Across the country, state legislatures have passed bills to ban “age-inappropriate” books from schools, in many cases subjecting teachers and school librarians to criminal charges for possession of such books. In January, EveryLibrary, a group that tracks legislation that puts school and college librarians, higher ed faculty and museum professionals at risk of criminal prosecution, identified 44 bills in 14 states as “legislation of concern,” for the 2024 session.

This climate has teachers and librarians feeling fearful, confused and stressed. Lindsey Kimery, the coordinator of library services for Metro-Nashville Public Schools, said she has “no hidden agenda other than that reading was my favorite thing.” Having books by, about and for LGBTQ+ students, she said, “does not mean we are out there promoting it. It just means we have books for those readers, too. What I try to convey is that a library is a place for voluntary inquiry.” 

Krause’s List

It is unclear how the recent book ban fervor started. Certainly, a former Texas state representative, Matt Krause, deserves some credit. On October 25, 2021, using his power as chair of the Texas House Committee on General Investigating, Krause sent a letter to the Texas Education Agency and to school districts listing some 850 books. He demanded that districts (1) identify how many copies of each title they possessed and where they were located, including which campuses and classrooms; (2) say how much the district spent to acquire the books; and (3) identify books not on his list that dealt with topics such as AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, or other subjects that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

Districts had until November 12, less than a month, to respond. This alarmed librarians. At the time, Mary Woodard, president of the Texas Library Association, was also in charge of school libraries in the Mesquite Independent School District (ISD). She recalled receiving the letter. “I was actually at home. My superintendent forwarded it to me. It was in the evening,” she said. “I just felt a cold chill. I was beyond shocked that somebody from our state government was asking what books were available in our school libraries. I never thought I would see anything like that.”  Like librarians around the state, Woodard was quickly called into a meeting with her superintendent. Ultimately, they gathered the information Krause asked for, but decided not to send it unless it was specifically requested. It wasn’t.

The lack of follow-up by Krause was interesting. He has repeatedly refused to say how he compiled the list or what he was trying to accomplish. But around the time the letter gained attention, Krause was running for state attorney general. He failed to make it onto the Republican ballot in March 2022, then decided to run for district attorney in Tarrant County as a “Faithful, Conservative Fighter,” but lost. His legislative term ended on January 10, 2023. He is now running for Tarrant County Commissioner.

Related: The (mostly) Republican moms fighting to reclaim their Idaho school district from conservatives 

The list was probably the most newsworthy thing he did as state legislator — it caught fire. Suddenly, Krause’s list was a state resource and discussed in the national media. Governor Greg Abbott called on the Texas Education Agency to launch criminal investigations into the availability of “pornographic books” in school libraries. Some of writer Andrew Solomon’s books were on the list, prompting him to write an essay titled “My Book Was Censored in China. Now It’s Blacklisted — in Texas.”

Actually, Krause’s list was quite sloppy. Media outlets dove into specifics and unearthed a ridiculous assemblage. Of course, books that mention LGBTQ+ students or are about sexuality (even from the 1970s) or race were well represented. But there was a lot that was puzzling. “Almost one in five of the books listed, I have no idea why they’re included,” wrote Danika Ellis of Book Riot, a podcast and website about books and reading, who sifted through the entire list. “Probably the one that has me the most stumped is ‘Inventions and Inventors’ by Roger Smith from 2002. What’s controversial about a book on inventions??” Other outlets shared similar head-scratching reactions. The Dallas Observer named their “10 most absurd” books on the list.

Actually, Krause’s list was quite sloppy. Media outlets dove into specifics and unearthed a ridiculous assemblage.

Yet many educators treated the list like an instructional manual. Chris Tackett, a political campaign finance expert, tweeted a photo of a man in a hoodie leaving the high school library in Granbury ISD pulling a dolly of cardboard boxes labeled “Krause’s List.” Granbury ISD’s superintendent, Jeremy Glenn, was eager to comply, as a leaked audio recording showed. He gathered librarians in January 2022 and told them that students didn’t need access to books about sexuality or transgender people. A secret recording shared by the Texas Tribune–ProPublica Investigative Unit and NBC News revealed a stunning disregard for students’ First Amendment rights.

Yet when Glenn addressed the librarians, there was clearly no room for disagreement. He stated that school board trustees had been in touch. “I want to talk about our community,” he said in a firm but syrupy drawl. “If you do not know this, you have been probably under a rock, but Granbury is a very, very conservative community and our board is very, very conservative.” He warned, “If that’s not what you believe, you’d better hide it because it ain’t changing in Granbury. Here, in this community, we will be conservative.”

He then detailed that meant not having books about sexuality or LGBTQ+ or “information on how to become transgender.” Then, Glenn revealed his discomfort with gender-fluid individuals, saying, “I will take it one step further with you and you can disagree if you want. There are two genders. There’s male and there’s female. And I acknowledge that there are men that think they are women and women that think they are men. And I don’t have any issues with what people want to believe, but there is no place for it in our libraries.” He told librarians that he was forming a review committee of parents and educators and that they would “pull books off the shelves, especially the 850” on Krause’s list. He finished with a directive that camouflaged the seriousness of what he asked them to do: “When in doubt, pull it. Let the community sign off on it, put it back on the shelf. You’re good to go.”

Objections Reflect Times, Personal Views

Not surprisingly, the matter of what should and may be included in school libraries has long been a source of contention, often influenced by the political climate of the time. In 1950, amid the fervor of McCarthyism, the Yale Law Journal delved into a controversy between The Nation and The New York City Board of Education after the left-leaning magazine published articles critical of Roman Catholic church doctrine and dogma. The school board voted to remove The Nation from school libraries. A multi-year battle followed with The Nation offering free subscriptions, but appeals to the state department of education failed. Was it censorship, as the Yale Law Journal and The Nation defense suggested? Libraries cannot subscribe to every periodical. The schools did not remove existing materials but did not include new issues.

The example hits on a current matter. Aside from pressure to remove materials, what should be included in the first place? Nowadays, rather than face controversy, some librarians are simply choosing not to purchase some books. A survey conducted by School Library Journal in Spring 2022 received input from 720 school librarians, 90 percent from public schools (all anonymous). It found that 97 percent weighed the impact of controversial subjects when making purchases. “The presence of an LGBTQIA+ character or theme in a book led 29 percent of respondents to decline a purchase,” the survey report said. Forty-two percent admitted removing a “potentially problematic” book that had not faced challenge or review. An updated 2023 survey revealed that this has only become more common. Thirty-seven percent said they declined to select books with LGBTQIA+ subject matter; 47 percent admitted to removing a book on their own. Interestingly, one-third said they had considered leaving the profession “in reaction to the intensity over book bans” — but two-thirds said that intensity has moved them to be more active in fighting censorship.

Book banning is a chaotic and illogical business. How a book is received or understood is often subject to the historical moment — and the tastes of individuals.

Book banning is a chaotic and illogical business. How a book is received or understood is often subject to the historical moment — and the tastes of individuals. The notion of an objective measure or checklist to decide what is “appropriate” — something far-right school boards have worked to police and enforce — is slippery to define. In the late 1930s, the children’s book “The Story of Ferdinand,” about a bull who would rather smell flowers than fight a matador, was interpreted as carrying a pacifist political message. But in a whirl of confusion, it was marked as both pro-Franco and anti-Franco — and also as “communist, anarchist, manic-depressive, and schizoid,” according to an analysis of children’s book censorship in the Elementary School Journal in 1970.  

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

In other words, people saw what they wanted to see. That also happened to “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble,” a children’s book by William Steig about a donkey who finds a magic pebble and, frightened by a lion, wishes himself into becoming a rock. The book contained images of police officers dressed as pigs. In 1971, the International Conference of Police Associations took offense at that portrayal of police as pigs — “pig” being a derogatory term for law enforcement officers. According to the author of the journal article, school librarians who agreed with the police association view of the drawings and “considered [the portrayal] a political statement,” pulled the books from shelves in many locales, including Lincoln, Nebraska; Palo Alto, California; Toledo, Ohio; Prince George’s County, Maryland; and several cities in Illinois.

Books often get singled out because they make someone uncomfortable. Lately, far-right activists have particularly objected to graphic images, including of intimate body parts. Which is what happened in the 1970s with Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen.” The book includes drawings that reveal the toddler hero’s penis on several pages. School and public libraries quietly devised a solution: They used white tempera to paint diapers on Mickey, the main character. At a meeting of the American Library Association in Chicago in June 1972, some 475 librarians, illustrators, authors and publishers were outraged at the practice of the painting over the penis and signed a petition denouncing it as a form of censorship.

“School libraries are for all students but not all students are the same — they have diverse interests, abilities, and maturity levels, and varied cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.”

Texas Library Association

Books that involve drugs, violence, sex and sexual orientation can attract fierce opposition, regardless of the intended message, literary merit or value. Sometimes these books offer windows into other worlds and experiences, which in 1971 bothered school board members and a few parents in a white middle-class section of Queens, New York City. Community School District 25 board voted to ban “Down These Mean Streets,” by Piri Thomas, in which the author shares his tough story of survival in Harlem as the dark-skinned son of Puerto Rican immigrants. The five members of the school board who voted to ban the book did not have children in any public schools governed by the district. At a meeting that drew some 500 people and lasted for six hours, 63 attendees spoke with most objecting to the ban. According to a New York Times account, “Book Ban Splits a Queens School District,” the five school board members who favored the ban were nicknamed “The Holy Five” or “The Faithful Five.” Four had run on a slate sponsored by the Home Schools Association, a support group for Catholic parents home-schooling their children. In a parallel to the present, some questioned their motives, concerned that they were reflecting personal interests and not the district’s. A few years later, in December 1975, the board, composed of different and recently elected members, voted to repeal the ban. The board president called the book banning “abhorrent” and “undemocratic.”

Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico

Thomas’s book also played a role in a case on which the Supreme Court ruled in 1982. It began in September 1975, when several board members of the Island Trees Union Free School District on Long Island, New York, attended a weekend education conference in Watkins Glen, New York, organized by a far-right group, Parents of New York United, Inc. (PONY-U. Inc. for short). Island Trees Union Free School District board members mixed with representatives from the Heritage Foundation and parents opposed to school desegregation in Boston. The keynote speaker, Genevieve Klein, a member of the New York State Board of Regents, advocated for adoption of a voucher system for education. “If you are a parent who believes that reading, writing, spelling and arithmetic are basic tools necessary for developing into a contributing member of society, then you know that parental control is an immediate necessity,” she told the group. “If there is to be any hope for saving another generation from becoming functional idiots the time to act is now.”

PONY-U. Inc. was not just a local group eager to talk about schooling. Headed by Janet Mellon, a far-right activist, the group had spent several years orchestrating opposition to sex education and human relations education in schools and to student busing across Upstate New York. Yet books were top of mind leading up to Watkins Glen. A few weeks prior, the group hosted a talk titled “Book Censorship in Our Schools” at the Central Fire Station in Ithaca, New York. The Watkins Glen conference also came on the heels of one of the most violent and divisive school textbook battles in history. For six months in 1974 and 1975, bitter conflict roiled West Virginia’s Kanawha County after a new school board member, Alice Moore, sought the removal of textbooks that she found objectionable. She had won her seat by convincing voters that schools were “destroying our children’s patriotism, trust in God, respect for authority and confidence in their parents.”

Moore mobilized other conservatives locally and nationally, including prominent education activists Mel and Norma Gabler, who sought to “excise the rot from the nation’s schoolbooks,” as Adam Laats writes in “The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education.” That “rot” included teaching evolution; communicating a “liberated” sexuality; “graphic accounts of gang fights; raids by wild motorcyclists; violent demonstrations against authority; murders of family members; of rape” and “books that denigrated traditional patriotic stories” in favor of popular subjects at the time, including Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Gertrude Ederle, Bobby Jones, Joan Baez, W. E. B. Du Bois “and many others dear to liberal hearts.”

Related: Who picks school curriculum? Idaho law hands more power to parents

As protests in Kanawha County grew, violence spread. Reverend Marvin Horand, a fundamentalist minister and former truck driver, called for school boycotts, arguing that “no education at all is 100 percent better than what’s going on in the schools now. If we don’t protect our children from evil, we’ll have to go to hell for it.” The controversy resulted in two shooting deaths and multiple bombings. Horand was charged and ultimately found guilty in connection with the dynamiting of two elementary schools. The Heritage Foundation was also on the ground, providing legal support and helping a local group hold a “series of ‘Concerned Citizen’ hearings on discontent with the public schools.” Mellon of PONY-U. was one of their “expert” speakers.

At the Watkins Glen conference — with the memory of Kanawha County still fresh — board members of the Island Trees Union Free School District received a list of 32 books described as “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy.” Then, in February 1976, the board ordered the Island Trees Union Free School superintendent to remove 11 books from the district’s junior and senior high schools, including nine from school libraries. The move stirred outrage, but the board defended the ban, claiming that the books contained “material which is offensive to Christians, Jews, blacks and Americans in general.” Two of the books — “The Fixer,” by Bernard Malamud, and “Laughing Boy,” by Oliver La Farge — had won the Pulitzer Prize. At a press conference, school board member Frank Martin read aloud from “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, citing sentences in which Jesus is called a “bum” and a “nobody.” Martin said that “even if the rest of the book was the best story in the world, I still wouldn’t want it in our library with this stuff in it.” The other books: “Down These Mean Streets,” by Piri Thomas; “The Naked Ape,” by Desmond Morris; “Soul on Ice,” by Eldridge Cleaver; “Black Boy by Richard Wright;” “Best Short Stories of Negro Writers,” edited by Langston Hughes; “Go Ask Alice,” by an anonymous author; “A Hero Ain’t Nothing but a Sandwich,” by Alice Childress; and “A Reader for Writers,” by Jerome Archer.

“We are not even allowed to order the newest ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ or the latest ‘Guinness World Records’ unless the board gives express permission for those specific titles. We can’t get any new nonfiction books about camels or squirrels or football without specific approval of the school board.”

A librarian from the Bear Creek Intermediate School, Keller Independent School District, Texas

Opposition to the ban grew. In April 1976, 500 people jammed a local school board meeting. Many juniors and seniors in high school also attended. One told a reporter, “These books are very tame. It’s nothing you can’t hear in the sixth-grade school bus.” Yet the board upheld the ban. Then, several months later, it reaffirmed the ban, saying that board members had read the books and pronounced them “educationally unsound.” By September 1976, the matter had attracted broad notice and Thomas, the author of “Down These Mean Streets,” wrote in The New York Times arguing for “the right to write and to read.”  He explained that the book “was not written to titillate but to bring forth a clarity about my growing up in El Barrio in the 1930’s and 1940’s.” He added, “Since the horrors of poverty, racism, drugs, the brutality of our prison system, the inhumanity toward children of all colors are still running rampant, let the truth written by those who lived it be read by those who didn’t.”

When the books were first removed, Steven Pico, at 16, was vice president of the junior class and a member of the school newspaper’s editorial board. The following year, as student council president and a liaison to Island Tree Union Free District Board of Education, he attended school board meetings. He decided to mount a challenge to the ban. Pico connected with lawyers from the New York Civil Liberties Union, and four other students joined the suit. It took years for the case to make it to the high court. Pico went off to college, earning his BA from Haverford College in 1981. Just over a year later, on June 25, 1982, the Supreme Court handed down its decision. The Court ruled that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech limited the discretion of public school officials to remove books they considered offensive from school libraries. The New York Times ran its story on the ruling on page one. Linda Greenhouse, who covered the Supreme Court, noted that Bruce Rich, general counsel to the Freedom to Read Committee of the Association of American Publishers, “called the ruling ‘marvelous’ and said it ‘sends a very important message to school boards: Act carefully.’”

The decision in Pico was taken as a victory by those opposed to book bans, but as Greenhouse’s story also stated, it was a complicated win. It was a plurality ruling, which included a four-justice majority and two concurring opinions, that recognized school officials had violated students’ rights when they removed library books they didn’t like. “Our Constitution does not permit the official suppression of ideas,” wrote Associate Justice William J. Brennan Jr. But, as Greenhouse noted, “The Court did not define the precise limits of the Constitutional right it recognized.”

In the late 1930s, the children’s book “The Story of Ferdinand,” about a bull who would rather smell flowers than fight a matador, was interpreted as carrying a pacifist political message. But in a whirl of confusion, it was marked as both pro-Franco and anti-Franco — and also as “communist, anarchist, manic-depressive, and schizoid.”

School board members in Pico wanted to remove books whose content they disapproved of. But what if books were removed as a result of a restrictive policy? Or if state legislatures or school boards passed rules that restricted library materials? Would that run afoul of the law? Or would it provide cover for de facto book bans? What if a district made a process for approving books so onerous that librarians simply stopped ordering books with certain content?

These and related questions are playing out in real time now over what should be allowed in school libraries. Keller ISD, near Fort Worth, Texas, has faced controversy. When Governor Abbott announced plans to investigate school libraries amid reports of “pornographic” books, he specifically targeted Keller ISD, putting librarians in the district on the defensive. And when the Texas Education Agency released new guidelines for how districts should prevent “obscene content” from entering school libraries — a bid for wholesale changes in how books were acquired for libraries, bypassing the graduate training that is part of being a librarian — a far-right majority Keller ISD school board, newly-election in Spring 2022 with backing from the Patriot Mobile Action PAC, was only too happy to get involved.

Related: Moms For Liberty flexes its muscles — and faces pushback

At the time, the Texas Library Association and the Texas Association of School Librarians (a division of the Texas Library Association) objected to the new state guidelines. Those guidelines included the language of the Texas Penal Code Åò43.24(a)(2), a clear political statement, and a not-so-veiled threat. In most states, after all, K–12 schools and public libraries are typically exempt from obscenity laws; it is recognized that items that may clash with the language of those standards — art, biology, literature — involve creative and educational works that seek to deepen understanding of the human experience. Removing that exemption was the goal of the failed Tennessee House Bill 1944; it is a focus of several proposed bills around the country. 

The Texas Library Association objected to the increased burden on librarians, superintendents and school boards to read and review thousands of titles, acknowledging the difficult task for people who lack training as librarians. Such a process means relying on personal views of elected officials and other untrained people, which got the Island Trees Free Union School Board in trouble. In a statement, the Texas Library Association also underscored the actual role that libraries play: “School libraries are for all students but not all students are the same — they have diverse interests, abilities, and maturity levels, and varied cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.” The statement also pointedly rebuffed Abbott’s charge, adding, “Furthermore, school libraries do not collect obscene content.”

Yet the new Keller ISD school board was more than eager to take up removing “obscene content” from school libraries, and on July 8, 2022 passed an updated book policy that largely mirrored the new state guidelines. They weren’t done. A month later, on August 22, the board voted 4-2 (with one abstention) to adopt new district guidelines for selecting books. Each would be judged according to how often certain items appeared in its pages. Ill-defined terms like “prevalent,” “common,” “some” or “minimal” would indicate what amount of specific flagged content — profanity, kissing, horror, violence, bullying, drug or alcohol use by minors, drug use by adults, the glorification of suicide or self-harm or mental illness, brief descriptions of nonsexual nudity, and sexually explicit conduct or sexual abuse — would be permitted at different age levels.

Veteran board member, Ruthie Keyes, who had abstained, puzzled over how to apply the guidelines. In talking about violence, she asked, “Are they talking about military combat?” She had spoken with teachers who estimated having to remove two-thirds of their classroom library books. “That’s a lot,” she said. “And none were talking about explicit sex scenes.” (In November 2022, the board added one more rule: No mention of “gender fluidity” was permitted.)

The new policy created a selection process with more layers of librarians reviewing each purchase. Books would be also placed on a list open to review and challenge by members of the community for 30 days. The board would then approve the purchase of each book. This had an almost immediate effect. At the October 24, 2022, school board meeting, a librarian from the Bear Creek Intermediate School made her way to the mic, her hair piled in a messy swirl, glasses affixed to her face, and paper in hand. She spoke calmly about the policy, which she considered an affront to the training she and her peers had undergone. The board “has shown by its actions that Keller ISD librarians are not respected at all,” she said. “We are not even allowed to order the newest ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ or the latest ‘Guinness World Records’ unless the board gives express permission for those specific titles. We can’t get any new nonfiction books about camels or squirrels or football without specific approval of the school board.”

“I just felt a cold chill. I was beyond shocked that somebody from our state government was asking what books were available in our school libraries. I never thought I would see anything like that.” 

Mary Woodard, president of the Texas Library Association

She described “a huge environment of fear” among librarians who “are not even trusted to order a new alphabet book like ABC Cats for pre-K students.” Students, she said, keep asking why there are no new books. She must constantly say that titles are coming soon and makes excuses for the lack of new books. What she doesn’t reveal is the truth: “I certainly don’t mention the role that politics is playing in our libraries and our district.”

But in a reminder that this is political, the far-right Keller ISD Family Alliance PAC used the new policy and book removals to fundraise, trumpeting that the board had “stood up against the left’s woke agenda in schools, now we MUST hold the line and protect our hard-earned victories and our children.” Then it asked, “Can we count on you today to support our school board with a donation of $25, $50, $100, $250 or even $500?” Below the text was a “donate” button.

Much as moves to ban books get cast by far-right activists as “protecting” students, they are —and long have been — baldly political. Just last week, a federal judge in Florida heard oral arguments in a case brought by PEN America, publishers, authors and parents against the Escambia County School District and Escambia County School Board. The plaintiffs charge that the board and district removed and restricted books “based on their disagreement with the ideas expressed in those books.” Further, they “have disproportionately targeted books by or about people of color and/or LGBTQ people.”

As this case proceeds, as state legislatures prepare to take up bills that threaten librarians, teachers and the freedom of students to read, however, it is important to remember that this is more than some theoretical debate. There are consequences — for librarians doing their jobs, for children who want ordinary books, and for those for whom these restrictions are received as an attack.

In Keller ISD, during the five-and-half-hour school board meeting at which the board adopted restrictive book selection policies, a high school senior spoke during public comments. He said that he was gay, and in middle school had been told by peers that he was “a freak.”  I began to agree with them,” he said. Then, he recounted, “I found a book about boys that felt the same way as I did.” Reading it made him less alone; he gained confidence as he reached high school. Yet the new library and book policies made students like him “feel attacked by the school board,” he said. “This pervasive censorship is about more than politics,” he added. “It is about lives.”

This is an adapted excerpt from “School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics and the Battle for Public Education” by Laura Pappano. Copyright 2024. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.

The post The magic pebble and a lazy bull: The book ban movement has a long timeline appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

PRIEST RIVER, Idaho —The moms seated at the conference table on Election Day were worried. They had good reason: Their poll watchers at voting sites — grange halls on dirt roads, community centers hardly larger than a bungalow— suggested things were not going their way.

There were no formal exit polls conducted in West Bonner County, where the school district covers 781 square miles over timbered hills and crystalline lakes in the north Idaho panhandle. But Dana Douglas, a fit and forceful blonde sipping on an Americano and a water bottle boosted with electrolytes (she was teaching spin at 6 p.m.) had been poll-watching at Edgemere Grange Hall, and she had her indicator for how voters were casting their ballots: “Anyone who said, ‘Hello, good morning’” was in their camp. “Anyone with a scowl” who would not look her in the eye was in the other. 

“It’s going to be a battle,” she said at the table. Sitting beside her, Candy Turner, a retired elementary school teacher who had brought Ziploc bags of pear slices and dried cranberries for the hours ahead, agreed. “I think we are in trouble based on what I saw.”

After Election Day, headlines in key locales all around the country spoke of moms fighting extremists in local school board races and winning. But even as some celebrated “flipping” their school boards back, far-right groups like Moms for Liberty remain. As the organization declared in an email blast in which they claimed winning 50 new school board seats: “WE ARE JUST GETTING STARTED!” 

Some people overlook school board skirmishes, seeing them as trivial. For Turner, Douglas, and many in the West Bonner County School District, they are anything but. It’s not about Democrats versus Republicans (Turner is a registered Democrat; Douglas is “a proud conservative Republican”). It’s about the viability of public education in their community. 

This is not hyperbole. The national infection facing public schooling—the tug-of-war between education professionals and extremist culture warriors—has brought chaos and damage to West Bonner County. After this past school year ended, the superintendent acknowledged that 31 percent of teachers, counselors, and education leaders left the district, and scores of parents pulled their children, opting for homeschooling, online learning, or enrolling in another district. Buildings are infrequently cleaned; an elementary school principal reported at an October school board meeting that mice were running over children’s feet and hallways smelled of urine. 

What has happened in West Bonner County offers a warning to public school supporters elsewhere. Douglas, Turner, and others are fighting to restore normalcy to an institution that should not be up for grabs — but is.

“We’ve been the canary in the coal mine,”Margaret Hall, the current school board chair who faced a far-right challenger, said on the eve of the November election. Hall, a soft-spoken but firm force, has served on the board for eight years, even through chemotherapy treatments for cancer. “What has to happen,” she said, “is people have to wake up and decide, ‘We don’t want someone to come in and tell us what we want. We want to decide ourselves.’”

Idaho is a conservative state and Bonner County is even more so, with registered Republicans outnumbering Democrats by almost seven to one (statewide it’s closer to five to one). Despite the nation’s bitter party politics, residents of this county have traditionally exercised a neighborly pragmatism in which the kids — or, as Douglas prefers, “our babies” — come first.

People filled in the gaps when it came to local needs, from sending groceries home with some children over weekends to teachers helping students brush their teeth or spending extra hours with struggling readers. But that spirit is now being tested by extremists who see a soft target in a stressed school district. Suddenly, the far-right’s anti-public-education catchphrases blared regularly on the national stage have become wedged into the local lexicon. 

For example, “transgenderism” (described by one candidate as “boys in girls bathrooms, boys in girls sports, ‘gender-affirming care,’ and related absurdities”) became a top issue in this November’s school board race. One candidate for reelection, Troy Reinbold, a nonchalant figure who has attended meetings in cutoff shorts and exited mid-agenda without explanation, touted his work on “the strongest transgender policy in Idaho schools” and opposition to “social emotional learning,” which he called “a precursor to critical race theory.”

Hall, for her part, abstained in an August vote on a school district policy that would require teachers and staff to “refer to students by their biological sex” and students to use bathrooms and locker rooms corresponding to their genders assigned at birth, along with bar transgender girls from girls’ sports teams. She said it was confusing, poorly written, and not vetted by the board’s legal counsel (instead it was reviewed by the anti-LGBTQ Christian legal advocacy group, Alliance Defending Freedom). Hall’s campaign signs were later tagged with rainbow stickers. The policy ended up passing 4-0.

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

How a place that had long treated differences with a live-and-let-live ethos adopted the intolerant tone of national politics is anyone’s guess. Some blame an influx of newcomers. Bonner County, like the rest of Idaho, is growing, and over the past decade, the tally of registered voters has risen almost 50 percent to nearly 32,000. 

But who they are and why some of them don’t support public education is a more complicated question. It’s possible that Idaho’s lax COVID-19 rules lured extremists, survivalists, and those lacking a communal impulse. There’s also a broader arc at play in a state economy that’s forced people to shift from work in local sawmills to commuter jobs that get them home later and leave them reliant on others to keep civic life running — a common pattern in 21st-century America. But Priest River, where the district is headquartered, is close-knit, populated by descendants of the six Naccarato brothers, who came from Italy to build the Great Northern Railroad in the late 1800s and stayed. That includes many mom organizers like Candy Naccarato Turner. 

Priest River police chief Drew McLain dates the start of recent drama to the school board vote to rescind the English Language Arts curriculum from the well-established education publisher McGraw Hill. It had been swiftly and unanimously approved in June 2022 and was delivered to replace the curriculum that was out of print. But far-right activists objected, complaining that it included aspects of social emotional learning. Such instruction — on skills like “self-confidence, problem-solving, and pro-social behavior,” as McGraw Hill described the curriculum on its website — is a bugaboo for conservative ideologues. And on August 24 of last year, with one member missing, the board voted 3-1 to return the texts to the publisher. 

The decision got the attention of moms like Douglas, Turner, and others. Whitney Hutchins, a new mother who graduated from West Bonner County schools in 2010 and whose family has operated a resort on Priest Lake for generations, started attending school board meetings. Ditto for Jessica Rogers, a mom of three daughters who had served on the curriculum committee and was upset by the reversal. Others, too, wondered what was happening.

After all, for years the meetings had been quiet affairs at the district’s storefront office on Main Street in a room with aged wood floors, folding chairs and tables, and a capacity of 34. By late 2022, such serenity was a thing of the past. People started lining up three to four hours in advance, which McLain said forced him to close Main Street for safety. Quickly, the gatherings got more and more unruly. First, McLain sent one officer, then several. At times, he called on the sheriff for backup. 

Things escalated even further when Jackie Branum, who was hired as superintendent in the summer of 2022, proposed a supplemental levy, which sets a chosen amount as property tax to support local schools’ operating costs, and a four-day school week to address financial issues — then abruptly resigned. The board approved the shorter week, angering many parents. Then it appointed Susie Luckey, a popular elementary school principal, as interim superintendent until June. By May, the board had put a levy before voters that would provide roughly one-third of the district’s budget.

Supplemental levies in Idaho, which ranks 50th nationally in public school funding, had long been used for capital projects and are now essential for operations. But residents suddenly sorted into “for” and “against” factions. Signs sprouted along rural roads; arguments raged on Facebook. The levy failed by 105 votes out of 3,295 cast. Parents expressed concern at a public meeting that the district would cut sports and extracurricular activities; some worried about teacher retention. Not to mention: The district still had no permanent superintendent.

In a swift but puzzling process, the school board eventually announced two finalists for superintendent. One was Luckey. The other was a far-right former elected politician who worked for the Idaho Freedom Foundation by the name of Branden Durst. Durst was an unusual choice given his lack of school experience and the IFF’s hostility to public education. (In 2019, the president of the IFF called public schools “the most virulent form of socialism (and indoctrination thereto) in America today,” adding, “I don’t think government should be in the education business.”) 

Then again, it wasn’t Durst’s first go-around: In 2022, the Democrat turned Republican ran for state superintendent of public instruction. He lost the GOP primary but in Bonner County beat his two challengers with 60 percent of the vote. Among the donors to his campaign were IFF leaders and a local resident who had opposed the McGraw Hill curriculum.

It is unclear how Durst, an abrasive outsider from 420 miles south in Boise, was so quickly ushered into contention. Jim Jones, former Idaho attorney general and a former justice of the Idaho Supreme Court, points to the IFF. He said the organization aims to “discredit and dismantle” public schools throughout the state, “starting with West Bonner County School District.” 

Related: Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right education policies

Jones also credits the IFF for helping extremists Keith Rutledge and Susan Brown get elected to the West Bonner County School Board in November 2021 in a low-turnout race. It was a pivotal election — but people didn’t realize it then. In hindsight, Douglas said residents “got lazy and complacent and we didn’t get to the polls and put people in the district that valued public education.” 

By early 2023, Rutledge and Brown — along with Reinbold, who revealed himself as a fellow extremist — had become a majority voting bloc on the five-person school board. Hall, the school board chair who works on climate change mitigation and who readily references the Idaho education code, and Carlyn Barton, a mother and teacher who describes herself as a “common sense constitutional conservative,” were at odds with the other three. 

Durst’s candidacy earlier this year turned up the heat on divisions both on the board and in the community. School board meetings were packed. Militia started showing up. And while the Second Amendment is cherished in Idaho, residents were alarmed to find men donned in khaki with walkie-talkies — and presumably guns — present for conversations on children’s education.

“The militia should not be at school board meetings,” argued McLain, the police chief who claimed that one grandfather “was so pissed at the militia” that he arrived drunk with a rifle. “It’s been frustrating,” he added. “If you told me I had the choice of a school board meeting or a bank robbery, I would be way less stressed going to the bank robbery.”

Following multiple contentious meetings with Hall and Barton, who pressed board members to reconsider Durst’s candidacy, in late June, he was selected by a 3-2 vote. After his hiring was finalized, Barton charged that “the direction of our board has turned into a fascist dictatorship with an agenda which is far from our conservative point of view.” 

From the moment he slid into the superintendent’s maroon Naugahyde-upholstered chair in the West Bonner County School District office, Durst seemed to relish his position of power. There was serious work to do — like negotiating a teacher contract — but he appeared far more interested in burnishing his reputation, describing his takeover as “a pilot” that others could learn from.

This was a chance, he told me in multiple interviews, to use the district to test his “ideas that are frankly unorthodox in education,” including some rooted in his Christian values. He wanted intelligent design taught alongside evolution in biology classes. He was working to have a Christian university offer an Old Testament course to high school students at a Baptist church near their school. He hoped the district would adopt curricula developed by the Christian conservative college Hillsdale in Michigan.

Durst also cast himself as a model for how non-educators could take charge of a school district. He boasted that national far-right figures were in touch and encouraged him not to “screw this up.” As he put it, “I broke into the club. I got a superintendency without having to go through the traditional process of doing it.” Indeed, he had not been a school principal, administrator, or classroom teacher.

Related: Teachers struggle to teach the Holocaust without running afoul of new ‘divisive concepts’ laws

That lack of process was a major problem for the state Board of Education, which in August gave the district notice it was not in compliance with Idaho law, a determination that jeopardized tax dollars critical for funding the schools. A letter sent to Rutledge, the chair at the time, cited budget irregularities, missed school bus inspections, concerns about discipline rates of special education students, and the failure to file forms to access federal funds. But the main issue, the state’s board said, was the district’s “decision to employ a non-certified individual as superintendent.” Durst had sought emergency certification but was rebuffed by the state. 

All of the uncertainty and division grew so dire that teachers found themselves struggling to carry on, leaving many no choice but to give notice. “It breaks my heart that I had to leave,” Steph Eldore, a fixture at Priest Lake Elementary School for 26 years, told me over tears in late August. With her daughter starting high school, Eldore and her husband, Ken, who had been director of facilities and capital improvements for 16 years, quit the district, finding jobs and enrolling their daughter elsewhere.

By the end of summer, 27 teachers had retired or resigned, along with 19 other staff members, including the director of special education, a school principal, and three counselors. Families followed. By fall, school district enrollment was down to 1,005 students, 100 less than projected. Even McLain, the police chief, had rented a place in Sandpoint, about half an hour from Priest River, and enrolled his two high school–aged children there. “We call ourselves the Priest River refugees,” he said. SergeantChris Davis, the district’s school resource officer, similarly said his daughter has opted to finish high school online. All in all, the Lake Pend Oreille School District in Sandpoint, whose permanent levy offers steady funding, reported 43 student transfers from West Bonner County School District.

Others, of course, remained. As the school year began, the West Bonner County School District 83 (“Strive for Greatness”) Facebook page was active with notices of cross-country races, soccer games, and picture day. But behind the sheen of normalcy were problems. A shortage of bus drivers led the district to cancel or combine routes. Many students’ commute times doubled, upsetting parents whose young children got home after dark, while other students had no bus transportation at all. There were also issues with school cleanliness. Kylie Hoepfer, a mom of a fourth grader, took on cleaning mouse turds on the bleachers at her daughter’s volleyball game. “I had heard about the mice problem but sweeping it all up was pretty gross,” she recalled.

The biggest hurt for families, however, was the loss of seasoned teachers. The district hired new ones, but a number of them soon quit. Trinity Duquette, a 1997 graduate of the high school, said her 8th-grade daughter “is on her third language arts teacher this year,” each with different styles and expectations. “They have been assigned essays and had a turnover in the midst of the assignment.” 

For Paul and Jessica Turco, who built strong bonds with their son’s special education teachers who have since left the district, the loss “was like breaking up a family.” They said it was weeks into the school year before the new teachers read their son’s Individualized Education Program, the written plan outlining his learning needs. “It was like he was starting from the very beginning rather than a stepping stone from where he left off the prior year,” said Jessica. And it’s showing. “We have been dealing with constant outbursts,” she added, and “when he comes home from school, he doesn’t want to talk about his day.”

While watching the disruption, Hutchins, the new mom whose soft features belie a fierce frankness, made a decision: She and her husband were moving to Spokane, Washington. “I’m not going to raise my daughter here,” she said, curling into a leather chair at her family’s resort. Hutchins’s brother is gay. Watching his experience in school had been painful, and the hostility toward LGBTQ+ students seemed to be growing worse. “This is horrible to say,” Hutchins said after Durst’s hiring, “but the right-wing extremists, they are taking over our community.” 

She wasn’t the only one thinking that — but not everyone was in a position to leave. Rogers, the mom of three who was on the curriculum committee, and her husband had recently built a home with sweeping views of Chase Lake. There was no moving away. So, she got involved at the school, first as a volunteer, then as a paraprofessional, and, more recently, teaching technology. Initially, she hadn’t wanted to get political, but soon, it no longer felt like a choice. 

Back in late 2022, after the school board rescinded the McGraw Hill curriculum and voted for a four-day week, parents like Paul and Jessica Turco reached out to Turner, the retired elementary school teacher, who dialed up Douglas, the Election Day poll-watcher. “I called Dana and said, ‘The kids want some help,’” Turner recalled.

Although Douglas grew up over the state line in Newport, Washington, she married her high school sweetheart from Priest River and now bled Spartan orange. They had built a thriving family business, sent two children through the local schools, and had grandchildren enrolled. She understood that what she saw happening was at odds with what she stood for.  

“I am a Republican. I am a Christian conservative,” said Douglas. “But I am 100 percent pro–public education, and I am pro–every child, and I will do anything for this community to embrace everyone and to love everyone.”

She, Turner, and others, including Hutchins, Rogers, and the Turcos, began meeting. How to take back the district? It started with the school board and, said Douglas, included a notion that should seem obvious: “getting people who value public education” to serve. 

By the summer of 2023, they had collected signatures for a recall vote of Rutledge and Brown, the board’s chair and vice chair respectively. The group’s slogan—“Recall, Replace, Rebuild” — blossomed on signs in downtown storefronts, in yards, and banners posted in fields. The group collected endorsements, video testimonials, and built a website. By the time they were days out from the August 29 vote, their numbers had swelled. Over 125 people gathered in the wood-beamed great room at the Priest Lake Event Center for what was part rally, part check-in: Who could pick up “WBCSD Strong” T-shirts? Who would hold signs at key spots ahead of the vote? 

Related: Inside the Christian legal campaign to return prayer to public schools

Recalls usually fail. But in West Bonner County, the result was resounding. With a 60.9 percent turnout, Rutledge and Brown were recalled by a wide margin. But then, after the election but before votes were officially certified, Rutledge and Brown posted notice of a board meeting for Friday, September 1, at 5 p.m., just before Labor Day weekend. The top agenda items — “Dissolve Current Board of Trustees” and “Turn Meeting Over to the Superintendent”— raised alarms. 

“I read the agenda and I was irate,” said Katie Elsaesser, a mom of two and a lawyer whose office is near the school district office. “I immediately started calling people.” She texted her husband that she would miss their son’s soccer game, then drafted a complaint, finishing at 2 a.m. In the morning, she drove to the district court in Sandpoint. One hour and fifteen minutes before the meeting was to take place, Elsaesser got a ruling to halt it. McLain delivered the news to the crowd in the high school cafeteria. “You would think I scored a touchdown,” he said.

In another strange twist after the recall, the board could not hold several meetings because Reinbold failed to show. Without a quorum, which required three present members, business halted. Finally, after a former school board chair alerted county officials, the sheriff agreed to investigate. Reinbold reappeared, and in mid-October, the board finally filled the vacant seats with two people who supported the recall. 

With his options running thin, on September 25, 2023, Durst announced plans for “an amicable and fair exit.” For the fourth time in less than two years — since a longtime superintendent retired in June 2022 — the district was again seeking a new leader. Hall reached out to Joseph Kren, a former principal at the high school who had also served as superintendent in a nearby district. Kren was enjoying retirement—he got Hall’s call at 9:30 p.m. before he was to wake at 3:30 a.m. to go elk hunting. He would agree to a 90-day contract (the four-day week means it runs through March). 

His appointment was greeted with relief. Kren, a serious-faced former wrestler, is religious but not ideological. On the sixth day of his new job, occupying the same spot Durst had just vacated, Kren showed me the silver-colored crucifix he had hung above his desk. Kren was clear that his faith “has guided [him]” but has “never gotten in the way.”

Growing up with a brother who was deaf, Kren said, has made him attuned to matters of inclusion and accommodation, which he called “a legal and moral responsibility.” His only agenda was to put things right. By Thanksgiving, he told me, the district had corrected state compliance issues, and he was working to add bus drivers. With so many turnovers, he acknowledged “disruptions can and do occur.” But his plan, he said, was steady: to “roll up [his] sleeves and work alongside” staff and to make “firm, consistent, morally sound decisions based in fact and the law.”  

The November 2023 election would be pivotal. With the two school board replacements set — picked by the recall supporters who lived in the two school zones that had been represented by Rutledge and Brown — the other three zones’ seats were on the ballot. The pro-recall crowd wanted to boot Reinbold and reelect Hall and Barton. The election, in essence, would decide which side had a majority.

But each had challengers. Hall faced Alan Galloway, a sharp-jawed army veteran and cattle rancher who opposed “transgenderism,” efforts “to impose the outlawed teaching of CRT through SEL or any other ‘trojan horse’ scheme,” and a levy. He circulated a controversial letter with inflammatory claims, including that Hall had “failed our children by delaying action related to bullying, dress codes and Pornography within our schools.” 

Barton faced Kathy Nash, who had pushed to rescind the curriculum, was treasurer of the Bonner County Republican Central Committee, and connected to far-right figures at the state level. Two of the far-right candidates shared a campaign treasurer and campaign finance reports show some of the same people donating to the three far-right candidates.

In other words, there were teams. Jim Kelly, Nash’s campaign manager, said Nash would bring scrutiny to school finances — and provide representation to those wounded by the recall. Kelly told me, “The big concern for Kathy, and for a lot of us, is that the school board is going to be 100 percent lopsided,” if the candidates he backed, whom many would consider far-right, were not elected. “People are objecting that there will not be a conservative voice.”

And yet, Nash’s opponent, Barton, was a conservative Christian. As was Reinbold’s challenger, Elizabeth Glazier, whose website described her as a “Proud Republican & Conservative Christian” who opposed the four-day week and the hiring of Durst. The race was not conservatives against liberals or Republicans against Democrats. It was, as locals told me, a referendum casting those who cared that students had books, buses, and teachers with a decent wage, against those who embraced extremist rhetoric. 

Related: Who picks school curriculum? Idaho law hands more power to parents

At various polling places on Election Day, far-right campaign volunteers were overheard promising that Nash and Reinbold would keep boys out of girls’ bathrooms. 

For parents who rely on the public schools, this kind of allegation was maddening. “It’s just paranoid bull honkey,” said Jacob Sateren, a father of eight (six in the schools). We met at a coffee shop across from the junior high on Election Day shortly after he had voted. Sateren, who’d turned a challenging childhood into a successful adulthood building pole barns, laughs when people call him “a woke liberal.” (His Facebook profile features an American flag emblazoned with the Second Amendment, he pointed out.)

He finds charges that schools are “indoctrinating” children absurd. “I haven’t had any of my kids come home and talk about any crazy weird stuff. And even if they did, if you are an involved parent, it doesn’t really matter. If teachers at the school are teaching my kids something I disagree with, it’s my job to be paying enough attention to catch it,” he said. “I don’t know why people get worked up. There is always going to be stuff you disagree with.” 

On the day before the vote, under steady rainfall, Hutchins, Rogers, and another volunteer placed signs along Route 57 across from Priest Lake Elementary School, a polling station. Rogers’s youngest daughter skipped while twirling a child-sized umbrella. “A lot of people are very confident of Margy winning — we are not,” said Rogers, referring to Hall by her nickname. 

There was good reason for concern. In the end, Hall did best Galloway by a 60-40 margin. But as Douglas and Turner had feared, Nash defeated Barton, and Reinbold won over Glazier. Retaking the district would not be quick or easy. Yet having a majority on the board offered relief. “We can rebuild,” said Douglas.

Hall, however, was concerned about the division that had eroded support for public education in the first place. The question on her mind was how to bring calm. On the eve of the election, she had made a soup with red lentils, ginger, and coconut milk, which she ladled into small ceramic bowls. As she sat at her dining table talking and eating, she rose periodically to let her dog, Cinco, outdoors, accompanying him with a flashlight. Because of a defect at birth, he now has only three legs; there were cougars and a pride of mountain lions in the dark woods. 

Between trips, she shared her idea of creating random seating assignments at the round tables in the high school cafeteria where school board meetings were now held, a strategy for encouraging residents on each side to sit together and actually converse. “How tired are people of the fighting and name-calling and bashing?” There was much work to do — a new levy needed, a curriculum people agreed on, teacher contracts, luring families back — but she told me it started with “trying to work as a team, to balance perspectives.”  

The day after the election, with the reality of the mixed board clear, Hall offered a sober assessment. “My work,” she said, “is definitely cut out for me.”

This story about West Bonner was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. Laura Pappano is the author of School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics and the Battle for Public Education, to be published by Beacon Press in January 2024.

The post The (mostly) Republican moms fighting to reclaim their Idaho school district from conservatives   appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

TWIN FALLS, Idaho — When J.D. Davis, the department chair of English at Twin Falls High School, was told last year that half of the committee he was leading to pick new texts and materials for the district’s English Language Arts classrooms would be parents and community members, he objected. 

“I said, ‘I’m not going to have parents involved! They don’t know what we’re doing. They don’t know what we need in a textbook as far as curriculum.’ I kind of scoffed at it,” said Davis, who also teaches journalism, oversees the school newspaper and advises the Gay-Straight Alliance.

A new Idaho law gave him no choice.

Across the U.S., educators typically lead textbook selections, although many districts, like Twin Falls, have long included parents in the process. Idaho’s “District Curricular Adoption Committees” law makes parent involvement mandatory — and then some — demanding districts form committees of at least 50 percent non-educators, including parents of current students, to review and recommend new texts and materials.

A year in, the law is reshaping what is or isn’t in the curriculum in many counties in this Western state, including how subjects like climate change or social movements are discussed in some courses. 

It has spurred tough but positive parent-school discussions in Twin Falls where parents and educators say the conversations have forced them to consider one another’s concerns and perspectives. In other districts, however, it’s poised to harden divisions and keep students from getting learning tools they need.

Related: Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right policies

Around the country, curricula — books and materials that guide but don’t define lessons — have become a political target of conservatives who fear conflict with values they want to instill in their children. Over the past two years, 147 “parental rights” bills were introduced in state legislatures, according to a legal tracker by the education think tank FutureEd.

Only a handful passed. Many restrict discussions around race and gender. Several enforce parents’ ability to review texts and materials. A 2022 Georgia “Parents’ Bill of Rights” requires that schools provide parents access to classroom and assigned materials within three days of a request. The Idaho curriculum law, embraced by the state’s conservative legislature, went into effect in July 2022.

The curriculum law is noteworthy because it gives non-educators more power not just to inspect curriculum, but to help choose it.

Some educators view it as a political move to undercut their professional role. “The parent partnership is important,” said Peggy Hoy, an instructional coach in the Twin Falls district and the National Education Association director for Idaho. “The problem is when you make a rule like they did and there is this requirement, it feels as an educator that the underlying reason is to drive a wedge between the classroom and parents.”

Sally Toone, a recently retired state representative and veteran teacher who opposed the law, sees it as a legislative move by conservatives “to have parents be a driver, instead of a partner, in the educational process.” 

Educators also voiced practical considerations. It can be tough for districts to find parents to devote time to curriculum review. Many have had to scramble, Hoy and others said. Only three non-educators agreed to serve on a math curriculum committee in Twin Falls, which meant that only three educators could participate — fewer than half the optimal number, said the educator who led the committee. Ditto for a science curriculum committee in Coeur D’Alene.

“My family and I are very religious. My biggest concern as a father was, ‘What are my children going to be reading?’ ”

Chris Reid, a father of seven who served on the committee to select a new English Language Arts curriculum for the Twin Falls School District

Having many non-educators involved also changes how materials are judged. Educators want to know, for example, if lessons are clear and organized, and whether they connect to prior learning and support students of differing levels. By contrast, “parents don’t understand the pedagogy of what happens in a curriculum,” said Hoy. They “look at the stories, the word problems, the way they are explaining it.”

Rep. Judy Boyle, a Republican state legislator who sponsored the law, initially agreed to an interview but did not respond to several requests to arrange it.

Related: Population booms overwhelm schools in the West: ‘Someone’s going to get left behind’

During the review process in Twin Falls, a district with 9,300 students in southern Idaho, parents objected to a theme around peaceful protests, the tone of questions around climate change and lessons that included social emotional learning. 

The curriculum with social emotional learning “got nixed pretty quickly,” said Davis, the English teacher leading the committee. Social emotional learning (SEL) — tools and strategies that research shows can help students better grasp academic content — has become a new lightning rod for the far-right across and is often conflated with Critical Race Theory or CRT.

Chris Reid, a banker and vice mayor of Twin Falls and father with seven children in the public schools, said he was eager to help select the new English Language Arts curriculum and make sure materials were “age-appropriate” and not include “revisionist history,” LGBTQ themes or sexuality introduced “to younger-age children.”

“My family and I are very religious,” said Reid, sitting one afternoon in his mezzanine office at First Federal Bank. “My biggest concern as a father was, ‘What are my children going to be reading?’”

Despite some tense conversations, Davis, the teacher, said the process was overall “not threatening.” He also liked the curriculum choice, the myPerspectives textbooks by Savvas Learning Company. He does, however, see risks with the new mandate, including that a parent or community member with an agenda “could hamstring the district from getting the best textbook,” he said. “It could literally be one member of the committee.”

Committee member Anna Rill, a teacher at Canyon Ridge High School, said the difficult conversations about content “made us think a little more about the community you are living in and that you are serving.” Twin Falls, named for the waterfalls formed by the Snake River Canyon dam, which in the early 1900s turned the area from desert into a rich agricultural region now called “The Magic Valley,” is politically conservative (70 percent voted for Donald Trump in 2020). L.T. Erickson, director of secondary programs for the school district, said he thought the curriculum “should meet the values and ideals of your community.”*

Increasing public involvement makes good sense because schools must be responsive to parent views, said Erickson. “Parents give us their children for several hours a day and a lot of trust and we want to make sure to earn and keep that trust.” 

Reid, the father of seven, liked being able to share his. “I got to hear other perspectives; they got to understand my side on the content,” he said. The experience led him to conclude that, “teachers are not evil. They are not trying to indoctrinate my child.”

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

The new law may help to build bridges in Twin Falls and some other communities. But in West Bonner County, which serves about 1,000 students in rural north Idaho, a year-old dispute over an English Language Arts curriculum continues to fuel division. 

The blow-up began last summer. In June, before the new law went into effect, the curriculum review committee, which included a few parents, chose the Wonders English Language Arts curriculum from McGraw-Hill. The school board approved it quickly and unanimously. The materials were purchased and delivered. “They were stacked in the hallways,” one parent said.

Then, some local conservative activists loudly objected, saying the materials contained social emotional learning components. In developing the curriculum, McGraw-Hill had partnered with Sesame Workshop to include SEL skills that language on the Wonders site said included “a focus on self-confidence, problem-solving, and pro-social behavior.” At a meeting on Aug. 24, 2022, the school board voted 3-1 to rescind the curriculum. 

Because the existing curriculum is out of print, the district lacked a reading program last year. 

“We had no spelling lists, no word work. The first unit was on the desert and we live in north Idaho,” said Whitney Urmann, who taught fourth grade last year at West Bonner County School District’s Priest Lake Elementary School. “Very early on, I stopped using the curriculum,” Urmann said. 

She had two workbooks for her entire class and few books leveled to her students’ abilities. Other materials were incomplete or irrelevant, she said. From mid-October on, she said, she purchased materials herself, spending $2,000 of her $47,000 salary to be able to teach reading. 

The board’s decision, said Margaret Hall, the board member who cast the dissenting vote, “has created some ill feelings.” Indeed: Two board members who voted to rescind the curriculum now face a recall after parents gathered enough signatures on petitions to force a vote. 

Shouting at one school board meeting in June went on for nearly four hours. 

The dispute, and the subsequent absence of teaching materials, has upset some local parents. 

Hailey Scott, a mother of three, said she worries that her child entering first grade, an advanced reader, won’t “be challenged.” Meanwhile, her third grader is behind in reading, said Scott, “and I fear she will be set back even more by not having a state-approved curriculum in her classroom.”

Whitney Hutchins, who grew up in the district and works at the Priest Lake resort her family has owned and operated for generations, recently decided with her husband to move across the state line to Spokane, Washington.

“This is not the environment I want to raise my child in,” said Hutchins, mother of an 18-month-old. She said the curriculum law is part of a larger problem of extremists gaining control and destroying civic institutions.

“It is scary to me that 50 percent of people choosing the curriculum are not going to be teachers,” she said. “It is scary to me that it is going to be people with a political agenda who don’t believe in public education.”

Hutchins doesn’t see things improving. The school board, on a 3-2 vote, chose Branden Durst — who was previously a senior analyst at the far-right Idaho Freedom Foundation and has no educational experience — as the district’s new superintendent over Susie Luckey, the interim superintendent and a veteran educator in the district. 

Durst said that he wanted the job because of the district’s challenges, including around curriculum. “I have a lot of ideas that are frankly unorthodox in education. I needed to prove to myself that those things are right,” he said. Those ideas could include using a curriculum developed by the conservative Christian Hillsdale College, he said. 

Durst is currently assembling a new committee with plans to quickly adopt a new English Language Arts curriculum, but declined to share details. 

“It is scary to me that 50 percent of people choosing the curriculum are not going to be teachers. It is scary to me that it is going to be people with a political agenda who don’t believe in public education.”

Whitney Hutchins, mother who recently decided to leave Twin Falls for Spokane, Washington

Jessica Rogers, who served on the committee that picked the Wonders curriculum, said she saw hints of trouble long before the vote to reject the curriculum. She said the curriculum adoption committee anticipated political attacks, including over images that showed racial diversity. “One of the things we did was go through the curriculum and see where the first blond-haired, blue-eyed boy was,” she recalled, adding that they noted pages to use as a defense. 

It was, she said, “bizarre.”

Rogers and her husband recently built a home atop a hill with a broad view of Chase Lake. As her three daughters had a water fight on the patio, she hoped aloud that building in the West Bonner County School District was not a mistake.

*Correction: This sentence has been updated with the correct first initials for L.T. Erickson.

This story about curriculum reviews 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 Who picks school curriculum? Idaho law hands more power to parents appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

PHILADELPHIA — If you’re going to celebrate yourself as “Moms Rocking the Cradle of Liberty” on your SWAG, it’s fair to expect a fight.  

That’s especially true if you are Moms for Liberty — the conservative group known for anti-LGBTQ+ attacks and efforts to ban books, challenge curriculum and gain control of school boards — gathering in a city that visibly embraces diversity.  

In a striking change from the first Joyful Warriors National Summit in Tampa, Florida, last July, where protesters were few, the second gathering in Philadelphia June 29 – July 2 was met with pushback from social justice advocates and parent activists opposed to the group’s right-wing policies. 

“It was bold, very bold” of them to come to Philadelphia, said Kim Barbero, a Bucks County, Pennsylvania, mom and a deputy director for Red, Wine & Blue, a national group organizing progressive suburban women. “They bring chaos into our communities, and we need to counter that,” she said. 

There were so many protests — rallies with speakers, “Dance Party Protest” events, a “Banned Book Giveaway”— that those attending the summit did so with a large, visible police presence around the Downtown Marriott where it was held. Attendees were advised not to wear conference badges on the street.  

“Why has Moms for Liberty become such a target for vilification? Because in a very short time since our founding in January 2021, we and our moms have been making a difference.”

Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice 

Protesters seemed to be everywhere. Moms for Liberty attendees, who numbered about 700, stepped off coach buses for a reception at the Museum of the American Revolution to chants of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” Protesters behind a police barricade held signs, including “Let Queer Youth Live” and “Say Gay, Stop Homophobia.” (Several organizations representing historians denounced the museum’s decision to host the group.) Earlier in the day, a box truck with the message “Stop Extremists and Moms for Liberty. Protect Our Freedom to Read” circled the hotel.  

After the summit, Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice in a tweet applauded attendees who she said “stood strong in the face of so much vitriol being thrown at them.”  

The protests had been months in the planning, but were amplified after an Indiana chapter of Moms for Liberty topped its June 2023 newsletter with a quote from Adolf Hitler (the group later apologized). At the summit, Justice responded angrily to “some nasty things said about Moms for Liberty recently on social media” after that incident, including death threats. “I assure you we are acting,” she said, adding that they were investigating and would turn over information to law enforcement. 

And then she described the attacks as a sign of success. “Why has Moms for Liberty become such a target for vilification?” said Justice. “Because in a very short time since our founding in January 2021, we and our moms have been making a difference.”

Related: Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right education policies   

In Tampa last year, the group laid the groundwork for the present battles around the country, offering Moms for Liberty members a soft introduction to political involvement. Speakers acknowledged that moms might not be used to stepping into the spotlight, speaking at school board meetings and — yes — seeking office. The summit offered help in running a campaign. And, more critically, a rationale for doing so. 

The messaging, the reason Moms were told to cast aside hesitation, was that their children were in danger: Speakers said public schools were brainwashing their children with Marxist beliefs, sexualizing them at young ages, indoctrinating them with “gender ideologies” — and failing to teach the basics. 

At last year’s summit, some attendees appeared genuinely shocked, but also motivated, by such charges. Much like the calls during World War II for women to step out of homemaking roles and work in factories, the conference deputized attendees as “War Moms” with a mission to challenge schools in order to protect their children.

This year, the disinformation about what actually happens in public school took on the sheen of familiarity. Strategy sessions covered ground that had become mainstream to many in attendance: “Comprehensive Sex Education: Sex Ed or Sexualization,” “Protecting Parental Rights,” “Protecting Kids from Gender Ideology,” “Cracking the SEL Code: The Manipulative Double Speak of Social Emotional Learning.” 

“It does not do anything to really prioritize what our children need in this moment. If you take a look at the NAEP scores, you take a look at the mental health crisis, we have work to do, and this is not work. It is political posturing.”

Keri Rodrigues, president and co-founder of the National Parents Union

Given that many attendees were now veterans of the culture wars, sessions included help in dealing with the media (including tips from Christian Ziegler, chairman of the Florida Republican Party) and running political campaigns, plus getting your school board to act once you have successfully “flipped” it to a majority of conservative members.

The second year also brought more sponsors, including Patriot Mobile, a Christian conservative wireless provider that donates a portion of earnings to far-right organizations, including the National Rifle Association, Conservative Political Action Conference, anti-abortion groups, and Patriot Mobile Action, a Political Action Committee it formed in 2022. 

The group, based in Grapevine, Texas, last year identified and funded 11 school board candidates in North Texas, all of whom won, which “flipped” four school boards, including one in Keller that has since adopted some of the most restrictive library book bans in the country.

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

Even as the national Moms for Liberty organization has attracted national conservative leaders and funders, some chapter members complained privately at the summit of getting no financial support from Moms for Liberty and having few resources to carry out their work. Nonetheless, the organization lists on its websiteschool board candidate endorsements by Moms for Liberty chapters, naming 17 that have “flipped” school boards to “parental rights supportive majorities.”

Beyond influencing school policy, local school board elections are seen by national conservative groups as a way to mobilize ordinary voters on other social-policy fronts. 

While those on the left were slow to recognize the significance of school board races and that school boards can be “flipped” with relatively few votes because of low voter turnout, increasingly, those groups are connecting with one another. In Philadelphia the “Schedule of Events Against the M4L Summit” was organized by a coalition that included nine named groups, but many others came to support them. Several said they expected the coordination to continue.

Meanwhile, the influence wielded by Moms for Liberty, which says it has more than 120,000 members in 45 states, resulted in a dazzling line-up of presidential hopefuls: Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Asa Hutchinson and Vivek Ramaswamy. 

While DeSantis was the darling of last year’s event — he was presented with the “liberty sword” award and a ballroom of women waved red “Mamas for DeSantis” campaign signs as he took the stage — his reception this year was more muted. His wife, Casey, who with their daughter Madison stole the show last year, was scheduled to speak, but did not appear.

Yet DeSantis, like every candidate, worked to court the room, insisting “mama bears” were “the most powerful political force in this country.” He rattled off his education-focused accomplishments in “the Free State of Florida,” as he calls it, from the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law to a voucher expansion that some experts fear will profoundly undercut funding for public schools.

DeSantis also acknowledged the protesters. “I see that Moms for Liberty is coming under attack by the corporate media, protests on the street,” he quipped. “Now you know what I feel like.” 

“It does not do anything to really prioritize what our children need in this moment. If you take a look at the NAEP scores, you take a look at the mental health crisis, we have work to do, and this is not work. It is political posturing.”

Keri Rodrigues, president and co-founder of the National Parents Union

While Haley and Hutchinson labored to connect to the crowd, Ramaswamy, who brought his wife, Apoorva, and two young sons on stage, earned a strong response when he promised, if elected, to abolish the Department of Education: “We will shut it down!” 

Trump — who in 2020 famously begged suburban women, “Will you please like me?” — received strong support from Moms for Liberty attendees who perhaps appreciated his defiant tone given their school board experiences. They stood in security lines for nearly an hour to enter the ballroom; many wore red MAGA hats. They cheered and chanted throughout his rambling hour-and-a-half speech (he received 19 standing ovations to Ramaswamy’s six and DeSantis’s three).

Trump joked about the protesters. “People are inspired and you have a lot of people who are very much in support outside,” he said to laughter. He ridiculed the Southern Poverty Law Center, which last month named Moms for Liberty an “extremist” group. “Can you imagine Moms for Liberty a hate group? I tell you, these people are sick,” he said. 

He dug into education, preying on parental fears with ill-defined promises to “overhaul juvenile justice to get violent monsters out of your children’s classrooms,” to “liberate our children from the Marxist, lunatics and perverts who have infested our education system,” to allow parents to  elect school principals and “move our education back to the states.” (Education is already primarily a state and local function with, on average, just eight percent of funding coming from the federal government.) 

Related: How Moms for Liberty wants to reshape education this school year and beyond

To critics, the reliable applause lines candidates embraced — critiques of “wokeness” in schools, denunciations of teacher unions, assertions that “there are only two genders, male and female”— didn’t have much to do with education and learning. 

This frustrates leaders like Heather Harding, a mother of two and executive director of the Campaign for Our Shared Future, a nonpartisan group supporting inclusive K-12 public education. She said the group held the “Banned Book Giveaway” both to bring attention to the fact that books were being banned and to put books that are becoming less available in schools into people’s hands. “What is happening as a result of Moms for Liberty is that certain groups are not represented in the curriculum and made to feel less welcome,” said Harding. 

Moms for Liberty has a prominent voice, but has diverted attention from critical issues, said Keri Rodrigues, president and co-founder of the National Parents Union, which has 1,000 affiliated organizations in 50 states plus Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. “We actually have deep concerns as parents that we want to have addressed. We want to have a serious conversation. This is not serious. It is a distraction,” she said, as she prepared to speak at a rally at LOVE Park, called that because of the 1970 Robert Indiana sculpture on the site.

“It does not do anything to really prioritize what our children need in this moment. If you take a look at the NAEP scores, you take a look at the mental health crisis, we have work to do, and this is not work,” she said. “It is political posturing.”

This story about Moms For Liberty 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 Moms For Liberty flexes its muscles — and faces pushback appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. — After seeing her daughter struggle in second, then third and fourth grades, Van McCourt-Ostrand wanted options. So, last year, the St. Petersburg mother of two applied for and received a voucher that would allow her youngest child to attend a private school in Florida.

McCourt-Ostrand, whose daughter has dyslexia, had two schools in mind, including one specializing in students with the reading-centered learning disability. She imagined her 11-year-old daughter finally having “peers, teachers, kids who understand what she is going through.”

That hope quickly vanished. Despite school visits, including one after which her daughter declared she had “met nice kids and enjoyed her experience,” she was not admitted. McCourt-Ostrand applied to the other school, but was told, “there is no room for you at fifth grade.”

“We had a voucher and nowhere to go with it,” she said.

Of the roughly 2,300 private schools accepting vouchers, 69 percent are unaccredited, 58 percent are religious and nearly one-third are for-profit, according to the state education department.

Even if her daughter had gotten in, she said, the voucher would have covered only about $7,000. Tuition at the first school was $20,000. It was $18,700 at the second — not including books, supplies, uniforms, tutoring and other expenses.

“I don’t know what we would have done,” said McCourt-Ostrand, “but we would have tried.”

Around the country, the political razzle-dazzle around “school choice” — giving families who enroll in the programs vouchers to spend on a range of school options as they see fit — is electrifying conservatives, grabbing public attention and becoming a GOP campaign banner. This year, states including Iowa, Utah and Arkansas have adopted universal school vouchers, which can be used like coupons for tuition, or education savings accounts (ESAs), which put money into accounts or onto debit cards for parents to use for school costs. Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account, offered starting last fall, has so far enrolled over 50,000 students, many of whom were already attending private schools. Legislatures in some 30 states are considering related moves.

Related: School choice had a big moment in the pandemic. But is it what parents want for the long run?

In March, Florida became the latest state to dramatically broaden access to public money for private schooling. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation making vouchers, worth about $8,500 each, eventually available to all K-12 students, regardless of family income (or whether a child has ever attended public school). The vouchers would also be available to home-schooled students, and ESAs could be used to pay for expenses beyond tuition.

In Florida and elsewhere, the pitches are bold, claiming that: “competition breeds excellence” and that choice will “put parents firmly in the driver’s seat” and is “about giving every student the best opportunity.” Less bold: detailed discussion of real-world consequences.

What if, like McCourt-Ostrand, your child doesn’t get into the school they want or need? What if a school costs more than the voucher’s value (as many do)? How can you tell if a private school is any good? And the big challenge: What does this mean for public schools, which 90 percent of children in America attend?

This historic expansion of vouchers in Florida has many parents and education experts there worried about the impact on public schools and debating what the expansion will cost and how it should be funded. Since 2019, when DeSantis began expanding access to vouchers, they have been paid for by rerouting state money from public districts to private education.

Over the past three years, the percentage of state-formula funding redirected from public to private education has risen from 3 to 10 percent, said Norín Dollard, senior policy analyst and KIDS COUNT director at the Florida Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research and policy organization. Next year, that could reach 30 percent, or $4 billion, according to calculations by Dollard and Mary McKillip of the Education Law Center.

“I don’t think I am being overly dramatic in saying it will fundamentally change public schools to have such a huge amount of funds diverted to private schools,” said Dollard.

“We will be decimated”

Florida public schools have long faced competition. In 1999, Gov. Jeb Bush signed into law the “Opportunity Scholarship Program,” which gave students in so-called failing public schools vouchers to help pay for private or religious ones. After the state Supreme Court in 2006 ruled the program unconstitutional because of its impact on public schools, the Florida Tax Credit (FTC) scholarship, created just a few years earlier, started to grow. It is financed through donations from companies to private school scholarships for low-income students that also lower the companies’ taxes. The number of students receiving FTC scholarships has risen by 62 percent over the past decade, which has no doubt contributed to the overall growth of private school enrollments. By the 2021-22 school year, 12.8 percent of Florida students attended private schools, above the national average; a decade earlier, it was 10.6 percent of the state’s students. 

Under DeSantis, the state also created and expanded (and combined and renamed) an array of voucher programs that cover tuition or other educational needs and services. These vouchers are targeted to students who have been bullied or faced violence or have disabilities, who are low-income or “working class” or siblings of voucher recipients, or who need reading help, among others.

Data from Step Up For Students, the primary group that administers the various scholarships, shows that about 130,000 students received vouchers in 2021-22 through four key scholarship programs. More recent state data shows that, in addition, nearly 100,000 students this year received tax-credit-based tuition vouchers, 81 percent to attend religious schools.

“I don’t think I am being overly dramatic in saying it will fundamentally change public schools to have such a huge amount of funds diverted to private schools.”

Norín Dollard, senior policy analyst and KIDS COUNT director, Florida Policy Institute

With this exodus from district schools in a state where the educational brand is “choice,” ordinary public schools face serious challenges. Step Up For Students boasts that 1.6 million, or “approximately 49% of K-12 students,” already participate in some form of choice, including magnet schools and career training programs.

The challenges are certainly being felt in Hillsborough County, located in an arc around Tampa Bay that includes the palm-treed “Riverwalk” downtown, tony suburban neighborhoods with water-view homes and mobile home parks in rural areas with names like “Plantation Oaks.” A rising percentage of Hillsborough County’s diverse student population now attends private schools —10.8 percent, up from 8.7 percent a decade earlier — or charters, which are public but often run by for-profit companies.

The nation’s seventh-largest school district, Hillsborough County may offer a harbinger of the impact of universal vouchers and “choice” on public schools nationally. Even before DeSantis signed the law, Addison Davis, superintendent of Hillsborough County Public Schools, warned during a school board workshop in February that voucher expansion “will potentially cripple public education.” Similar concern has rippled through the community.

“I give us maximum two years; we will be decimated,” said Paula Castano, a public school parent who, in spring 2021, co-founded the nonprofit Hillsborough Public School Advocates. The group avoids culture war issues like book bans to focus on the threat to the existence of public education. Castano worries: “People just don’t know what is about to happen to their schools.”

One parent, Earlishia Oates, already sees stresses. “I have all the kids from the bus stop on my porch,” she said by phone one day a few weeks ago. The school bus was not just a bit late; it wasn’t showing. She had 10 children with her, she said, and “they can’t go back home. The doors are locked.”

A mother of four who parents another child in her home (“my community son”), Oates works as a community organizer and advocate for parents in public housing. She is “the bus stop lady” because she waits with children whose parents leave early for jobs at Walmart and Family Dollar. When buses don’t show (the district has a shortage of drivers, teachers and staff), Oates said, “high schoolers go back and find something else to do, which is not good.”

Even parents in the county’s wealthier neighborhoods are noticing new troubles in their district schools, said Brita Wilkins Lincoln, a parent and member of the Florida PTA state legislative committee. She cited a request her school made to the PTA to organize parents to monitor students who had to take an AP Physics class online because a teacher retired and the school couldn’t hire a replacement. (The group declined. “That is not an appropriate thing for the PTA to do,” Wilkins Lincoln said.)

When schools are beset with problems, voucher advocates say parents should be able to send their children elsewhere. As DeSantis signed the new law, he said choice forces schools to “perform better because they compete for individual students.”

But Damaris Allen, a Hillsborough County Public Schools parent and executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Families for Strong Public Schools, said vouchers diminish resources for public schools. Her son attends her old high school and takes AP French, as she did. “My class had 24 students in it; his class has 38 students in it,” she said. “In addition to that, we are seeing reductions in programs, such as the arts and robotics.” The voucher expansion will lead to more cuts, Allen fears, and leave parents “without a real choice.”

Related: COLUMN: Do we need more ‘parental rights’ — or help fixing the real problems in education?

That message is missed by many, said Wilkins Lincoln. “People just hear headlines of ‘We are going to have more choices,’ ” she said. Parents coping with inflation and rising rents “do not realize the significance of what is happening.” Advocates, she said, “sell it as ‘choice’ and who doesn’t want choice? But that is not what this is about. It is about privatizing public education.”

“Choice is sold as a solution.”

Choice is a tough subject in Hillsborough County. The region has grown 20 percent in a decade, but that has been anything but a boon for the public schools. Data from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Florida Policy Institute shows that county public schools lost $75.7 million in state funding to private school vouchers this year — and are poised to lose more than three times that, or $309.4 million, next year. That represents more than one-quarter of the district’s state aid.

Charter school choice has been an even more dramatic challenge to Hillsborough County’s district public schools. Over the past decade, enrollment in district-run schools fell as charter enrollment nearly tripled. This year, district data show that charters serve 34,505, or 15 percent, of county public school students. Because money follows the student, in addition to losses from vouchers, the Hillsborough County district schools are also losing dollars to charters.

It’s a complicated problem. While voucher advocates say funding losses are offset because schools no longer have to educate the children who leave, Dollard says that districts like Hillsborough County cannot turn on a dime. “Public schools have fixed costs, with buildings and buses and salaries, whether the kid is there or not,” she said. Plus, unlike private schools, including religious and for-profit ones, public schools cannot cap enrollment or pick some students and reject others. They must accept and serve all.

“I wish everyone came home to a sit-down dinner with their parents. [But] we are not living in a utopic world.”

Karen Perez, Hillsborough County Public Schools board member

That’s an issue because district schools enroll a higher percentage of students who are more costly to educate. Of the county’s English Language Learners in public schools, 96 percent are enrolled in district schools, not charters. And 90 percent of those with special needs attend district schools, not charters, according to district data.

On top of funding headaches, county population growth has fed enrollment shifts. Now, with uneven moves to privates and charters, some schools are half empty (as low as 44 percent capacity), while others are busting at the seams (as high as 159 percent). District leaders are trying to redraw attendance boundaries to even out enrollments and — critically — save money. But it hasn’t gone well. Parents are upset — and therefore could leave or “choice out,” as one school board member put it, placing the district in an even more precarious position.

District stresses were on display at a Hillsborough County school board workshop in mid-February. In an administration building 15 minutes from downtown Tampa, administrators, school board members, media and 50 others convened in a mustard-walled room with drop ceilings in hopes of gaining some consensus around boundary plans. (There would be none.) Glum-faced parents propped signs before them that read “Say No to 3!” in opposition to one plan. School board members advocated for their neighborhoods. But most people acknowledged a glaring fact: The proposed reassignment plans would fall most heavily on low-income students of color by busing them to different neighborhoods.

Busing the most disadvantaged students far from where they live makes it hard for the students to fully participate in school, including in sports and clubs, objected board member Karen Perez. In many cases, grandparents are acting as parents and may not have a car or be able to drive students who come early or stay after school when there is no bus transportation. “That 70-year-old grandma with cataracts is raising grandchildren; that is a reality,” she added after the meeting. “I wish everyone came home to a sit-down dinner with their parents,” said Perez, but “we are not living in a utopic world.”

In theory, vouchers let students “vote with their feet” and force schools to improve to attract them. They also let families choose a school that seems the best fit. “My view is that these things can be good,” said Seth Zimmerman, an associate professor at Yale’s School of Organization and Management who studies the economics of education.

But details matter, he said, and effectiveness depends on ensuring that “competitive pressures are pointed in the right direction” — which means regulating or incentivizing schools in a choice system to serve at-risk students. “It’s tricky,” said Zimmerman. “What I’m not convinced works very well is saying, ‘Here are the vouchers, let it rip.’”

Related: Supreme Court ruling brings an altered legal landscape for school choice

School choice, ideally, said Thomas Toch, director of FutureEd, an education think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, is not “just giving families public dollars to attend private school,” but requiring transparency — and providing good information — so parents can make informed decisions. Otherwise, said Toch, it “is largely a transfer of public monies to families without a public policy purpose.”

In Hillsborough County, surrounding Tampa, 96 percent of English Language Learners are in district public schools, not charters, and 90 percent of those with special needs attend district schools, not charters, according to district data.

That is a problem in Florida, where it is hard to tell if a private school is any good. There are no teacher certification or school accreditation requirements for private schools, no publicly available school test scores or school climate surveys. Of roughly 2,300 private schools accepting vouchers, 69 percent are unaccredited, 58 percent are religious and 30 percent are for-profit. Only 3 percent of voucher-accepting private schools are accredited, nonreligious and nonprofit, according to data on the state Department of Education website.

“Choice” and a voucher seemed like a solution to McCourt-Ostrand. Reality was different. Her daughter remained in her public magnet school. Fortunately, she is having a good year, but McCourt-Ostrand credits that to good communication with the school and getting an experienced teacher.

Oates, “the bus stop lady,” also understands the lure of vouchers. Her youngest, Russell Stanley, Jr., an eighth grader who plays football, attends a magnet school. One boundary proposal would have routed him to a high school with students from rival neighborhoods. Oates was concerned for his safety. “I would ask for a voucher” if that happened, she said. “I would not have allowed my son to attend.”

Then there’s the practical matter of who can access a private school. Never mind getting in, most do not provide transportation (many charters do not, either). Plus, vouchers often do not cover the full cost. While Oates entertained the thought, she also recently saw her electric bill hit $300 and her rent rise by $500. “It’s not a realistic choice for working parents with rent going up the way it is,” she said.

Which is why parents like Oates and Ashley Foxworth, a single mother, need the public schools to keep working. For Foxworth , who grew up as the daughter of a young single mom who moved a lot, the Hillsborough Country Public schools were a steadying force. “My school was my school and a safe place,” she said. It enabled her success. She graduated from Bethune-Cookman College, earned a master’s degree, then taught for over a decade in the same public schools she had attended. Today she is an educational tutor, adviser and coach.

Her son, Tristen, is now a precocious first grader in Hillsborough County Public Schools. “I want him to be a hawk,” she said, referring to a local high school’s mascot, a school she hopes will still be an option for him to attend.  Foxworth is anxious about what the new law will mean for public schools, and about Tristen’s shot at the same opportunities she had.

“These people who have the economic advantage of having their kids in private schools, they don’t see the effects in the public schools,” said Foxworth. “Choice is sold as a solution — when it’s not.”

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

The post Florida just expanded school vouchers — again. What does that really mean? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

MEQUON, Wis. — With the pandemic dragging on, the string of setbacks that recently hit Lucas Regnier, a sophomore at Concordia University Wisconsin, has become oddly routine.

A wrestler and physical education major, he suffered a concussion and a sprained ACL. Then, he and half his team got Covid, forcing him to isolate in the basement of his girlfriend’s parents’ home nearby, disrupting his academics and prized time training with teammates.

“I have been out eight weeks,” Regnier, who has anxiety and ADHD, said, sporting sweats as he finally attended practice in early February. “I have been struggling to keep mentally strong.”

His struggle — and openness — are common now, both on this 3,300-student Lutheran campus and at colleges across the country.

“The pandemic has spurred conversation and openness around mental health in ways we have not seen before.”

Becky Fein, director of training and engagement for Active Minds

It is hard to overstate how much the pandemic has short-circuited the college experience and affected students’ well-being. To those already burdened by the demands of social media and fears about how to succeed in the world, Covid piled on.

Students have weathered shifting academic schedules and mask protocols. They have faced restrictions on the free-form socializing that builds acquaintanceships and a sense of belonging. As one Concordia student put it, “I haven’t had a normal year of college that wasn’t impacted by Covid.”

Data from the 2021 Healthy Minds Study shows 34 percent of college respondents struggling with anxiety disorder and 41 percent with depression — rates that have risen in recent years.  More broadly, nearly 73 percent in the Fall 2021 American College Health Association National College Health Assessment survey reported moderate or serious psychological distress.

For years, college students have agitated for improved mental health services, such as more counselors, easier access to them and greater awareness and sensitivity, including having professors put suicide prevention and other hotline numbers on syllabuses. They have been met with a tepid response from administrators who have traditionally considered mental health a private matter, not an institutional one.

That is changing. Covid is cracking open a conversation that students are desperate to have.

It’s true that there are not enough professionals to meet rising demand. (Counselor burnout is real.) Yet this is about more than counselor numbers; students are pressing for an array of tools and, critically, a culture shift. What they want most is more talk about — and more attention paid to — a subject once treated as taboo.

Related: More students are dropping out of college during Covid — and it could get worse

“We should always be talking about mental health. It is one of the best things you can do to prevent suicide,” said Kelsey Pacetti, a senior majoring in social work at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, a campus of 11,000 students set in a small city between Madison and Milwaukee. “When I started to be open with other people is when things started to turn around for me.”

Pacetti, who described herself as “a multiple suicide-attempt survivor,” is president of the campus chapter of Active Minds, which helps students advocate for change around mental health, from more flexible academic practices to integration of messaging across campus.

Nationally, the number of Active Minds chapters has more than doubled over the past six years to more than 600, including 130 high schools, said Becky Fein, director of training and engagement. “The pandemic,” she said, “has spurred conversation and openness around mental health in ways we have not seen before.”

As a student at Dartmouth in 2020, Sanat Mohapatra launched a mental health peer support app called Unmasked, which kept students connected when the pandemic sent them home. It now has 12,000 users at 46 schools. Students post anonymously to a campus-specific group or a broader audience. They share experiences, from what medications they take (and the side effects) to interactions with specific counselors and painful battles with social anxiety.

Recently, Mohapatra said, more of the 75 daily posts are from students seeking to organize. Students want to discuss “what mental health should look like on campus — what is the administration’s role, what is the student’s role?” he said. “Just this week, I saw several petitions like, ‘We have to change the administration’s policies.’ ”

Pacetti’s chapter of Active Minds, which has grown from fewer than a dozen to 35 members over the course of the pandemic, has provided valuable support. “It is a place where I don’t feel stigma exists and I can be myself and share how I am feeling,” she said. At a recent meeting, she brought supplies for students to make valentines to themselves.

Yet Pacetti also wants institutional change. She believes mental health education should be required.  Why are there “so many random requirements, but why is mental health not one of those?” she said. “Everybody deserves the skills to get through college, through life.”

Related: Burnout symptoms increasing among college students

That view — that mental health talk is a tool that prevents trouble rather than creating it — is starting to reach administrators, said Diana Cusumano, director of The Jed Foundation’s campus and wellness initiatives, which guide colleges in building mental health and suicide prevention supports.

“One of the big changes we have seen is a huge interest in making sure students on campus have what they need for their mental health,” she said. “And the interest is coming from presidents and provosts.”

At Concordia, as for many of the 400 schools that have worked with JED, outreach followed tragedy. Two students died by suicide, in fall 2017 and summer 2018, said Beth DeJongh, an associate professor of pharmacy practice who knew both and had one in class at the time. She co-directs the JED campus team, which gathers students along with faculty and staff from academic departments, financial aid offices, athletics, ministry, counseling, housekeeping and campus safety, among others. With JED’s guidance, the group examines how the university operates, from leave of absence policies (it lacked a formal one) and support services to how it communicates with students.

“I needed something to pour my grief into,” said DeJongh. “I wanted to focus on prevention.” And students clearly wanted help; use of campus counseling rose 23 percent from 2019 to 2020.

Yet it could take weeks to see someone. It was hard even to make an appointment, said Tracy Tuffey, who retired in December as chair of the university’s psychology department but continues working as a life coach with the campus’ wellness team.

“We had no intake,” she said. There was also no receptionist. Because counselors were in session, they did not respond to messages from students until the end of the day.  In addition, all the counselors were white, which is also an issue elsewhere. “Our students of color were not seeking out the counseling center,” said Tuffey.

The shortage, especially of therapists of color and those focusing on LGBTQ+ students, is a problem across the country.  This has fueled the growth of digital mental health clinics like Mantra Health, a company founded in 2018 that partners with 52 campuses to serve 500,000 students, said Dr. Nora Feldpausch, medical director of Wellround, Mantra’s provider group. Mantra connects students to a provider, either nearby or virtually, then coordinates care with the campus and offers students support via video chat and messaging.

Related: Mandatory advising looks more like social work as colleges try to meet student needs during pandemic

“The conversation nationally has shifted from ‘Do we do hybrid care?’ to ‘How do we do hybrid care?’ ” she said. It has unfolded as campus counseling centers “are now being hit by a tidal wave of students with pretty significant mental health concerns.”

Still, not all students need “full-blown therapy,” as Tuffey put it.  Concordia embarked on a pilot in October to offer students support that is not therapy, hiring five life coaches; three are Black. All were trained by Daniel Upchurch, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Louisiana Monroe, whose app, Positivity+, facilitates online coaching and counseling with a focus on providers from diverse backgrounds. Students at Concordia do not pay for the sessions.

De’Shawn Ford, a junior majoring in psychology who is president of the Black Student Union, said having these coaches “has broken down a barrier for mental health as it relates to our Black students.” Several, including himself, are now meeting with life coaches, he said.

“We should always be talking about mental health. It is one of the best things you can do to prevent suicide.” 

Kelsey Pacetti, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

The school also hired two intake and triage coordinators who screen students to assess what help they need. From October to mid-January, coordinators met with 183 students; they connected 155 to counselors, 22 to life coaches, 15 to peer support and others to academic advisers, campus ministry, sports teams or campus activities; 160 were connected to more than one.

The approach provides students with more timely help. Whether they call, email or walk in, they get a response within 24 hours; urgent requests are answered even faster, said Rebecca Hasbani, one of the coordinators. The center has some evening hours, which have proved critical, she said. Recently, Hasbani said, a student expressing suicidal ideation had walked in at 5 p.m. “If we had not been there, he might not have reached out,” she said.

Concordia’s efforts also include a quiet, dimmed room called “Evelyn’s Place,” named for a beloved former employee, with massage chairs, weighted blankets and a Stress Management and Resiliency Training (SMART) lab tool that teaches breathing techniques. Mini versions of the rooms, “Evelyn’s Corners,” are tucked into dorms and the school of pharmacy.

Nora Rudzinski, a senior majoring in mass communications, sees the spaces as a sanctuary for students “who may not have crippling depression but feel overwhelmed.” She stops in to “get out of my head space,” she said. “It is literally walking in that room and sitting on the floor.”

Students can do a lot to help themselves, said Jennifer Laxague, assistant director of LiveWell, the campus health and wellness office, at the University of Washington in Seattle. She supervises and trains students as peer coaches and health educators; last February, her office piloted one-on-one peer wellness coaching sessions, at first virtually, then, starting in September, in person.  

Students make appointments online with one of three coaches and state a goal for the session. Nikita Nerkar, a peer wellness coach and senior from Phoenix majoring in psychology, said students often “are looking to have a space to talk things through.”

Many feel stress from deadlines and schoolwork, made worse by poor sleep habits and time management. Kaycie Opiyo, a peer wellness coach and senior from Vancouver, British Columbia, who is majoring in biochemistry and public health-global health, said she reminds those feeling defeated of their strengths and that it is “a common experience and they are not alone.”

There is a counseling center on campus, but Laxague said that universities “cannot provide long-term therapy for 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 students.” Nor should they: “A lot of what people are calling ‘mental health struggles’ are actually figuring out this human experience and figuring out how to be an adult,” she said.

Questions like, “How do I build community? How do I build meaningful relationships?” are important, she said. Students now “are more aware and willing to ask for help” with such things. But, said Laxague, “you don’t necessarily need a therapist to learn those skills.”

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) and the Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 — are free, 24-hour services that can provide support, information and resources.

This story about mental health on campus 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 College students to administrators: Let’s talk about mental health appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

WINTHROP, Wash. — When the afternoon bell rang, Autumn Edwards, a high school senior in the Methow Valley, on the eastern slope of the Cascade Mountains, rushed out of class to her 1997 Ford F-150 pickup truck — and to her job at a ranch.

She was tasked with slaughtering a sheep and a goat, then gutting them. The day had begun with barn chores. The weekend before, she had skinned 12 pigs. “If there was no school, I would work from morning until evening,” said Edwards. Her goal? To own a ranch (she’s designed a logo) and a million acres.

This young woman with her scuffed cowboy boots and her striking confidence is plenty ambitious. Yet ask her about college and she is clear: “I don’t plan on it.”  What’s more, Beth Anderson, the college and career adviser for the Methow Valley district, is not pushing it.

Many high schools, said Anderson, “like to promote the fact that 100 percent or 95 percent are college-bound.” Such data points are not barometers of success, she argues, because they are more about “sending students off to the next institution” than helping them work through individual needs, skills and desires.

Are people ready to rethink what “success” looks like? And how to help students achieve it?

For teens across the country — many of them burnt out, confused or newly questioning long-held plans — that conversation is coming alive. It is unfolding amid scrutiny of the cost and value of a college degree and the multiplying options for alternative training.

The march to college is getting pandemic-adjusted. More students are taking gap years. Others feel they “don’t need college to be successful,” or don’t want to go until they know what to study, said Marguerite Ohrtman, director of school counseling and clinical training at the University of Minnesota. Some have lost ground academically. Others have earned certifications and want to use them. The pandemic has also driven some students to work more hours at jobs, earning money that remains critical to families.

“There are students who frankly are not ready to go to college and pay thousands of dollars” or take out hefty loans, said Ohrtman. Yet, she said, “there is still a push from school leaders that ‘We want 100 percent of our students to apply to college.’ ”

The situation has school counselors feeling stuck, said Mandy Savitz-Romer, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and expert in school counseling. 

“We celebrate kids who get into college; we do not celebrate students who choose work,” said Savitz-Romer. She added that “we can’t just now pivot to choosing careers” without giving counselors time and support to have those conversations with students — a challenge compounded by caseloads that have counselors responsible for scores or even hundreds of students.

The college-for-all push, originally a response to criticism that counselors were the gatekeepers to college access, was embraced more than a decade ago as “a really easy standard to hold ourselves to.”

Now, it may be overshadowing the complex needs of teens.

“What happened is we jumped to this place of helping students apply to college and skipped over the entire exploration process ­— ‘What do I want to do? How do I want to contribute?’ ” Savitz-Romer said. “There is no process of discovery. It is, ‘Here, apply to college.’ ”

Students are pushing back. Early data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows college enrollments down this fall for the second year in a row. Earlier this year, a survey of teens by the ECMC Group and VICE Media found that more than half believed they could be successful without a four-year college degree. (The ECMC Foundation, an affiliate of the ECMC Group, is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

Related: Proof Points — Many young adults choose work over college, report shows

A report in October by the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University found that more education generally yields higher earnings — but not always.

The report shows that 37 percent of workers with a high school diploma have higher earnings than half of those with some college. What subjects people study, what fields they enter, even geography — all matter in determining income, said Anthony Carnevale, director of the center and a co-author of the report.

A key factor that is little discussed, said Carnevale, is how well suited a person is to a job. “It is all about the match,” he said. “Where people are successful and have good earnings, it has to do with their own personal work interests and personality.”

That idea — finding what someone is good at and enjoys — is shaking up the adult labor market. (A record 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs in September.)  The pandemic also shuffled students’ perspectives, said Jill Cook, executive director of the American School Counselor Association. Disruptions to school routines led students to more work and community experiences, she said, at the same time that they saw “reports about folks who have left their jobs” asking, “What is a good fit? What is bringing them joy and making them happy?”

At Osseo Senior High School, which serves 2,100 students about 30 minutes northwest of Minneapolis, Dayo Onanuga, a senior,  joined several other students on a recent morning in a beige-wallpapered conference room and shared that she had long planned to be a surgeon.

But a year of online school changed that. “I was burnt out from the pandemic,” she said. Onanuga reasoned that if her energy was flagging now, “I probably cannot manage surgery” and years of training. Rather than give up the field — the pandemic highlighted for her “the injustices and struggles” faced by health care workers — she is now considering health care administration.

As it did for many students, the pandemic also forced Onanuga to manage her time and become more independent. She now also worries less about what others think of her choices or how she reaches her goals. “I kind of stopped caring about permission,” she said. “At the end of the day, nobody else is going to work this job until retirement but me. I should be happy. It can’t be something that I work two years, and then I hate it.”

Her classmate Kenji Lee had a similar revelation. Someone drawn to puzzles who has “math homework in my backpack all the time,” Lee planned to study engineering but admitted he “was just doing school to do school.” Then he got his driver’s license and discovered cars.

“Cars make me happy. Cars are fun,” he said. “I love working on cars, I like driving cars, anything to do with cars.” He now plans to attend a technical college to focus on engines for cars, boats or motorcycles. Adults tell Lee he won’t earn a lot, which makes him “double-check myself, ‘Do I really want to do this?’ ” But he concludes: “ ‘Yeah, I do.’ ”

Related: Poll — Nearly half of parents don’t want their kids to go straight to a four-year college

While some high school students know what they want to do, many do not. Carnevale from Georgetown said the average age at which people “land in an occupation” — earning the median wage for workers of all ages  — has risen from the mid-20s in the 1970s to the early 30s now.

“The journey is a lot longer,” he said. One reason, said Carnevale, is that the labor market now demands more specific skills. Students are especially anxious about spending to acquire skills they don’t end up using.  Osseo senior Mila Phethdara said her mother earned a nursing degree, “realized she hated it” then worked in insurance.

“My mom wants me to figure out what I want to do and stick with it. She doesn’t want to waste money,” said Phethdara, who is interested in the dental field.  Still, she said, “I worry that I will switch out of it. That is an ongoing fear.”

It’s easy to see why many students feel pressure around education and career choices. A Georgetown report published in October showed that from 1980 to 2019, average college costs rose 169 percent, while earnings for those aged 22 to 27 rose only 19 percent.  Some jobs don’t seem to justify the education costs.

Yusanat Tway, a sociology major at the University of Minnesota, wants to go to law school, then do human rights advocacy. “It will cost $200K” to get a law degree, she said. (The median salary for a lawyer is $126,930, but varies widely.) Tway, a first-generation college student, also has family financial expectations to think about: “Because my parents are immigrants, I am their retirement plan.”

One big problem, said Carnevale, is a dearth of guidance to help students relate their interests, education and training to potential work. “There is a kind of missing link in this relationship between people and their work values, work interests, personality traits, then linking that to education and then linking that to training and then linking that to jobs.”

In recent years, Career and Technical Education (CTE) has been included in state graduation requirements and high school curricula in order to address this exact issue. It is far different from old vocational education (candlesticks in metal shop, anyone?) and can yield certifications, community work experiences and awareness. (What did you learn about client confidentiality in that health care course? What interested you?)

In Minnesota, the Greater Twin Cities United Way works with 17 school districts that have developed career pathways offering students of color and those with low incomes job exposure, college credits and training. The stated goal: jobs paying at least $25 an hour and zero college debt. Sareen Dunleavy Keenan, senior program officer for Career Academies, which connects schools and employers, said it takes coaching to change both how employers consider young talent — as in rewriting entry-level job descriptions and paying to train young people, not just older workers — and how students view “success.”

Related: Biggest gap year ever? Sixteen percent of high school seniors say they’ll take a gap year

“Previously, it was ‘A four-year degree is a ticket out of here,’ ” she said. “Now we want people to stay in their communities.” She pitches “wealth creation,” which in this context means helping students forge pathways to high-wage local jobs (with “an upward career trajectory”), while they use college credits in high school, Pell grants and employer tuition programs to pay for education, rather than acquiring debt.

Keenan said the 10-year project (the United Way is halfway through it) challenges schools to focus less on college applications and instead help students build a career “where they don’t need two, three jobs or a side hustle.”  And to do it through local relationships.

The approach may make sense. But the pandemic canceled many in-person experiences for students — and threw them off track. A school year “when you do almost nothing” was tough, said Hamza Mohammed, a senior at Humboldt High School in St. Paul.

He had planned to take calculus now but can’t because he didn’t feel comfortable taking pre-calculus online last year. Mohammed likes computer science, “but I haven’t shadowed anyone,” he said. “What I really need at this point is more career-based education.”

Hannah Chan, career pathways coordinator for the St. Paul district, sitting across from Mohammed in a Humboldt High conference room, was herself a first-generation college student and understands the setback of missing key exposures.

“I hear you loud and clear that because of Covid you couldn’t have these experiences,” she said to Mohammed.  Many low-income first-generation students, she said, “only know the careers around them.”

The pandemic also surfaced issues of identity, community and social justice, which are especially keenly felt in Minneapolis, said Derek Francis, manager of counseling services for Minneapolis Public Schools. He said staff members had set up food drives in school parking lots as the pandemic hit. “We became community support, right off the bat,” he said of counselors. And, he asked, “What else has happened here?” referring to the murder of George Floyd.

Students are back, but the world has changed. As counselors, he said, “we want to make sure we are not missing out on college and career” planning. But, said Francis, “We have to talk about race and inclusion.” Many students, he said, “have been beaten up physically and emotionally” and now ask, “Why would I want to go to college?”

Francis spoke while at a school counselors’ gathering in a brewery outside Minneapolis, the in-person social piece of the Minnesota School Counselors Association’s virtual two-day conference. Counselors described students missing credits and falling behind academically, and talked about students feeling uncertain. “Our high flyers are still applying to college,” said one, but fewer “are feeling the pressure to apply soon.”

A counselor from South High School in Minneapolis said she had just written a letter of recommendation for a student who “is involved in, like, 50 organizations,” from social justice to climate change. The pandemic and social unrest have spurred activism and artistic and creative efforts, she said.

Related: Shopping for a major? Detailed salary info shows which majors pay off

Education and work experts say it is too soon to tell if we are on the cusp of deep cultural change in how our education system guides students from school to work and life — wherever they come from.

Among the graduates of Osseo Senior High School’s Class of 2021, 20 percent went right to work, up from 11 percent just five years earlier.  Jacqueline Trzynka, a school counselor, said a few years ago the school began celebrating students once they declared a postsecondary plan — not necessarily college — with an orange T-shirt that read “I’M IN.”

This year, counselors are paying close attention to how they speak to students. Rather than focus on being “college ready,” they urge figuring out what interests students, then finding out how and where to pursue it. 

“We are really conscious of not making it all about four-year [institutions] in our presentations, on our website, our materials,” she said. The aim is “to make students feel that whatever they choose is valued.”

In some places, expectations can be hard to unwind, said Edward Pickett III, a board director of the National Association for College Admission Counseling and a dean and college counselor at Polytechnic School, a private school in Pasadena, California.

“Success looks different for every person,” said Pickett, a former admissions counselor at Tufts University. Well-off parents at his school, he said, “have worked to have these resources, so they want to make sure they pass it along to their kids.”

To the parents, that often means having a child attend an elite school and pursue a high-paying profession. At the same time, the pandemic offered counselors “this opportunity to reflect” on the need “to present different opportunities” to students, said Pickett, himself a first-generation college student.

He sees more students planning gap years.  Opal Hetherington, a senior at Polytechnic, hopes to spend next year on a farm.  She is rethinking a previously scripted path in which “I was choosing to go to college because I am going to a college preparatory school and that is what we do,” she said. 

She is still applying to college.  But her onetime plans to major in political science now bend toward religion and thoughts of homesteading. Where she once “thought I was certain about things,” Hetherington said she now wants “to experience what happens to me.” She added, “I don’t want to always be living in a planning stage.”

This story about college alternatives was produced by The Hechinger Report. Sign up for The Hechinger Report higher education newsletter.

The post More students question college, putting counselors in a fresh quandary appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — As it did for a lot of people, the pandemic gave Kara Reilly time to think.  

“My turning moment was when I was shut down and I had 11 weeks to sit around,” said Reilly, 49, a hairdresser in Louisville, Kentucky, whose salon closed early in the pandemic. Seeing that “things could literally end in a split moment” pushed her to revisit an old goal: going to college, maybe to become a high school English teacher. 

Then, on June 8 of this year, Jefferson Community & Technical College  announced a “Jump-Start Grant” offering a year’s free tuition for new  students 25 and older in the region.  

A week later, 344 students had applied. By month’s end, there were 665 (including Reilly), which was more than double the college’s June 2019 applications. 

“We talk about our adult learners as workers who go to school rather than students who work.”

Emily House, executive director, Tennessee Higher Education Commission and the Tennessee Student Assistance Corporation

“It gets people’s attention anytime you say, ‘Free,’ ” said Jimmy Kidd, the director of admissions, who spoke between in-person student orientation sessions in the library of the school’s downtown Louisville campus in late June.  

“Free college” or “promise” programs have long focused on recent high school grads. But now a convergence of factors — a dwindling pool of traditional-age students, the call for more educated workers and a pandemic that highlighted economic disparities and scrambled habits and jobs — is putting adults in the spotlight.  

“The message is getting clearer and clearer: This is what our postsecondary population looks like,” said Alexandria Walton Radford, co-author of a new study by the American Institutes for Research that identified 67 “promise” programs across the U.S. that pay college tuition for adults.  

Getting the roughly 35 million adults age 25 and over with some college and no degree — or those like Reilly who never enrolled — to engage is critical, but not easy. One huge problem: Many programs aimed at adults are not set up to serve them. 

Cost is an obvious barrier, which is why free tuition gets attention. The “Michigan Reconnect” offer of free community college tuition for those 25 and up was flooded with applications after opening in February.  

But “free” is not straightforward.  Missouri’s Fast Track Workforce Incentive Grant, created in 2019 to target those 25 and older, has a “clawback” provision so students  who don’t fulfill requirements must repay it as a loan with interest. (“It’s a real barrier,” said Zora Mulligan, the state’s commissioner of higher education.) Only 500 people have enrolled in two years. Other state programs, including one in Kentucky and a new one in Louisiana, offer free tuition only for study in certain fields.  

Related: ‘Free  college’ programs sound great  — but who gets excluded? 

In fact, the American Institutes for Research analysis of “adult promise” programs, which included statewide and institution-based offerings, found numerous requirements that conflicted with the needs of many adult students.  

Two big hurdles, said Radford, were that applicants be first-time college students and that they attend full time.  “Free college tuition only gets you so far,” she said. 

Experts in higher education note that college has been set up for 18- to 22-year-olds with flexible schedules who like to sleep in and take weekends off — and are supported by parents.  

Adults may have jobs, child care concerns, questions about past credits, loan defaults, even anxiety  about returning to school, said Laura Perna, executive director of the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania, who oversees a database and research on college promise programs.  

“There is a complexity to adult learners,” said Perna. Programs to serve them must consider finances, schedules and supports. “It is really recognizing, ‘What are the circumstances of individual people’s lives?’ If someone is to enroll in college, how do you make it possible for them to attend?” 

For Valissa White, a 29-year-old single mother, going to college requires housing help and medically appropriate schooling and child care for her 8-year-old son, who has congenital heart failure and an intellectual disability.  

Her apartment at Family Scholar House in Louisville, a program that supports low-income parents attending college, is about as different from a dorm as you could imagine. It is spotless and with a level of organization that hints at the demands of her life.  

She wakes every morning an hour before her son for prayer, reflection and to make breakfast. “The night before,” she said, “I have everything organized — his backpack, my purse.” 

There are lists on the fridge — strawberries, spinach, bananas and yogurt to get at Kroger, pulmonology appointments and swim lessons for her son, reminders to update her resume and renew her car registration — and  workspaces for both of them; hers features her diplomas, awards (Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society) and folders of to-do lists.  

“There is a complexity to adult learners. It is really recognizing, ‘What are the circumstances of individual people’s lives?’ If someone is to enroll in college, how do you make it possible for them to attend?”

Laura Perna, executive director, Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania

White, like many adult students, has quality work experience. After graduating from high school in Pulaski, Tennessee, she worked as a bank teller (and was once held up by a robber). After her pay rose by just $1.60 an hour in five years, she took an administrative job at an automotive manufacturer that assembled car headlamps. Her skills got her hired away by a competitor, with more responsibility — and pay of over $50,000 a year. In late 2017, she was laid off.   

“Not having an education, not having that piece of paper,” White said, made her feel vulnerable. Without family to lean on (she was raised by her grandmother), she moved into public housing. She enrolled at Columbia State Community College, tapping federal grants and the “Tennessee Reconnect” adult promise program to pay for school. Savings and a loan covered living costs. 

In May 2020, White earned an associate degree in business administration, with a 3.84 GPA. She finished while helping her son attend school remotely. Recently, she started classes toward a bachelor’s degree in organizational leadership and learning at the University of Louisville.  

That degree program is not free. But a key attraction is a course in which students create a portfolio of prior experience — and can earn up to 48 academic credits for it, which saves money and time. Adults with workplace skills such as human resources training or financial management deserve credit for such college-level learning, said Mathew Bergman, an associate professor at the University of Louisville who is a national expert in adult learning and teaches in the program. 

“If we are not doing this,” he said, “it is a social justice issue. Should you not get college credit just because we don’t teach it here?” 

Related: Sometimes politicians’ lofty promises of free college are too good to be true 

Enrollment in this program has more than tripled since 2008, when it was updated shortly after Bergman’s arrival; it now has almost 500 students, a number that  remained steady during the pandemic. Bergman said it is purposely structured to recognize the needs of adults and move them toward degree completion. Some courses are compressed into eight-week blocks; students can attend in person, hybrid or online; there are five start dates during the year and generous credit transfer policies. Students who drop out because of life issues can return, keep earned credits but have their GPAs “started fresh,” Bergman said.  

Traditional institutions have treated adults “as a kind of afterthought,” he said.  It just makes sense to help them return and speed through, said Bergman. “They did not go to school not to finish,” he said. “They went thinking they would finish, and life intervened.”  

This is a fairly new perspective. Higher education experts say many colleges have not considered how they accommodate adult students — or don’t.  

Shasta College in Redding, California, serving a rural region in the northern part of the state, had an eye-opening experience five years ago while planning an adult-friendly accelerated program. When a task force took stock, said Kate Mahar, the dean of innovation and strategic initiatives, it discovered that “we were not set up to serve people who had responsibilities other than school.” 

Courses were held midday, “making it almost impossible to hold a job” and attend full time, which allows students more financial aid. Support offices were open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. And, said Mahar, schedules shifted each semester, so adults had to reorganize their lives. 

In response, Shasta created a compressed “full-time” schedule of two eight-week courses, predictable class times, advisers for each student and the option to take time off. Overall student enrollments in the program have more than doubled, to nearly 200, and remained steady even during this past academic year. (Eighty-three percent of students are over age 24.) Students have an 82 percent course completion rate. 

One reason for that is the support, said Eric Olson, 44, who works in software sales and earned his associate degree in May. As someone who had never connected with academics, he wanted to “start something and see it all the way through.” 

But in the midst of his studies, he stumbled and had to retake an economics course. His counselors reached out. “Right away they were like, ‘What happened?’ ” he said. A counselor arranged tutoring, keeping him motivated and “feeling that I am not doing this alone.” 

Otherwise, it would have been easy to drop out. “You get discouraged,” said Olson. “It is very easy to say, ‘You know what? I’m just going to pick this up later.’ ” 

Many adults do go back, then stop out. Some even earn degrees — but leave without getting them. One big surprise at Shasta came as the college worked with Degrees When Due, a project of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a national nonprofit group that seeks to improve higher education access and completion. Shasta conducted an audit of those who’d dropped out despite having earned all or nearly all the required number of credits. It turned out that about 35 percent of them were missing a single required computer literacy class.  

“It had been created a decade ago, when people did not come in with those skills,” said Mahar. The requirement has been removed. As a result of the audit, she said, 258 degrees have been awarded retroactively to students in the past two years. 

The urgency for adults to earn degrees has been underscored by the pandemic, which had the greatest economic impact on those without higher education.  In Kentucky, Aaron Thompson, president of the state’s Council on Postsecondary Education, last fall tweeted an infographic showing that 89 percent of Kentuckians on unemployment lacked a college degree or credential. 

Thompson, whose father “was an illiterate coal miner” and mother only completed eighth grade, but who earned a doctorate in sociology, said raising educational levels is critical to prosperity in the state. “There is a direct correlation between building wealth and having a highly educated workforce,” he said. 

Related: How one country with close parallels to the United States has made college free 

Many states have embraced education attainment goals. (Tennessee’s is “Drive to 55” — to equip 55 percent of Tennesseans with a college degree or certificate by 2025.) In Kentucky, the target is 60 percent by 2030 (“60×30”).  In June, Thompson tweeted a map showing that, at 27 percent, the state’s bachelor’s degree attainment “lags behind the pace of neighboring states.”  

Yet, higher education has been a tough sell in Kentucky. Only about half of high school graduates go on to college, which makes adult education critical, but since 2012, Kentucky’s adult undergraduate enrollment has fallen nearly 50 percent. 

It is a stubborn problem. Thompson said many people believe they don’t need college. Growing up,  “many felt if you wanted to go to college, you were getting above your raising,” he said, adding that the sentiment still lingers. He also thinks people don’t know what’s available, including the state’s “free tuition” for study in some fields. 

Last year, he launched a media campaign, tapping hip-hop artist Buffalo “B.” Stille of Nappy Roots, who recently earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Louisville, as a spokesman. The state has partnered with national college completion groups and organized on-the-ground ambassadors. Adult education recruiters attend college fairs to reach parents who come with their high schoolers. Thompson wants adults to know that “we have things to help them get through.”  

Tennessee, which in 2014 created “Tennessee Promise,” the first statewide free tuition program for high school graduates, and has run “Tennessee Reconnect” for adults returning to higher education since 2018, has useful lessons. (A 2020 report showed that among the first adult cohort, 61 percent earned a credential or continued their studies.)  

From the start, said Emily House, executive director of the state’s Higher Education Commission and Student Assistance Corporation, Tennessee underscored the different needs of adults. “We talk about our adult learners as workers who go to school rather than students who work,” she said. The state offers “navigators,” who connect students with services and talk through workforce needs and educational options, but does not require adults to use them. The program leaders press institutions to make adjustments for adults, for instance by opening financial aid offices at night.  

“You get discouraged. It is very easy to say, ‘You know what? I’m just going to pick this up later.’ ”

Eric Olson, adult learner who returned to Shasta College for his degree

Given the complexity of adults’ lives and emotional concerns about school, House said state leaders were “really intentional” in discussing college as broader than the stereotypical four-year undergraduate experience. “When we talk about going back to college, you can go to Vanderbilt,” said House. “But you are also ‘going to college’ if you go get your certificate.”  

For many adults, college feels like too big a mountain to climb. That is one reason Ty J. Handy, president of Jefferson Community & Technical College, Kentucky’s largest community college, believes that “we have had a devil of a time getting students to come.”   

He hopes the college’s “Jump-Start Grant” will change that. There are positive signs,  but it will take more than free tuition. Support matters. 

After Reilly, the hairdresser, finished her orientation, she met with George Scott III, an adviser, in his second-floor office. He walked her, step by step, through registration.  

Almost 35 million adults nationwide have some college experience but no degree. 

They picked classes and planned a schedule. Online Mondays, on campus Wednesdays. She works other days and also needs “mom time.” (She has twin 15-year-old daughters.) The two bantered about enticing English and history classes, but settled on basics: a “transition” math course;  Foundations of College Success (required); and a digital literacy class. Reilly’s first day is Aug. 16. 

She thanked Scott profusely. He printed her schedule. Reilly tucked it into her leather shoulder bag and left to get her student ID. “I just learned how to use a Mac a week ago!” she marveled. 

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

The post For adults returning to college, ‘free’ tuition isn’t enough appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — A few weeks ago, ahead of a nor’easter that unleashed biting winds and snow across New England, Alyssa Washington, a high school senior who wants to be a nurse, made her big college decision: Not to go next fall.

There was no single reason. Rather, mounting obstacles led Washington, a senior at Metropolitan Business Academy, a public school in New Haven, to hit pause. She had not finished the Common App, a shared application form used by more than 900 colleges and universities; had struggled to write her application essay; had lost her password for Naviance, which collects transcripts, recommendation letters and other forms needed to apply; and — like many students in low-income districts this year — had not filled out the FAFSA, the federal financial aid application form.

It didn’t help that a favorite aunt got Covid. (She recovered.) Or that class was remote, amplifying the isolation and monotony that have defined this school year. Washington, who would be the first in her family to go to college, had always planned to attend. But applying suddenly felt overwhelming.  

As incomplete application tasks piled up, she said, “I thought, ‘Is this really something I want to do?’ I came to the conclusion that right now is not my time.”

Applying to college has always been harder for first-generation and low-income students than for peers with greater access to support at every step of the process. This year, data shows, that gulf has widened. 

“What we are really worried about, simply put, is: ‘Will we miss out on an entire generation of students going to college?’ ” said Angel Pérez, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “If the pandemic has highlighted anything” about admissions, he said, it is “how the system perpetuates inequality” and how complex applying has become.

Related: As admissions season descends, wealthier applicants once again have the advantage

Common App data through Feb. 15 showed applications up 11 percent overall from a year ago — yet down 1.6 percent among first-generation students and flat among low-income students. Overall FAFSA completion, a harbinger of college-going intent, was 9.2 percent behind the prior year on Feb. 19.  However, in high schools serving lower-income students, it lagged 12.1 percent, and in schools with a high percentage of students of color, the decline was 14.6 percent.

The FAFSA drop represents “a gobsmacking number,” said Bill DeBaun, director of data and evaluation for the National College Attainment Network. It makes it less likely that low-income students will be able to attend, as many colleges and universities commit financial aid money to others ahead of those who apply later.

 “What we are really worried about, simply put, is: ‘Will we miss out on an entire generation of students going to college?’”

Angel Pérez, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling

Counselors and college access groups are still working with low-income and first-generation students. But it is happening mostly online. Without in-person contact, DeBaun said, “many students are not getting the help they need right now.”

High school has been remote since last March in New Haven, a low-income district in a wealthy state with an elite university, Yale, in the city’s center. Diana Hernandez-DeGroat, who supports counselors across the district, said counselors try to reach students “via any platform, any way of communicating with them.”

Counselors in two New Haven public high schools described a landscape of stress. Students have had friends and family fall ill and die. Parents have lost jobs; students are taking on more work, even overnight shifts, to help out.  They are also doing more child care, including helping younger children with online school, even during their own meetings and classes. After one counselor at Wilbur Cross High School, the city’s largest, saw a student juggle class for two siblings while discussing her college plans over Zoom, he rewrote her letter of recommendation to acknowledge it.

Related: Progress in getting underrepresented people into college and skilled jobs may be stalling because of the pandemic

Students, said one counselor, “are exhausted.” Typhanie Jackson, director of student services for the district, said counselors call students “three, four, five times” without reaching anyone. When they do connect, often college application tasks “are not the first thing on their mind,” she said. “Some people are barely surviving.”

A student who agreed to be interviewed for this story, but missed scheduled times because he got the chance to work more hours “felt ashamed,” he said in a text. “Things have come up and gotten out of hand, got a lot of things going on, DACA application, school work, applying for college and looking for scholarships, studying for [driver’s] permit test, working … etc.”

“The mechanics of applying to college, students can figure that out. [But] if I believe I am not college material, if I feel hopeless, if I don’t feel there is a path forward for me, then I will not apply.”

Mandy Savitz-Romer, senior lecturer, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Counselors speak longingly, as Heidi Pitkin of Metropolitan Business Academy did, of the days “when if somebody doesn’t turn in something to me, I walk into the class or sit down in the cafeteria with them.” She said, “You chase them.”

That now happens electronically — kind of. Some students say counselors don’t get back to them, or reply too late to be helpful.  It’s a perfect storm of disconnection that has counselors feeling harried, responding to texts and emails at odd hours, but also has left students feeling deserted.

“Our students are very relational,” and connect best in person, said Patricia Melton, executive director of New Haven Promise, which provides money and support to help New Haven Public School and charter students earn a college degree.

As college assistance shifted from in-person meetings to email instructions and documents studded with links, students were “just overwhelmed,” Melton said. “Adults are thinking we can send them emails galore and they will go through them.”

Rosé Aliyah Smokes, a senior at Metropolitan Business Academy, felt so lost  in October that she turned to YouTube videos. “I went on my bed and had my notepad, turned on the TV and searched, ‘How to apply to college,’ ” she recalled. She was surprised to learn about application deadlines. “I really did not know that,” she said. “I thought we just applied and that was that.”

Smokes applied to several colleges, getting in to Clark Atlanta University, her “dream school.” But she is stymied by the FAFSA. Because she is 18, she said, her  parents don’t want to provide information, so she missed the college’s aid deadline. Now, she hopes to transfer there in the future.

She needs financial aid to afford University of New Haven, a private school where  she now hopes to go; in late February, she was anxious. “Time is ticking and I am still here by myself, trying to figure it out,” she texted.

Students said they have relied more on themselves and one another. Destiny Thomas, a senior at James Hillhouse High School in New Haven, is a strong candidate, earning As and Bs, competing on the volleyball and math teams and participating in theater club.

But when it came to applying to college, she said, “Nobody knew where to start.”  Thomas said her emails to a counselor “went weeks on end with no response,” though she was  finally able to schedule a Zoom call. Texts to one teacher seeking feedback on her essay went unanswered, she said. By the time three others she reached out to responded, the early deadline had passed and “I had submitted it.”

After Thomas had applied (to the University of New Haven, Clark Atlanta and Harvard, among others), she steered several friends through the Common App over FaceTime. One, Jaheim Sewell, paid it forward: He helped three friends who otherwise “100 percent would not have applied” to any college, he said. (Sewell was admitted to several, but in mid-February, he had not submitted a FAFSA; nor had about 73 percent of his class.)

In the November Zoom chat, Thomas said, her counselor told her, “You are on the right track.” But “it was not what I was expecting,” she said. “I am really indecisive, and it would have helped if there was guidance on weighing out your options.”

Being on your own and “in front of the computer all day you fall into a state where you are lost, unmotivated or confused,” said Thomas. It’s one reason “kids don’t want to participate in anything anymore,” she said. “They just want to get their diploma and graduate.”

Related: PROOF POINTS — A warning sign that the freshman class will shrink again in the fall of 2021

Those vital support conversations have gotten lost in many schools across the country, said Mandy Savitz-Romer, a senior lecturer in human development and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. 

“The mechanics of applying to college, students can figure that out,” she said, but “if I believe I am not college material, if I feel hopeless, if I don’t feel there is a path forward for me, then I will not apply,” she said. “It is the harder conversations that are missing now.”

One reason, according to a survey of 984 school counselors by Savitz-Romer, Heather Rowan-Kenyon at Boston College and others, is what you might expect: Counselors are tasked with more duties.

They are now tracking down students who miss class (“they called themselves ‘the attendance police,’ ” said Savitz-Romer), and helping families get technology, broadband, even food.  “They told us that there just wasn’t time for counseling,” she said.

In many public schools, counselors were already juggling scheduling and testing, plus mental health aid, social services and learning needs — along with guiding the college process. By contrast, well-resourced schools have counselors focused only on college.

“Time is ticking and I am still here by myself, trying to figure it out.”

Rosé Aliyah Smokes, senior at Metropolitan Business Academy in New Haven, Conn.

For example, Achievement First Amistad High School, a charter school about half a mile from Hillhouse High, has four college counselors for 151 seniors — plus social workers and school counselors. Students also take a class that readies them for college. This year, the school added midday Zoom blocks for students and counselors to meet. (Hillhouse has five counselors for 1,161 students, including the 223 seniors.)

Rather than picking colleges based on “buzz” or internet searches, students are guided to schools that make sense. “There are two data points we have honed in on,” said Kathryn Goldberg, associate director of college and career counseling. They are percentage of financial need met and the graduation rate for students of color.

“It could be a different outcome going to a school with a 65 percent graduation rate versus a 25 percent rate” for students of color, she said. And, she pointed out, how useful is getting into a college that meets just 30 percent of demonstrated financial need? (By early March, 73.4 percent of Amistad seniors had completed the FAFSA, according to the state tracker.)

Such nuanced guidance is harder to achieve in schools with large caseloads, Goldberg said.  That makes nonprofit partners a valuable source of help. This year across the country, they report more students delaying college plans.

This is raising alarms. Research shows that not going to college right after high school decreases chances of earning a degree.

What worries Steve Desir, a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California who studies the transition from high school to college for Black, Latinx and low-income students, is what happens next.

“The handoff from high school to college is a space that nobody owns,” he said. “It is not clear who is responsible for guiding students during that period. The student is really on their own.”

He does not blame schools or counselors. “They are doing a great deal,” he said. “What we are seeing is a system that was separate and unequal, and you add a pandemic and you have a system that is more separate and more unequal.”

At Metropolitan Business Academy, Leslie Blatteau, who teaches a peer leadership class, noticed low FAFSA completion rates in late January — just 43 percent of the senior class had applied — and prodded students to organize a peer support session. During a Zoom class, students eagerly volunteered for tasks like making a slide deck and designing an electronic invite.

But given the year’s many challenges, they debated what to cover. Should they just press peers on the FAFSA? One student suggested, “Kids would more like to figure out what they want to do, instead of joining a session of something they hear about but might not want to do.”

Washington, the aspiring nurse who decided not to apply to college this year, is a member of this class. She urged offering support so students “feel less alone.”

After class, she spoke about her decision. Next year, she will work (“a clothing store, or Target or Walmart”) to earn money for college. “I don’t think my mind will ever get off wanting to be a nurse,” she said. But neither could she have imagined the emotional toll of Covid and remote school.

“If somebody five years ago said your senior year you would be deciding to take a gap year,” she said, “I wouldn’t believe it.”

This story about high school students applying to college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

The post ‘Right now is not my time’: How Covid dimmed college prospects for students who need help most appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

LAWRENCE COUNTY, Tenn. —You could easily find reasons why Kali Lindsay should not be in college right now. She lost her mother at age 8. At 16, for her own good, she left home.

To support herself (she moved in with an older brother) in high school she worked 30 hours a week at an Arby’s next to a weed-studded field in a retail park, earning $8.20 an hour. She closed, at 1 a.m., forcing a choice: Go to school exhausted or skip classes and learn the material on her own.

Lindsay also faced a huge cultural obstacle — geography.

She is from Clinton, Missouri (pop. 8,947), where college-going is not a given. No one in her family went. Few around her did, either. “I didn’t know how anything worked,” she said.

From a young age, students in suburban and urban communities marinate in college-going, even college-competitive, environments. That is often missing in rural America, where communities like Lindsay’s can treat high school as a capstone, not a steppingstone.

Federal data show that less than 30 percent of rural residents age 25 and up have an associate degree or higher; more than 43 percent of urban residents do. That’s a problem because the data don’t lie: Two-thirds of all jobs and 80 percent of all “good” jobs (paying a median wage of $65,000) demand a postsecondary credential, according to research by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

This longstanding gap troubled Jim Ayers, a businessman raised in rural Decatur County, Tennessee, enough to make him act. He started The Ayers Foundation in 1999, and through it has been quietly changing how people in some rural communities think about postsecondary education.

Given the educational and economic divide between rural and nonrural America, this may be the most important college access program you’ve never heard of.

The foundation’s results in several small, rural counties are eye-popping. By 2019, Ayers had helped impoverished Perry County reach an 86 percent college-going rate (57 students), the highest in the state, according to government figures. At Decatur County ’s Riverside High School, where the foundation has been working since 1999, postsecondary enrollment (including military and technical training) has risen from 24 to 84 percent (95 students). In two other counties, three rural high schools reached that postsecondary enrollment for 76 percent (143 students), 82 percent (98 students) and 87 percent (159 students) of their 2019 graduates, the foundation reports.

Such performances have attracted a national partner, rootEd Alliance, a two-year-old philanthropic collaborative, which has taken the Ayers-style model to other rural communities in Tennessee, Missouri and, now, Texas., serving more than 3,000 students.

For years, Janet Ayers, the foundation president who is married to Jim, said they resisted pleas to work in other counties. “It was not sustainable for us to serve everyone all over the place,” she said. But when former Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam urged a meeting with rootEd, “it opened our eyes.” Now, through rootEd, the model inspired by Ayers is in 23 rural high schools plus has partnerships with four community colleges. (RootEd took the model to 13 rural Texas high schools this fall and plans to expand to 30 by 2023).

Noa Meyer, president of rootEd Alliance, was drawn to the foundation’s emphasis on local relationships. Those living in rural places “trust people from their communities to solve problems,” she said. “They are not looking for outsiders to give them answers.”

Jim Ayers was not a stellar student, and neither of his parents had a college degree. But Ayers said his father, a sawmill logger and farm worker, “told me right quick, he did not intend for me to grow up and work like him all his life.” Having done farm work as a teen, Ayers agreed.

The accounting degree he earned from Memphis State University, he said, opened the door that enabled him to build a fortune, first with a network of nursing homes and then by acquiring a bank, renaming it FirstBank and expanding. It is now the third largest bank in Tennessee.

A college-going expectation, he said, is powerful. Yet, in places where many people live within a half-hour drive of their birthplace, it’s also fraught. Ayers said parents have told him that they don’t “want their children to get more education than they had because it would make them look bad.” Or, as one rural student shared, classmates don’t go to college “because they don’t know how and their parents didn’t.” Plus, the student said, “kids in friend groups that don’t go to college tend not to go to college.”

Changing such mindsets is not easy. But it is happening.

Related: A big reason rural students never go to college: Colleges don’t recruit them

The Ayers Foundation model is ridiculously simple. It starts with putting a counselor — someone raised rural and connected to the community — in a local high school to help every student craft a career plan, then guide them through the tasks required to apply for — and pay for — a postsecondary degree to execute it. (This is in addition to the guidance counselors employed by the schools, who are often overtaxed.)

There are a few important details, however. One is that while many college-access programs focus on helping high-performers reach top schools, this model goes broad. The goal is for everyone to have a path.

Students may aim for a four-year university. They may attend a local community college or technical school. They may choose the military. (About 85 percent enroll at two- or four-year colleges; about 75 percent of those earn a degree or credential.) A few may go to colleges like Vanderbilt and Yale. But the goal is not to name-check elites; it’s to educate local students for living-wage jobs.

Another feature of the Ayers Foundation model is how personal and deep the help is. The counselors, who work full-time, year-round, and earn $50,000 to $65,000 a year, including benefits, stop by to check in with students stocking the dairy case at Walmart or working a shift at a Sonic Drive-In. They answer a student’s 1 a.m. text right away because, said Paige Cyrus-Ham, a counselor at Reed Springs High School in Reed Springs, Missouri (pop. 873), “I know the student is looking at their phone right now.”

The model, in other words, is Cyrus-Ham, masked and socially distanced, in her office at 7 p.m. on a fall Thursday helping Kylie Eubanks and her mom complete the FAFSA. They couldn’t meet with Cyrus-Ham until Kylie’s mom got out of work.

“We were completely clueless,” said Kylie, speaking by phone as she volunteered at a “cat café” where felines await adoption (“you might hear some meows”). “She walked us literally through the whole entire thing.”

What struck Kylie about applying to college — she wants to attend the University of Arkansas or NorthWest Arkansas Community College — was that it was “not simple, but easier than people make it sound.” She added that, “if they know that, it will skyrocket people going to college from here.”

That seems to be happening. Two years ago, rootEd put Ayers-style counselors in two rural southwestern Missouri high schools. The next year, nearby Ozarks Technical Community College, known as OTC, says it saw a 21 percent enrollment increase from those two schools.

That spurred Hal Higdon, OTC’s president, to partner with rootEd and Ayers to support more counselors, in four high schools (including Kylie’s), plus put two “navigators” on campus to help students with school issues or personal needs. Higdon saw the power of the model: Helping students also helped the bottom line.

Related: A regional public university’s identity crisis

As a result, even as community colleges across the U.S. have suffered plummeting enrollments — down 9.5 percent for fall 2020 over fall 2019, according to federal data — OTC says it had a 14 percent rise last summer and only a 2 percent drop this fall.

Ayers and rootEd are demonstrating how barriers to higher education can be overcome with effective personalized guidance. To do this, Ayers spends about $4.7 million per year supporting education efforts, including for the counselors, college fairs, campus visits and scholarships. RootEd provides seed funding and expertise, as it did to OTC (Ayers supplied training), with hopes that the efforts will become self-sustaining. At OTC, increased enrollments should in the future “cover much, if not all” the counselor costs, said Meyer of rootEd, which will invest nearly $3 million this year to help local partners. Texas got rootEd’s attention, she said, because a new education finance law, HB3, includes funding to encourage post-secondary enrollment that could help support their efforts there.

Both organizations are building their success on a key strategy: Rather than highlight the deficiencies that feed the rural education gap, they focus on fortifying existing local relationships — a form of social capital — and bending them toward increased college-going.

I saw the grit of rural networks while visiting Lawrence County, Tennessee, in September. Education leaders (as everywhere) were grappling with a tough Covid school year. In addition, they faced the added rural burdens of spotty cell service and fragile high-speed internet (it went down two days in a row in the schools, which are designated hotspots in a county where just 52.4 percent of residents have broadband).

Yet, I saw teachers making videos of lessons and putting them on thumb drives, and school officials figuring out ways to turn school buses into remote internet hot spots. With little fanfare, they took on hard things. “It is kind of what we do,” said Hope Perry, the Ayers Foundation counselor at Summertown High School.

Perry can get 20 to 30 texts a day from students with questions. The fact that she was a reluctant college-goer herself (she wanted to enlist in the Army, but her father, a veteran, “wouldn’t sign my papers”; she went to the University of Northern Alabama) helps her read the hesitation many students have about college.

She also amplifies a critical Ayers strategy. Susan Rhodes, who heads the foundation’s Scholars Program, calls it “understanding the dynamics of a rural community.” That means not placing counselors in the high school they graduated from, to avoid preconceptions about a student’s aspirations, as in “oh, you are wasting your time.” Perry, a graduate of Summertown’s rival Loretto High School, embodies that balance of familiarity and distance. She counters the branding of a student as “so and so’s kid,” with a reputation good or bad, “and everyone assumes that is who you will be.”

In early September, inside the Summertown High library, Perry wore a print fabric mask featuring the school’s bald eagle mascot. Ashlyn Walker and Cheyenne Mattox, both Class of 2020, sat nearby, masked and socially distanced. Both said they had intended to go to four-year campuses, but ditched those plans when Covid hit, settling instead on attending Columbia State Community College, 20 miles away, remotely.

What appeared an easy move grew complicated when both happened to be picked for FAFSA verification; to receive financial aid, they had to prove that their submitted information was accurate. From April until August, Perry marched them through documentation requests, often meeting them in the school parking lot before entering the darkened building to use the copier in the main office.

After all that, Walker considered not attending when she faced a new obstacle: She didn’t have a computer to take the required online orientation class. Perry found her a laptop to borrow, then a scholarship to buy one. “I probably would not be in college if not for Miss Hope,” Walker said.

Related: As jobs grow hard to fill, businesses join the drive to push rural residents toward college

For some, it doesn’t take much for college to lurch out of reach. But getting students in and through is not rocket science, either.

“We are barrier-removers,” said Janet Ayers. Counselors are charged with figuring out what students need and connecting them to it, whether mental health services, food pantries or transportation. They have helped students navigate immigration laws and get federal and state support because they are homeless. In Kali Lindsay’s case, they helped her gain legal independence from her father so she could receive financial aid reflecting her circumstances.

If that looks more like social work than strict educational guidance, it is. Yet, personalizing counseling to an individual student’s life circumstances — rather than offering a standard menu of college-application help — may be the powerful missing piece needed to tackle the rural education gap.

In Lindsay’s case, that is certainly true. She wanted to go to college — her ticket, she thought, “to creating a life for myself where I was not struggling all the time” — but had no idea how to begin. When the rootEd-Ayers partnership brought the model to her high school last year, counselor Lindy Johnson became a path-changing ally.

“She helped me personally with figuring out what I actually wanted to do,” said Lindsay, who despite hardships scored a 28 on the ACT, 5’s on Advanced Placement English Language and English Composition exams and a 4 on the AP U.S. Government and Politics exam. Johnson also helped her apply for financial aid and find scholarships to cover nearly the full cost of college (after a campus job and a grant fell through, she took out $3,500 in loans).

Now a first-year student at the University of Missouri, double-majoring in English and political science with designs on law school, Lindsay said Johnson “was a game changer.”

Yet Covid has thrown up more challenges: Lindsay wanted an off-campus job, but after having to quarantine twice will wait to work full time at Wendy’s over winter break.

She marvels at the support many of her classmates have, including parents who send them money for shopping, which, she said, “blows my mind.” But she loves being at school. “It is the kind of energy I wanted in my life.”

Plus, she knows that Johnson is there for her. “I text her all the time, ‘Hey, what do I do?’ ” said Lindsay. Once, after sharing that she felt overwhelmed, Lindsay recalled, “she sent me a message: ‘You’re bright, you’re smart, you can do this.’”

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

The post How to raise rural enrollment in higher education? Go local appeared first on The Hechinger Report.