Our students are struggling. As a college president and a clinical psychologist, I know this well.

Recent headlines tell a distressing story about the mental health of college students. While the news articles are alarming, it is worth noting that much of the data they cite comes from self-reporting by students.

This self-reporting gives us important insights into how our students are feeling, but it is not equivalent to clinical diagnoses. By equating self-reporting with diagnoses, we risk applying the wrong interventions.

I’ve spent much of my career overseeing clinical services and other student supports, and I know the importance of clinical interventions. They are intended to be matched to specific diagnoses and can involve a variety of treatments, including individual or group and outpatient or inpatient, by licensed mental health professionals.

But I believe we must shift how we support students’ emotional needs. Clinical interventions are not the only way — and often not the most appropriate or effective way — to support young people who may be temporarily struggling with feelings that do not meet the full psychological definition of mental illness.

Rather than needing a clinical intervention, many students may benefit most from support that builds their resilience if they are feeling sad, worried, overwhelmed or anxious. Resilient students are better positioned to cope with temporary periods of heightened emotional stress.

In the past, teaching these skills was usually not seen as central to the mission of a college or university, yet learning how to cope emotionally may be among our students’ most vital and integral lessons.

It is something that will serve them throughout — and well beyond — their time on our campuses.

Related: Congress is starting to tackle student mental health

Data drawn from student self-reporting provides important insights into their needs. Some 44 percent of students reported that they experienced symptoms of depression during the 2021-22 academic year, a Healthy Minds survey of 96,000 U.S. college students shows; 37 percent said they experienced anxiety.

In addition, two out of five undergraduates said that they “frequently” experience emotional stress, results from a Gallup-Lumina Foundation report found, while 36 percent of students pursuing bachelor’s degrees reported that they had considered “stopping out” in the last six months. The most commonly cited reasons were “emotional stress” (69 percent) and “personal mental health reasons” (59 percent).

Researchers have hypothesized that at least some of these self-reported crises may be due to an increased awareness and normalization of mental health conditions.

This awareness is something we should regard as positive and beneficial because it reduces the stigma and isolation that have long impeded students from getting support. But we also must recognize an unintentional, negative impact of this increased awareness: overinterpretation.

Young people experiencing negative emotions and facing normal developmental challenges may be particularly vulnerable to misidentifying those experiences as actual illnesses.

This is not to suggest that the mental health crisis is not real, or that we should not support our students or validate their experiences. Students are struggling every day on my campus and on campuses across the country. Mental illness often first appears or worsens in young adulthood, and for these students, accessing appropriate clinical intervention is critical.

But for many students, what will be most appropriate and effective are supports to develop their resilience and coping strategies and the confidence to rebound from setbacks.

Being a young adult today is not easy. In addition to facing typical challenges, such as forming an identity and developing life skills, they have grown up with pressures from social media, isolation brought on by the global pandemic and the economic and political uncertainties of the twenty-first century.

Rising college costs have also raised the stakes for many students. College is a huge commitment both monetarily and emotionally, and our students know it.

They inevitably face obstacles when they move into the college environment, such as not knowing where they fit in and encountering more challenging coursework than they had previously. Believing they are an outlier, rather than the norm, may undermine their resilience.

That’s why at Lewis & Clark we incorporate resilience-building practices, using research-based belonging exercises as well as intentional peer-to-peer support.

Two of our psychology professors, Jerusha Detweiler-Bedell and Brian Detweiler-Bedell, spearheaded our participation in a multiyear Stanford-led study that aimed to foster a deeper sense of belonging among our incoming first-year students, with the goal of helping them understand that their struggles are normal — and that things will get better over time.

The exercises in the study incorporated stories of obstacles faced by other students and how they overcame them. While the original study’s sample size was small, we saw an increase in retention rates and GPAs, especially among students from underrepresented groups. The results were so compelling that all incoming Lewis & Clark undergraduates now participate in the social belonging intervention.

Related: OPINION: One college president uses board games, bedtime stories, horses and ice-cream sundaes to help students cope

We also initiated a peer mentoring program specifically serving first-year students. The mentors reach out to incoming first-year students and introduce them to campus life with information about academic advising, navigating health and wellness services and various campus clubs and social options. The mentoring relationship begins during orientation and continues throughout the semester. Just as important as what the peer mentors do is how they model resilience.

Of course, approaches like these should be offered with an understanding of what other interventions some students may need. Clinical depression and anxiety disorders do require clinical support. Higher education institutions must continue to expand our capacity to provide such support for those students who need it.

But we must also prioritize programs that bolster resilience. These efforts can reassure and help students (and their families) who may be misidentifying their feelings based on popular rather than clinical understandings of depression and anxiety.

When it comes to setting students up for success in their professional and personal lives, resilience may be the most important skill we can encourage them to develop.

Robin H. Holmes-Sullivan is president of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She has maintained a private clinical psychology and consulting practice for more than three decades.

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

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WAUKEGAN, Ill. — On a sunny but brisk November afternoon inside Robert Abbott Middle School, six eighth grade girls quickly filed into a small but colorful classroom and seated themselves in a circle.

Yuli Paez-Naranjo, a Working on Womanhood counselor, sported a purple WOW T-shirt as she led the group in a discussion about how values can inform decisions.

“Do you ever feel like two little angels are sitting on each of your shoulders, one whispering good things to you, the other whispering bad things?” Paez-Naranjo asked the girls. The students nodded and giggled.

At the 50-minute WOW circle, girls have a chance to set aside the pressures of the school day, laugh with and listen to one another, and work through personal problems. The weekly meeting is the centerpiece of individual and group therapy that WOW offers throughout the school year to Black and Hispanic girls, and to students of all races who identify as female or nonbinary, in grades 6 to 12.

Created in 2011 by Black and Hispanic social workers at the nonprofit organization Youth Guidance, WOW’s goal is to build a healthy sense of self-awareness, confidence and resilience in a population that is often underserved by mental health programs.

Youth Guidance offers WOW to about 350 students in Waukegan Community Unit School District 60, which serves an industrial town of about 88,000 located about 30 miles north of Chicago. Just over 93 percent of the district’s 13,600 students are Black or Hispanic, and about 67 percent come from families classified as low income.

The program also serves students in Chicago, Boston, Kansas City and Dallas. WOW counselors work with school-based behavioral health teams, administrators and teachers to identify students with high stress levels who might benefit from the program.

Recent research shows that WOW works: At a time when teen girls’ mental health is in crisis, a 2023 University of Chicago Education Lab randomized control trial found that WOW reduced PTSD symptoms among Chicago Public Schools participants by 22 percent and decreased their anxiety and depression.

Multiple hurdles, including funding, counselor burnout and distrust of mental health programs stand in the way of getting WOW to more students. But one way the program overcomes impediments is by bringing the program to the place students spend most of their time — school.

Paez-Naranjo, who is so well-liked among Abbott students that even kids who aren’t in the program seek her out, posed a question to the group.

“Let’s talk about positive and negative consequences of certain decisions. How about fighting?” she asked.

“The only positive outcome is you may find out how strong you are,” said Deanna Palacio, one of the girls.

“Why fight when you can talk it out?” asked another student, Ka’Neya Lehn.

“Right? What’s the point?” said a third girl, Ana Ortiz.

Related: A surprising remedy for teens in mental health crises

Nacole Milbrook, Youth Guidance chief program officer, said WOW was developed to address often overlooked needs among Hispanic and Black girls. “Girls have been left out [of mental health support initiatives], mainly because they are not making trouble,” she said.

A baseline study of over 2,000 girls in Chicago’s public schools, conducted by the University of Chicago Education Lab team, found “staggeringly high” rates of trauma exposure: Nearly one third of the participating young women had witnessed someone being violently assaulted or killed, and almost half lost someone close to them through violent or sudden death. Some 38 percent of girls in this group showed signs of PTSD, double the rate of service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Paez-Naranjo and fellow WOW counselor Te’Ericka Kimbrough, who works at Waukegan Alternative/Optional Educational Center, have supported students who have suffered sexual assault. Some participants in their circles are teen parents. Others are trying to resist negative peer pressure. Still others are in families that are struggling financially.

Compared to other students, Black and Hispanic students have a harder time getting mental health support in school. In-school mental health support targeted to girls, especially evidence-based, sustained programs like WOW, is scarce or nonexistent in many public schools.

Even scarcer is mental health support from providers who can give culturally responsive care. Only 5 percent of U.S. mental health providers are Hispanic. Just 4 percent are Black.

Sally Nuamah, associate professor of urban politics in human development and social policy at Northwestern University, said the tendency of adults to view Black youth as more adult-like than their white peers can shroud the mental health needs of Black children. In addition, the girls’ own positive behavior can mask their needs: In a study of the WOW program, participants were found to have strong school attendance and at least a B average, even as more than a third showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“They are perceived as resilient and possessing grit,” Nuamah said. “This obscures the real mental health needs of students of color and perpetuates institutionally racist policies because these students are not perceived as needing the same resources.”

Serving students where they are physically present nearly 200 days per year is one way to fill the too-often unmet need for support, Nuamah said.

“WOW is the only [school-based] organization that does what it does to the extent that it does,” she said. “Most [mental health] services are offered out of school.”

“Before I came here, I was not finding myself at all.”

Ana Ortiz, student, Robert Abbott Middle School

Laurel Crown, Youth Guidance senior research and evaluation manager, said the nonprofit is working to figure out just what parts of the program work best. End-of-school-year participant surveys, which use measures similar to those used in the Education Lab study, suggest that the relationships developed between WOW counselors and participants are a key reason the program is effective.

“Our theory of change is that WOW works because … [students] are attending this incredibly powerful support group every week and this support person is there every day in the school for them,” Crown said.

WOW counselors are “systemically engaged” in the schools where they are based, said Fabiola Rosiles-Duran, WOW program supervisor for Waukegan. They stay informed about whole-school dynamics by being part of behavioral health team and all-staff meetings.

Counselors Kimbrough and Paez-Naranjo added that daily access to teachers and staff provides wraparound support for their students. The counselors’ presence also helps them respond to acute situations immediately and follow up on student progress each school day.

“If I need extra support with a student, I can lean on the school behavioral health team,” Kimbrough said. She added that if she has a student in crisis, being able to see that student
regularly helps her know if their interventions are working.

RELATED: Another tool to improve student mental health? Kids talking to kids

Providing intensive support to students every school day can be emotionally taxing for WOW counselors. Youth Guidance provides group training and individual support to help counselors maintain their own emotional health.

During their first year on the job, counselors participate in three hours of curriculum training each month plus three days of refresher courses. Many training activities mirror those the counselors will later use with their students.

WOW leaders also check in every weekday to offer support to the counselors. Those new to WOW also attend a two-day, three-night retreat that “helps counselors and staff figure out what’s happening within ourselves,” said Ngozi Harris, Youth Guidance director of program and staff development, “so we have the fuel to do this work.”

A baseline study of over 2,000 girls in the Chicago school district, which is served by WOW, found that 38 percent of girls in grades 9 to 11 exhibited signs of PTSD.

One study found that the multiple layers of support WOW offers students and staff, at a cost of about $2,300 per participant, are cost-effective. Still, that can amount to a significant portion of a district’s or school’s annual budget.

But Jason Nault, Waukegan CUSD 60’s associate superintendent of equity, innovation and accountability, said WOW is well worth the cost. Earlier this year, the district’s Board of Education approved a two-year extension of its contract with WOW and its counterpart for male students, Becoming a Man, at a cost of $4.2 million.

Nault said data Youth Guidance collects at the end of each school year shows WOW students are less depressed and anxious, more self-confident and have less post-traumatic stress.

Yet multiple implementation challenges exist for WOW and other school-based student support programs. One is that the work of counselors is isolating and can lead to psychological burnout, said Inger Burnett-Zeigler, associate professor of psychology at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

“There is significant and chronic and traumatic stress the WOW counselors experience,” she said. Burnett-Zeigler is working with WOW to develop and test an evidence-based mindfulness intervention to support counselors.

“Counselor well-being is important in and of itself,” said Burnett-Zeigler. It also can support youth outcomes, she said.

Another barrier experienced by programs like WOW is that, according to research, Hispanic and Black families are more reluctant to seek out mental health support and treatment than other ethnic and racial groups. The WOW program works to build trust not only with the students, but
with their parents and family members.

“You feel heard and understood here.”

Deanna Palacio, student, Robert Abbott Middle School

“Families of color have a tendency to not name mental health issues as mental health issues,” said Milbrook, the chief program officer for the organization that oversees WOW. “Seeking treatment still has a stigma, even for children.”

Milbrook said the school-based setting is key for destigmatizing both mental health conditions and treatment.

“Being in school and participating in the groups with other students, understanding that you’re not the only person dealing with these same problems, and talking about them in ways that don’t feel like their idea of traditional therapy” all help, she said.

Also essential, Milbrook added, is fostering a sense of belonging. “We give the participants WOW T-shirts, and now they can walk around the school identifying as Working on Womanhood girls,” she said. “All of a sudden, nobody is ashamed to be in this group.”

Deanna, the Abbott eighth grader, added that the sense of belonging WOW fosters has helped her feel less lonely.

“You feel heard and understood here,” she said.

RELATED: Nation’s skeletal school mental health program will be severely tested

Although the school setting presents advantages for WOW, it can also involve implementation challenges. Youth Guidance’s Harris said that both WOW staff and school staff want positive outcomes for WOW students, but WOW’s healing-centered approach might conflict with a school’s discipline policy. So, school staff might initially be wary of program staff and counselors.

Schools also sometimes underestimate the expertise of the counselors, and sometimes even ask them to take on tasks like cafeteria monitoring that are not their responsibility.

“It takes a year of building relationships, really being intentional about how to collaborate with the school,” said Harris. “Until that trust is built, you are an outsider.”

Paying for the program is another challenge. Although Waukegan CUSD 60 covers all program costs, most districts do not. Youth Guidance relies primarily on philanthropic support to pay for its programs.

Youth Guidance is less likely to tap into public funding sources like Medicaid because the public assistance program’s cumbersome processes can lead to higher program costs and even threaten the trust WOW builds with students and their families.

For example, WOW counselors often make numerous phone calls to parents, or visit them at home. It’s time well spent, Milbrook said, but it’s not financially productive. Counselors can only bill their time to Medicaid after a parent signs a consent form.

Despite some of these implementation challenges, WOW leaders and counselors consider the Waukegan WOW program a success.

“As a whole [group], I’ve seen a decrease in anger and fights,” said Paez-Naranjo, the Abbott Middle WOW counselor.

The lessons on mindfulness during WOW Circles at Abbott Middle School have helped Ana Ortiz build confidence in her emerging identity as a young woman. She, like her other classmates in the program, returned for a second year after starting WOW as seventh graders.

“Before I came here, I was not finding myself at all,” Ana said. “I wanted to know, how is it, being a woman? I wanted to know what other girls’ opinions and perspectives were.”

Paez-Naranjo said she has seen Ana’s growth since last school year.

“Ana has stepped out of her comfort zone a lot more. She feels more confident to share intimate details about her life and is willing to support anyone in need,” said Paez-Naranjo.

“And she is so much more smiley,” Paez-Naranjo added. “You can see her smile from a mile away.”

Later, on her way out of the Wednesday Abbott WOW circle, Ana turned back to offer a final take on how WOW has helped her.

“It makes me feel free in here,” she said, flashing one of those smiles. “I understand better about myself.”

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

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CONCORD, Calif. – Aylah Levy had some catching up to do this fall when she started first grade.

After spending her kindergarten year at an alternative program that met exclusively outdoors, Aylah, 6, had to adjust to being inside a classroom. She knew only a handful of numbers and was not printing her letters clearly. To help her along, the teacher at her Bay Area elementary school has been showing her the right way to hold a pencil.

“It’s harder. Way, way harder,” Aylah said of the new grip.

Still, her mother, Hannah Levy, says it was the right decision to skip kindergarten. She wanted Aylah to enjoy being a kid. There is plenty of time, she reasoned, for her daughter to develop study skills.

The number of kindergartners in public school plunged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Concerned about the virus or wanting to avoid online school, hundreds of thousands of families delayed the start of school for their young children. Most have returned to schooling of some kind, but even three years after the pandemic school closures, kindergarten enrollment has continued to lag.

Some parents like Levy don’t see much value in traditional kindergarten. For others, it’s a matter of keeping children in other child care arrangements that better fit their lifestyles. And for many, kindergarten simply is no longer the assumed first step in a child’s formal education, another sign of the way the pandemic and online learning upended the U.S. school system. 

Kindergarten enrollment remained down 5.2 percent in the 2022-2023 school year compared with the 2019-2020 school year, according to an Associated Press analysis of state-level data. Public school enrollment across all grades fell 2.2 percent. 

Kindergarten is considered a crucial year for children to learn to follow directions, regulate behavior and get accustomed to learning. Missing that year of school can put kids at a disadvantage, especially those from low-income families and families whose first language is not English, said Deborah Stipek, a former dean of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Those children are sometimes behind in recognizing letters and counting to 10 even before starting school, she said.

But to some parents, that foundation seems less urgent post-pandemic. For many, kindergarten just doesn’t seem to work for their lives.

Related: We know how to help young kids cope with the trauma of the last year – but will we do it?

Students who disengaged during the pandemic school closures have been making their way back to schools. But kindergarten enrollment remained down 5.2 percent in the 2022-2023 school year compared with the 2019-2020 school year, according to an Associated Press analysis of state-level data. Public school enrollment across all grades fell 2.2 percent. 

Kindergarten means a seismic change in some families’ lifestyles. After years of all-day child care, they suddenly must manage afternoon pickups with limited and expensive options for after-school care. Some worry their child isn’t ready for the structure and behavioral expectations of a public school classroom. And many think whatever their child misses at school can be quickly learned in first grade. 

Christina Engram was set to send her daughter Nevaeh to kindergarten this fall at her neighborhood school in Oakland, until she learned her daughter would not have a spot in the after-school program there. That meant she would need to be picked up at 2:30 most afternoons.

“If I put her in public school, I would have to cut my hours, and I basically wouldn’t have a good income for me and my kids,” said Engram, a preschool teacher and a mother of two. 

Engram decided to keep Nevaeh in a child care center for another year. Engram receives a state child care subsidy that helps her pay for full-time child care or preschool until her child is 6 and must enroll in first grade.

“If I put her in public school, I would have to cut my hours, and I basically wouldn’t have a good income for me and my kids.”

Christina Engram, a preschool teacher and a mother of two

Compared with kindergarten, she believed her daughter would be more likely to receive extra attention at the child care center, which has more adult staff per child. 

“She knows her numbers. She knows her ABC’s. She knows how to spell her name,” Engram said. “But when she feels frustrated that she can’t do something, her frustration overtakes her. She needs extra attention and care. She has some shyness about her when she thinks she’s going to give the wrong answer.”

Related: Luring Covid-cautious parents back to school

In California, where kindergarten is not mandatory, enrollment for that grade fell 10.1 percent from the 2019-20 to 2021-22 school year. Enrollment seemed to rebound in the next school year, growing by over 5 percent in fall 2022, but that may have been inflated by the state’s expansion of transitional kindergarten — a grade before kindergarten that is available to older 4-year-olds. The state Department of Education has not disclosed how many children last school year were regular kindergartners as opposed to transitional students. 

Many would-be kindergartners are among the tens of thousands of families that have turned to homeschooling.

Some parents say they came to homeschooling almost accidentally. Convinced their family wasn’t ready for “school,” they kept their 5-year-old home, then found they needed more structure. They purchased some activities or a curriculum — and homeschooling stuck.

Others chose homeschooling for kindergartners after watching older children in traditional school. Jenny Almazan is homeschooling Ezra, 6, after pulling his sister Emma, 9, from a school in Chino, California. 

“She would rush home from school, eat dinner, do an hour or two of schoolwork, shower and go to bed. She wasn’t given time to be a kid,” Almazan said. Almazan also worried about school shootings and pressures her kids might face at school to act or dress a certain way.

To make it all work, Almazan quit her job as a preschool teacher. Most days, the children’s learning happens outside of the home, when they are playing at the park, visiting museums or even doing math while grocery shopping.

“She would rush home from school, eat dinner, do an hour or two of schoolwork, shower and go to bed. She wasn’t given time to be a kid.”

Jenny Almazan, who is homeschooling Ezra, 6, after pulling his sister Emma, 9, from a school in Chino, California

“My kids are not missing anything by not being in public school,” she said. “Every child has different needs. I’m not saying public school is bad. It’s not. But for us, this fits.”

Kindergarten is important for all children, but especially those who do not attend preschool or who haven’t had much exposure to math, reading and other subjects, said Steve Barnett, co-director for the National Institute for Early Education Research and a professor at Rutgers University.

“The question actually is: If you didn’t go to kindergarten, what did you do instead?” he said.

Related: Millions of kids are missing weeks of school as attendance tanks across the US

Hannah Levy chose the Berkeley Forest School to start her daughter’s education, in part because she valued how teachers infused subjects like science with lessons on nature. She pictured traditional kindergarten as a place where children sit inside at desks, do worksheets and have few play-based experiences.

“I learned about nature. We learned in a different way,” daughter Aylah said.

But the appeal of a suburban school system had brought the family from San Francisco, and when it came time for first grade, Aylah enrolled at Cornell Elementary in Albany.

Early this fall, Levy recalled Aylah coming home with a project where every first grader had a page in a book to write about who they were. Some pages had only scribbles and others had legible print. She said Aylah fell somewhere in the middle.

“It was interesting to me because it was the moment I thought, ‘What would it be like if she was in kindergarten?’” she said.

In a conference with Levy, Aylah’s teacher said she was working with the girl on her writing, but there were no other concerns. “She said anything Aylah was behind on, she has caught up to the point that she would never differentiate that Aylah didn’t go to Cornell for kindergarten as well,” Levy said.

Levy said she feels good about Aylah’s attitude toward school, though she misses knowing she was outside interacting with nature.

So does Aylah.

“I miss my friends and being outside,” she said. “I also miss my favorite teacher.”

Lurye reported from New Orleans and Stavely reported from Oakland. Daniel J. Willis of EdSource contributed from Concord.

This article was produced by The Associated Press and. EdSource is a nonprofit newsroom based in California that covers equity in education with in-depth analysis and data-driven journalism.

The Associated Press receives support from the Overdeck Family Foundation for reporting focused on early learning. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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ATLANTA – It’s unclear to Tameka how — or even when — her children became unenrolled from Atlanta Public Schools. But it was traumatic when, in Fall 2021, they figured out it had happened. 

After more than a year of some form of pandemic online learning, students were all required to come back to school in person. Tameka was deeply afraid of COVID-19 and skeptical the schools could keep her kids safe. One morning, in a test run, she sent two kids to school. 

Her oldest daughter, then in seventh grade, and her second youngest, a boy entering first grade, boarded their respective buses. She had yet to register the youngest girl, who was entering kindergarten. And her older son, a boy with Down syndrome, stayed home because she wasn’t sure he could consistently wear masks. 

After a few hours, the elementary school called: Come pick up your son, they told her. He was no longer enrolled, they said.  

Around lunchtime, the middle school called: Come get your daughter, they told her. She doesn’t have a class schedule. 

Tameka’s children — all four of them — have been home ever since.  

Related: Millions of kids are missing school as attendance tanks across the US  

Thousands of students went missing from American classrooms during the pandemic. For some who have tried to return, a serious problem has presented itself. A corrosive combination of onerous re-enrollment requirements, arcane paperwork and the everyday obstacles of poverty — a nonworking phone, a missing backpack, the loss of a car — is in many cases preventing those children from going back. 

“One of the biggest problems that we have is kids that are missing and chronic absenteeism,” says Pamela Herd, a Georgetown University public policy professor. She studies how burdensome paperwork and processes often prevent poor people from accessing health benefits. “I’m really taken aback that a district would set forth a series of policies that make it actually quite difficult to enroll your child.” 

In Atlanta, where Tameka lives, parents must present at least eight documents to enroll their children — twice as many as parents in New York City or Los Angeles. One of the documents — a complicated certificate evaluating a child’s dental health, vision, hearing and nutrition — is required by the state. Most of the others are Atlanta’s doing, including students’ Social Security cards and an affidavit declaring residency that has to be notarized.  

The district asks for proof of residency for existing students every year at some schools, and also before beginning sixth and ninth grades, to prevent students from attending schools outside of their neighborhoods or communities. The policy also allows the district to request proof the student still lives in the attendance zone after an extended absence or many tardy arrivals. Without that proof, families say their children have been disenrolled.  

“They make it so damned hard,” says Kimberly Dukes, an Atlanta parent who co-founded an organization to help families advocate for their children.  

During the pandemic, she and her children became homeless and moved in with her brother. She struggled to convince her children’s school they really lived with him. Soon, she heard from other caregivers having similar problems. Last year, she estimates she helped 20 to 30 families re-enroll their children in Atlanta Public Schools.  

The school district pushed back against this characterization of the enrollment process. “When parents inform APS that they are unable to provide updated proof of residence, protocols are in place to support families,” Atlanta communications director Seth Coleman wrote by email. Homeless families are not required to provide documentation, he said.  

Tameka’s kids have essentially been out of school since COVID hit in March 2020. She and her kids have had a consistent place to live, but nearly everything else in their lives collapsed during the pandemic. (Tameka is her middle name. The Associated Press is withholding her full name because Tameka, 33, runs the risk of jail time or losing custody of her children since they are not in school.) 

Related: Thousands of kids are missing school. Where did they go?  

Tameka’s longtime partner, who was father to her children, died of a heart attack in May 2020 as COVID gripped the country. 

His death left her overwhelmed and penniless. Tameka never graduated from high school and has worked occasionally as a security guard or a housecleaner for hotels. She has never gotten a driver’s license. But her partner worked construction and had a car. “When he was around, we never went without,” she says. 

Suddenly, she had four young children to care for by herself, with only government cash assistance to live on. 

Schools had closed to prevent the spread of the virus, and the kids were home with her all the time. Remote learning didn’t hold their attention. Their home internet didn’t support the three children being online simultaneously, and there wasn’t enough space in their two-bedroom apartment for the kids to have a quiet place to learn. 

Because she had to watch them, she couldn’t work. The job losses put her family even further below the median income for a Black family in Atlanta — $28,105. (The median annual income for a white family in the city limits is $83,722.) 

When Tameka’s children didn’t return to school, she also worried about the wrong kind of attention from the state’s child welfare department. According to Tameka, staff visited her in Spring 2021 after receiving calls from the school complaining her children were not attending online classes. 

The social workers interviewed the children, inspected their home and looked for signs of neglect and abuse. They said they’d be back to set her up with resources to help her with parenting. For more than two years, she says, “they never came back.” 

“He wasn’t in school, and no one cared.”

Candace, mother of a seventh grader with autism 

When the kids missed 10 straight days of school that fall, the district removed them from its rolls, citing a state regulation. Tameka now had to re-enroll them.  

Suddenly, another tragedy of her partner’s death became painfully obvious. He was carrying all the family’s important documents in his backpack when he suffered his heart attack. The hospital that received him said it passed along the backpack and other possessions to another family member, Tameka says. But it was never found.  

The backpack contained the children’s birth certificates and her own, plus Medicaid cards and Social Security cards. Slowly, she has tried to replace the missing documents. First, she got new birth certificates for the children, which required traveling downtown. 

After asking for new Medicaid cards for over a year, she finally received them for two of her children. She says she needs them to take her children to the doctor for the health verifications and immunizations required to enroll. It’s possible her family’s cards have been held up by a backlog in Georgia’s Medicaid office since the state agency incorrectly disenrolled thousands of residents.  

When she called for a doctor’s appointment in October, the office said the soonest they could see her children was December. 

“That’s too late,” she said. “Half the school year will be over by then.” 

She also needs to show the school her own identification, Social Security cards, and a new lease, plus the notarized residency affidavit.   

She shakes her head. “It’s a lot.” 

Related: Civil rights at stake: Black, Hispanic students blocked from class for missing class  

Some of the enrollment requirements have exceptions buried deep in school board documents. But Tameka says no one from the district has offered her guidance. 

Contact logs provided by the district show social workers from three schools have sent four emails and called the family 19 times since the pandemic closed classrooms in 2020. Most of those calls went to voicemail or didn’t go through because the phone was disconnected. Records show Tameka rarely called back.  

The only face-to-face meeting was in October 2021, when Tameka sent her kids on the bus, only to learn they weren’t enrolled. A school social worker summarized the encounter: “Discussed students’ attendance history, the impact it has on the student and barriers. Per mom student lost father in May 2020 and only other barrier is uniforms.”  

The social worker said the school would take care of the uniforms. “Mom given enrollment paperwork,” the entry ends.  

The school’s logs don’t record any further attempts to contact Tameka.  

“Our Student Services Team went above and beyond to help this family and these children,” wrote Coleman, the district spokesperson. 

Inconsistent cell phone access isn’t uncommon among low-income Americans. Many have phones, as Tameka’s family does, but when they break or run out of prepaid minutes, communication with them becomes impossible. 

So in some cities, even at the height of the pandemic, social workers, teachers and administrators checked on families in person when they were unresponsive or children had gone missing from online learning. In Atlanta, Coleman said, the district avoided in-person contact because of the coronavirus.  

Tameka says she’s unaware of any outreach from Atlanta schools. She currently lacks a working phone with a cell plan, and she’s spent long stretches over the last three years without one. An Associated Press reporter has had to visit the family in person to communicate.  

The logs provided by Atlanta Public Schools show only one attempt to visit the family in person, in Spring 2021. A staff member went to the family’s home to discuss poor attendance in online classes by the son with Down syndrome. No one was home, and the logs don’t mention further attempts. 

The details of what the district has done to track down and re-enroll Tameka’s children, especially her son with Down syndrome, matter. Federal laws require the state and district to identify, locate and evaluate all children with disabilities until they turn 21.  

One government agency has been able to reach Tameka. A new social worker from the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, the same agency that came years earlier, made another visit to her home in October.  

The department offered to organize a ride for her and her children to visit the doctor. But without an appointment, Tameka didn’t see the point.  

The social worker also shared a helpful tip: Tameka can enroll her children with most of the paperwork, and then she would have 30 days to get the immunizations. But she should act fast, the social worker urged, or the department might have to take action against her for “educational neglect.”  

Related: When the punishment is the same as the crime: Suspended for missing class 

To many observers, Tameka’s troubles stem from Atlanta’s rapid gentrification. The city, known for its Black professional class, also boasts the country’s largest wealth disparity between Black and white families.  

“It looks good from the curb, but when you get inside you see that Black and brown people are worse off economically than in West Virginia — and no one wants to talk about it,” says Frank Brown, who heads Communities in Schools of Atlanta, an organization that runs dropout-prevention programs in Atlanta Public Schools.  

Atlanta’s school board passed many of its enrollment policies and procedures back in 2008, after years of gentrification and a building boom consolidated upper-income and mostly white residents in the northern half of the city. The schools in those neighborhoods complained of “overcrowding,” while the schools in the majority Black southern half of the city couldn’t fill all of their seats.  

The board cracked down on “residency fraud” to prevent parents living in other parts of town from sending their children to schools located in those neighborhoods.

“This was about balancing the number of students in schools,” says Tiffany Fick, director of school quality and advocacy for Equity in Education, a policy organization in Atlanta. “But it was also about race and class.” 

Communities such as St. Louis, the Massachusetts town of Everett and Tupelo, Mississippi, have adopted similar policies, including tip lines to report neighbors who might be sending their children to schools outside of their enrollment zones. 

But the Atlanta metro area seems to be a hotbed, despite the policies’ disruption of children’s educations. In January, neighboring Fulton County disenrolled nearly 400 students from one of its high schools after auditing residency documents after Christmas vacation.   

The policies were designed to prevent children from attending schools outside of their neighborhood. But according to Dukes and other advocates, the increased bureaucracy has also made it difficult for the poor to attend their assigned schools — especially after the pandemic hit families with even more economic stress. 

Related: Many schools find ways to solve absenteeism without suspensions 

The Associated Press spoke to five additional Atlanta public school mothers who struggled with the re-enrollment process. Their children were withdrawn from school because their leases had expired or were month to month, or their child lacked vaccinations.  

Candace, the mother of a seventh grader with autism, couldn’t get her son a vaccination appointment when schools first allowed students to return in person in Spring 2021. There were too many other families seeking shots at that time, and she didn’t have reliable transportation to go further afield. The boy, then in fourth grade, missed a cumulative five months.  

“He wasn’t in school, and no one cared,” said Candace, who asked AP not to use her last name because she worries about losing custody of her child since he missed so much school. She eventually re-enrolled him with the help of Dukes, the parent advocate. 

“One of the biggest problems that we have is kids that are missing and chronic absenteeism. I’m really taken aback that a district would set forth a series of policies that make it actually quite difficult to enroll your child.”

Pamela Herd, a Georgetown University public policy professor 

Many parents who have struggled with the enrollment policies have had difficulty persuading schools to accept their proof of residency. Adding an extra burden to those who don’t own their homes, Atlanta’s policy allows principals to ask for additional evidence from renters. 

Shawndrea Gay was told by her children’s school, which is located in an upper-income neighborhood, that her month-to-month lease was insufficient. Twice, investigators came to her studio apartment to verify that the family lived there. “They looked in the fridge to make sure there was food,” she says. “It was no joke.” 

Then, in Summer 2022, the school unenrolled her children because their lease had expired. With Dukes’ help, Gay was able to get them back in school before classes started. 

Tameka hasn’t reached out for help getting her kids back in school. She doesn’t feel comfortable asking and doesn’t trust the school system, especially after they called the child welfare department. “I don’t like people knowing my business,” she says. “I’m a private person.” 

On a typical school day, Tameka’s four children — now 14, 12, 9 and 8 — sleep late and stay inside watching television or playing video games. Only the youngest — the girl who’s never been to school — has much interest in the outside world, Tameka says.  

The girl often plays kickball or runs outside with other kids in their low-income subdivision. But during the week, she has to wait for them to come home from school at around 3 p.m. 

The little girl should be in second grade, learning to master chapter books, spell, and add and subtract numbers up to 100. She has had to settle for “playing school” with her three older siblings. She practices her letters and writes her name. She runs through pre-kindergarten counting exercises on a phone. 

But even at 8, she understands that it’s not the real thing. 

“I want to go to school,” she says, “and see what it’s like.” 

This story was produced by the Associated Press and reprinted with permission. The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content. 

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OWENTON, Ky. — During a school-wide club fair in this northern Kentucky town, a school administrator stood watch as students signed up for a group for LGBTQ+ students and their allies.

After the club sign-up sheet had been posted, students wrote derogatory terms and mockingly signed up classmates, according to one of the club’s founders. The group eventually went to the administrator, who agreed to help.

Simply being able to post the sign-up sheet in school was a victory of sorts. For two years, the club, known as PRISM (People Respecting Individuality and Sexuality Meeting), gathered in the town’s public library, because its dozen members couldn’t find a faculty adviser to sponsor it. In fall 2022, after two teachers finally signed on, the group received permission to start the club on campus.

Much of that happened because of one parent, Rachelle Ketron. Ketron’s daughter Meryl Ketron, who was trans and an outspoken member of the LGBTQ+ community in her small town, had talked about wanting to start a Gay-Straight Alliance when she got to high school. But in April 2020, during her freshman year, Meryl died by suicide after facing years of harassment over her identity. 

Following Meryl’s death, Ketron decided to continue her daughter’s advocacy. She gathered Meryl’s friends and talked about what it might mean to start a Gay-Straight Alliance, a student-run group that could serve as a safe space for queer youth on campus. After trying, and failing, to get the school to sign off on the idea, the group decided to gather monthly at the public library, where its members discussed mental health, sex education and experiences of being queer in rural areas. Ketron, a coordinator of development at a community mental health center just across the border in Indiana, also founded doit4Meryl, a nonprofit that advocates for mental health education and suicide prevention, specifically for LGBTQ+ youth in rural communities like hers.

Around the country, LGBTQ+ students and the campus groups founded to support them have become a growing target in the culture wars. In 2023 alone, 542 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced by state legislatures or in Congress, according to an LGBTQ-legislation tracker, with many of them focused on young people. Supporters of the bills say schools inappropriately expose students to discussions about gender identity and sexuality, and parents deserve greater control over what their kids are taught. Critics say the laws are endangering already vulnerable students. 

Kentucky’s law, passed in March, is one of the nation’s most sweeping anti-LGBTQ+ laws, prohibiting school districts from compelling teachers to address trans students by their pronouns and banning transgender students from using school bathrooms or changing rooms that match their gender identity. The law also limits instruction on and discussion of human sexuality and gender identity in schools. A separate section of the law bans gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth in the state.

“What started out as really a bill focused on pronouns and bathroom use morphed into this very broad anti-LGBTQIA+ piece of legislation that outlawed discussions of gender and sexuality, through all grades, and all subject matters,” said Jason Glass, the former Kentucky commissioner of education. Glass left the state in September to take a job in higher education in Michigan after his support for LGBTQ+ students drew fire from Republican politicians in Kentucky, including some who called for his ouster.

Related: In the wake of ‘Don’t Say Gay,’ LGBTQ students won’t be silenced 

Because the law’s language is sometimes ambiguous, it’s up to individual districts to interpret it, Glass said. Some have adopted more restrictive policies that advocates say risk forcing GSAs, also known as Gender and Sexuality Alliances or Gay-Straight Alliances, to change their names or shut down, and led to book bans and the cancellation of lessons over concerns that they discuss gender or sexuality. Others have interpreted the law more liberally and continue to offer services and accommodations to transgender or nonbinary students, if parents approve.

Across the country, the number of GSAs is at a 20-year low, according to GLSEN, an LGBTQ+ education advocacy nonprofit. GLSEN researchers say there may be two somewhat contradictory forces at work. Fewer students may feel the need for such clubs, thanks to school curricula and textbooks that have become more inclusive of LGBTQ+ individuals and thanks to an increase in the number of school policies that explicitly prohibit anti-gay bullying. Conversely, the recent surge in anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, as well as the halt to extracurricular activities during the pandemic, may also be fueling the drop, the researchers said.

Willie Carver, a former high school teacher and Kentucky’s Teacher of the Year in 2022, left teaching this year because of threats he faced as an openly gay man. Laws like the one in Kentucky legitimize and legalize harassment against LGBTQ+ kids, he said, and may even encourage it. “We’ve ripped all of the school support away from the students, so they’re consistently miserable and hopeless,” he said.

Owenton is a picturesque farming community with rolling green hills and winding roads located halfway between Cincinnati and Louisville. Its population of about 1,682 is predominantly white and politically conservative: The surrounding county has voted overwhelmingly Republican in every presidential election since 2000.

Ketron moved here from Cincinnati in 2014 with her then-husband, seeking to live on a farm within driving distance of large cities. Shortly after the move, she recalled, a city official visited the property to give Ketron a rundown of expectations in the community — and a warning.

“It was basically ‘You better watch what you do and don’t get on the bad side of people because one person might be the only person that does that job in this whole county.’ Do you understand what I mean?’ ‘Yup,’” Ketron recalled saying, “‘I understand what you mean.’”

A few years later, she met her now-wife, Marsha Newell, and the two began raising their blended family of eight children on the farm. They also started fostering LGBTQ+ kids. Ketron said her family is one the few in the county to accept queer kids. Their children were often met with hostility, Ketron said; other students made fun of them for having two moms and told them that Ketron and her wife were sinners who were “going to hell.”

Ketron said the couple thought about moving, but beyond the financial and logistical obstacles, she worried about abandoning LGBTQ+ young people in the town. “Just because I’m uncomfortable or this is a foreign place for a queer kid to be doesn’t mean there aren’t queer kids born here every day,” she said.

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

After Meryl came out to family and friends in fifth grade, the bullying at school intensified, Ketron and Gwenn, Meryl’s younger sister, recalled. Few adults in Meryl’s schools took action to stop it, they said. When Meryl complained, school staff didn’t take her seriously and told her to “toughen up and move on,” Ketron said. (In an email, the high school’s new principal, Renee Boots, wrote that administrators did not receive reports of bullying from Meryl. Ketron said by the time Meryl reached high school, she’d given up on reporting such incidents.)

That said, as she got older, Meryl became more outspoken. As a ninth grader, in 2019, she clashed with students who wanted to fly the Confederate flag at school; Meryl and her friends wanted to fly a rainbow flag. The school decided to ban both flags, Ketron said. After that, Meryl brought small rainbow flags and placed them around campus. (According to Boots, students were wearing various flags as “capes” and were advised not to do so as it was against school dress code.)

Ketron said she generally supported her daughter’s advocacy, but sometimes wished she’d take a less combative approach. “You might need to dial it back a little bit,” Ketron recalled telling Meryl once, when her daughter was in eighth grade.

Ketron recalled seeing Meryl’s disappointment; she said it was the only time she felt that she let her daughter down.

For years, the most effective wedge issue between conservatives and progressives was marriage equality. But when the Supreme Court in 2015 recognized the legal right of same-sex couples to marry, opponents of gay rights pivoted to focus on trans individuals, particularly trans youth. After early success with legislation banning trans kids from playing sports, conservative legislators began to expand their efforts to other school policies pertaining to LGBTQ+ youth.

The ripple effects of these laws on young people are becoming more apparent, said Michael Rady, senior education programs manager for GLSEN. Forty-one percent of LGBTQ youth have seriously considered suicide in the past year, according to a 2023 survey by The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ+ suicide prevention nonprofit. Nearly 2 in 3 LGBTQ+ youth said that learning about potential legislation banning discussions of LGBTQ+ people in schools negatively affected their mental health.

Konrad Bresin, an assistant professor in the department of psychology and brain sciences at the University of Louisville whose research focuses on LGBTQ+ mental health, said that for LGBTQ+ individuals just seeing advertising that promotes legislation against them has negative effects. “Even if something doesn’t pass, but there’s a big public debate about it, that is kind of increasing the day-to-day stress that people are experiencing,” he said.

Bresin said that student participation in GSAs can help blunt the effect of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, since the clubs provide students a sense of belonging.

Supporters of Kentucky’s new law argue that the legislation creates necessary guardrails to protect students. Martin Cothran, spokesperson for The Family Foundation, the Kentucky-based conservative policy organization that advocated for the legislation, said the law is designed to keep students from being exposed to “gender ideology.”

Cothran said that nothing in the law impedes student speech, nor does it entirely prohibit traditional sex education. “It just says that you can’t indoctrinate,” he said. “Schools are for learning, not indoctrination.”

Related: College wars on campus start to affect students’ choices of college

When the law, known as SB 150, went into effect last spring, Glass, the former education commissioner, said school districts were forced to scramble to update their curricula to comply with the bill’s restrictions. In some cases, that meant removing any information on sexuality or sexual maturation from elementary school health curricula, and also revising health, psychology and certain A.P. courses in middle school and high school, he said.

Some families have sued. In September, four Lexington families with trans or nonbinary kids filed a lawsuit against the Fayette County Board of Education and the state’s Republican attorney general, Daniel Cameron, alleging that SB 150’s education provisions violate students’ educational, privacy and free speech rights under state and federal law. The families say that since the law passed, their kids have been intentionally misgendered or outed, barred access to bathrooms that match their gender identity and had their privacy disregarded when school staff accessed their birth certificates in order to enforce the law’s provisions.

School districts that don’t comply fully with the law could face discipline from the state’s attorney general, said Chris Hartman, executive director of the Fairness Campaign, a Kentucky-based LGBTQ+ advocacy group.

“Teachers who before this were willing to speak out and advocate are, as a general rule, unwilling to speak publicly about what’s happening.”

Willie Carver, Kentucky Teacher of the Year, 2022

Meanwhile, LGBTQ+ and student rights advocates fear that GSAs in the state will close or change their names because of the law. Teachers from across the state have also shared stories about their schools removing pride flags and safe space stickers, banning educators from using trans students’ pronouns and names, and removing access to bathrooms for trans kids, according to Carver, the former Teacher of the Year, who is collecting that information as part of his work with the nonprofit Campaign for Our Shared Future. The law’s broad language has not only affected teaching about gender and sexuality, he said: Educators have complained of schools banning references to the Holocaust in image or film, removing books with LGBTQ+ characters, and nixing discussion of scenes in Shakespeare’s plays because of images that may depict nudity, sex or language that talks about sexuality and gender.

Educators and school staff are fearful, said Carver. “It’s nearly impossible to know what’s happening because the law gets to be interpreted at the local level. So, the district itself gets to decide what the law’s interpretation will look like,” he said. “And teachers who before this were willing to speak out and advocate are, as a general rule, unwilling to speak publicly about what’s happening.”

For supporters of the law, that may be the point. GLSEN’s Rady said the bills are often written in intentionally vague ways to intimidate educators and school district leaders into removing any content that might land them in trouble. This year, his group is focused on providing educators, students and families information about their rights to free speech and expression in schools, including their right to run GSAs, Rady said.

In March 2020, when the pandemic hit and schools went remote, Meryl, then a high school freshman, posted a video diary on social media. In it, she strums her ukulele, and shares a message to her friends. “Some of you guys don’t have social media, some of you guys don’t like being at home,” Meryl said in the video. “I won’t get to see you guys for a whole month which is awful because you guys make me have a 10 times better life, you guys make mountains feel like literally bumps and steep cliffs just feel like a little bit of walking down the stairs.”

The video ends with her saying she’ll see her peers in school on April 30, when schools were scheduled to reopen. On the morning of April 18, Meryl died.

Ketron, Meryl’s mother, had thought remote school would be a relief for her daughter after years of bullying in school buildings. But it was difficult to be separated from her friends, she said, and Meryl also knew some of them were struggling in homes where they did not feel accepted.

“Suicide is never one thing,” Ketron said. “A lot of times people talk about death by a thousand paper cuts. As sad as it sounds, for me to have that come out of my mouth, I feel like that really speaks to Meryl’s life. She had wonderful things, but it was just like thousands of paper cuts.”

For months after Meryl’s death, Ketron would read text messages on Meryl’s phone from her friends sharing stories about how she’d stood up for them in school and in the community. Ketron said she made a promise to herself — and to Meryl — that she was going to be loud like her daughter and “make it better.” In the spring of 2020, she started doit4Meryl.

“I don’t ever want this to happen again, ever, to anyone,” she said. “I never want someone to be in that place and pieces of it that got them there was hate and ignorance from another human being.”

In 2021, the anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-critical race theory book bans movement reached the Owenton community after a teacher in the district taught “The 57 Bus,” a nonfiction book that features a vocabulary guide explaining gender identities and characters who are LGBTQ+.

The book created an uproar in the town, with parents calling for its removal and for the educator to be disciplined. After that, Ketron said the few teachers who had seemed open to sponsoring the GSA no longer felt comfortable.

Related: Teachers, deputized to fight the culture wars, are often reluctant to serve

In mid-2021, Ketron decided to start the club herself, at the public library. Each month, a dozen or so kids gathered in one of the building’s study rooms, talking about what it means to be queer in rural Kentucky, and what they hoped to accomplish through their GSA. Some of them were Meryl’s friends, others were new to Ketron.

In July 2022, the group held a Color Run, a 5K to bring together various advocacy groups from around the county and state to uplift people after the isolation of Covid. Later that year, they invited Carver to speak about his experiences as an openly gay man growing up in rural Kentucky. The students worked with Ketron and doit4Meryl to create a “Be Kind” campaign: They printed signs with phrases like “You’re never alone” and “Don’t give up,” along with information on mental health resources, and placed them in yards around town.

In the fall of 2022, after two teachers agreed to serve as advisors for the GSA, the school principal allowed the club on campus. While Ketron checks in with the students occasionally, the club is now student-led, she said. The past school year would have been Meryl’s senior year, and the club’s students were excited about finally being welcomed onto campus, Ketron said.

Then Kentucky’s 2023 legislative session began with the onslaught of bills targeting LGBTQ+ youth that eventually merged to become SB 150.

Around the same time, tragedy entered Ketron’s life again: She lost one of her foster children, who was trans, to suicide. The loss of her daughters prompted her to spend countless hours in the state capitol, attending committee meetings and hearings and signing up to testify against the anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ bills on the senate floor. She watched, devastated, as legislators quickly voted on and passed SB 150.

“All I could think about was Meryl,” she said. “They’re just starting and this world is supposed to love them through this hard part. When you’re shaping yourself and instead we’re going to tell you that we don’t want you to exist.”

In Owenton, the district follows SB 150 as per law, said Reggie Taylor, superintendent of Owen County Schools. Little has changed as a result of the legislation, he said: “It’s been business as usual.” Trans and nonbinary students have long had a separate bathroom they could use and that hasn’t changed, he said, and the district offers a tip line for students to anonymously report bullying, as well as access to school counselors.

Ketron, though, sees fallout. Fearful of bullying and other harms, she said that she and the other parents with trans kids in the school system are trying to get their children support by applying for help through Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. While 504 plans are typically for students with disabilities, they are sometimes used to help secure LGBTQ+ students services and accommodations, such as protection from bullying, mental health counseling and access to bathrooms that match their gender identity.

SB 150 has also had a chilling effect on the work of the school’s GSA, according to Ketron. During the summer, after the law went into effect, PRISM members discussed changing the club’s name and direction to focus on mental health.

Related: How do we teach Black history in polarized times?

Across the state, students and educators are grappling with what their schools will look like as the law takes hold. In March, Anna, a trans nonbinary student from Lexington, launched an Instagram account called TransKY Storytelling Project, anonymously documenting the impact of the new law on young people and teachers.

People shared examples of the ways the legislation affects them, such as making them afraid to go to school, erasing their identities and making the jobs of educators and librarians tougher. A middle school guidance counselor in rural Kentucky wrote that the new law makes it harder to connect with students and support them: “If we are the only ones students have, and we can’t provide them the care they desperately need and deserve, the future looks very bleak.”

Even in the state’s more progressive cities, the law has changed daily life in schools, Anna, the Instagram account’s curator said. The GSA at Anna’s Lexington high school used to announce club meetings and events on the loudspeakers and post flyers in school hallways, Anna said. But the group has since gone underground, to avoid bringing attention to its existence lest administrators force it to stop meeting.

“The school felt so much safer knowing that [a GSA] existed because there were students like you elsewhere. You could go in and say, ‘Hey, I’m trying out this set of pronouns. I’m trying to learn more about myself. Can you all like call me this for a couple of weeks?’” Anna said. “It just allowed for a place where students like me could go.”

But while the absence of a GSA is concerning, Anna fears most the impact of SB 150 on students in rural parts of Kentucky. GSA members from rural communities have shared that they no longer have supportive school staff to advocate for their clubs because of the climate of fear created by the law, Anna said.

That said, November’s election brought some hope for LGBTQ+ advocates: Cameron, the state attorney general who backed SB 150 and campaigned on anti-trans policies, lost his bid for the governorship to incumbent Andy Beshear, and several other candidates for office who advocated anti-trans policies were defeated too.

Back in Owenton, Ketron is working with Carver to plan a summit for Kentucky’s rural, queer youth. Ketron said she hopes the gathering will serve as a reminder for students that even though they may be isolated in their communities, there are people like them across the state.

But as of this fall, participating in a GSA is no longer an option for students at the Owenton high school. Boots, the school principal, wrote in an email that the club had changed its focus, to one geared toward addressing “social needs across a variety of settings.”

But according to Ketron, students said they were afraid to continue a club focused on LGBTQ+ issues in part because of SB 150. She offered to help students restart the club in the library, or at her house, she said, but members worried that would be too difficult because many of them have not come out to their families.

Ketron said she’s not giving up. “At its core,” she said, a GSA is “a protective factor and so very needed, especially in a rural community.”

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org for free, 24-hour services that can provide support, information and resources.

This story about LGBTQ+ students in schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter, and share your thoughts about this story at editor@hechingerreport.org. 

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As a former public-school teacher, I know that my students sometimes acted out when they didn’t receive the additional educational supports they needed. Too often they then faced a choice: Get your licks or go home.

 “Licks” meant an assistant principal beat their backsides with a paddle. “Go home” meant suspension. Those who chose the former would come back to class dejected, disengaged and depressed.

Many people may assume that what I saw is an outlier, but the latest Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) shows that at least 19,395 students experienced corporal punishment during the 2020-21 school year. Every time the CRDC data is released, I am reminded that corporal punishment continues in our schools today, and I am convinced it can be put to an end tomorrow.

To make this change, advocates must demand that their education leaders end this inhumane practice.

Corporal punishment has been banned in a majority of states since the mid 1990s. Nevertheless, during the 2017-18 school year, the CRDC reported, 69,492 students received corporal punishment, on top of 92,479 students in 2015-16. The most recent number is much lower mainly because in-person instruction and data reporting were disrupted during the pandemic.

Corporal punishment remains expressly legal in 16 states. Banning the practice in just 10 of those states, including the one I taught in, Alabama, along with Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas, would reduce the number of schools using corporal punishment by over 99 percent. Despite the small number of cases in the remaining six states where it is legal — Arizona, Idaho, Kentucky, South Carolina, North Carolina and Wyoming — it is still important to ban corporal punishment there to prevent individual schools from continuing the practice.

Additionally, explicitly prohibiting corporal punishment in states that have not yet done so (Connecticut, Kansas, Indiana, Maine, New Hampshire, and South Dakota) would protect future generations.

Related: State-sanctioned violence: Inside one of the thousands of schools that still paddles students

Corporal punishment needs to end because there is no evidence that retaining it decreases misbehavior. In other words, in the states that allow it, corporal punishment is not helping students control their behavior.

Instead, corporal punishment is associated with unintended negative consequences. These include higher rates of mental health problems, more negative parent-child relationships, lower cognitive ability, lower academic achievement, lower self-esteem and higher risk for physical abuse.

While practicing corporal punishment has never made sense, it makes even less sense now.

Ending corporal punishment is also a civil rights issue: It is disproportionately used against Black students, students with disabilities and male students. News reports have highlighted that Black students receive physical punishment at twice the rate of white students nationwide; research shows that educators’ perceptions of student behavior are based on the students’ race — rather than the actual behavior — and that these perceptions contribute to the disproportionate rates in school discipline.

While practicing corporal punishment has never made sense, it makes even less sense now that millions of students have not returned or are continuing to miss school since pandemic-based disruptions.

While states revisit their discipline policies, they should also reduce the “go home” exclusionary discipline practices (suspensions and expulsions), which can undermine children’s attachment to school. Such harsh punishments increase the chances of students dropping out and feed the school-to-prison pipeline. In addition to those punishments increasing the number of school days students miss, research shows that exclusionary discipline can decrease students’ likelihood of accumulating course credits, reduce their likelihood of graduating and lower their chances of earning a postsecondary credential.

Related: Preventing suspensions: Tackle discipline problems with empathy first

In my experience observing its impacts, corporal punishment has a similar distancing effect on students as suspensions and expulsions — making school feel like a place where they do not belong.

Schools still need to address misbehavior, of course, but there are better ways to do this. They can replace corporal punishment with evidence-based practices that help create safe and inclusive learning environments for all students. Such practices — including advisory systems, in which students meet regularly with a staff member about academic challenges, and “looping,” in which students have the same teacher for multiple years — build positive school-student relationships. These positive relationships can help prevent physical violence and bullying.

Restorative practices, also backed by research, typically foster dialogue in “circles” or “conferences” in which educators help students listen to each other and to teachers in order to resolve conflict and build community. For me, this often meant chatting with students in a hallway about why they acted out, giving them a chance to share their side of the story, regroup and refocus on school.

Recent research shows that investing in student supports, including social and emotional learning and mental health, is a better way to make schools truly safe, along with professional development for teachers and school staff. States should act quickly to make these alternatives more widely available and make schools less like prisons and more like everywhere else.

Corporal punishment is prohibited in almost every facet of life in the U.S. except schools. It is banned in military training centers, child care centers and juvenile detention facilities, and cannot be carried out as a sentence for a juvenile crime. The vast majority of children (76 percent) across the globe are protected by law from corporal punishment. Let’s use this current round of CRDC data to spur action to give our students better choices than the one my students faced.

Stephen Kostyo is an Impact Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists. Before working in education policy, Kostyo taught middle and high school math and science — and was recognized as a high school Teacher of the Year by his peers in 2015.

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

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Growing numbers of students need special education services. Yet there are fewer qualified clinicians who are willing and able to work in school buildings full time.

There is a new solution that exists, one that many other sectors have embraced: A hybrid, more flexible workforce.

The number of students deemed to need special education services increased by nearly a million students over the last decade, and it now makes up 15 percent of all public school enrollments.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates a 19 percent growth in demand for speech language pathologists and a 12 percent growth in demand for occupational therapists over the next decade.

Since the start of the pandemic, more than two-thirds of public schools have reported increases in students seeking mental health services.

The effects of these strains on resources are far-reaching. Students and families are left waiting for critical services, while staffers are faced with ever-growing caseloads that lead to burnout and, in some cases, departure from the profession.

Students in low-income areas are already the least likely to have access to special education and early intervention services — a challenge exacerbated by staffing shortages.

Teletherapy services, provided online via live videoconferencing, were commonly used during the pandemic months when schools were shuttered and students needed connection with their therapists.

Related: Teletherapy has been powering virtual special education for years

Once clinicians learned how to work online, many embraced teletherapy, finding that it brought focus to their time with children and offered exciting new ways to engage in their sessions. A significant number of U.S. public school districts relied on it to provide critical special education services including psychological evaluations, speech therapy and occupational therapy to their students.

But when schools reopened, many prioritized a return to fully in-person services. Even though clinicians were ready to change how and where they worked, most schools were not. In discussions I’ve had with school leaders, many regarded teletherapy as an emergency stopgap, and in my view, that was a mistake.

Returning to the old ways of doing things just hasn’t worked. Many schools that dug in on resuming in-person services with no exceptions have been unable to fill vacancies across their special education teams.

And, for example, annual data from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association shows that despite growing student needs, the percentage of certified speech language pathologists working in schools has been declining steadily for over a decade.

With staff shortages in critical areas, backlogs and compensatory time (to make up for services not provided) have been building up, signaling a need for a better solution.

Some districts are now turning to teletherapy services for special education as more than a temporary pandemic-era solution.

Some districts are now turning to teletherapy services for special education as more than a temporary pandemic-era solution, and are creating true hybrid service models, in which schools strategically utilize their in-person staff for emergent issues or high-need students, while virtual therapists provide support for ongoing special education service needs.

Data from my organization, Presence, a provider of teletherapy solutions, shows that some of the nation’s largest districts, and at least 10,000 forward-thinking schools, have adopted a hybrid model to ensure support for students, clinicians and school and district leaders.

With the capability to deliver a portion of services online, districts can offer services and stability for students regardless of their zip code. The hybrid model also enables school administrators to increase capacity and balance workloads by retaining great therapists while adding more diversity and deeper specialties to the talent pool.

For example, Newberg-Dundee Public Schools in Oregon embraced teletherapy to assess and address the needs of their students faster and have since seen positive results. Teachers in the district told us that many students appear to be more eager to attend their teletherapy sessions. They said that students often seem more focused in the dedicated virtual setting and less distracted.

District officials say parents are now requesting teletherapy services for their children because they’ve seen such great progress.

Related: These parents want more virtual learning. New Jersey says they’re on their own

In addition to supporting students and school administrators, teletherapy serves the providers themselves. The model embraces working remotely from home, with flexible hours, including part-time.

Many of those drawn to teletherapy are working mothers seeking to reduce time outside the home and retirees who want to continue the work they love in a reduced capacity.

The thousands of clinicians who have embraced teletherapy find that when they remove themselves from day-to-day burdens inside the school building, they are better able to focus on their clinical work and target their students’ specific needs.

A hybrid staffing model alone isn’t a cure-all to address students’ increasing needs or to reverse widespread school staff shortages. But as schools search for solutions to address these issues, embracing a combination of in-person staff and remote specialists offers promise.

Kate Eberle Walker is CEO of Presence, the leading provider of teletherapy solutions for children with diverse needs.

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

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SALISBURY, Md. — Three times a week, on average, a police car pulls up to a school in Wicomico County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. A student is brought out, handcuffed and placed inside for transport to a hospital emergency room for a psychiatric evaluation.

Over the past eight years, the process has been used more than 750 times on children. Some are as young as 5 years old.

The state law that allows for these removals, which are known as emergency petitions, intended their use to be limited to people with severe mental illness, those who are endangering their own lives or safety or someone else’s. The removals are supposed to be the first step in getting someone involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital.

But advocates say schools across the country are sending children to the emergency room for psychiatric evaluations in response to behaviors prompted by bullying or frustration over assignments. The ER trips, they say, often follow months, and sometimes years, of the students’ needs not being met.

In most places, information about how often this happens is hidden from the public, but in districts where data has been made available, it’s clear that Black students are more frequently subjected to these removals than their peers. Advocates for students with disabilities say that they, too, are being removed at higher rates.

“Schools focus on keeping kids out rather than on keeping kids in,” said Dan Stewart, managing attorney at the National Disability Rights Network. “I think that’s the fundamental crux of things.”

In 2017, as part of a settlement with the Department of Justice intended to address widespread racial disparities in how students were disciplined, schools in Wicomico County agreed not to misuse emergency petitions. But while the number of suspensions and expulsions declined, mandated trips to the emergency room ticked up.

Last year, children were handcuffed and sent to the emergency room from Wicomico schools at least 117 times — about once per every 100 students — according to data obtained from public records requests to the Wicomico County Sheriff’s Office.

At least 40 percent of those children were age 12 or younger. More than half were Black children, even though only a little more than a third of Wicomico public school children are Black.

In interviews, dozens of students, parents, educators, lawyers and advocates for students with disabilities in Wicomico County said that a lack of resources and trained staff, combined with a punitive culture in some of the schools, are behind the misuse of emergency petitions.

One Wicomico mom, who asked for anonymity because she feared retaliation from the school, recalled the terror she felt when she got the phone call saying that her son’s school was going to have him assessed for a forced psychiatric hospitalization. When she arrived at the school, she said, her son was already in handcuffs. He was put in the back of a police car and taken to the hospital.

“He said his wrists hurt from the handcuffs,” the boy’s mom said. “He was just really quiet, just sitting there, and he didn’t understand why he was in the hospital.”

The use of psychiatric evaluations to remove children from school isn’t just happening in Wicomico. Recent data shows that New York City schools still call police to take children in emotional distress to the emergency room despite a 2014 legal settlement in which they agreed to stop the practice.

A Kentucky school district was found to have used a forced psychiatric assessment on kids more than a thousand times in a year.

In Florida, thousands of school-aged children are subjected to the Baker Act, the state’s involuntary commitment statute.

In a settlement with the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, , the Stockton Unified School District in California agreed to protocols that require other interventions before referring students with disabilities for psychiatric evaluation.

In Maryland, Wicomico uses emergency petitions more often per capita than almost every other Maryland district where data is available. Baltimore City, for example, last year had 271 emergency petitions from schools, compared with Wicomico’s 117, according to data obtained from law enforcement agencies through public records requests. But Baltimore City’s student population is five times as large.

‘Trying to get him out of school’

Wicomico parents describe struggling to get support from the schools when their children fall behind on basics like reading and math in early grades. These gaps in learning can lead to frustration and behaviors that are challenging for teachers to manage.

The Wicomico mother whose son was handcuffed said she fought for years with administrators to obtain accommodations for her child, who is autistic, an experience echoed by other parents. Her son, who also has ADHD, was several years behind in reading by the time he got to middle school. The mother said he was sent to the hospital after an outburst rooted in frustration, not mental illness.

She recalled school officials telling her, “‘He doesn’t have special needs, he just has anger issues.’ They were trying to get him out of the school.”

Her son had grown increasingly discouraged and agitated over an assignment he was unable to complete, she said. The situation escalated, she said, when the teacher argued with him. The student swiped at his desk and knocked a laptop to the floor, and the school called for an emergency petition. After being taken to the hospital in handcuffs, he was examined and released.

“After that, he went from angry to terrified,” she said. “Every time he saw the police, he would start panicking.”

A spokeswoman from the Wicomico County Public Schools said that emergency petitions “are used in the most extreme, emergency situations where the life and safety of the student or others are at risk.”

“[Emergency petitions] are not used for disciplinary purposes and frequently do not result from a student’s behaviors,” Tracy Sahler, the spokeswoman, said in an email. “In fact, a majority of EPs are related to when a student exhibits suicidal ideation or plans self-harm.”

Schools did not respond to questions about why the rate of emergency petitions was so much higher in Wicomico than in other counties in Maryland. The Sheriff’s Department declined to share records that would show the reasons for the removals.

Educators stretched thin

By law, certain classroom removals must be recorded. Schools are required to publicly report suspensions, expulsions and arrests — and the data reveals racial disparities in discipline. Those statistics are what state and federal oversight agencies typically use to judge a school, and they often serve as triggers for oversight and investigations.

But with the notable exceptions of Florida and New York City, most places do not routinely collect data on removals from schools for psychiatric assessments. That means oversight agencies don’t have access to the information.

Without insight into how often schools are using psychiatric removals on children, there is no way to hold them accountable, said Daniel Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law.

“The civil rights of children is at stake, because it’s more likely it’s going to be Black kids and kids with disabilities who are subjected to all kinds of biases that deny them an educational opportunity,” he said.

Families who have experienced emergency petitions say that the educators who can best communicate with their child are stretched thin, and measures that could de-escalate a situation are not always taken. The day that her son was sent to the hospital, the Wicomico mother who requested anonymity recalled, the administrator who had consistently advocated for him was out of the building.

In another instance, a middle schooler said that the required accommodations for his learning and behavioral disabilities included being allowed to take a walk with an educator he trusted. The day he was involuntarily sent to the hospital, that staff member was unavailable. When he tried to leave the building to take a walk on his own, an administrator blocked him from leaving. The student began yelling and spat at the staffer. He said that by the time police arrived, he was calm and sitting in the principal’s office. Still, he was handcuffed and taken to the hospital where he was examined and released a few hours later.

Because emergency petitions happen outside the standard discipline process, missed school days are not recorded as suspensions. For students with disabilities, that has special consequences — they are not supposed to be removed from class for more than 10 days without an evaluation on whether they are receiving the support they need.

“If you use the discipline process, and you’re a student with a disability, your rights kick in,” said Selene Almazan, legal director for the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates. With emergency petitions, the same rules do not apply.

In many places around the county, the resources needed to support students with disabilities are scarce.

“‘He doesn’t have special needs, he just has anger issues.’ They were trying to get him out of the school.”

Wicomico, Maryland, mother whose autistic son was sent to hospital in handcuffs

On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, lawyers and advocates for families said the spectrum of alternatives for students is limited by both money and geography. Those can include private, out-of-district placements and specialized classrooms for specific needs like dyslexia, for example. 

“If it’s a resource-rich school system, you can provide services and supports,” said Maureen van Stone, director of the Maryland Center for Developmental Disabilities at Kennedy Krieger Institute. “If you need a walk, if you need a sensory work break, if you need to go see the school counselor, those kinds of things can prevent some of this escalation of getting to the point that you’re … emergency petitioning.”

When children need targeted services that are unavailable in the local district, the district must allow them to be educated outside the school system — and pay for it.

“You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place because you’re like, ‘This kid needs more services,’ but you can’t get the school to agree,” said Angela Ford, clinical director at Maple Shade Youth and Family Services, which serves children with emotional and behavioral disabilities in Wicomico.

Last year, only one student was placed in a private day school, according to data from the Maryland State Department of Education.

ER trips increased after settlement

The 2017 settlement with the Justice Department required the Wicomico district to reduce the significant racial and disability-related disparities in suspensions, placements in alternative schools and other discipline measures.

The district agreed not to use emergency petitions when “less intrusive interventions … can be implemented to address the behavioral concern,” and not to use them “to discipline or punish or to address lack of compliance with directions.”

But since the settlement, many parents, teachers and community leaders said the district has seemed more concerned with keeping suspension numbers down than providing support for teachers to help prevent disruptive behavior.

“If we know how to handle and deal with behaviors, then we will have less EPs,” said Anthony Mann, who was an instructional aide at Wicomico County High School last year and is a Wicomico public school parent.

“The civil rights of children is at stake, because it’s more likely it’s going to be Black kids and kids with disabilities who are subjected to all kinds of biases that deny them an educational opportunity.”

Daniel Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law

Tatiyana Jackson, who has a son with a disability at Wicomico Middle School, agrees teachers need more training. “I don’t think they have a lot of patience or tolerance for children with differences. It’s like they give up on them.”

Wicomico school officials said ongoing professional development for staff includes the appropriate use of emergency petitions.

“Each school has a well-trained team that includes a social worker and school counselor, with the support of school psychologists,” said Sahler. “All supports that may be beneficial to assist the student are utilized. However, the safety of the student is paramount, and the determining factor is ensuring that there is no unnecessary delay in obtaining aid for the student.”

But Denise Gregorius, who taught in Wicomico schools for over a decade and left in 2019, questioned the feasibility of the discipline and behavior strategies taught during professional development.

“The teachers, when they said they wanted more discipline, really what they’re saying is they want more support,” she said.

“You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place because you’re like, ‘This kid needs more services,’ but you can’t get the school to agree.”

Angela Ford, clinical director at Maple Shade Youth and Family Services

Under the terms of the settlement, Wicomico was under federal monitoring for two years. Since then, the number of suspensions and expulsions has declined markedly — for both Black and white students.

But the number of emergency petitions, which don’t appear in state statistics and are often only revealed through FOIA requests, has edged up. And other measures of exclusionary discipline remained high, including school arrests. In 2021-22, Wicomico had 210 school-based arrests — the second-highest number in the state, while they were 15th in student enrollment. More than three-quarters of the children arrested were Black, and 80 percent were students with disabilities; 37 percent of Wicomico students are Black, and 10 percent of Wicomico students have disabilities.

“Monitoring the numbers doesn’t bring you the solution,” said Losen, from the National Center for Youth Law. “If you’re going to a district where they’re resistant, and they have sort of draconian policies that they can’t justify educationally and there are large racial disparities, the problem is more than what they’re doing with discipline.”

The Department of Justice declined to comment.

Black parents point to culture problem

Some Wicomico parents and educators point to an insular culture in the school district where problems are hidden rather than resolved.

They are frustrated, for example, that there is no relationship with the county’s mobile crisis unit, which is often relied on in other counties to help de-escalate issues instead of calling the police.

Many Black parents say they believe their children are more often viewed as threats than as children who need support.

Jermichael Mitchell, a community organizer who is an alum and parent in Wicomico County Schools, said that teachers and school staff often do not know how to empathize with and respond to the trauma and unmet needs that may lead to children’s behavior. 

Last year, among children sent to the hospital on emergency petitions by Wicomico schools, at least 40 percent were age 12 or younger and more than half were Black children..

“A Black kid that’s truly going through something, that truly needs support, is always looked at as a threat,” he said. “You don’t know how those kids have been taught to cry out for help. You don’t know the trauma that they’ve been through.”

Studies have found that Black and Latino children who have a teacher of the same race have fewer suspensions and higher test scores. Such educator diversity is lacking in Wicomico County: Its schools have the largest gap in the state between the percentages of students of color and teachers of color .

Wicomico school officials said they do not discriminate against any of their students.

A Wicomico teenager described a years-long process of becoming alienated from school, with an emergency petition as the ultimate break. He said he was bullied in middle school over a series of months until one day he snapped and hit the student who had been taunting him.

The school called the police. He told the officers not to touch him, that he needed to calm down. Instead, the officers grabbed him and shoved him onto the ground, he said. He was handcuffed and transported to the emergency room. But when he returned to school, he said the only thing that was different was how he felt about the adults in the building.

“I got used to not trusting people, not talking to people at school,” he said. “Nothing else really changed.”

This story about emergency petitions was produced by The Associated Press and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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Much attention in the post-pandemic era has been on what students have lost – days of school, psychological health, knowledge and skills. But now we have evidence that they may also have gained something: schools that address more of their needs. A majority of public schools have begun providing services that are far afield from traditional academics, including healthcare, housing assistance, childcare and food aid. 

In a Department of Education survey released in October 2023 of more than 1,300 public schools, 60 percent said they were partnering with community organizations to provide non-educational services. That’s up from 45 percent a year earlier in 2022, the first time the department surveyed schools about their involvement in these services. They include access to medical, dental, and mental health providers as well as social workers. Adult education is also often part of the package; the extras are not just for kids. 

“It is a shift,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, where she tracks school spending. “We’ve seen partnering with the YMCA and with health groups for medical services and psychological evaluations.”

Deeper involvement in the community started as an emergency response to the coronavirus pandemic. As schools shuttered their classrooms, many became hubs where families obtained food or internet access. Months later, many schools opened their doors to become vaccine centers. 

New community alliances were further fueled by more than $200 billion in federal pandemic recovery funds that have flowed to schools. “Schools have a lot of money now and they’re trying to spend it down,” said Roza. Federal regulations encourage schools to spend recovery funds on nonprofit community services, and unspent funds will eventually be forfeited.

The term “community school” generally refers to schools that provide a cluster of wraparound services under one roof. The hope is that students living in poverty will learn more if their basic needs are met. Schools that provide only one or two services are likely among the 60 percent of schools that said they were using a community school or wraparound services model, but they aren’t necessarily full-fledged community schools, Department of Education officials said.

The wording of the question on the federal School Pulse Panel survey administered in August 2023 allowed for a broad interpretation of what it means to be a community school. The question posed to a sample of schools across all 50 states was this: “Does your school use a “community school” or “wraparound services” model? A community school or wraparound services model is when a school partners with other government agencies and/or local nonprofits to support and engage with the local community (e.g., providing mental and physical health care, nutrition, housing assistance, etc.).” 

The most common service provided was mental health (66 percent of schools) followed by food assistance (55 percent). Less common were medical clinics and adult education, but many more schools said they were providing these services than in the past.

The number of full-fledged community schools is also believed to be growing, according to education officials and researchers. Federal funding for community schools tripled during the pandemic to $75 million in 2021-22 from $25 million in 2019-20. According to the  education department, the federal community schools program now serves more than 700,000 students in about 250 school districts, but there are additional state and private funding sources too. 

Whether it’s a good idea for most schools to expand their mission and adopt aspects of the community school model depends on one’s view of the purpose of school. Some argue that schools are taking on too many functions and should not attempt to create outposts for outside services. Others argue that strong community engagement is an important aspect of education and can improve daily attendance and learning. Research studies conducted before the pandemic have found that academic benefits from full-fledged community schools can take several years to materialize. It’s a big investment without an instant payoff.

Meanwhile, it’s unclear whether schools will continue to embrace their expanded mission after federal pandemic funds expire in March 2026. That’s when the last payments to contractors and outside organizations for services rendered can be made. Contracts must be signed by September 2024.

Edunomics’s Roza thinks many of these community services will be the first to go as schools face future budget cuts. But she also predicts that some will endure as schools raise money from state governments and philanthropies to continue popular programs.

If that happens, it will be an example of another unexpected consequence of the pandemic. Even as pundits decry how the pandemic has eroded support for public education, it may have profoundly transformed the role of schools and made them even more vital.

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

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In Newton, the liberal suburb of Boston where I live, parents of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim children gather weekly to discuss our concerns about how schools are responding to events in Israel/Palestine. We come together to find community and safety amid escalating hostility toward us because of a crisis we did not create and do not condone.

Schools should support the well-being of all students equally. They should help children develop a healthy sense of identity and belonging, encourage curiosity about divergent perspectives and teach the skills needed to constructively address conflict. Unfortunately, we feel that Newton schools, like others throughout the United States, not only fall short, but are complicit in perpetuating divisive anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment — and their complicity is not new.

When 9/11 happened, my oldest daughter was in school in Newton. The principal took great pains to tell the children that they and their families were safe. But it felt like she was only considering the white kids, oblivious to how others, especially Muslims, would increasingly be subject to suspicion. My daughter, just 5 at the time, got the message at school that being a Muslim Arab was something “different” and to be ashamed of.

Schools should support the well-being of all students. They should help children develop a healthy sense of identity and belonging, encourage curiosity about divergent perspectives and teach the skills needed to constructively address conflict.

Seeing the writing on the wall, our mixed American Jewish-Palestinian Muslim family relocated to Jerusalem so the kids could find pride in their culture. When we returned to Newton 13 years later, our youngest daughter found friends here, most of whom were Jewish. But the kids worried they would be ostracized if they spoke about Palestine at school, and when my daughter raised concerns about censorship with school staff, they dismissed it as a simple misunderstanding. She decided to leave the district and graduate from a school where kids from marginalized backgrounds were believed when they talked about their own life experiences.

Related: OPINION: Palestinian American educators deserve support from their peers

One year later, during the 2021 Israeli attack on Gaza, a teacher was dismissed from that same Newton school for writing a pro-Palestinian (not anti-Israel or anti-Jewish) statement on a white board. While we do not know enough about what happened in the classroom to determine if the termination was justified, the principal’s explanation to the community was definitely not appropriate. He wrote that “our students” had been put in an emotionally vulnerable position – but he certainly wasn’t talking about the district’s Palestinian students. My daughter read the letter and said it felt like being told that “others need to heal from your existence.”      

Now, in 2023, everything is exponentially worse.

In the last three weeks in Newton, as in other cities, the superintendent, school principals, PTO groups and a local antiracism group issued statements about the current violence. A few expressed compassion for all those affected by events in the Middle East. But those messages were quickly walked back under pressure and revised to clarify solidarity only with Israelis. To us, it felt as if our city was condoning the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians.

If teachers and students are too frightened to learn about Arabs and Muslims and too uncomfortable to discuss the role the U.S. plays in international affairs, how can schools help kids become informed, global citizens?

References to the historical context, including 75 years of Israeli expulsion, colonization and occupation of Palestine, were absent. Uninformed people were left to misunderstand that the deplorable violence against Israeli civilians on October 7th was motivated solely by some kind of innate or religious hatred of Jews.

False accusations of antisemitism make Arabs and Muslims targets, threatening their children’s safety, both inside and outside of schools. A six-year-old Palestinian boy was murdered, and his mother seriously injured, by their Chicago landlord who was motivated by anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim hate, fueled in part by media bias that relies on inflammatory words like “brutal” “and “violent” in relation to Palestinians. In Newton, a Palestinian American mother, who was fearful that flyers of Israeli hostages posted around the city would increase division between Muslims and Jews, removed them with the approval of city hall. She was subsequently doxxed, lost her job and now has police protection because of threats against her family.

Related: COLUMN: No son, war is not necessary

I understand why educators are scared to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. A few years ago, the Newton school district and several individuals were sued by the pro-Israel group Americans for Peace and Tolerance, which falsely asserted that the district’s instruction on Islam, the Middle East and Palestinians was antisemitic. Teaching accurate, nuanced history and providing unbiased context about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis has become dangerous for educators, not unlike the dangers they face from anti-critical race theory forces who seek to limit learning about the role of colonialism and slavery in U.S. history.

Unfortunately, that fear has led schools to avoid teaching about Palestinian experiences and narratives. To us, this censorship feels very much like blatant anti-Palestinian racism.

But it is not only Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students who suffer when fear and anti-Palestinian racism are normalized. All students do. If teachers and students are too frightened to learn about Arabs and Muslims and too uncomfortable to discuss the role the U.S. plays in international affairs, how can schools help kids become informed, global citizens?

The consequences of having an uninformed citizenry are dire. Without quality, unbiased information and antiracist education, U.S. citizens are less likely to support rational, humane policies and more likely to acquiesce to violent ones. As I write right now, Palestinian children are being killed in Gaza and Israeli hostages remain captive.

For all these reasons, Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and allied parents will continue to meet to support one another and the rights of all children. We will continue the important but often exhausting work of advocating for the recognition of Palestinian humanity in our schools and in Gaza and the West Bank. Only when U.S. educators stand bravely to uplift everyone – including Palestinians – can our schools ethically and credibly teach the next generation how to pursue justice and peace.

Nora Lester Murad is the author of “Ida in the Middle,” which won the 2023 Arab American Book Award in the young adult category and the Skipping Stones Honor Award, as well as “I Found Myself in Palestine: Stories of Love and Renewal from Around the Globe” (2020) and “Rest in My Shade: A Poem About Roots” (2018). While living in Palestine, Nora co-founded the community foundation Dalia Association and the group Aid Watch Palestine. From a Jewish family, Nora lives with her husband in Massachusetts and blogs at www.NoraLesterMurad.com.

This story about Palestinian American students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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