak to the kids I don’t see. Those are the ones I’ve worried about.

Kami Karr, senior at Redmond High School

There are just so many weird things happening one after another. Even when we were in elementary school, like with the stock market crash, everyone moved. I moved. All my friends would have lost their houses. And then you get into middle school, and then, like, the internet starts becoming a thing. You have to start dealing with that as a young child. Kids are growing up really fast because of the internet, and then you get to high school and Covid happens.

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

Sharahn Santana, African American history and English teacher at Parkway Northwest High School 

The students are adjusting. You can certainly see the growth that’s happening. … When we first came back, I was begging the students to say something, and now it feels more like a normal classroom again.

Next year, there are new variants, but I must say, I don’t think teachers, parents or stakeholders will address it the same way. It has kind of just become the new normal, living in the pandemic. We are trying to just get on with it. 

The pandemic made me take myself and my students not as seriously. It made me really put things in their place and prioritize things. It’s really difficult to get me upset, whereas prior to the pandemic I was a bit more rigid and strict. Now I am much more trusting of my students.

I’ve had such wonderful relationships with my students that I’ve never experienced before, and I think it’s because of me seeing them so vulnerable, me being so vulnerable. I care about my students first as people.

William Hite, superintendent

We are seeing young people settle in and settle back into school. For many of our young people, particularly in the city of Philadelphia, they feel like schools for them are the safest place. It doesn’t mean fights don’t happen or students don’t misbehave. It just means they don’t feel like someone is going to open fire on them from a moving vehicle, and they do worry about things like that on their way to and from school.

That’s sad, that’s a sad state of what many cities are dealing with right now. We are going to have to continue to provide those social-emotional supports for young people and adults alike.

Anna Phelan, kindergarten teacher at Overbrook Educational Center

I am really hoping that next year is as normal as possible and as close to three years ago as possible. Realistically probably it won’t be, in the winter, but I’m hoping next year is as normal as possible.

The pandemic made me realize the importance of preschool, of early learning. I wish the country could do preschool and it could be free for everybody.

It was easier for teachers to recover from early learning academic losses, but social-emotional losses were a lot harder for us to recover from. The academics can be made up for, but the social-emotional is much more difficult. I will now spend a lot more time than I already did on social-emotional and making sure they know how to read and emotional skills and conflict resolution.

GREENVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA

Betsy Bloodworth, parent of an eighth grade student and a college student

My general trust of people, I’m afraid, is lower. … Pandemic precautions and just general behaviors and attitudes — I think that it’s changed a lot of people. … The people who you thought were nice, normal people suddenly have all these nasty things to say.

My husband is an internist, and we were at a big internal medicine conference a couple of weeks ago in Chicago. The president of the internal medicine association said that the one greatest thing we have learned through the pandemic is that public health is no match for partisan politics, and I think that sums the whole thing up.

[Next year is] going to be another tough year for the schools. … The school has lost a bunch of teachers, but three of my son’s core subject teachers — English, social studies and science — have all left since Christmas. If every school has that much attrition of teachers, I don’t know how they’re going to have the staff to even staff the schools next year.

Anne Tromsness, drama teacher at the Fine Arts Center

I think the biggest change has been change, if that makes any sense at all. There’s just so much that’s been shaken up in our country, in our culture, in our education system. I think what’s changed about me is that I don’t want to go back without honoring what’s happened. I don’t want to return to normal … and now I don’t want to return without reflection.

CLEVELAND, OHIO

Jessica Boiner, home-based child care provider and parent of a preschool-age girl and a second grade son

Next year, I think, for my daughter, it will be good. I’m going to keep her at her private school. It is absolutely a financial sacrifice for my family. But I think it’s worth it because she’s been so happy.

I’m a little nervous about my son. One of the teachers at his school passed away suddenly over winter break. She was young. That’s the class he would have been going to next year, and he really liked her. It was kind of heartbreaking for his class and the teachers. I’m looking to see if the other teacher in the class stays or leaves. It worries me because I don’t know who’s coming in next. It takes him a while to warm up. My son has autism, and it took him almost to the end of the year to say something when he was in kindergarten.

Eric Gordon, superintendent

I’ve been in Cleveland 15 years, and 11 of them as the superintendent. I’m proud of the work we’ve done, but I would characterize the work we did pre-pandemic as rapid, continuous improvement. The work we’re trying to do now is much more transformational. That really arose out of the pandemic.

Kids just expect a much more engaging experience, and I’m trying to lead from a lens of, We can deliver on that. We can do more complex tasks kids care about. … We can make a more fun environment for learning. And we can use those tools to get better gains for all kids. It’s an approach I’ve always believed in, but as I’ve looked back, I’ve stayed more in the confines of the seat-time, credit-accumulation system. I’m challenging us to challenge those rules more aggressively than I was doing pre-pandemic.

TAOS, NEW MEXICO

Orion Salazar, graduating eighth grader, Taos Middle School

Last year I was not paying attention in school because I had my TV and phone and all that. This year, I didn’t have anything to distract me. It was pretty cool to learn.

It started off a little slow because of the pandemic, but my math teacher helped me a lot. … Kids just need someone to pay attention to them, to show them they are listening.

Mark Richert, social and emotional coordinator, Taos Municipal Schools

I heard from quite a few teachers around February or March that they noticed, as far as academics, that kids were not doing well and they didn’t care that they were not doing well. That’s something new and I heard that message quite a bit.

Traditionally, teachers are always trying to connect and find a way to recognize the value of materials, activities and learning. And it seemed like a lot of teachers ran into some roadblocks with that.

There’s the idea of normal and people are talking about the new normal. I would say, Let’s forget the idea of normal and just reinvent things. That’s my hope.

FREMONT COUNTY, WYOMING

Troy Zickefoose, superintendent

We had a little bit of a blowout in our community about adding eight days to our calendar. You would have thought the world had come to an end. … Not once did anyone mention academics. It was all about parent convenience.

People want public schools to be community centers, and day care, and social welfare agencies and feed-my-kid centers. The whole concept of public education being a place to learn — I’m waiting for that to come back again.

[When it comes to next year, I feel] a lot of hope, actually. There is a piece with this [Covid relief] funding that we’ve been able to spend on some curricular things that we’ve wanted to do for some time. The Census drove our poverty rates through the roof here. Our Title I budget [to support low-income students] doubled. If we can find them, we can hire more Title I teachers and interventionists, but that’s still a struggle. With people moving and quitting and trying something different, there’s just nobody to hire. 

FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS

Steven Weber, associate superintendent for teaching and learning at Fayetteville Public Schools

I definitely think we’ve learned to be more adaptable. We’ve learned more scenario planning and not just to plan for one or two outcomes. We’ve learned communication and how to communicate through multiple channels. We’ve learned, from an instructional standpoint, that we can use devices. But when we came back we were using the devices too much, so we’ve had to find a balance.

I believe some students got into some bad habits during the Covid pandemic related to attendance, and so we need to work with students and families to increase school attendance and make sure they’re on campus and they show up on time.

I certainly think focus groups help. A counselor can have a focus group, work through and talk to them. Quite often kids or parents will talk to you and say, This is what’s making me late. And then we can help them with transportation or whatever it is.

Maranda Seawood, student support specialist at Washington Elementary School

I’ve seen more trauma in the littles than I’ve seen in a long time. … Even now, with our pre-planning [for next year], I know the first few weeks of school, even though they want us to jump into curriculum like they did this year, we’ve got to really build relationships.

We’re prepared to make sure we love on them, first of all, when they get here. And then we’ll have a full week of routine procedures and building relationships. We’ve got to get back to that. I know what the administration wants, but we as teachers know what kids need, because we’re the ones in the building with them.

Evan Garner, father of four and rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

In our parish, we’ve had several members of our church who are not going back to in-person schooling because their children have flourished with virtual schooling. And they discovered that, and have maintained it. Not the majority, a handful. But in some ways it’s helped us either reaffirm what we know to be true about our children or maybe discover things that we didn’t know about how they can best learn.

I predict that [next year] our school system will have almost zero change, interruption, policies that anticipate or respond to local outbreaks, other than to ask people to stay at home when they test positive, and perhaps to have hand sanitizer. But it is almost impossible for me to imagine our local school system saying “we’re going virtual” or “virtual is a likely option.” … It feels like that ship has sailed.

PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY, MARYLAND

Alvaro Ceron-Ruiz, 16, junior at Eleanor Roosevelt High School and student member of the Prince George’s County Board of Education. He was recently elected to a second term as student member, which he will serve during his upcoming senior year.

It took a bit for all of us to get back into the flow of things, but we are back to how things were before. It definitely feels more normal. Obviously the pandemic is not over, but it isn’t playing as active a role in our conversations as a school board. I’m glad we’re able to get some normalcy back.

I chose to run for student school board member again because of the passion I was able to develop over this year, and the awareness that one year really isn’t enough. A lot of your time in your first year is spent learning the procedures, practices and responsibilities of a board member. In the second year, you get a lot of time to do the governing.

The first thing I want to look into is our food — that’s something that students always want to see changed, but we never really see action. With the second term, I actually want to get on it. We’d bring in our food and nutrition department, different professions, individuals from the private sector who may be willing to offer better food. A lot of what our students were eating every day was pizza and french fries. 

With Covid fading away, I feel more hopeful and more optimistic on what you can do in the school system. A lot of the limitations that you have are lifted, in a way.

This story about the end of the year was produced byThe Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post ‘Next year will be a better year’: An oral history of year three of pandemic schooling, Part III appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

BELGRADE, Mont. — Nearly every classroom at Story Creek Elementary School offers sweeping views of the snow-capped Rocky Mountains that surround the Gallatin Valley here in southwest Montana.

But on a recent spring morning, most teachers kept the roller shades in their classrooms down, hoping to focus students’ attention away from the nearly nonstop construction happening next door.

Lori Degenhart, principal of Story Creek, which opened a new campus last August, scanned the sunny vista from a second-grade classroom that overlooks swiftly vanishing ranchland. Bulldozers and dump trucks were clearing the way for an estimated 7,000 houses that will fill with families over the next few years.

“Where will we put all those kids?” she muttered to herself.

Over the last decade, enrollment in Belgrade and the 15 other school districts in Gallatin County, which includes Bozeman, swelled by 21 percent to 14,162 students as of October — significantly outpacing the statewide growth of just 4 percent in that time. The surging enrollment comes with some benefits: More students mean more state funding to hire more teachers, and new homeowners pay taxes to help build new schools, like Story Creek.

But there are also new headaches.

“How do we staff schools if no one can afford to live here?” said Degenhart, noting the spiraling cost of housing that has made hiring educators difficult. “It’s hard when you grow so fast.”

In Bozeman and other small cities like it across the West, the population is exploding faster than schools can keep up. Once a mostly rural county known as a sleepy outdoor paradise, Gallatin saw the number of residents rise by nearly a third in a decade, to almost 120,000 in 2020, as people relocated for new construction and tech jobs and a seemingly better quality of life. And the pandemic “sent everything into hyperdrive,” according to one principal: Bozeman, a city of 53,000, added 3,211 residents between July 2020 and July 2021.

That rapid growth, however, threatens the reputation — and sustainability — of its public schools.

School district leaders there, many of whom started their careers in small-town classrooms, now grapple with big-city problems: large class sizes, stretched budgets, crowded school buildings and too few staff, especially those with the cultural and language skills to serve this region’s diversifying student base. A tight labor market has made it even harder to hire and retain educators, as soaring housing costs — the median sales price of a single-family home in Gallatin County reached nearly $900,000 earlier this year — push more students and teachers alike into homelessness.

At the same time, the ballooning population in Gallatin County and across the state is testing the will of voters to fund education. Montana spends about $12,000 per student, putting it in the bottom half of states. It’s one of just two states (the other being Mississippi) that sets no money aside for English learners, despite increasing numbers of those students arriving in schools each day. And this fall, a proposed ballot initiative to cap local property taxes could complicate the task of serving an influx of students and curb education funding for many years to come.

“Before, we could slow down, step back and re-examine if a kid’s struggling,” said Nora Martin, elementary librarian for Bozeman’s Monforton school district, which more than doubled in size over the past 10 years. “Now we have to be on the same page on the same date and move everyone along at the same pace. Someone’s gonna get left behind.”

Related: Rural schools have a teacher shortage. Why don’t people who live there, teach there?

Bozeman is among dozens of small cities across the American West where population is skyrocketing, according to a Hechinger Report analysis of decennial U.S. Census Bureau data released in September 2021. Others include Cedar City, Utah; Twin Falls, Idaho; and Carlsbad, New Mexico — all of which are located in counties that saw total and childhood populations surge by double digits between 2010 and 2020.

Development in Cedar City and the surrounding county has sent the local school board scrambling to approve attendance boundary changes and relieve some of the overcrowding in high-growth neighborhoods. An Idaho nonprofit group identified Twin Falls — where student enrollment is projected to rise by an additional 17 percent through the end of this decade — as a potential growth market for new charter schools. In Carlsbad, voters approved $80 million for new schools in 2019 and school officials may return to the ballot box next year for additional funds as southeast New Mexico’s booming economy continues to draw new people.

Despite the growth in Bozeman, natives and newcomers alike almost universally refer to it as a small town. And their accounts offer a glimpse of the growing pains that have already arrived — or will soon — in booming communities across Western states.

On a recent weekday, students rushed through the hallways of Belgrade High School, about 10 miles outside Bozeman, to make it on time to study hall, their last class of the day.

In one basement room, three teens waited quietly for Susan Davis, the Belgrade School District’s English language coordinator. A world map hanging on one wall showed two locations marked with red dots: Chihuahua and Tepic, Mexico — the hometowns of two of the young men who needed some help with homework.

One student, Francisco, asked Davis for advice on his drawing of a pair of Air Jordans, part of an assignment on persuasive appeals for his argumentative writing class.

“Teacher, what can I put for ‘pathos?’ ” he asked in Spanish.

“ ‘Pathos’ is emotion, so what should I feel if I’m wearing these shoes,” Davis explained.

“You want to feel what it’s like to be the best,” wrote Francisco.

He’d moved to Belgrade in July 2020, when his father joined a surge of immigrants and refugees seeking high-paying construction and hospitality jobs in the nearby ski resort of Big Sky. He’s also one of nearly 4,000 students learning English in Montana’s schools — a 27 percent jump in four years.

“It’s too much people here,” Francisco said of his classes. “In Mexico, my biggest was 15. Here, it’s like 30 kids.”

In a state that earmarks no funding for English learners, the lack of support shows: In 2015-16, only about 15 percent of those students achieved proficiency on standardized exams; the number dropped dramatically the next year and has improved slightly since then, to just 3 percent in 2019-20.

“Unless you have $1 million to drop on a tiny house, don’t come.”

Cedar, sixth grader, Bozeman Online Charter School   

With no state funding for language instruction, the Belgrade district relies on less than $10,000 in federal funding — and whatever it can spare from its local budget — to cover the salaries for Davis and two other teachers, one of whom is part time. The trio divide their time among 100 students, and more English learners seem to enroll almost every week, Davis said.

The day after study hall, Davis had to abandon her normal duties — spread across three campuses — to provide translation for a new family from Chile.

“How do I help them when I’m handling 25 other students?” she said. “I just want more people. I don’t care about tech or textbooks. We need more teachers.”

Related: ‘More than a warm body’: Schools try long-term solutions to substitute teacher shortage

Will Dickerson, meanwhile, envies that Belgrade can afford even those positions.

He’s the interim principal at Hyalite Elementary School in Bozeman, where about 1 in 10 of his 500 students identify as English learners. As he finishes his first year there with volunteer tutors from Montana State University and a part-time teacher’s aide on loan from the district’s central office, Dickerson this spring started sorting through resumes to hire Bozeman’s first teacher for English learners.

“The feds require that we have to meet the educational needs of all students,” he said. “We’re nowhere close to providing what we should.”

To help fill the gaps, nonprofit groups have stepped in to provide language support to students new to Bozeman.

Thrive, a social services group founded in 1986, recently hired its first Spanish-speaking parent liaison to help families navigate the Gallatin Valley schools.

“My job is definitely a new one for Bozeman,” said Isabela Romero, a bilingual immigrant from Peru who joined Thrive in that role last fall. “For lack of a better word, it’s a very white place. We don’t have many bilingual or multilingual speakers in general. In school, there’s maybe one or no Spanish speakers.”

And while Romero can help families figure out how to enroll in school or offer interpretation in parent-teacher conferences, there are limits to the support she can provide. Federal law, for example, mandates that schools arrange for a qualified interpreter in meetings to discuss special education services.

“It’s not a perfect solution,” Romero said of her job. But, “oftentimes, I’m their first and only point of help.”

Related: A multilingual, multicultural call center helps families of color cope with remote learning

The most common need that Romero hears about from her families — and one shared by the staff at their children’s schools — is affordable housing.

The average rental price for a one-bedroom apartment in Bozeman hit more than $2,000 at the close of last year. And even before the pandemic, more than half of renters were considered “cost-burdened,” meaning they paid 30 percent or more of their income for housing. And nearly a third of renters spent more than half their income on those costs, which include utilities. That makes it particularly hard for a school district with fixed funding levels to offer competitive wages.

A drive down Main Street from the Bozeman school district’s headquarters illustrates the problem: “Now hiring” signs at cafes, fast-food joints and grocery stores advertise jobs paying up to $20 an hour.

“Our biggest challenge is this booming economy,” said Casey Bertram, Bozeman school superintendent. “It’s just unreasonable to find a place to rent and make $17 an hour as a custodian. It just doesn’t add up anymore.”

The competition for new workers has convinced Bertram to consider entering the rental market.

In 2018, in an attempt to ease the housing affordability crisis, Bozeman approved an “inclusionary zoning” policy that required builders to include affordable homes in their developments or pay a fee. But the Montana Legislature last year voted to ban that zoning, prompting Bertram to consider incentives to entice developers to work with the district and build teacher housing.

“A school district getting into the affordable housing business — five years ago, that would be crazy,” Bertram said. “And now we’re meeting with developers to figure out a path forward.”

Potential partners don’t have to drive far to find an example.

About 50 miles southwest of Bozeman, in the Big Sky School District — home to the “Biggest Skiing in America” — multimillion-dollar mansions surround Lone Peak High School and an adjacent pair of one-story triplexes. The triplexes, offered to teachers at deeply discounted rent, were built by volunteers with Habitat for Humanity in partnership with the district.

The skyrocketing cost of housing across Gallatin County has also fueled a rise in homelessness.

Over the past decade, the number of unhoused students attending Montana schools more than tripled, reaching 4,700 as of last year. But Gallatin County — unlike larger urban centers with longer histories of providing emergency housing — has no shelter for youth experiencing homelessness and just one shelter for families.

Related: 420,000 homeless kids went missing from schools’ rolls last year. They may never be found

In Belgrade, Superintendent Godfrey Saunders said at least three of his district’s teachers were homeless this school year.

“It’s astonishing,” he said. “We’re encountering more unaccompanied youth, too. They’re just alone. In a country like ours, that should never happen.”

As in other parts of Gallatin, the pace at which families are moving to Belgrade, whether or not they can afford housing, has made it difficult to fill classroom vacancies.

Degenhart, the principal at Story Creek, returned from winter break to greet 23 new kindergartners enrolled at the school. She couldn’t just divide those students among the existing kindergarten teachers: State law caps the early elementary grades at 20 students, which forced Degenhart to make a quick hire.

But Degenhart worried a quick Google search about the region’s high cost of living and low salaries — teachers in Montana earn among the lowest in the country — could dissuade candidates from applying.

“A school district getting into the affordable housing business — five years ago, that would be crazy.”

“A school district getting into the affordable housing business — five years ago, that would be crazy.” Casey Bertram, superintendent, Bozeman Public Schools

“Eight, nine years ago, I had over 100 candidates for one job — 120, easily,” she said. “Now, I get maybe 20 applications from teachers. That’s with the job open for three weeks.”

The scramble to find a new kindergarten teacher provided Degenhart with a preview of another hiring crunch to come: Belgrade will have to find room — and teachers — for all the additional kids who move into the 7,000 homes to be built within the district’s attendance boundaries.

Saunders has already started the search for more land to build another elementary school, and possibly a second middle school.

To build Story Creek, the district paid $475,000 for 20 acres three years ago. Now, a similar lot costs $2.5 million, Saunders said. “It’s mind-boggling.”

Related: Short on financial knowledge, some school districts get bad deals on bonds

In 2015, state lawmakers tried to make it easier to pay for school construction and allowed districts to collect more in local property taxes. Gallatin County superintendents applauded the change, even as they wondered whether taxpayers might start to revolt.

Local property taxes make up close to a third of all funding for public schools in Montana, and Gallatin County voters historically have supported ballot measures that pay for basic district operations and new school buildings. But with a possible constitutional initiative in the works  that could cap taxes on residential property throughout the state, local support for increased taxes might be moot.

A Bozeman attorney and the state auditor have sponsored the measure, and proponents note  taxes for many property owners have risen by more than 30 percent over the last year. They warn of a bigger increase ahead, blaming a pandemic-fueled boom in real estate values that will lead to even larger tax bills. A state analysis, meanwhile, estimates the measure could cost schools about $84 million in funding over three years.

If passed, the constitutional initiative would be most harmful to residential districts like Belgrade, which lack the business tax base of a place like Bozeman.

“I get the burden for homeowners, especially if they’re on a fixed income,” said Saunders, raising his hands like two sides of a scale. “Just to keep up with the cost of living, the debate gets pretty tough: Do you pay for meds or vote to support schools?”

Supporters of the initiative have until June to collect enough signatures to place it on the ballot.

Regardless of whether the ballot initiative succeeds, some young people have already made up their minds about Bozeman and its future.

At the end of a recent school day, a pair of middle schoolers sat in an open-space classroom that was once the library for the district’s former high school, waiting for text messages announcing the arrival of their parents. They were students in the Bozeman Online Charter School, the state’s first standalone public charter school, an online academy that has so far enrolled more than 100 kids, including some from families that preferred remote learning during Covid lockdowns. But the middle schoolers, in the building for in-person instruction or help on assignments, had their own reasons for wanting to attend a virtual charter.   

“It’s hard to think,” said James, a sixth grader, of the district’s traditional middle school.

“Yeah, way too many people,” agreed Cedar, also a sixth grader. “You go through the hallways and can’t get anywhere.”

Cedar tapped the trackpad on his laptop, developing an app that morphs people’s selfies into faces of potatoes. James, meanwhile, was busy looking at March Madness scores — for a math assignment, he said.

Both begged their parents to keep them in remote school after spending just a few weeks in sixth grade classrooms. Overcrowding, they said, overwhelmed them and triggered anxiety attacks.

They were less worried, though, about how the changes in Bozeman and Gallatin County would affect the area long term. Neither planned to make a life here.

“I don’t like it here,” Cedar said. “Unless you have $1 million to drop on a tiny house, don’t come. If you’re already here, good luck if you stay.”

This story about Montana schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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