This story about suspensions for truancy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter and the AZCIR newsletter.

PHOENIX — Guadalupe Hernandez’s attendance problems started in kindergarten.

The boy, who has two attention disorders and oppositional defiant disorder, often refused to sit still for circle time. He also experienced separation anxiety while away from his grandmother, Frances Yduarte, who raised him. He’d spend his days distracted from lessons, wishing he was home with her.

Guadalupe started asking Yduarte, whom he calls mama, to let him skip school. Frequently, she did. Eventually, school administrators responded to his absences with punishment: Guadalupe said they gave him an in-school suspension, keeping him away from his classmates for an entire day. The next year, in first grade, he said administrators escalated the punishment to an out-of-school suspension, temporarily barring him from school altogether.

To Yduarte and Guadalupe, the discipline didn’t make any sense. She was struggling to get him to class, and now the school was telling her not to bother.

“They should have talked to me,” said Guadalupe, now 13, “instead of just coming to conclusions and straight up suspending me.”

Suspending students for missing class — whether it’s because they showed up late, cut midday or were absent from school entirely — is a controversial tactic. At least 11 states fully ban the practice, and six more prohibit out-of-school suspensions to some extent for attendance violations.

That leaves schools in much of the country, including Arizona, free to punish most students for missing learning time by forcing them to miss even more. Yet the scope of that practice is largely hidden: The federal government doesn’t collect detailed data on why schools suspend students, and most states don’t, either.

Arizona collects limited discipline data from its districts. But a first-of-its-kind analysis by The Hechinger Report and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting has found that attendance-related suspensions are pervasive, in some districts accounting for more than half of all in-school suspensions.

Related: How the pandemic has altered school discipline – perhaps forever

Hechinger and AZCIR obtained, through public records requests, data from 150-plus districts and charter networks that educate about 61 percent of Arizona’s 1.1 million public school students. The majority had suspended students for attendance-related violations, collectively assigning nearly 47,000 suspensions over the past five school years. Of those, 1 in 5 were out-of-school suspensions. Totals for the full public school population are likely much higher, given that almost 250 school systems failed to produce comprehensive data — or any data at all — under Arizona public records law.

Among districts in the Hechinger/AZCIR sample that suspended for attendance, missing class led to 10 percent of all suspensions, resulting in tens of thousands of additional missed days of school. A deeper analysis of 20 districts that provided extensive demographic data revealed Black and Hispanic students frequently received a disproportionate share of these suspensions.

Students may miss class for any number of reasons, including transportation problems, family responsibilities or disengagement from school. Suspending them, experts say, not only fails to remedy these underlying challenges but, as with Guadalupe, can lead to further disengagement and worsen the attendance problems the discipline was meant to address.

Suspensions can also contribute to new problems, such as lower academic performance and higher dropout rates. The consequences can extend beyond high school, researchers have found, with suspensions linked to lower college enrollment rates and increased involvement with the criminal justice system. Nationwide, critics of the punishment cite missed class time as a key problem with it, and the U.S. Department of Education now tracks days lost to out-of-school suspensions.

“If a child is struggling to get to school or class and this is the issue, then removing them from the place that we want them to be is really counterintuitive,” said Anna Warmbrand, director of student relations for Tucson Unified School District, where district policy prohibits out-of-school suspensions for attendance violations alone.

But many districts continue to suspend kids for missing school, not just for dayslong absences but also for showing up a few minutes late to class, the 11-month Hechinger/AZCIR investigation found. In conversations with more than 75 students in two Arizona districts that frequently suspend for attendance violations, kids described how administrators mete out the punishment routinely.

Richie Taylor, a spokesman for the Arizona Department of Education, noted that state statute generally allows school boards to set their own rules when it comes to discipline. But after reviewing preliminary Hechinger/AZCIR findings, he suggested it may be time to examine what he called “state policies, or lack thereof, that lead to overly punitive disciplinary actions related to attendance and result in more time spent by students out of the classroom.”

“If the past few years have taught us anything,” Taylor said of the pandemic and its aftermath, “it is that regular in-person learning is critical to a student’s academic success.”

For years, it was a battle getting Guadalupe to his Phoenix elementary school in the Washington Elementary School District. Yduarte said she would wake him up, pull the blankets off him and tell him it was time to go. Sometimes, he’d negotiate: “I’ll go at 10,” or “I’ll go at lunchtime.” Sometimes, he’d plead: “Get me out early, mama — please, please get me out early.” Other times, he’d just lie there in silence.

“That was a daily thing for him,” Yduarte said.

Guadalupe missed so much school that, when he did show up, he couldn’t follow what was happening in class.

“Most of the things that we were learning, I didn’t understand, and I wasn’t getting much help,” Guadalupe said. “I just didn’t feel comfortable coming to school anymore.”

Guadalupe remembers a two-day out-of-school suspension in first grade. It was the first time the school had punished him by forcing him to stay home, he said. He was chastened for a day, returning to school as instructed when his suspension was over. But the effect didn’t last. He didn’t go the following day. The suspension, he said, made him want to go to school even less.

The district declined to comment on his case, citing federal student privacy laws, but a spokesperson, Pam Horton, said it generally does not suspend students for attendance violations. Data provided by the district shows that it has, however, issued suspensions for attendance issues — at least 650 over the past four school years.

Related: Students can’t learn if they don’t show up at school

Under Arizona law, students are considered truant if they miss at least one class period without a valid excuse. The law defines excessive absences as missing 10 percent of school days or more, a level more widely referred to as chronic absenteeism. State statute allows districts to set their own punishments for missing school and suggests a range of consequences for chronically absent students, including failing a subject, failing a grade level, suspension and expulsion.

Districts and charters use a mix of approaches to address absenteeism, the Hechinger/AZCIR investigation found, including warnings, parent conferences, detentions, in-school suspensions and out-of-school suspensions. In a relatively small portion of cases, schools refer kids who are frequently absent to the courts for truancy, which can lead to criminal charges for children or their guardians.

Strategies for combating absenteeism can vary within a single school system. Several administrators contacted for this story said they did not realize how often certain schools in their districts were suspending kids for attendance violations.   

Arizona places pressure on schools to reduce chronic absenteeism, evaluating elementary and middle schools in part on the number of their students who miss at least 10 percent of school days. In fact, most states now expect districts to pay attention to this issue, informed by research that says an average of two absences per month can create a tipping point in early literacy, performance on standardized tests and dropout rates. But the Hechinger/AZCIR analysis indicates suspensions in many Arizona districts are compounding an absenteeism problem already exacerbated by the pandemic.

Colorado River Union High School District, near the Nevada border, is among the most punitive districts in the Hechinger/AZCIR sample. It serves fewer than 2,000 students but assigned 351 out-of-school suspensions for attendance-related violations over the past five school years. Most of those suspensions happened at Mohave High School.

Principal Gina Covert said the school has a homeless liaison and a psychologist intended to help students overcome barriers to their attendance, but “there are times when consequences have to happen.”

For the first few weeks of this school year, teachers and administrators were relatively lenient, she said, explaining school rules and guiding students who tested those rules back to class. But by late August, Covert said students without a hall pass received a suspension.

“We’ve been training them now for five weeks,” she said at the time. “They need to be where they’re supposed to be.” 

Related: When typical middle school antics mean suspensions, handcuffs or jail

Lucky Arvizo is principal of Somerton High School in the Yuma Union High School District, which serves about 11,000 students and handed out 535 attendance-related out-of-school suspensions over the past five years — one of only three districts issuing more of these suspensions than Covert’s. He described a similar policy of gradually escalating discipline and said he considers suspension in response to poor attendance a last resort.

“But when it does happen, the student thinks, ‘Oh, wow, this is more serious than I thought.’ And that behavior changes,” Arvizo said.

Several current and former school officials disagree. During a suspension, they said, students don’t get support to change bad habits, and they don’t get help with barriers that might keep them from school, such as family and work commitments. Suspensions similarly fail to address school-based issues that can contribute to poor attendance, like bullying or academic troubles.

Missing just two days of school per month has been tied to lower reading proficiency in third grade, lower math scores in middle school and higher dropout rates in high school.

Limited research exists on whether suspensions are an effective strategy for discouraging absenteeism. One study found that while kids who received out-of-school suspensions for truancy were less likely to be truant again in the short term, repeated use of suspensions actually led to greater absenteeism in the long term.

That absenteeism can have lasting consequences: Missing just two days of school per month has been tied to lower reading proficiency in third grade, lower math scores in middle school and higher dropout rates in high school. Meanwhile, the growing body of research on suspensions more generally shows they harm kids and their learning, leading to growing calls to address misbehavior in ways that keep students in class.

Terri Martinez-McGraw, executive director of the National Center for School Engagement, says suspensions are counterproductive. Her group counsels schools to address absenteeism with problem-solving, working with students to identify exactly why they’re missing school and addressing those root causes.

“Our kids have the answer,” Martinez-McGraw said. “If we sit down and talk to them about their behavior, they’re going to let us know the whys and the whats and how we can get that behavior changed.”

In Guadalupe’s case, suspensions added to his time out of class, while doing nothing to change his academic trajectory.

Related: A third of public school children were chronically absent after classrooms re-opened, advocacy group says

Yduarte said Guadalupe was consistently failing all his classes. He struggled to read and do grade-level math and couldn’t follow what was being taught in science and social studies.  

Yduarte said she tried to convince the school to give him extra services to help him control his behavior and catch up on his work, but the help was intermittent. When he was given more one-on-one attention, he would go to school more willingly, she said. But when he didn’t get that extra help, he’d go back to begging to stay home.

“What they never understood,” Yduarte said, “was because he hadn’t been in school for so long, he didn’t know what was going on at school, he didn’t know his work, and there was nobody there to help him with it.”

Dysart Unified School District serves about 23,000 students across 140 square miles of Maricopa County, its sprawling campuses dotting the dry valley terrain. The district handed out nearly 12,000 attendance-related suspensions over the five-year period reviewed.

During the 2018-19 school year, the last full year before COVID, Dysart suspended students nearly 3,500 times for being late to class. During the roller coaster of 2020-21, school leaders suspended students more than 1,000 times for being late, according to the district’s data. In total, over the past five years,nearly 60 percent of all in-school suspensions in the district were for attendance violations. (This includes single-period or half-day suspensions.)

It’s not hard to find Dysart High School students who’ve been suspended for being late. Most students have six classes each day, 180 days of the year, providing more than 1,000 chances to rack up a tardy. School policy indicates six tardies lead to a one-day in-school suspension. Three more lead to a three-day stint in the suspension room, where students are expected to stay quiet. They can work on assignments or, as one sophomore put it, stare at a wall.

Five Dysart students who had been suspended for being late to class said various circumstances contributed to their tardiness. One said she was suspended when her school bus arrived late, while two others were suspended after relatives dropped them off after the bell. Two more students said they overslept or lost track of time. A sixth said her friend was suspended for missing class while in the school bathroom dealing with her menstrual cycle. She had blood on her clothes and spent unexcused time cleaning herself up.

Another student, whose name is being withheld due to privacy concerns, described the school’s suspension policy for tardiness as “stupid.”

“If you’re late in one class, and it’s repeated,” she said, “I feel like they shouldn’t take your learning away from your other classes, because then you’ll fall behind.”

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

District officials said they could not comment on individual suspensions. But Renee Ryon, Dysart Unified’s director of communications, said students would only get suspended after a late bus arrival if they didn’t “promptly report to class.” And she defended the district’s suspension policy for repeated tardies.

“While it may seem odd to take students out of class in response to attendance issues, it is important to remember that it is also a safety issue if students aren’t where they should be during class time,” Ryon said. “We take safety very seriously and must be able to account for each student throughout the day.”

Still, advocates say schools should address the root causes of absenteeism rather than resort to disciplinary action. Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of the national nonprofit Attendance Works, urges schools to identify the barriers keeping students from class — including transportation issues, family instability, bullying, mental health problems and academic struggles — and offer solutions like bus passes, counseling, tutoring and other support to reengage students and keep them in class.

Students simply can’t benefit from instruction and opportunities in the classroom, Chang said, if they’re not there.

DaMarion Green, 16, said he has gotten approximately four in-school suspensions for arriving late to first period, all at Dysart High School, where he is a sophomore. Each time, he slipped behind in his classes without access to his teachers.

“That’s the whole point of a teacher, is to give you help,” DaMarion said. In the suspension room, he said, he couldn’t ask any questions. “They just want you to be quiet.” 

Though Arizona largely leaves disciplinary policy decisions to districts and charters, state legislators can, and do, intervene when they want to ban or limit certain punitive practices.

By the start of the 2021-22 school year, for example, lawmakers had stepped in to stop schools from suspending kids in kindergarten through fourth grade for all but the most serious disciplinary infractions — a move that should have indirectly eliminated attendance-related suspensions for the state’s youngest learners. But the law did not establish a state-level process for enforcement.  

Indeed, the Hechinger/AZCIR analysis suggests some districts may be flouting it. Phoenix-based Wilson Elementary School District, for instance, assigned eight out-of-school suspensions and 26 in-school suspensions to its youngest students for missing school between September and December of 2021, according to its own records. (Only a handful of districts provided discipline data to The Hechinger Report and AZCIR in a format that tracked student grade level along with suspension type.)

Superintendent Ernest Rose, who moved to Wilson from Tucson Unified in 2021, doesn’t defend the suspensions. After noticing an overreliance on suspensions in general, he said, he introduced a new code of conduct in January that discourages suspending kids for attendance violations, among other changes.

“It doesn’t make sense to punish someone for attendance by sending them home,” Rose said, adding that the change required a shift in mindset among district staff.

Related: Why is it so hard to stop suspending kindergartners?

Darrell Hill, policy director for the ACLU of Arizona, said advocates previously pushed for legislation explicitly targeting schools’ ability to suspend students because of excessive or unexcused absences, but conversations stalled. And while he still supports a law to end the practice, he also wants policymakers to give educators and administrators more resources to help struggling students.

“Schools haven’t been equipped to deal with these issues in any way but a suspension or expulsion,” Hill said. “So … they rely on exclusionary discipline even when it is clearly detrimental to the students they’re serving.”

In Guadalupe’s case, his attendance issues led to even more extreme consequences. While Yduarte said she remains his legal guardian, Guadalupe now lives with a foster family southeast of Phoenix. He was placed in foster care in large part due to his many absences from school while living with Yduarte. But the move came with a bevy of supports.

At his new public school in Chandler, Guadalupe said he gets counseling and after-school tutoring, and his doctors have finally settled on medication that helps him control his behavior disorders. He qualified for special education services shortly before moving, and the new supports have contributed to a turnaround: Guadalupe said he feels caught up academically, and he goes to school consistently.

Both Guadalupe and Yduarte hope the boy will soon be able to move back home.

Yduarte has a nagging worry that if he ends up in another school that responds to absenteeism with suspensions rather than supports, he’ll get off track again. But Guadalupe assures her he’ll be able to maintain his momentum at any school.

Yduarte remains cautious: “You’ll try.”

Fazil Khan contributed data analysis to this report.

This story about suspensions for truancy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter and the AZCIR newsletter.

The post When the punishment is the same as the crime: Suspended for missing class appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related: What happens once school resource officers leave schools?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caroline Preston contributed reporting to this story.

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

The post Student protests prompted schools to remove police. Now some districts are bringing them back appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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

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

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

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

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

But there are also new headaches.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cedar, sixth grader, Bozeman Online Charter School   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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EVERETT, Wash. — Over the past few months, Nathan Roberts has witnessed dozens of substitute teachers stumble through their first days at Penny Creek Elementary School.

He’s watched them circle the parking lot outside, wondering whether to leave their car in a visitor or employee spot. He’s encountered subs in the hallway, looking for the library or a place to make copies of classwork. And he’s noticed when they struggle to remember a kid’s name while taking attendance or praising students for good work.

Roberts is a substitute, too, but by now he knows his way around campus. Unlike the other subs — many of them parent volunteers or people looking for a little extra work — he’s a full-time, salaried employee with health benefits and a long-term contract with Everett Public Schools, north of Seattle. In January, the school district hired Roberts and about two dozen other “floaters” as part of a broader effort to improve the quality of substitute teaching and alleviate a staffing crunch that grew dire during this winter’s Covid-19 surge.

“Instead of trying to find a sub every single morning, or bringing in administration, I can step in for the entire week and give those kids some consistency,” Roberts said. “It’s so much better when I actually know the kid’s name and a little bit about their learning style or how to help when they’re struggling.”

Roberts represents one example of how the recent coronavirus wave prompted school districts to reconsider their relationship with — and reliance on — substitute teachers. Much like bus drivers and custodians, substitutes have long been among the lowest-paid workers in education but remain critical to keeping schools open day to day. And they have a significant impact on student learning: Studies have linked teacher absences and uncertified, less trained subs to declines in student achievement.

Even before Covid, the U.S. faced a critical shortage of substitutes. Schools were unable to cover  teacher absences some 20 percent of the time in 2018-19, according to the Frontline Research and Learning Institute, a research firm. Black and Hispanic students and students living in poverty were most likely to have to go without substitutes, according to a 2020 study from the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.

Covid made a bad situation worse. Some 95 percent of district leaders reported in a recent  survey that the pandemic caused a shortage of substitute teachers. And while the winter’s omicron wave has passed, the substitute staffing crunch isn’t going away.

1 in 5 — how many classes with absent teachers went unfilled in schools in 2018-19, before the pandemic

Teachers will continue to get sick and miss class even as the coronavirus goes from pandemic to endemic, and older, retired educators — who in normal times regularly serve as subs — might still be wary of stepping onto campuses depending on masking or vaccination mandates. Principals, meanwhile, face increasing competition for temporary workers from the growing gig economy and an abundance of jobs in other fields.

The federal government provided billions of dollars to help schools recover from Covid, and some tapped that money for temporary stipends to attract new substitutes. But the stakes to find more permanent solutions are high.

“Teachers will continue to be absent, so we need to have a smarter way to cover those absences,” said Jessie Weiser, director of capacity building with Substantial Classrooms, a national nonprofit that works with school districts to improve the substitute experience. “Substitute teachers are an essential part of education. They’re not just a Plan B or an afterthought.”

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

When omicron hit the U.S. in December, policymakers and education leaders took desperate measures to shore up the pool of eligible substitutes. School district administrators dusted off their teaching certificates to step in for absent educators. Some states tried to entice state employees and police officers into schools. And at least one governor called on National Guard members to volunteer as warm bodies in the front of classrooms.

Several states that previously required substitutes to have a bachelor’s degree lowered that threshold and now allow candidates with only a high school diploma to apply for emergency certification. That has raised questions about the quality of learning that students receive, especially at a time when disadvantaged students need even more help to make up instruction disrupted by the pandemic.

Carole Basile, dean of Arizona State University’s teachers college, criticized lowering the bar for temporary teachers. Her state allows substitutes with only high school diplomas to receive emergency certification and recently doubled to two years the length of those emergency licenses. 

“A lot of substitutes only need a high school diploma and know very little about education,” Basile said. “That’s a crapshoot, really, for kids.”

Other places are offering pay bumps to substitutes. Around 60 percent of large school districts surveyed by the National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy group, increased pay for subs during the pandemic. The survey found substitutes on average got a raise of 18.5 percent — which the council described as “an unprecedented increase” in the past decade.

And a few districts, including Everett, provided health benefits to subs. That made a difference for Roberts, who had access to both health coverage and a retirement account from his first day as a floater.

“With subbing, you [usually] don’t get those benefits. You kind of have to take care of yourself,” Roberts said. “Having health insurance is a big deal during a pandemic.”

Weiser, with Substantial Classrooms, said it’s important for school leaders to consider what would make taking over a classroom for a full day more attractive than other, more flexible short-term gigs like driving for a ride-sharing service or delivering meals. Benefits may be one answer.

“How can we [schools] design jobs that are full-time, site-based, benefited roles that give people the stability that they may be craving … and attract a different group of people?” Weiser asked.

Related: Teacher licensing red tape limits teachers and schools

The Everett district’s decision to hire floaters and offer them benefits was part of a broader strategy born out of crisis. Last fall, in the district, nearly half of teacher absences went unfilled, compared with 26 percent in fall 2019. Administrators, principals, librarians and other staff members regularly covered those classrooms. Teachers collected extra stipends to sacrifice their planning periods to cover for a missing colleague. “Now hiring” signs outside the schools advertised critical job openings, including custodians, nurses and substitutes.

The district of 20,000 students — where 42 percent come from low-income households, 21 percent are Hispanic and 5 percent are Black — eventually had to resort to hiring substitutes who had only emergency certification. (In Washington state, districts can apply to hire emergency substitutes who have a bachelor’s degree but no formal education training.)

In January, the district also upped its daily pay — from $200 to $250 — for all substitutes who worked on Mondays or Fridays, the most common days for teachers to call out. And it created an extra stipend for those who work at least 15 days every month until summer break. Still, that wasn’t enough once the highly contagious omicron variant started spreading.

In the fall the superintendent charged a task force with overhauling the district’s approach to recruiting, placing and training substitutes. Its recommendations included limiting training that would require subs to fill in and reaching out to retired teachers, as well as hiring substitute floaters. Chad Golden, executive director of human resources, also added a position in his office dedicated to recruiting substitutes.

Golden said in March that the floater program had helped the district weather omicron, but no decision had been made on whether to continue funding that program after the pandemic ebbs. Currently, the district is using federal Covid relief dollars to pay those substitutes, but Golden said the district’s general budget could cover the program in the future — if it helps improve coverage rates for absent teachers and school administrators report positive feedback.

Related: Why we could soon lose even more Black teachers

As Everett waits to see if its efforts make a difference, the Central Falls School District in Rhode Island credits its survival during the omicron surge to changes it made to substitute teaching six years ago.

Jay Midwood, chief of human capital for the district, recalled his thinking at the time.

“The role of the substitute teacher was obsolete,” he said. “It just wasn’t working anymore. The days of just getting a warm body or person in there just didn’t impact teaching or learning in the way we know our kids needed it to be.”

The district, meanwhile, wanted to go beyond ensuring that high-quality instruction continued in the absence of a certified teacher. Midwood hoped to create a stable corps of substitutes while preparing them to become teachers.

In 2016, the district launched a teaching fellowship program to provide yearlong contracts to about 30 aspiring teachers who are placed in its six schools. They can earn a higher daily rate than traditional substitutes, or put the extra amount toward health benefits. The district also provides individual coaching for the fellows and pays them a stipend to attend after-school training.

“We want them to see that they’re not just a fish swimming around and nobody knows who they are,” Midwood said. “We want them to know we’re investing in them.”

The fellowship is budget neutral: The district covers the extra pay for each fellow by diverting what it would have offered to teachers giving up their planning periods. Midwood credited the fellows for “keeping us above water” during the omicron surge, when about 20 percent of the district’s staff on average were calling out each day.

The program has also succeeded in creating a pipeline of potential educators who live in the same neighborhoods as Central Falls families. (About 86 percent of the roughly 2,800 Central Falls students are economically disadvantaged, according to state data; 53 percent are Hispanic and 16 percent Black.) The district so far has hired 21 former fellows as full-time teachers, and another 20 have moved on to teach in neighboring districts.

Related: Who wants to lead America’s school districts? Anyone? Anyone?

Back in Washington state, Seattle Public Schools has also tried to use substitute teaching as a way to both fill immediate needs and train future teachers. Through its Academy for Rising Educators, launched in 2019, teachers-in-training take night and weekend classes at local colleges or universities to study for their certification and a guaranteed teaching placement in the city’s schools. In the meantime, they serve as substitutes: About 60 substitutes hired in January come from the academy or similar programs, according to The Seattle Times.

Southeast of Seattle, the growing Tahoma School District, like Everett, hired full-time, roving substitutes to help with its immediate crisis. Administrators there also filled in for absent teachers — and returned to the central office with lessons about the reality of substitute teaching in Tahoma schools.

“It’s so much better when I actually know the kid’s name.”

Nathan Roberts, substitute teacher, Everett Public Schools

It had been 16 years since Kimberly Allison, the district’s instructional technology coordinator, had been in the classroom as a teacher. And after subbing for a week last winter, she started to sympathize with substitutes who get a call at 7 a.m. to report to school by 8 a.m.

“What can we do to make this better?” she remembered asking herself. “How do we get them to want to come back? When you really start looking at the substitute experience, it’s pretty abysmal.”

Recently, the district set a cap on how many teachers can be out at once for mandatory training. It also sent templates of lesson plans that teachers can leave for their temporary replacements. Allison hopes that next year, the district might offer stipends for substitutes to take additional training on classroom management and basic instructional skills.

“We’ve had the best of intentions, but a lot of stuff just never came to fruition,” she said. “This crisis really helped catapult us in the right direction.”

Related: When schools reopen, we may not have enough teachers

By late March, the students and staff at Penny Creek had won Nathan Roberts over.

Roberts, 28, had started applying for full-time teaching jobs earlier that month after finishing a master’s degree in education at Western Governors University, an online college. He added Penny Creek to the top of his list.

“I would love to stay here if a position’s open,” he said. “Everyone’s really supportive and professional. I know the kids now. They’re easier to work with.”

This story about substitutes 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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OAKLAND, Calif. — After schools went remote in 2020, Jessica Ramos spent hours that spring and summer sitting on a bench in front of her local Oakland Public Library branch in the vibrant and diverse Dimond District. Ramos would connect to the library’s Wi-Fi — sometimes on her cellphone, sometimes using her family’s only laptop — to complete assignments and submit essays or tests for her classes at Skyline High School.

Ramos, used to texting quickly, was able to do simple assignments online, so at first her schoolwork was very easy. Then came the five-page papers for her two AP classes. “It was a hassle,” she said. “I was like, this is not for me.”

Ramos’ parents promised to buy her a laptop eventually, but bills mounted and it wasn’t in the family’s budget. Ramos knew there were many kids like her, eager to keep up with school but lacking the technology to do so. To her, it was “heartbreaking.”

“We have this huge digital divide that’s making it hard for [students] to get their education,” she said.

At the start of the pandemic, only 12 percent of low-income students, and 25 percent of all students, in Oakland’s public schools had devices at home and a strong internet connection. David Silver, the director of education for the mayor’s office, said people talked about the digital divide, but there had never been enough energy to tackle it. Once the pandemic hit, suddenly everyone was paying attention, said Silver, a former Oakland public school teacher and principal.

“You don’t have a computer, you don’t have internet, you can’t even access distance learning,” Silver said. “The 50,000 kids that are in Oakland public schools cannot actually go to school if they don’t have internet and computers. We need to change that.”

Now, two years into the pandemic, Oakland has been able to connect 98 percent of the students in the district. As of February, the city had provided nearly 36,000 laptops and more than 11,500 hot spots to low-income public school students. While some students remain unconnected, Oakland’s effort has emerged as an example of how to tackle a citywide digital divide. 

“We were using the crisis as an opportunity to address a moral wrong that needs to be changed forever, not just during the pandemic,” Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said. “We can’t afford not to.”

RELATED: Racial segregation is one reason some families have internet access and others don’t, new research finds

City leaders, including Mayor Schaaf, say a partnership among the district, the mayor’s office, the Oakland Public Education Fund, the nonprofit Tech Exchange, Oakland Promise and other community-based organizations is behind Oakland’s success. Oakland’s partnership, known as #OaklandUndivided, launched in May 2020. The ambitious goal: close the city’s digital divide for good by providing all K-12 public school students in Oakland with a computer they could keep, a reliable internet connection and ongoing, multicultural tech support in languages families use.

“Each of these partners were doing their individual work, but we had never been working together,” Mayor Schaaf said. “That’s what Covid inspired us to do to really accelerate — not just having computers be at schools, but having them in the homes. Not just so students could keep learning during the shutdown, but so that the whole family had access to information and resources.”

“We [didn’t] want this to be a Band-Aid fix,” said Jordan Mickens, a Leadership for Educational Equity public policy fellow who served as #OaklandUndivided’s project manager until August 2021.

Oakland has been able to connect 98 percent of the students in the district.

While most schools across the country are fully back in person, students continue to struggle to complete homework assignments or participate in remote learning because they lack adequate internet service and access to a computer at home — a phenomenon commonly referred to as the “homework gap.” According to a 2021 report from the think tank New America, 1 in 8 children from low-income families don’t have a computer at home, while 1 in 7 lack access to broadband internet.

“The homework gap isn’t new. It’s just been exacerbated by the pandemic,” said Rebeca Shackleford, the director of federal government relations at All4Ed, an education advocacy nonprofit. “There’s kids who sit in McDonald’s parking lots to be able to do their homework, and that’s pretty tragic.”

People have to remember “the pandemic isn’t over,” she said. Disruptions will continue when students have to quarantine after classmates test positive for Covid-19. Natural disasters, exacerbated by climate change, are also shuttering schools with more frequency. When schools are closed, she said, students “still have to do their schoolwork; they still need access to the internet at home.”

efore the pandemic, the digital divide was often considered a rural problem. But the chaotic effort to get students online during Covid school closures made clear the issue affects Americans living in all kinds of places. A recent study from EducationSuperHighway, a nonprofit that works with school districts to help close the digital divide, found that affordability was the largest contributing factor.

Though only about 40 miles north of Silicon Valley, home to technology giants such as Google and Apple, Oakland was deeply underconnected when the pandemic shuttered its schools. When the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) shut down, its 83 district-run schools and 33 charter schools served more than 49,000 students. Kyla Johnson-Trammell, Oakland’s superintendent, said the first couple of months of the pandemic were a scramble.

“It was all hands on deck. We piecemealed as much as we could in March and April 2020,” she said. Still, she added, there were “just so many stories of kids using their cellphones to complete assignments, to research, or having to figure out how to get to public libraries in order to access devices.”

The district handed out its existing stockpile of loaner devices and hot spots to as many students as possible, said Preston Thomas, OUSD’s chief systems and services officer.

Many of the devices were already 4 to 5 years old. Because the district had been under significant financial pressures for the five years prior to the pandemic, “we hadn’t really invested in our infrastructure around technology,” Thomas said.

The district lacked a system for tracking how many students weren’t logging on to classes for lack of a working computer, tablet or internet connection at home.  “We didn’t even have infrastructure on tracking devices,” Thomas said. The district relied on individual schools to call families, while its department of research, assessment and data conducted surveys at individual school sites to find out whether families had an internet connection and computer access.

“Nothing was coordinated,” Thomas said. “Everybody was on the ground doing their absolute best to make sure that kids had access to technology, but it was piecemeal.”

Just before the pandemic, OUSD had begun to identify tech leads at each school, mostly teachers with technology know-how. Once the pandemic hit, the district created the position of distance learning lead, tasked with making sure all students had computers and hot spots. It helped, Thomas said, that these educators “had technological understanding at their school sites, had the ear of teachers at the school site, and could communicate for their community.”

RELATED: Hot spots no silver bullet for rural remote learning

Jen Bender is an instructional teacher leader and technology coordinator at Castlemont High School, in a historically under-resourced neighborhood in East Oakland. Helping the school with its technology needs had been only a small part of her job before the pandemic. In April 2020, Bender stepped in as the school’s distance learning lead, and finding devices for students became her full-time role.

Bender was fortunate in that many Castlemont students already had school devices when the pandemic hit. Still, by the end of that April, she had handed out every last device on campus, even hunting down lost Chromebooks in the process, and some students, including new immigrant students, were still empty-handed.

In the beginning, schools asked students to come get a device if they didn’t have one. But public transportation was disrupted as the state began to shelter in place, and some students and parents had no way to get to school. Other students’ family members were essential workers who couldn’t make it to school during the school day. The newcomers who didn’t speak English were the hardest to reach.

“We realized we had to start really targeting families,” Bender said. The district pulled in community workers who spoke Spanish and Mam, a Mayan language, and “had them make individual phone calls to families to get them to come in and pick up those devices.”

Bender said calling didn’t always help, especially if a family was moving or in temporary housing.  School leaders sent teachers and staff members with computers to students’ homes. Even then, Bender said, they had “very little success, because addresses had shifted.”

As May arrived, district administrators realized that relying on the distance learning leads to understand what was happening on the ground was insufficient, Thomas said.  “We didn’t have a centralized way to track devices for students,” he said. “Like, we had no idea. Every school had their individual Google spreadsheet, and there wasn’t a unifying place where any of us could look.”

“This is truly a once-in-a-generation moment to close the digital divide and one that has united our city.”

Patrick Messac, #OaklandUndivided project manager

District leaders knew they couldn’t confront a problem as massive as the digital divide in Oakland on their own; they were already stretched thin addressing students’ other basic needs, including rising food insecurity.

Johnson-Trammell, the superintendent, and Mayor Schaaf had several conversations about how to tackle technology access and connectivity. As the pandemic unfolded, city officials also saw how deeply the lack of technology access impacted all of Oakland. Almost every resource and piece of information about Covid-19, including where to get food and how to apply for unemployment benefits, was being provided digitally.

“All the information was on the internet. And I imagined, for a minute, what a mother must feel like who didn’t have an internet connection or a computer,” Mayor Schaaf said. “It was so much bigger than just education. It was literally survival for Oakland families. Technology was the lifeline to information.”

Jordan Mickens, who spent his first year as a teacher at Castlemont High School in 2014, said he vividly remembers the technology divide his students faced compared with those in the wealthy areas surrounding Oakland. In 2017, he left teaching to work in education technology at Clever, a digital platform for schools. But soon after the pandemic started, the crisis in schools drew him back to working more directly to support students in Oakland, and he became a public policy fellow on the mayor’s education team.

Silver and Thomas had been working to help Johnson-Trammell and Mayor Schaaf come up with an idea for getting a better handle on the communities left out of remote learning: by tapping into the relationships the city and the school district had with various community-based nonprofits already providing direct services in the neighborhoods they needed to reach. Mickens jumped at the opportunity to come on board when the city hired him to run the new #OaklandUndivided initiative to close the digital divide in June 2020.

The first thing the group did, Mickens said, was to start tracking the number of public school students in Oakland who already had a device and internet service, and those who didn’t. In August 2020, they launched a “Tech Check” survey to collect that data. The new survey was created to be more comprehensive than the initial individual school-led surveys, and made a point of not relying on yes or no questions. The survey asked families if all students at home had devices of their own; whether those devices were loans from a school or family-owned; and whether the family was connected to the internet and, if so, how: via broadband, mobile phone or otherwise.

By May 2021, the campaign had accounted for roughly 70 percent of all Oakland public school students through the survey. Going in, the #OaklandUndivided team had anticipated about 25,000 students would need devices, internet or both, based on the earlier school surveys and census data. The Tech Check survey “opened our eyes,” Mickens said.

Based on the survey results, #OaklandUndivided estimated that 75 percent of K-12 public school students, or almost 40,000, were either disconnected or underconnected, with inadequate internet access.

As another part of the information-gathering effort, #OaklandUndivided tapped into data from the online learning platforms schools were using — Google Classroom and Clever — to see which students were logging in through a computer or mobile phone to access online resources. By October 2020, the district had created a public-facing tech access dashboard to track student access to computers and broadband, and also make the campaign’s effort more transparent to the community and funders, according to Mickens.

Meanwhile, the #OaklandUndivided leadership team, made up of staff employed by multiple agencies in the partnership, met weekly and launched a fundraising campaign with a goal of $12.5 million to provide the initial devices and hot spots. The campaign was able to bring in big donors like Twitter’s co-founder and then CEO Jack Dorsey, who pledged $10 million to help meet the goal. As funding came in, the next step was to buy the Chromebooks and hot spots. There the campaign relied on Tech Exchange, an Oakland-based nonprofit that has been working on closing the city’s digital divide for more than two decades.

The organization has a warehouse and a public-facing Tech Hub that provides residents with free tech support and computer and digital literacy training, as well as refurbishment services. It also offers training on site at public housing complexes. Tech Exchange trains people from the surrounding communities; hires locals to provide its tech services; and hosts interns from Oakland high schools, who sometimes come back to work for the organization.

Tech Exchange’s role was to put in orders for the devices and get the equipment ready for students. By March 16, 2021 — a year after school closures in Oakland — the partnership had handed out 25,000 Chromebooks to low-income students.

Mickens said distributing the devices — which students could keep permanently — was an experience he will never forget. When he taught at Castlemont in 2014, the school had only one Chromebook cart. “To go from that, to now giving every student their own computer … was incredible to be a part of,” he said.

Tech Exchange became an essential partner in not only getting the devices, but also providing the “culturally competent” tech support that had been promised as part of the #OaklandUndivided mission. Tech Exchange was the “secret sauce” of the initiative, Mickens said.

RELATED: A parent-led effort to close the digital divide  

In July 2020, the #OaklandUndivided campaign team brought in more community-based organizations, including the Latino Education Network and the Oakland branch of the NAACP. It also added parent and student liaisons who would have a voice in the leadership of the project. High school students including Jessica Ramos, who was recruited by David Silver, her former principal, were invited as student liaisons to help with engagement efforts.

“Community-based organizations, those folks … really have the relationships [with] the Latino/Latina community, the Yemeni community, the African American community,” Johnson-Trammell said. “Typically, without that level of partnership, it’s hard for us as a district to really make sure we’re getting and serving the needs of the most vulnerable.”

The Oakland Reach, a parent-led advocacy group that works with underserved communities, also joined the partnership. Keta Brown, a co-founder of the group, eventually became co-chair of #OaklandUndivided’s family engagement team. The team got the word out about the new initiative and also helped the coalition identify weak points, including engaging with Black parents.

One of those parents was Bernadette Fenceroy, who has four children in Oakland public schools. Early in the pandemic, they relied on one loaner device and a hot spot that worked sporadically. No one got much learning done, she said.

“It is hard when you have some kids that are on the phone and you can’t get all your information,” Fenceroy said. “And a lot of times [my child] has tutoring. You can’t do it on your phone and have to do it on a laptop or a desktop.”

Fenceroy, who met Brown through the Oakland Reach, had a hard time getting support from her kids’ schools for remote learning during the first year of the pandemic. Brown told her to take the Tech Check survey to see if her family qualified for free devices.

When Fenceroy finally got the call in May 2021 saying her kids’ permanent laptops were ready to be picked up, she almost couldn’t believe it. She took a picture of one device and called Brown: “I think I got it! I think I got the computer.”

Although her kids have devices now, Fenceroy hopes the district and #OaklandUndivided’s members don’t “just drop the ball,” she said.  She wants them to stay in touch, make sure the devices are working and let parents know who to call for help if they’re not.

At 10 o’clock on a bright Wednesday morning in May 2021, the blinds were still down at Tech Exchange’s Tech Hub, housed in a small office sandwiched between an apartment complex and an appliance store in Oakland. But inside, Samuel Aristondo, then Tech Exchange’s bilingual program coordinator, and two colleagues were already fixing devices and taking calls for tech support.

Aristondo spent more than an hour on the phone talking with a Spanish-speaking family new to the city, walking them through the Tech Check survey to get their free laptops. After he got off the phone, Aristondo still had a list of 300 to 400 students’ families to call. A majority of the families on the list who still remained unconnected were like the one Aristondo reached: They’d been in the U.S. for only a few weeks. Some weren’t aware their kids could get a free device or, if they had a device, didn’t understand how to log on to Google Classroom or use Zoom.

Aristondo, who is now Tech Hub’s operations manager, understands how hard it can be for some of these families, he said. He grew up in foster care after his parents were deported, and he was a first-generation college student. After he’s finished helping connect families with technology, he always asks them if they know where to get free food and medical help. “It’s more than just tech support,” he said.

“That is the secret of how to get folks connected. It’s not just blanketing devices and internet. It’s social work.”

Seth Hubbert, the former executive director of Tech Exchange

Since the launch of #OaklandUndivided, the Tech Hub office has been busier than usual, helping students, families and even teachers with their #OaklandUndivided devices. Tech Exchange employees have answered more than 10,000 tech support calls from community members in various languages, according to Mickens.

At 16, Kemish Rosales learned how to fix computers as an intern at Tech Exchange. He has worked there since graduating from nearby Fremont High School in 2013 and is now the Tech Hub coordinator​ for the nonprofit. Seeing kids’ smiles when he gives them computers, or the relief on a worried parent’s face when he answers a question, is why he’s never left this job, he said.

“We know the community, we are part of that community,” Rosales said. “We’re all local. That gives us a better understanding of who we’re helping.”

Tech Exchange employees like Rosales have been key to building trust and reaching out to some of the city’s Spanish-speaking community. Seth Hubbert, the former executive director of Tech Exchange, said it’s been critical to make sure that when partners reach out to families, they do so with language and culture in mind.

“That is the secret of how to get folks connected,” Hubbert said. “It’s not just blanketing devices and internet. It’s social work.”

Parents, especially those who may be undocumented, feel comfortable coming to Tech Exchange for help because “it gives them an ease of mind to [hear] familiar voices and [see] familiar faces,” said Rosales, who is a participant in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

The #OaklandUndivided project has evolved since its inception. With an influx of federal funding available to schools in response to the pandemic, Oakland is using the opportunity to strengthen the program. The district received nearly $130 million from the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund, in addition to money from the Emergency Connectivity Fund (ECF), a federal program that has helped schools and libraries provide internet access and connected devices to students and educators during the pandemic.

But those federal funds come with parameters. All the #OaklandUndivided devices handed out in the early days of the pandemic were permanent gifts to families; officials said this was important because a district-managed device has restrictions on its use. A permanent device could be useful to parents trying to access online resources or pursuing their own educations, or it could follow a student on to college.

The federal ESSER and ECF programs require that any device purchased be owned by the school or the district. So, since Aug. 1 of 2021, all the #OaklandUndivided devices going out have been loaners. While the district-lent devices will stay with the student for up to five years, the #OaklandUndivided initiative is still trying to keep its promise of providing permanent devices.

“Recognizing the importance of students owning a computer, we are working with Tech Exchange this year to distribute 4,800 refurbished computers to families who have no owned computer,” said Patrick Messac, the current #OaklandUndivided project manager.

The federal funding itself isn’t permanent. The ECF funding, which was originally set to expire this June, has recently been extended until June 30, 2023.  The ESSR funds expire in 2024. Kyleigh Nevis, the devices and operations lead for #OaklandUndivided and OUSD, said the Oakland program is planning for the future and may, for example, switch students on hot-spot plans over to T-Mobile’s Project 10Million, a national program providing free internet to underserved student households.

RELATED: Congress is cutting the funds that could have closed the homework gap

As of January, the #OaklandUndivided team said, 35,960 families of public school students had received a Chromebook or hot spot or both. Two percent of low-income students remain unconnected. Getting to them will be hard.

For those still “missing,” the district has made a push this year to focus on what it calls high-priority students: those most at risk and with the greatest need, and whom the program still hasn’t been able to reach. The coalition launched a simplified paper-based Tech Check survey, which is integrated into the back-to-school enrollment process. Students can also fill out the survey in class, to make it easier for families.

Messac said he and others on the team are working with the schools’ data tech leads — as the distance learning leads are now called — to identify those students through updated school rosters and call them.

“We’re just trying to find creative solutions to reach these hardest-to-reach students,” Messac said. As of December, the district had surveyed 6,953 students and handed out an additional 5,835 Chromebooks.

Truancy remains one of the main barriers in reaching out to those missing students, Messac said. Bender, data tech lead at Castlemont High School, has found it challenging to assess the home connectivity of some students because they aren’t coming to school often, or at all. The district’s office of digital equity and OUSD’s tech equity and access action team, created in 2020, have also been working to figure out why these students aren’t able to attend classes and connect them.

The Oakland district is currently facing a financial crisis, and John Sasaki, director of communications for OUSD, said it plans to close two schools.  Although #OaklandUndivided is a separate program run in partnership with the city that doesn’t rely entirely on funding from the district, the closings could complicate efforts down the road to reach out to students who aren’t connected yet. Messac said the program is working with the district to ensure that if students at the impacted school sites need digital access, those resources will be provided.

As the #OaklandUndivided project enters a new phase, the focus is on building infrastructure to support citywide connectivity by bringing high-speed broadband internet within five years to the estimated 36,951 unconnected households, whether or not they have children in the schools.

“It’s this goal that we believe is absolutely critical to closing the digital divide for good,” Messac said. Oakland launched OAK Wi-Fi, a broadband program, in late 2020 using $7.7 million from CARES Act funding. The program provides residents living in the most underconnected areas with free access to Wi-Fi across the city. In another local effort, the recently launched Town Link program will also improve access to digital literacy; and Oakland is getting help from the state to expand broadband infrastructure.

“This is truly a once-in-a-generation moment to close the digital divide and one that has united our city,” Messac said. “It’s going to take a lot of effort at the state and federal level as well, but our coalition will be active until we bring broadband to all of our families.”

#OaklandUndivided is also partnering with national nonprofits. In November, EducationSuperHighway announced that Oakland was the inaugural pilot city for its nationwide initiative to close the affordability gap. The partnership is deploying free Wi-Fi in low-income apartment buildings.

“Oakland has done a terrific job creating a public-private partnership to connect their unconnected,” said Evan Marwell, EducationSuperHighway’s CEO. “That was really an effective thing for a lot of students. It hasn’t been a perfect solution, but was a best-in-class effort [from] around the country.”

Jessica Ramos is now a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley, which provided her with a new laptop when she started classes. While immersed in college, meeting people and learning more about herself, she still makes time for Oakland. Ramos sits on the #OaklandUndivided leadership committee and helps connect students and their families to both the internet and the program. Watching the project grow “has been amazing,” she said.

Ramos wants other cities to use #OaklandUndivided’s model and expand on it to tackle the homework gap.

“With the pandemic, we all saw what we didn’t want to see. With the digital divide, it’s like one of the things that we think [is] so small, but in reality affects so many people,” said Ramos. “That’s what the pandemic brought, a light to all these problems that need to be solved.”

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

The post How one city closed the digital divide for nearly all its students appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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The ability to understand a child’s struggles — and then do or say just the right thing to help them through — is arguably the skill society prizes most in its teachers.

Books have been written about it. Movies have been made about it. Indeed, many assume all teachers are innately compassionate.

But educators at one university say compassion is something that can and should be taught. A new course, called Cultivating Compassion and Dignity in Ourselves and Our Schools, offered by the University of Colorado, Boulder, teaches the practice of compassion, and the philosophy that guides it.

The course, which has been through the university’s review process, was co-designed by a team of educators, researchers and “contemplative experts,” said Ashley Potvin, one of the project’s leaders and a research associate at the university’s Renée Crown Wellness Institute, an interdisciplinary team of academics dedicated to youth wellness.

In the course, teachers learn about techniques for “settling the mind” to allow for better focus and “setting an intention” to provide a higher goal before a difficult interaction. For example, before a meeting with parents a teacher is worried might be angry, the teacher would stop, take a deep breath, and set an intention to stay calm and find a solution for the child.

Finding calm and focus have not become easier in year three of pandemic schooling.

“It’s a hard time to be an educator right now,” Potvin said. “Folks are finding themselves coming to these kind of opportunities [to learn about compassion] in part because of burn-out and deep stress.”

To be compassionate means taking action to relieve suffering, said Potvin, who was a classroom teacher before becoming a researcher. She and others involved in the course see that focus as the key in teaching compassion as a framework for educators. Taking action moves teachers beyond just having empathy, which can be stifling when faced with crisis after crisis, to having agency.

“I believed in the work before I started, but now I’m living and breathing it,” said course co-author, Jovita Schiffer, the extended learning and community programs manager for the Boulder Valley School District and a consultant to the Crown Institute.

Schiffer said that teachers she knows have always exhibited immense compassion for their students. What she likes about the course she helped design is that it also helps teachers have compassion for themselves and for other adults. To do that, she said, is to recognize our “common humanity,” a key concept in the formal practice of compassion that holds we are all connected, regardless of skin color or professional status or any other social signifier.

“I think it’s easy to pick out what’s different between us and someone else, but when you start to look for the things that are the same, that’s where we find the connection with others and where compassion can occur,” Schiffer said.

Seeing someone else – a principal, a parent – make a mistake becomes a moment to recognize the vulnerability of a fellow human rather than a moment to criticize. And that’s as good for the person who observes the mistake as the person who makes it, Schiffer said.

“What I learned most is that compassion is wonderful to receive, but it’s just as great a gift, if not more, to give it,” she said. “It can be very fulfilling. It can bring peace. It’s a great way to counter stress.”

The course at the University of Colorado can be taken as a certificate course or “stacked” with other certificates offered by the school to add up to a master’s degree in teacher leadership. Enrollment is currently open.

This story about teaching compassion 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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When I first took on the role of president at the University of Montana nearly four years ago, my chief of staff mused that I’d need to draw upon a reservoir of endurance in the face of many tests ahead.

As a former U.S. Army Special Forces officer, I quipped, “I’ve lived for extended periods of time in places where I was surrounded by people who wanted to kill me.”

“Sure,” she replied. “But this is different. This is academia.”

Turns out she was right.

At the University of Montana, we have a vocal student body. If a protest hasn’t disrupted the rhythm of campus life in several months, I start to worry.

In fact, early in the morning on the day of my inauguration, students held a protest to express their concerns about the future of the humanities on campus. They sat on the steps of Main Hall where the inauguration was scheduled to take place just hours later.

As I walked to campus that morning, my chief of staff alerted me to the protest, because she knew I’d want to do what I believe leadership ought to do: show up. I walked directly to the steps of Main Hall, not to my office, and spoke with the students.

My job was neither to assume I understood anything about their concerns nor to ignore them; it was to endorse the act of protest by seriously listening; to expose myself to their criticism and concern, not protect myself from it.

Leading a university campus today demands an appreciation for the value of adversity and an ability to remain calm under fire, which can come at any moment from just about any direction, “friendly” and “enemy.”

The position of university president used to be a nice capstone to a successful career; now it’s what some call “the toughest job in the nation.”

Whether the superlative is accurate doesn’t really matter (I would argue for pediatric ICU nurse, personally) — this job is pretty darn tough. I admit I did not fully appreciate, before taking the job, the intense pressures that university presidents must endure, day in and day out.

Even without the bewildering challenges created by the pandemic, a university president must constantly scan the immediate surroundings and be ready to respond to just about anything — while sustaining the mental discipline to chart a long-term course and position the institution for enduring success. This requires agility, endurance and the ability to cultivate deep trust among your leadership team and across the campus.

Our job as leaders in higher education is not to quell dissent or resolve debate, but rather to sponsor that spark within our students. In short, we, the administration — the very embodiment of the status quo — are called to nurture and encourage those who seek to challenge us.

The skills needed for strong leadership in the academy are far more similar than I ever imagined to the skills I developed and relied upon in the military.

And yet there is a significant difference between the military and academia, one worth discussing and actively preserving.

My goal in the military was to accomplish our mission while protecting my soldiers and our partners from enemy fire. For a university president, there are also bullets (metaphorically speaking, thankfully) — but you must be willing to take those bullets and even, paradoxically, vigorously encourage them.

To put it mildly, that’s not something I was used to in the military.

For many leaders in higher education, students protesting across campus on a regular cadence is intimidating, and a sign that something is amiss. It can feel like an attack, and sometimes it even gets personal.

But a vocal and engaged student body is exactly what defines our flagship university. Woven into the very fabric of our campus is the idea that the student body should be outspoken, with their eyes on a future they must shape.

At the University of Montana, our motto is “Lux et Veritas,” Latin for “truth and light.” I like to think that the spark of light is born from sometimes uncomfortable disagreement, and that truth can only come from the rigorous pursuit of what Ronald Daniels, president of Johns Hopkins University, calls “a deeply pluralistic capacity” to live productively in a world where differences — in beliefs, identities, experiences, opinions — thrive and sometimes collide.

Related: Facing an existential crisis, some colleges do something rare for them — adapt

Our students are drawn to the University of Montana’s respect for this ethos, and our alumni serve in leadership positions across the country because they’ve cultivated this same respect for difference and debate. This ethos includes the questioning of conventional thinking and institutional structures.

No one is fooling this next generation of leaders — they recognize the need to press those in power to listen and continually improve.

For people who serve in my role, this means we may become targets of intense criticism, sometimes for reasons far beyond our control. The pressure can be difficult and the temptation to stifle criticism strong.

However, our job as leaders in higher education is not to quell dissent or resolve debate, but rather to sponsor that spark within our students. In short, we, the administration — the very embodiment of the status quo — are called to nurture and encourage those who seek to challenge us.

It is a dereliction of duty and hypocritical if in one moment I claim that our university exists to bring diverse identities and perspectives together and in the next moment duck from or silence those who question my actions as a leader. I frequently tell my team that the price of leadership is criticism, and that there is no positive change without critique.

This is why I’m grateful that the University of Montana’s student body regularly calls for us to engage seriously with their ideas for how to improve the institution.

To dismiss students’ critiques as simply stemming from a generational divide is at best naive and at worst demeaning to our mission: to empower the next generation to boldly and thoughtfully challenge the world we have built for them. I’d guess some version of that is written into each of our university charters. And the recent assaults on democracy have brought into sharp relief the urgent relevance of that part of our charters.

At the University of Montana, my hope more than anything is for students to use their voices for the greater good, and for our leadership team to actively throw open the doors for them to do so. We must lean into and preserve space for critique as exactly the ingredient that will make our campuses — and our leadership teams — better.

Related: By suspending protesting students, what lessons are Syracuse University leaders teaching?

This means admitting that we — those in positions of leadership — are unfinished and in need of some transformation ourselves.

To my fellow presidents, I encourage you to humble yourselves enough to listen deeply to your students. Visit with them frequently, on their terms. Build a culture of productive criticism by showing up at student protests, engaging with dissent and holding your team accountable for doing so as well.

A generation of young people, empowered to usher in transformation and buoyed by the endorsement of their institutions, might be our most powerful tool in fulfilling the promise of higher education in America.

Seth Bodnar is the president of the University of Montana.

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

The post OPINION: A former military man turned university president welcomes student protest and dissent appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

“Mamá, ¿sabe en dónde puedo encontrar pasantías?” (“Mom, do you know where I can find internships?”), I ask.

“No sé … pregúntale a la consejera de escuela o a tu maestra. Ellas te van a poder ayudar más porque tienen más información.” (“I don’t know… ask your school counselor or your teacher. They will be able to help you more because they have more information”), she replies.

My mother didn’t attend high school or college, so she has limited knowledge about college and career readiness. Most parents in my community, Salinas, California, are in the same position.

Here, 79.3 percent of people are Hispanic or Latino, 37.3 percent of residents are foreign-born and just 13.3 percent of adults have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher.

At school, students struggle to find college and career resources. It is common to hear students complain about slow responses from the guidance office. As a junior in high school, my lack of access to quality college and career information has been particularly stressful. Although I’m researching my options, I fear that it’s not enough.

In my community, many students aspire to careers in nursing, agriculture and education. It’s clear why: Agriculture provides 24.1 percent of all local jobs, while education, social assistance and health care provide 18.2 percent. Students have the most exposure to those jobs.

Related: How to raise rural enrollment in college? Go local

Although these are perfectly good professions, they are a narrow range of career opportunities, and many students don’t know about other options. Recently, one of my teachers showed us a video about a day in the life of a software engineer. In our discussion, most students said they had never considered such a career a possibility.

A study done by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development found that many students in the 21st century have aspirations for careers that were created in the 19th or 20th centuries. This means that many students have minimal knowledge of new careers and the skills needed to pursue them. The students who do aim for these new careers tend to be more affluent.

Many students have minimal knowledge of new careers and the skills needed to pursue them.

In Salinas, where many students will be first-generation college students, better awareness of these careers is needed. Google is a big help for those of us looking for possible careers, but having an opportunity to see the jobs in practice and getting support in navigating our career search journeys would be a bigger help.

Schools and community organizations in Salinas should invest more in developing college and career readiness. This could be done through career fairs and schoolwide college visits.

For example, in the Natchez-Adams School District in Mississippi, students have the opportunity to get training in different career paths at the Fallin Career & Technology Center. Students can take courses there in digital media technology, health science and health teaching, among others.

Natchez-Adams high school students also have a program through which they can get a head start on higher education. They can enroll at their local community college and take classes to get associate degrees. This pathway is strongly encouraged, and 75 percent of students in the 2021 graduating class of the Natchez Early College Academy received associate degrees this way.

Related: Nothing can replace relationships between students and advisers, but some tools make a big difference

I believe high schools in Salinas and elsewhere should implement similar programs to help students feel more prepared as they enter college and the workforce. That would be the first step, but promoting the programs would be the second. Students would be grateful for it.

I encourage the Salinas Union High School District and other districts to consider creating more programs that will help students get not only high-quality college and career information but also high-quality assistance for their future endeavors.

Carolyn Dorantes is a junior at Rancho San Juan High School. She writes for the Voices of Monterey Bay and the Student Voice Journalism Fellowship.

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

The post STUDENT VOICE: Is anyone out there? We need help figuring out our futures in Hispanic communities like mine appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

ELKO, Nev. — After years leading school districts on the East Coast, Michele Robinson wanted to come home.

In May of 2020, the Las Vegas native accepted an offer to become superintendent of the Elko County School District, which serves roughly 10,000 students in northeastern Nevada. Her tenure began just a few months into the pandemic when coronavirus cases were surging across the nation and education officials were grappling with whether and how to reopen schools.

As hard as those first months were, the gradual return to in-person learning in fall 2020 was harder. Parents and community members — angry about mask requirements and bristling at potential Covid vaccine mandates — pressured Elko County School Board members and district officials to flout state directives and exert local control over those decisions. At some point last school year, board meetings devolved into people shouting at district leaders to watch their backs. Security at meetings was increased.

“I loved the community, and I really loved the work that I did,” Robinson said. “It’s just you get to a point where you have to weigh whether or not the threats to your safety are worth the continuation.”

Robinson concluded they weren’t and resigned in June 2021.

Nationally, about 25 percent of superintendents have made a similar decision in the past year, compared to a typical turnover rate of 14 to 16 percent, according to the American Association of School Administrators.

Superintendents’ reasons for leaving vary. As many as 1,500 to 2,000  superintendents have stepped away after delaying their retirement during the first year of the pandemic, estimated Michael Collins, president of Ray and Associates, a national search firm that consults with school boards to find new leaders.

“Superintendents stood by their districts when they thought this would be a couple of months,” said Molly Schwarzhoff, executive vice president and a lead recruiter for Ray and Associates. “It’s a whole different ball game now. Once we saw what we were up against … a lot of people just said, ‘I don’t want to play anymore.’ ”

Altogether, the ongoing impact of Covid-19, coupled with political turmoil at the local level, has likely added as many as 3,000 vacancies beyond normal attrition during the last and current school years in the approximately 13,500 public school districts in the U.S., Collins said.

25 percent — superintendent turnover last year, up from about 15 percent in a typical year

Depending on how long pandemic conditions persist, he added, “the first five years of this decade could produce a staggering rate of turnover, rearranging the average turnover rate for the entire decade.”

The job of a superintendent — managing multimillion-dollar budgets, supervising school principals and central staff, fielding matters of public concern and negotiating school board priorities — has never been easy. And now, as thousands of school boards across the country compete to hire new district leaders, it’s not entirely clear who actually wants and will be qualified to do these jobs.

The collective scramble for new leadership comes at a tense time for school boards. Although they typically hire and technically supervise superintendents, in recent months school boards have been at the center of public fights over mask mandates, Covid-19 vaccines and teaching about race. The recent surge of vitriol at public meetings, meanwhile, has made it difficult to recruit top talent when a new superintendent is needed.

Related: Do fraught school board meetings offer a view of the future?

Social distancing has prompted many school boards to host their public meetings online, if they weren’t already. And that’s made it easier for potential applicants for superintendencies to observe what their life would be like in those districts.

“Candidates are doing more homework than ever,” Schwarzhoff said. “You may be setting up interviews in two to three months,” she advises school boards, “but you’re being interviewed right now. Candidates are seeing the good, the bad and the ugly right now.”

In Alaska, the state’s school administrators association estimated that superintendent turnover is nearing 30 percent. Lon Garrison, who heads the Association of Alaska School Boards, has urged members to try to act more respectfully to each other and to administrators. He said that he recently worked with a school district that had cycled through six different superintendents in just four years.

“In today’s world, anybody can see how you behave,” Garrison said. “And with boards where there’s been a lot of controversy or board members who create some havoc, they have a harder time recruiting those top candidates.”

Like other school systems nationwide, Elko County School District’s hunt for a new superintendent may be complicated by its neighbors doing the same thing. Two other school districts in northern Nevada — Washoe County and Carson City, including Reno and the state capital — have also launched searches preceding their superintendents’ impending retirements.

Collectively, the Washoe County, Carson City and Elko County school districts serve roughly 84,300 students, or 19 percent of children attending Nevada’s public school districts.

But the superintendent shortage was almost much worse: The school board overseeing the roughly 320,000-student Clark County School District in the Las Vegas area terminated Superintendent Jesus Jara in October before undoing that action several weeks later. The tumultuous fall highlighted the split nature of the seven-member school board and the ongoing tensions between the superintendent and a few trustees over governance policies, management styles and issues plaguing the district, such as low morale and severe staffing shortages.

“Every district has its challenges, and I don’t think you do anybody any good by pretending like you don’t have a challenge.”

Angie Taylor, Washoe County School Board president

Despite a fraught relationship with his bosses and a host of pandemic-era challenges, Jara decided to continue leading the nation’s fifth-largest school district. In a statement announcing an agreement with the school board, Jara framed his decision as rooted in not wanting to desert the community’s most vulnerable children.

“There are too many children in this community that have been left behind,” he wrote. “I won’t walk away from them.”

His decision to stay came as a relief to Clark County trustee Lola Brooks, who worried about the board’s prospects of finding a new leader given what she described as its “reputation for dysfunction and for micromanagement.” More superintendent vacancies across the country, she said, mean more options for those seeking top-level positions.

“There are communities that are way more supportive of education in general,” she said. “They actually pay more, and they have fewer students, and they have less drama.”

That sentiment isn’t shared by Brooks’ Clark County colleague Linda Cavazos, one of three trustees who sought to terminate Jara. She said districts should not be so reliant on hiring national search firms that produce the same stable of candidates. Instead, Cavazos suggested that districts look for new leaders who have demonstrated success with similar student demographics, even if they hail from smaller cities and don’t fit the “cookie-cutter image” of a veteran superintendent.

Despite Clark County being out of the competition, Washoe County School Board president Angie Taylor wants to make sure the governing body is on its “best behavior” while they look for a new superintendent.

“Every district has its challenges, and I don’t think you do anybody any good by pretending like you don’t have a challenge,” Taylor said. “Because then you’re bringing somebody in under false circumstances.”

Related: A year in the life of a small-town superintendent shows the federal bailout won’t be enough

Outgoing Washoe County superintendent Kristen McNeill, who has worked for the district since 1996, said her husband retired last year and it was time to join him. After a stint as interim superintendent beginning in 2019, she was appointed the district’s leader by the Washoe County School Board in April of 2020. Her reign as superintendent unfolded during the pandemic, but she said the difficulty of working in schools at this time was not unique to her. Bus drivers, teachers, central office staff and other employees have also been pulling double duty to plug holes caused by vacancies.

She said she’s just “one of many people that continue to feel exhausted and burned out.”

The Washoe County School District’s deputy superintendent and chief operations officer are also retiring at the end of the school year.

Leadership changes like these can create a ripple effect throughout districts. New superintendents bring new visions, new curricula, new administrative practices and sometimes even new staff. A change can lead to a yo-yo effect for those at the school level who have grown accustomed to one way of doing things, only to be thrust in a different direction.

Calen Evans, a STEM coordinator in the Washoe County School District and president of an advocacy group called Empower Nevada Teachers, is bracing himself for that change yet again. He has worked under four superintendents since he started with the district as a substitute teacher in 2012. The new hire will be his fifth.

Evans said he is remaining optimistic, hoping the shift in leadership forces the district to rethink how it educates students. But pros come with cons, he said.

“Let’s relearn the wheel again. Let’s reinvest the resources we don’t have into new programs,” Evans said, explaining the downsides.

Before any of that happens though, district leaders have to find people willing to take on the role, and they anticipate that search will be a tough one.

The Carson City School District, which is about 30 miles south of Reno, hired the Nevada Association of School Boards (NASB) to help with its search for its new leader. Longtime Carson City superintendent Richard Stokes is retiring at the end of the school year.

Debb Oliver, executive director of NASB, said superintendent positions that may have drawn 20 applicants pre-pandemic are only seeing five or six right now. The smaller pools limit districts’ choices and perhaps the quality of candidates, she said.

At the same time, superintendent salaries will likely rise. Carson City School Board president Joe Cacioppo said trustees increased the salary range for the next superintendent, knowing that rising housing prices and the other superintendent openings could make it difficult to attract the right person. The new salary range is $170,000 to $210,000, depending on experience, he said. The outgoing superintendent’s annual base salary was $178,000.

“If we find out that the best person for the position is somebody internally, that’s a positive for us,” Cacioppo said. “If we find out the best person is somebody who comes in from outside the district, we’re excited about that, too.”

In Valdez, Alaska — a remote district that enrolls about 700 students at four schools — Kathy Todd isn’t sure how to approach her city’s next superintendent search.

She’s served on the school board in Valdez for 15 years and helped select the last superintendent, who started in July. But after a few months on the job — and following protests at his home about mask mandates — he quit. The school board pulled a former employee out of retirement to fill the post, but it’s not a permanent solution.

“Frankly, being a superintendent in this kind of politicized pandemic is extremely difficult,” Todd said. “We have lots of competition from other Alaska school districts trying to hire, and the pool [of candidates] is shallow.”

In Alaska — where superintendents’ salaries are lower than those in a majority of other states — it’s also a struggle to find leaders willing to work in isolated settings. There’s long been a teacher shortage, making schools dependent on hiring from out of state and sometimes lowering the bar for required experience. School boards in remote areas use the same techniques to find superintendents. Now, even those imperfect solutions may not work as well as they once did.

“We have just voted to appoint you as our interim superintendent. So, congratulations and condolences all at the same time.”

Teresa Dastrup, Elko School Board president

“You’re not seeing that comparable education and experience and training,” said Lisa Parady, executive director of the Alaska Council of School Administrators. “We’re so reliant on the lower 48 [states] to produce those candidates … and the pipeline has just dried up.”

As for superintendents on their way out, “they’re next-level exhausted,” Parady said.

Karen Gaborik stepped away from the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District in June, deciding to take at least a year to travel and spend time with her mother in the warmer Arizona climate. Gaborik declined to cite specific quarrels with the school board, but said “lightning rod” debates over Covid and masking overtook conversations about instruction. Gaborik, who graduated from high school and started her teaching career in Fairbanks, is sad that her seven years as superintendent — a bit longer than the average national tenure rate — have come to an end.

“I reached the age that I could retire, and would have stayed if the dynamic with the school board stayed productive,” Gaborik said. “I could see things change before my eyes. It was time to step out.”

Related: An Appalachian county kept school Covid cases down with strong community partnerships

Robinson, the former Elko County superintendent, also left town, and doesn’t feel safe disclosing her current location.

After she left last summer, more Elko County education leaders stepped down as well. Five trustees quit in the wake of a board attempt to make mask-wearing optional for students and teachers. The superintendent search stalled. Several candidates withdrew, and the two remaining trustees delayed making any decision about whom to hire.

But a reconstituted Elko County School Board recently took a step toward temporary stability. In mid-December, trustees selected C. J. Anderson, a district employee, as the district’s third interim superintendent. The board hasn’t ruled out conducting another search for an official superintendent, but it may ask Anderson to assume the role.

Elko School Board president Teresa Dastrup said she was grateful that two candidates had even applied for the interim position after such a rough summer and fall.

“We have just voted to appoint you as our interim superintendent,” Dastrup told Anderson at the Dec. 14 board meeting. “So, congratulations and condolences all at the same time.”

This story about the superintendent search was produced by The Nevada Independent, a nonprofit newsroom based in Las Vegas, and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Who wants to lead America’s school districts? Anyone? Anyone? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

CENTRALIA, Wash. — At 8:01 p.m., on an unseasonably warm April evening, Lisa Grant hit refresh on her internet browser. Grant had been the superintendent of schools in this old coal and lumber town on the side of I-5, the major highway running the length of the west coast, for just 10 months. Tonight, she’d find out if she’d have the funding she needed to keep doing that job.

The Washington secretary of state’s website didn’t immediately update, so she hit refresh again, and again, until the early results of a vote on her school district’s property tax levy appeared on the screen.

Voters in the Centralia school district, it seemed, would again reject a ballot proposal to bring in $9.1 million over two years for their schools by renewing an existing property tax. It would be their third rejection in less than a year and a half. States and the federal government contribute some money to school budgets, but most are still dependent on local support to survive. Losing the revenue from the local property tax the first time had led the Centralia school board to issue pink slips to nearly 100 staff members and had even put the athletics program on the chopping block.

Managing an always-too-tight budget is just one of the challenges facing superintendents in small- and medium-size districts these days. Explosive political fights over masking, vaccines and critical race theory have resulted in superintendents in places as different as rural Oregon and suburban Maryland resigning or being forced out of their jobs under pressure from newly zealous school boards. About 25 percent of superintendents left their jobs last year, according to the American Association of School Administrators. So far, Grant has stayed.

On that anxious spring evening, Grant knew final results wouldn’t come in for at least a couple more days. But that night the proposition was failing by 23 votes. She took calls from the local newspaper and radio station, telling reporters, “We’re holding out hope.”

A former special education teacher who grew up in Oregon, Grant rarely considers a problem without mentioning how it affects students. She’s quick to list solutions and quick to laugh.

“She was brimming with enthusiasm and seemed so excited to be there,” said Lori Fast, former president of the Centralia school board, recalling Grant’s first interview. “We wanted to bottle up that energy and have her start the next day.”

But just over a year later, as she waited for the election results in April 2021, Grant was exhausted. There had been a pandemic, the district’s financial situation turned out to be as bad as Fast and other board members had warned and now she had to prepare for potentially more cuts. Before heading home, Grant phoned her husband — a pandemic routine — letting him know she was on her way. He cautiously asked, “What should I prepare for?”

“I remember feeling mixed emotions, such disappointment that we didn’t make it initially but knowing it was so close,” Grant said months later.

A 2019 study from the nonpartisan Albert Shanker Institute found only five states spend enough money to help students in high-poverty school districts achieve test scores that meet the national average; Washington ranked among the lowest spenders on that list. And while recent reforms here attempted to narrow the gulf between wealthy and low-income schools, critics question whether Washington’s complicated new funding formulas provide enough money to support all students.

“Washington … is so close and yet so far from the goal,” said Zahava Stadler, a special assistant for state funding and policy at the Education Trust, a national nonprofit that works to close opportunity gaps.

“We need to remember that there is no federal right to public education, but every single state constitution mentions a right to public schooling,” Stadler said. “It is the states that assigned themselves the responsibility of doing right and doing fairly by students, and it is appropriate and necessary to hold them to that.”

Related: “Kids who have less, need more” — The fight over school funding

Getting voter support in a cash-strapped, conservative-leaning town like Centralia is hard. The tax measure that kept Grant at work late in April 2021 first failed in February 2020, just a month after Grant accepted the job as superintendent of Centralia schools. It also failed in August 2020, a month after she’d started. And 13 months into a global pandemic, the prospect of once again banking the financial future of the town’s public school system on the will of its voters struck Grant as especially risky.

That April evening, Grant left the district complex feeling disappointed and frustrated. The two-building central office sits across the street from Centralia’s only middle school; nearby, towering Douglas firs dot the high school campus and a large boulder at the school entrance features a student’s painting of the school mascot, a tiger, wearing a face mask.

Centralia is home to about 18,000 residents, 3,400 of whom are students in the public schools. “Tiny Tigers,” whose presence is announced on lawn signs throughout the small city, attend the district’s five elementary schools. Congratulatory banners hanging from lampposts wave the senior portraits of each graduate in the Class of 2021. But in April, if history was any indication, all that school spirit wouldn’t necessarily translate to financial support.

Later that night, after exhausting her frustration on an exercise bike, Grant replayed two videos she had created to put on the school district’s social media pages. There was one to use if the tax proposal failed, the other if it somehow passed. She couldn’t remember dreaming when she finally let herself sleep. And not long after her alarm rang at 4:30 a.m., she fielded a call from a school board member angry about the vote.

“No matter what happens we’re going to move forward,” Grant remembered saying. “Everything has to move us in a positive direction, even if this isn’t a positive experience.”

The federal government moved quickly early in the pandemic to support K-12 schools, approving $13.2 billion in March 2020 to cover unanticipated costs. And by the spring of 2021, Congress had approved three separate rounds of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief fund, known to educators as ESSER, sending a grand total of nearly $190 billion hurtling toward classrooms that have not seen such federal largesse since 2009, during the Great Recession.

But the emergency funding is temporary — the last of it must be used by 2023 — and it won’t fix the long-term problems faced by school districts like Centralia, which were broke long before the pandemic started.

$190 billion — the total amount that Congress approved in three rounds of Covid relief funding for K-12 schools

In such places, a return to normal won’t be enough. Communities like Centralia, which has a small tax-base, can’t always count on local financial support, no matter how many Tiny Tiger signs dot the lawns. For these communities, what’s needed is the realization at the state or federal level that the amount of government money required to support schools — both before and potentially after the pandemic — is many times more than what has been spent so far.

On the local level, it’s not just a matter of voters’ willingness to tax themselves. Many homeowners have little sense for why the local schools always seem broke when they keep hearing about multimillion-dollar state budgets, which their property taxes already help support.

“The federal government, given the limited tools at its disposal, did the right thing” to send so much relief money, said Stadler, of the Education Trust. “But a short-term infusion of funds in districts that have been struggling with underinvestment for a long time is not going to be a silver bullet.”

Related: Rich schools get richer

In Centralia, as she waited for the final results of the election, Grant worried the federal boon could actually jeopardize “yes” votes for continuing a local tax.

“People think we have all this money to play with,” Grant said the morning after election night. “We have these federal dollars coming in but that’s not a recurring fund.”

Meanwhile, Centralia schools were short on staff, short on community trust and very short on money. In 2018, a teacher strike over demands for a salary hike delayed the start of school for a week. The previous superintendent, who eventually signed a union contract with hefty — and unaffordable — pay raises for teachers, left the central office mired in a culture of bullying and almost nonexistent communication with the public. And a new school board, swept into power in late 2019, discovered years of red ink baked into the district budget.

Although required by law to approve a balanced budget each year, the district forecast it would overspend its revenues by about $500,000 in 2021-22. The projected shortfall would eventually top $3.5 million in 2023-24, according to budget documents.

Centralia has also been losing a couple hundred students each year, at the cost of about $8,700 per kid. During the 2020-21 school year, Grant said, the district lost a staggering 476 students — some to a better-performing district nearby, some to homeschooling and others to virtual schools — for a net loss of about $4.2 million.

“That’s a school’s worth of funding,” Grant told a budget task force in early December.

She’d also learned in her first weeks on the job that the district had virtually no cash reserves to spend in an emergency. It had no long-term facilities plan to upgrade decaying infrastructure or to replace its aging fleet of buses, Grant said. In her estimation, it also had no sense of financial responsibility.

“One of the issues of why we lost the levy in the first place [was] people felt we gave too much to teachers [when] they went on strike,” she said. “The board was spending in the red every year. You can’t sustain that.”

Related: Should rich families be able to fundraise a better public school education for their kids?

Grant attempted to speak with her predecessor, Mark Davalos, to understand the budget mess. She never succeeded. (Davalos declined an interview request for this story.)

“It is what it is,” she said of the district’s past money troubles. “We can’t change that, but how do we move forward?”

The federal money will help Centralia and other small struggling districts for a year or two, but the pressure is on superintendents to spend it wisely, said Michael Griffith, a school finance expert with the Learning Policy Institute.

“If you spend like pre-pandemic, and don’t have additional results, that’s going to come back hard,” he said. “People come back and say, ‘We gave them all this money, and there was no return. There was no long-term improvement in schools.’”

The stakes aren’t lost on Grant.

In January 2020, during the hiring process, Grant appeared at a public interview and fielded an hour’s worth of questions about sex education, student poverty, the teachers’ union and property-tax levies. She touted her experience as a special education teacher, principal, central administrator and, most recently, superintendent of the neighboring Mossyrock school district.

Grant, who commuted to Mossyrock from her home in Centralia, easily rattled off facts about Washington’s school finance system and K-12 policy — a home-field advantage that distinguished her from the other finalist, a superintendent from rural Colorado.

“I can guarantee you that I can make mistakes,” she said of her leadership style, according to The Daily Chronicle. “I can also guarantee you that I will learn from them.”

The board announced her selection that same evening. By the time she finally stepped into the role six months later, on July 1, the world had turned upside down. She walked into the central administration building that day and set down a box of family photos, desk décor and positive affirmation posters next to the desk in her new office. Instead of unpacking, Grant spent her first day in a crash course on the district’s planning for the start of school in just two months.

The box remained on her office floor, unopened and collecting dust, for the next nine months.

As the third vote on a tax levy drew closer, in spring 2021, there seemed to be a chance for victory, but a slim one. Voters had sent mixed messages in the previous two elections: A whopping 69 percent doomed the first tax measure. The second failed by less than 1 percentage point.

Related: One of the fairest school funding models in the nation might be about to fail

Mark Dulin, owner of a local construction company and vice president of the Centralia Community Foundation, always supported the school levies. (His wife, Sarah, teaches math at Centralia High and their son graduated from the school.) Nonetheless, Dulin could see why so many voters gave the levy a thumbs-down before: They were still seething over the 2018 teacher strike.

“It was very contentious,” Dulin said. “People remain offended that the schools were closed for days. [The strike] zapped what used to be a really good community rally behind the schools.”

Centralia’s failure at the ballot box also revealed an obscure quirk in Washington’s school finance system.

In Centralia’s case, the doomed February 2020 election guaranteed the school district would collect neither its local property taxes nor the additional state support. The lost revenue forced Centralia to trim a fifth of its entire budget — right at the start of a global pandemic.

“I wish our school funding wasn’t contingent on whether the community passes a levy,” said Fast, who will step down from the school board this year. “It’s really unfair that’s how the system works. Folks already feel taxed enough.”

On a sunny spring morning in March 2021, the Dulins walked through the neighborhood just west of Centralia College to try to convince voters this particular tax — one that would support the town’s Tigers — was worth extending. They paged through a stack of papers with the names and addresses of past and likely voters, hoping to convince more people to vote in favor of the levy and flip the narrow loss from August.

Front door after front door, their knocks went unanswered. Sarah Dulin tucked campaign flyers into mailboxes or between screen doors.

In 2018, she had joined the teacher walkout to secure a better contract. It’s also the reason she doubted the likelihood of a win this time.

At the time, she thought most people supported the teachers. After the strike, she said, everyone suspected the union would “raid the levy” for even more raises.

At one home, with a dog yapping behind her, a mother with a student in middle school answered the door. She listened to the campaign pitch, then asked if voting ‘yes’ meant the district would fully reopen soon.

“That needed to happen a long time ago,” said the mother. And didn’t schools just get a lot of money from the feds, she asked.

“Well,” Dulin replied, “it’s complicated.”

Months before the door-to-door campaign — in August 2020 — a Lewis County workgroup of superintendents, pediatricians and public health officials started meeting to discuss how to safely reopen schools. One of their top concerns was student mental health.

“With suicidal ideation, it’s never been at this level” said Jennifer Polley, director of the Northwest Pediatric Center in Centralia and a member of the group. Diagnoses of anxiety, depression and conduct disorder — in which children exhibit aggressive or destructive behavior — had more than doubled, she said. She even heard from pediatricians that children as young as 8 were talking about suicide.

“I don’t think we even know the depth of it yet,” Polley said.

On March 15, 2021, almost exactly a year after ordering schools to close, Gov. Jay Inslee signed an emergency proclamation citing a youth mental health crisis and requiring all public schools to at least partially reopen. That same week, Centralia middle and high schools finally welcomed students back to campus.

The year without in-person learning fueled a lot of arguing between Gloria Delgado and her youngest son, a senior at Centralia High. He had already struggled with their sudden move to the small town from the San Francisco Bay area five years ago and he was still finding it difficult to make new friends or take an interest in school.

“The pandemic just exacerbated that,” Delgado said.

Balancing the mental health of 3,400 kids against the potential for outbreaks if schools reopened took a toll on Grant.

“My hair is greyer,” she said. “It’s a heavy responsibility, and one I don’t think any of us [superintendents] ever experienced to that degree … I know I wasn’t perfect at it.”

In Lewis County, nearly two-thirds of voters supported Donald Trump’s reelection bid, even as Washington state swung 58 percent in favor of Joe Biden. The county’s most prominent landmark — a billboard of Uncle Sam — greets drivers along I-5 with what the New York Times once described as “archconservative views in big block letters.” During the pandemic and Washington’s mask mandate, Uncle Sam warned that “edicts are the tools of dictators” and asked “What will the next Wuhan chimera virus be like?”

Although he found the prevalence of anti-mask sentiment and people questioning the reality of the virus frustrating, J.P. Anderson, the deputy director of Lewis County Public Health & Social Services, also sympathized with the community’s reaction to state orders and prolonged school closures.

“It’s defined largely by economic devastation that was caused by decisions made outside of Lewis County,” he said.

Related: Progress in the Deep South — Black students combat segregation, poverty and dwindling school funding

The first blow to the economy came in 2006, when the TransAlta Centralia Power Plant shuttered its coal mine, eliminating 600 top-paying jobs in Lewis County. The Great Recession soon followed, driving unemployment here to a peak of 15.4 percent in 2009.

Those losses affected Centralia’s schools too. In 2010, about 64 percent of students qualified for subsidized meals at school, a common gauge of household poverty. A decade later, 79 percent of students were considered low-income. As the schools’ finances floundered, its reputation suffered too, driving many families away: The district lost about 100 students a year, even before the pandemic.

“There’s real historical trauma,” Anderson said, explaining the local reaction to Covid mandates. “When [a decision] comes down and shuts down the economy and folks don’t have jobs any more, that’s suspect. That’s an enemy.”

On New Year’s Eve 2020, TransAlta closed one of its two coal-burning power plants in Centralia. By the time TransAlta extinguishes its second burner in 2025, a total of nearly 200 people will have lost their jobs.

Three weeks before winter break in 2020, kids in grades 4 to 6 returned to in-person classes. Grant was there to greet them, and make sure protocols were followed. Hands shaking — either from nerves or the December morning chill — Grant fumbled to catch the batteries falling out of a digital thermometer and onto the front lawn of Jefferson Lincoln Elementary. It was the second thermometer she had borrowed from the principal’s office. The first didn’t seem to work when Grant tested it on herself while walking toward a line of cars snaking around the entrance to the school.

Replacing the batteries, Grant hustled to join the school staff who approached each vehicle with a new routine: Cheerily welcome each student back to Jefferson Lincoln. Check their temperature. Collect a declaration that they had no symptoms of Covid-19.

One mother and her kids remained in their car, appearing confused by Grant’s request.

“You don’t speak Spanish, do you?” Grant asked the school staffer standing closest to her.

Earlier in the year, Grant had convened a reopening task force, hoping to bring all secondary students back to campus by early 2021. But negotiations with the teacher union had stalled.

“We have a ways to go,” Grant said, with a deep sigh.

The impasse joined a growing list of concerns for Grant, who struggled with how to address the mental health of both students and staff, language barriers with families who didn’t speak English at home and an uptick in the number of students experiencing homelessness.

Schools were also short on para-educators, having cut that budget by $2.1 million. At Jefferson Lincoln, that meant students in kindergarten through third grade got much needed one-on-one academic help, but older kids did not. And teachers supervised recess.

Parents, meanwhile, had started calling and emailing Grant to alert her to social media posts of teachers traveling for Thanksgiving or having parties at their homes.

Grant asked principals to remind teachers of the safety protocols — and common sense. (“You can’t post that you’re at Disneyland if you’re supposed to be working,” Grant said.) Part of the problem, she added, was that about half of Centralia’s teachers didn’t live in the city or even in the county.

“There’s certainly a feeling that we have staff who bring different beliefs and ideas than our community holds, and that played out a bit in that tension between getting kids back and having staff feel safe,” Grant said.

After the first bell rang that December morning, a straggling student raced past Grant and through the front doors.

“Whoa whoa whoa!” she called after him. “Where’s your mask?”

Cursing, the boy ran back into the thick Northwest fog to check if his ride had already left.

In January 2021, the district received about $1.1 million from the first round of federal relief money passed in early 2020. Within three months of that disbursement, Grant said, the fund was about to be exhausted.

The district was spending about $18,000 each month just to cover internet access for students still learning at home, Grant said. It paid $36,250 for extra desks to bring middle and high schoolers back on a four-day hybrid schedule. And some of the federal money had simply backfilled months’ worth of spending on disinfecting classrooms, temporary custodial staff and personal protective equipment.

As school returned from winter break, Grant noticed a deep sense of fatigue creeping across the district.

Related: New data—Even within the same district some wealthy schools get millions more than poor ones

She had hoped the two weeks away from school would have recharged central office staff, teachers — and herself. Grant relied more and more on her husband, a project superintendent in construction, to make it through each dreary, cold day. But she also wondered how employees managed without a spouse or support network, especially as a third wave of cases and extended lockdowns prevented many from spending the holidays with family.

“I have a lot of energy, and I love this work. But I know I’m tired,” Grant said. “And I can tell [my husband] that I’m not thinking as quickly as normal. I mean, we’re all fatigued, right?”

The April election finally arrived. From that night when Grant repeatedly refreshed the voter results page, it would be 10 days before she knew the fate of her town’s schools.

“I don’t like that we have to rely on it,” Grant said of the levy election. “In Washington, we’re a pretty regressive tax system … so that’s a heavier burden on our community and our taxpayers.” 

In the end, Centralia voters — by a margin of just 1 percent — approved the $9.1 million tax measure. Only 38 percent of registered voters cast a ballot, but it was enough. The district was also approved by the state to receive about $4.2 million from the second round of federal emergency funding and will need to apply to receive an additional $9.5 million from the third. If the Biden administration has its way, there will be more money down the line as well as incentives for states to commit to permanently increasing funding to high-poverty districts.

“I wish our school funding wasn’t contingent on whether the community passes a levy. It’s really unfair that’s how the system works. Folks already feel taxed enough.” Lisa Fast, outgoing president, Centralia School Board

Meanwhile, to get the estimated $4.2 million that Centralia schools were eligible for under the second Covid relief package, the district would first have to submit a recovery plan detailing how it would ensure seniors graduated on time, what it would spend the money on over summer and which interventions it would prioritize in fall 2021. Hiring new staff with the one-time money, which Grant said was “tempting,” could bind the district’s budget in the future.

“We have a lot of money. It’s a ton of money,” she said at the end of the 2020-21 school year. “If we misspend it and just go back to business as usual, legislators in the future will add tighter controls … That’s always the tension.”

Grant does not expect the extra state and federal money to last. It never has before.

“We won the support of the public, barely,” she said, “but that swing to trust us isn’t permanent. We have the opportunity to prove ourselves now.”

She doesn’t plan to waste her chance. Unless the federal and state governments commit to massive, ongoing increases in school funding, Grant knows that in two years, when this latest property tax expires, she’ll have to go back to Centralia voters with her hand out, asking again for their help.

This story about public school funding 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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