While the rest of the country’s schools were losing ground in math during the COVID pandemic, students in a small rural Alabama school district soared. 

Piedmont City schools landed in the top spot among all school districts nationwide in a comparison of math scores in 2019 and 2022.

Other Alabama school districts fared well, too, but Piedmont, a small, 1,100-student district where 7 out of 10 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, stood out. Nationwide, students are on average half a year behind in math, researchers say.

Schools nationwide are scrambling to find ways to recover unfinished learning over the past three years, using federal relief money to hire interventionists to work with students and placing students in high-dose tutoring sessions after school and during the summer. 

Piedmont has pursued an approach it began before the pandemic: It focused on changing its regular school day and working with its current staff. 

Superintendent Mike Hayes said two keys for success have been giving teachers more regular time to dig into student data and increasing instructional time where math teachers can focus on specific skills.

“We made a total transformation about five years ago,” he said, “where we decided that we were going to let data make every decision as far as instructional changes were concerned. And that we were going to involve the teachers, and that it was going to be a collaborative effort and we were going to drill down as minutely as we could.”

Rebecca Dreyfus, with TNTP, a national nonprofit devoted to helping schools improve student learning, helps teachers apply best practices from research to the classroom.

Dreyfus said targeted instruction for small groups of students has years of research and evidence to back it up as an effective way for teachers to teach and students to learn. Pinpointing what skills need shoring up – and using systematic and explicit instruction, as backed up by the “science of math” – makes it even more effective.

“The short answer is that using data effectively and efficiently to plan and monitor instruction is always going to make instruction better for kids,” Dreyfus said.

Related: The science of reading swept reforms into classrooms. What about math?

Because math is a subject that builds on itself year after year, teachers need to make sure students, even those who are struggling, are keeping up with grade level learning. 

“You’re not just pulling kids to teach them a skill that they should have had a few years ago that is not coming back,” she said. “We’re trying to teach them something that will ensure they have access to the grade-level rigor.”

“I think the data days give us an opportunity to really dig in to where the weaknesses are and adjust instruction.”

Cassie Holbrooks, who teaches fourth grade math in Piedmont City schools

A look at math scores for spring 2022 shows the district ranked twelfth in the state on math proficiency, with 57 percent of students reaching proficiency. Statewide, 30 percent of students scored proficient in math.

That’s a lot of progress over the last five years; in 2017, when Hayes took over as superintendent, Piedmont students ranked 35th in math proficiency.

“Once we made that decision and stuck to it and made changes and allowed our teachers time to look at the data and dive into the data, it paid off,” Hayes said.

Related: Teachers conquering their math anxiety

Hayes said his team knew that if they wanted teachers to use student data well they needed to give teachers more time to dig in and analyze the numbers. 

So they made the school day longer and freed up enough full days to allow for “data days,” Hayes said.

Every four weeks, teachers get together to examine student data. 

“I think the data days give us an opportunity to really dig in to where the weaknesses are and adjust instruction,” said Cassie Holbrooks, who teaches fourth grade math. “We’re able to take those small groups and adjust all our instruction based on the data that we look at.”

Sixth grade teacher Lisa Hayes, who has taught for 35 years, said when she joined the district five years ago she was surprised to see how hard teachers worked during those data days.

“When I came here and we had a workday,” she said, “you don’t sit in your room. You’re in here [the media center] most of the day, digging through test scores.”

Understanding student data is the main ingredient when it comes to knowing what to do next.

Related: How can schools dig out from a generation worth of lost math progress?

After thoroughly examining student data, in addition to making plans for classroom lessons, teachers decide how to use targeted small group instruction – where a teacher works directly with a small number of students to target particular skills.

Grouping two to six students together to work on an identified, specific skill has been used for reading instruction and in younger grades for a long time. 

There is less research on the use of targeted small group instruction in math and in middle grades – but researchers like Dreyfus say that the same principles of correctly identifying students that need extra help on certain skills, rather than simply pulling out children who are “behind,” applies.

“We’ve always done small groups in reading,” third-grade teacher Windy Casey said. “But [doing small groups in] math is really just the last few years.”

Math specialist Keri Richburg oversees all training for middle school math teachers statewide through the Alabama Math Science and Technology Initiative, or AMSTI. She’s working to help more middle grade educators use small group instruction effectively.

“For a long time,” Richburg said, “it is something our K-5 friends have done a lot better at implementing in their classrooms than our sixth through eighth grade.” 

Richburg said that research supports the use of regular testing, called formative assessments, to help teachers figure out  which students need personalized help.

“The idea is that we’re using evidence of student learning and making in-the-moment decisions about our instruction for each of our students within those small groups,” she said. 

Related: College students are struggling with basic math. Professors blame the pandemic

Throughout Piedmont’s elementary and middle schools, soon after the start of the school year in August, students worked busily on their devices playing learning games or finding solutions to math problems while their math teacher worked with a small group in a space designed for up-close instruction. 

Those who weren’t using an iPad to work on their Individualized Learning Path, created from assessments of what a student needs or wants to learn, wrote in their math journals. 

In Holbrook’s class, she worked with four students in a small group on how to subtract 278 from 4,000, borrowing from the “0” in each place. Each student had a white board, and Holbrooks modeled the steps students needed to take, working with each student who needed additional attention.

Superintendent Hayes said when Piedmont’s math teachers first expanded small group instruction beyond reading in elementary grades five years ago, teachers said they didn’t have enough time in a regular class to do small group instruction well. So the district expanded math and English language arts to 80 minutes every day in the middle school and 120 minutes each day in the elementary school.

“We’ve always done small groups in reading. But [doing small groups in] math is really just the last few years.”

Third-grade teacher Windy Casey, Piedmont City schools

High school math teacher Landon Pruitt – who taught at the middle school until four years ago – said moving to 80-minute math classes made a big difference in his ability to work with students in small groups. 

“In a 52- or 53-minute class,” Pruitt said, “there’s no way you can consistently do [small groups] and work on getting through the standards that you have to cover.” 

The school also had to help teachers adjust classroom management techniques so that small groups and independent work could both occur effectively. Hayes said gave teachers a program to monitor each students’ screen simultaneously was the solution.

“I think our teachers will tell you that they have better control of the classroom and are able to see what’s going on in the classroom and address that immediately,” he said. 

Dreyfus said getting targeted small group instruction right is hard. “What it comes down to is: Are teachers being given the support, the resources, the time and development and space to do a hard job really well?”

Those are the pieces Hayes said the district wants to make sure are in place.

“I’m not sure we have a secret sauce or anything earth shattering,” Hayes said, “but we do have teachers and administrators committed to being intentional with data and letting that data drive small group instruction. Changing instruction in real time to meet our students where they are, may be the most important step in our data driven instructional process.”

This story was produced by AL.com as part of The Math Problem, a series by The Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that is documenting the math crisis facing schools and highlighting progress. Members of the Collaborative are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.

The post ‘Data days’ and longer math classes: How one district is improving math scores appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This story on math scores is the first in a series, The Math Problem, produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times. The series will explore the challenges schools face in helping kids make progress in math, a pre-pandemic problem that has snowballed into an education crisis, and highlight examples of success.

On a breezy July morning in South Seattle, a dozen elementary-aged students ran math relays behind Dearborn Park International School.

One by one, they raced to a table where a tutor watched them scribble down the answers to multiplication questions before sprinting back to high-five their teammate. These students are part of a summer program run by nonprofit School Connect WA, designed to help them catch up on math and literacy skills they lost during the pandemic. There are 25 students in the program hosted at the elementary school, and all of them are one to three grades behind.

James, 11, couldn’t do two-digit subtraction last week. Thanks to the program and his mother, who has helped him each night, he’s caught up.

“I don’t really like math but I kind of do,” James said. “It’s challenging but I like it.”

Across the country, schools are scrambling to get students caught up in math as post-pandemic test scores reveal the depth of kids’ missing skills. On average students’ math knowledge is about half a school year behind where it should be, according to education analysts.

Children lost ground on reading tests, too, but the math declines were particularly striking. Experts say virtual learning complicated math instruction, making it tricky for teachers to guide students over a screen or spot weaknesses in their problem-solving skills. Plus, parents were more likely to read with their children at home than practice math.

The result: Students’ math skills plummeted across the board, exacerbating racial and socioeconomic inequities in math performance that existed before the pandemic. And students aren’t bouncing back as quickly as educators hoped, supercharging worries about how they will fare as they enter high school and college-level math courses that rely on strong foundational knowledge.

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the ‘Nation’s Report Card,’ showed that fourth graders and eighth graders’ math scores slipped to levels not seen in about 20 years. 

Students had been making incremental progress on national math tests since 1990. But over the past year, data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” showed that fourth graders and eighth graders’ math scores slipped to the lowest levels in about 20 years.

“Another way to put it is that it’s a generation’s worth of progress lost,” said Andrew Ho, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

Related: How can we improve math education in America? Help us count the ways

At Moultrie Middle School in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, Jennifer Matthews has seen the pandemic fallout in her eighth grade classes.

Some days this past academic year, for example, only half of her students in a given class did their homework.

Matthews, who is entering her 34th year of teaching, said in the last few years, students seem indifferent to understanding her pre-Algebra and Algebra I lessons.

“They don’t allow themselves to process the material. They don’t allow themselves to think, ‘This might take a day to understand or learn,’” she said. “They’re much more instantaneous.”

And recently students have been coming to her classes with gaps in their understanding of math concepts. Working with basic fractions, for instance, continues to stump many of them, she said.

Because math builds on itself more than other subjects each year, students have struggled to catch up, said Kevin Dykema, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. For example, if students had a hard time mastering fractions in third grade, they will likely find it hard to learn percentages in fourth grade.

Math teachers will play a crucial role in helping students catch up, but finding those teachers in this tight labor market is a challenge for many districts.

“We’re struggling to find highly qualified people to put in the classrooms,” Dykema said.

Like other districts across the country, Jefferson County Schools in Birmingham, Alabama, saw students’ math skills take a nosedive from 2019 to 2021, when students not only dealt with the pandemic and its fallout, but also a new, tougher math test. Math scores plunged 20 percentage points or more across 11 schools that serve middle school students.

The district’s International Baccalaureate school had higher scores — about 30 percent of students were proficient — but that was a far cry from having 90 percent of students proficient in 2019.

It raised the inevitable question: What now?

Using federal pandemic relief money, some schools have added tutors, offered extended learning programs, made staffing changes or piloted new curriculum approaches in the name of academic recovery. But that money has a looming expiration date: The September 2024 deadline for allocating funds will arrive before many children have caught up.

Progress is possible in upper grades, said Sarah Powell, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin whose research focuses on teaching math. But she said it’s easy for students to feel frustrated and lean into the idea that they’re not a “math person.”

“As the math gets harder, more students struggle,” she said. “And so we need to provide earlier intervention for students, or we also need to think in middle school and high school, how are we supporting students?”

Related: Inside the new middle school math crisis

Jefferson County educators took that approach and, leveraging pandemic funds, placed math coaches in all of their middle schools starting in the 2021-2022 school year.

The math coaches work with teachers to help them learn new and better ways to teach students, while math specialists oversee those coaches. About 1 in 5 public schools in the United States have a math coach, according to federal data.

Jefferson County math specialist Jessica Silas — who oversees middle school math coaches — said she and her colleagues weren’t sure what to expect. But efforts appear to be paying off: State testing shows math scores have started to inch back up for most of the district’s middle schools.

Silas is confident they’re headed in the right direction in boosting middle school math achievement, which was a challenge even before the pandemic. “It exacerbated a problem that already existed,” she said.

“Stereotypically, math is that class that people don’t like. And I believe part of the reason is because for so many adults, math was taught just as memorization.”

Kevin Dykema, president of the National Council for the Teachers of Mathematics

Ebonie Lamb, a special education teacher in Pittsburgh Public Schools, said it’s “emotionally exhausting” to see the inequities between student groups and try to close those academic gaps. Her district, the second-largest in Pennsylvania, serves a student population that is 53 percent African American and 33 percent white.

But she believes those gaps can be closed through culturally relevant and differentiated teaching. Lamb said she typically asks students to do a “walk a mile in my shoes” project in which they design shoes and describe their lives. It’s a way she can learn more about them as individuals.

“We have to continue that throughout the school year — not just the first week or the second week,” she said.

Ultimately, Lamb said those personal connections help on the academic front. Last year, she and a co-teacher taught math in a small group format that allowed students to master skills at their own pace. By February, Lamb said she observed an increase in math self-esteem among her students who have individualized education plans. They were participating and asking questions more often.

“All students in the class cannot follow the same, scripted curriculum and be on the same problem all the time,” she said.

Related: Is it time to stop segregating kids by ability in middle school math?

Adding to the complexity of the math catch-up challenge is debate over how the subject should be taught. Over the years, experts say, the pendulum has swung between procedural learning, such as teaching kids to memorize how to solve problems step-by-step, and conceptual understanding, in which students grasp underlying math relationships, sometimes making these discoveries on their own.

“Stereotypically, math is that class that people don’t like. And I believe part of the reason is because for so many adults, math was taught just as memorization. You had to memorize exactly what to do, and there wasn’t as much focus on understanding the material,” said Dykema, of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. “And I believe that when people start to understand what’s going on, in whatever you’re learning but especially in math, you develop a new appreciation for it.”

Powell, the University of Texas professor, said teaching math should not be an either-or situation. A shift too far in the conceptual direction, she said, risks alienating students who haven’t mastered the foundational skills.

“We actually do have to teach, and it is less sexy and it’s not as interesting,” she said.

“As the math gets harder, more students struggle. And so we need to provide earlier intervention for students, or we also need to think in middle school and high school, how are we supporting students?”

Sarah Powell, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin 

Diane Manahan, a mother from Summit, New Jersey, said she watched the pandemic chip away at her daughter’s math confidence and abilities. Her daughter, a rising sophomore, has dyscalculia, a math learning disability characterized by difficulties understanding number concepts and logic.

For years, Manahan paid tutors to work with her daughter, a privilege she acknowledges many families could not afford. But, Manahan said, the problems in math instruction are not limited to students with learning disabilities. She often hears parents complain that their children lack basic math skills, or are unable to calculate time or money exchanges.

Manahan wants to see school districts overhaul their curriculum and approach to emphasize those foundational skills.

“If you do not have math fluency, it will affect you all the way through school,” she said.

Related: Proof points: How a debate over the science of math could ignite the math wars

Halfway across the country in Spring, Texas, parent Aggie Gambino has often found herself searching YouTube for math videos. Giada, one of her twin 10-year-old daughters, has dyslexia and also struggles with math, especially the word problems. Gambino says she has strong math skills, but helping her daughter has proved challenging, given instructional approaches that differ from the way she was taught.

She wishes her daughter’s school would send home information to walk parents through how students are being taught to solve problems.

“The more parents understand how they’re being taught, the better participant they can be in their child’s learning,” she said.

It doesn’t take high-level calculations to realize that schools could run out of time and pandemic aid before math skills recover. With schools typically operating on nine-month calendars, some districts are adding learning hours elsewhere.

Lance Barasch recently looked out at two dozen incoming freshmen and knew he had some explaining to do. The students were part of a summer camp designed to help acclimate them to high school.

The math teacher works at the Townview School of Science and Engineering, a Dallas magnet school. It’s a nationally recognized school with selective entrance criteria, but even here, the lingering impact of Covid on students’ math skills is apparent.

“There’s just been more gaps,” Barasch said.

When he tried to lead students through an exercise in factoring polynomials — something he’s used to being able to do with freshmen — he found that his current group of teenagers had misconceptions about basic math terminology.

He had to stop to teach a vocabulary lesson, leading the class through the meaning of words like “term” and “coefficient.”

“Then you can go back to what you’re really trying to teach,” he said.

Barasch wasn’t surprised that the teens were missing some skills after their chaotic middle school years. His expectations have shifted since the pandemic: He knows he has to do more direct teaching so that he can rebuild a solid math foundation for his students.

Filling those gaps won’t happen overnight. For teachers, moving on from the pandemic will require a lot of rewinding and repeating. But the hope is that by taking a step back, students can begin to move forward.

This story on math scores is the first in a series, The Math Problem, produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times. The series will explore the challenges schools face in helping kids make progress in math, a pre-pandemic problem that has snowballed into an education crisis, and highlight examples of success.

The post How can schools dig out from a generation’s worth of lost math progress? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

As schools across the South grapple with vacancies, many turn to those without teaching certificates or formal training to serve students. 

Alabama administrators increasingly hire educators with emergency certifications, often in low-income and majority Black neighborhoods. Texas, meanwhile, allowed about 1 in 5 new teachers to sidestep certification last school year.

In Oklahoma, lawmakers expanded an “adjunct” program that enables schools to hire applicants without teacher training if they meet a local board’s qualifications. And then there’s Florida, where military veterans without a bachelor’s degree can teach for up to five years using temporary certificates.

These states provide a window into the patchwork approach across the South that allows those without traditional training to lead a classroom. Officials must determine if it’s better to hire these adults, even if they aren’t fully prepared, or let children end up in crowded classes or with substitutes.

“I’ve seen what happens when you don’t have teachers in the classroom. I’ve seen the struggle,” Dallas trustee Maxie Johnson said just before the school board approved expanding that district’s reliance on uncertified teachers. He added, “I’d rather have someone that my principal has vetted, that my principal believes in, that can get the job done.”

A Southern Regional Education Board analysis of 2019-20 data in 11 states found roughly 4 percent of teachers — which could be up to 56,000 educators –  were uncertified or teaching with an emergency certification. In addition, 10 percent were teaching out of field, which means, for example, they may be certified to teach high school English but assigned to a middle school math class. 

By 2030, as many as 16 million K-12 students in the region may be taught by an unprepared or inexperienced teacher, the Southern Regional Education Board projects.

“Lowering standards and lowering the preparedness, the training and the supports for teachers has been happening for at least a decade, if not longer,” said the nonprofit’s Megan Boren. “The shortages are getting worse and morale is continuing to fall for teachers.”

Districts need immediate fixes to plug holes.

The trustees in Dallas, for example, leaned into a state program that allows districts to bypass certification requirements, often to hire industry professionals for career-related classes. But Texas’ second-largest district had to fill elementary classrooms and core subjects in middle and high schools. DISD hired 335 teachers through the exemption as of mid-September. 

Texas’ reliance on uncertified new hires ballooned over the last decade. In the 2011-12 school year, fewer than 7 percent of the state’s new teachers – roughly 1,600 – didn’t have a certification. By last year, about 8,400 of the state’s nearly 43,000 new hires were uncertified.

In Alabama, nearly 2,000 of the state’s 47,500 teachers — 4 percent — didn’t hold a full certificate in 2020-21, the most recent year for which data is available. That’s double the state’s reliance on such educators from five years earlier. 

And almost 7 percent of Alabama teachers were in classrooms outside of their certification fields, with the highest percentages in rural areas with high rates of poverty.

Related: To fight teacher shortages, some states are looking to community colleges

Many states have loosened requirements since the pandemic hit, but relying on uncertified teachers isn’t new.

Nearly all states have emergency or provisional licenses that allow a person who has not met requirements for certification to teach. Such licenses can often be used for multiple years, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.

The rush to get more bodies into classrooms only delays the inevitable as such teachers don’t tend to stay as long as others, said Shannon Holston, the nonprofit’s policy chief. Meanwhile, student learning suffers because the quality of education takes a hit, she added.

“It has some unintended consequences down the road that in the immediacy of us trying to perhaps fix a staffing challenge for the 22-23 school year has greater or more taxable consequences down the line potentially,” she said.

In a 2016 study, the U.S. Department of Education reported that 1.7 percent of all teachers did not have a full certification. It went up to roughly 3 percent in schools that served many students of color or children learning English as well as schools in urban and high-poverty areas.

The use of such educators can be concentrated in certain fields and content areas. One example: Alabama’s middle schools.

Rural Bullock County, for example, had no certified math teachers last year in its middle school. Nearly 80 percent of students are Black, 20 percent are Hispanic, and 7 in 10 of all students are in poverty.

Christopher Blair, the county’s former schools superintendent, long struggled to recruit teachers. Poorer counties can’t compete with higher salaries in neighboring districts, and statewide recruiting initiatives often aren’t enough to increase the teacher pools when fewer and fewer educators are graduating from traditional programs. 

Blair, who resigned from his post last spring, had launched a program in Bullock County to help certify its math and science teachers.

“But that’s slowly changing as the teacher pool for all content areas diminishes,” he said. 

In Montgomery, seven of the 10 middle schools had rates higher than 10 percent, and three of those exceeded 20 percent. Birmingham had three middle schools where more than 20% of teachers had emergency certification. 

Birmingham spokeswoman Sherrel Stewart said district officials seek good candidates for emergency certifications and then give them the support needed through robust mentoring. 

“We have to think outside of the box,” she said. “Because realistically, you know, that pool of candidates in education schools has drastically reduced but the demand for high quality educators is still there.”

Prior to 2019, an emergency certificate in Alabama could only be used for one year. But after a teacher shortage task force recommended changes, lawmakers changed to a two-year certification and gave educators the option to extend an additional two years. 

The prohibition against using such certificates in elementary school was lifted, too.

Texas allowed about 1 in 5 new teachers to sidestep certification last school year.

Since then, the number of teachers holding emergency certificates increased dramatically in rural, urban, and low-income schools across the state. 

The highest percentage of teachers on such status in Alabama during the 2020-21 school year was in rural Lowndes County in an elementary school where seven of 16 teachers — 42% of the teaching force — had an emergency certificate, up from three the previous year. 

Most of the school’s 200 students, about 70%, are from low-income families. Only 1% of students tested reached proficiency in math that year.

The National Council on Teacher Quality recommends states not offer emergency certifications, but if they do, they should only be good for one year and nonrenewable. 

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

Dallas principals look for “highly-qualified” individuals committed to teaching who have strong academic backgrounds, said Robert Abel, the district’s human capital management chief. “For us, it’s about the passion, not about the paper.”

Dallas’ uncertified hires — who must have a college degree — participate in ongoing district-specific training on classroom management and effective teaching practices. 

Abel said the district is getting positive reports so far as many who came in through this pathway have achieved academic distinctions with their students. 

Texas lawmakers have embraced policies that give public schools flexibility in hiring uncertified teachers.

In 2015, the state loosened teacher certification requirements under a program called Districts of Innovation.

More than 800 public school districts — out of over 1,000 — have the flexibility to allow non-certified people to teach in specific areas. 

Charters, a growing sector of public schools that operate independently from traditional districts, also have leeway in certification requirements. 

Some teacher groups worry about inconsistent expectations for teacher candidates. 

“You’re dealing with children’s lives, and you have very extreme and important responsibilities related to children,” said Andrea Chevalier, a former lobbyist with the Association of Texas Professional Educators. “Having the certification demonstrates the professionalism that is required for that.”

Texas officials didn’t provide information on where these teachers are concentrated and what subject areas they’re teaching. It’s unknown how the influx of uncertified teachers impacts students. 

A great teacher needs sensitivity and empathy to understand how a child is motivated and what could interfere with learning, said Lee Vartanian, a dean at Athens State University. 

By 2030, 16 million K-12 students in the region may be taught by an unprepared or inexperienced teacher, the Southern Regional Education Board predicts.

They must know how to keep a child’s attention, engage them, and ensure the information sticks, he said. 

A certification helps set professional standards to ensure teachers have those qualities as well as content expertise, said Vartanian, who oversees the Alabama university’s College of Education.

Uncertified teachers may have some of that knowledge, he said, but not the full range. 

“They’re just less prepared systematically,” he said, “and so chances are they’re not going to have the background and understanding where kids are developmentally and emotionally.”

The Alabama Education Lab’s Rebecca Griesbach contributed to this report.

The Alabama Education Lab team at AL.com is supported through a partnership with Report for America, a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.

The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks, Todd A. Williams Family Foundation and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.

This story on uncertified teachers was produced by the Dallas Morning News and AL.com as part of Tackling Teacher Shortages, an ongoing series revealing critical areas of school staffing with an eye toward the gaps that most affect kids and families. The series is part of an eight-newsroom collaboration between AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Fresno Bee in California, The Hechinger Report, The Seattle Times and The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, with support from the Solutions Journalism Network.

The post Uncertified teachers filling holes in schools across the South appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Alabama schools were just starting a new venture to help students find mental health resources when COVID hit.

Mental health service coordinators are now in place in nearly all of Alabama’s 138 school districts; they help smooth the path so more students can find resources. The new role came at a key time, officials say, and will help more communities wrestle with the best way to help more students.

“We know firsthand of several situations where, had some people not been in place, we would have lost several children,” said Kay Warfield, of the Alabama Department of Education, who directs the coordinators from the state level.

Schools around the country are trying to staff up counselors and therapists, but experts say Alabama’s creation of a bridge role could be a model. Mental health service coordinators set up mental health awareness events, hold small group sessions with students and connect families with professional mental health services.

“It’s not a competition. We have to collaborate,” said Emily Herring, a mental health service coordinator in Fairfield, a small district in the Birmingham metro area, of partnering with colleagues to help students find services.

“Someone who is focused on customizing and coordinating supports to better meet students’ evolving needs is an important function,” said Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center for Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education.

“Too often districts and schools fall back on a one size fits all approach,” he said, for example, assigning every school a counselor or a social worker. “But some schools may need this, and some other schools may need different types of student supports, and what schools need in the fall might be different from what they need in the spring.”

Related: College students to administrators: Let’s talk about mental health

The coordinator position started as a state-funded pilot in 102 school districts during the 2020-21 school year. Districts had to apply for a $40,000 grant for the coordinator’s salary and agree to provide the coordinator a space and the freedom to interact with students, teachers and parents.

During the 2021-22 school year, 114 school districts received a grant and Warfield cobbled together enough money to add a dozen more. Her office conducts all of the training, but districts must foot the cost for coordinators to attend.

Students and schools really need the added focus on mental health after two years of COVID-related challenges, she said.

According to survey data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than a third of high school students said they had poor mental health and just under half said they had persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year. 

The state is still gathering evidence to determine how well the program is working, Warfield said. Officials are looking at three measures – rates of absenteeism, rates of suspension and promotion and retention in third, sixth and ninth grades – to gauge the effectiveness of the coordinators.

During the 2018-19 school year, 11 percent of Alabama students were chronically absent, meaning they missed 18 or more days. Some student populations, including those who were economically disadvantaged, disabled, Black and American Indian, had rates higher than 12 percent. Some individual schools had absentee rates up to 48 percent.

Dorann Tanner, with Alabaster City Schools, a growing district south of Birmingham, said COVID restrictions and the uprooting of predictable routines were hard on everyone.

When it was time to come back to normal, she said, “I think we realized that it’s not just a light switch.”

“You can’t just go from being at home and all the precautions and all the anxiety and stress and worry that was just everyone was feeling and then just come back and be like, ‘Oh, hey, the doors open. I’m good.’ ”

Related: Making sure campus counseling centers serve LGBTQ+ students and others

Tanner leads support services for Alabaster City’s 6,200-student district and has many years of experience as a social worker in the district.

She said adding a mental health services coordinator was a natural progression so the district could ease connections between families and mental health resources.

Debbie Brinson started as the district’s mental health services coordinator in December 2020. “Miss Debbie,” as she is called, connects students and parents with mental health resources in the community.

“Navigating the mental health world can be confusing for all of us at times,” she said.

Brinson has been a part of the Alabaster community for a long time, so she is familiar with which practice or therapist might be the best fit.

If a student is referred to Brinson by a counselor or teacher, she’ll contact the child’s parent to see what type of resources they may need and whether they’re receptive to assistance with their mental health.

“There’s still a stigma in regards to mental health,” she said.

Parents sometimes need some help understanding how services could help their child. Connecting with parents is crucial, she said, for good outcomes for students.

“The value of being able to identify and get services earlier for a child helps with the outcome and is going to help them when they become an adult – learning those skills and how to deal with something,” she said.

“Our kids go through a lot,” Escambia County Schools mental health services coordinator Marlo Young said. “One of my main goals was making sure that even when our community mental health centers may not have someone [available], our students have a safe person that they can talk to.”

Related: Schools struggle to help students return to class after a mental health crisis

Young, who just completed her second year as Escambia County’s mental health services coordinator, said she sees her role not only as a resource for the 4,000 students in the district but also as an advocate for raising awareness about the importance of taking care of your mental health in the greater community.

Escambia is a rural county in southern Alabama with just 36,000 residents. Young was born and raised there. During her first year as a coordinator, she organized a mental health awareness walk in Atmore, and while turnout was good, this year, she said, was even better.

Knowing who’s who and where help and support are available is central to the job

“We had a lot of support from the mayor, the police department, the Sheriff’s Department,” she said, as well as local businesses.

Laura Bruce, who serves as coordinator for another small district, Ozark City Schools, organized a poetry night for students where they could share facts about mental health. She also coordinated an “Aware Fair on the Square” event, where she arranged for free inflatables, rides and outreach from local social service agencies.

 “People got a chance to find out about resources they never knew existed around here,” she said.

Related: Nation’s skeletal mental health network will be severely tested

Beyond connecting families with professional help and galvanizing support for mental health awareness in their communities, coordinators adapt their skills to what their local schools need.

Young holds programs in the schools, bringing in mental health organizations to talk with students about bullying and suicide prevention. She’s there if a crisis arises, helping coordinate care and resources to ensure a student gets the help they need. She also helps teachers talk through a situation.

But she can’t do the work alone. Rural community health centers in her area of south Alabama might not always have staff available when help is needed, and as service coordinators join systems, they also have advocated for additional staff to help them meet growing needs.

“We know firsthand of several situations where, had some people not been in place, we would have lost several children.”

Kay Warfield, of the Alabama Department of Education, who directs the coordinators from the state level

Young said she was happy district leaders hired three social workers at the start of the 2021-22 school year, one for each of the three feeder patterns in the county.

Historically, social workers have not been a part of Alabama’s schools, and only 51 of Alabama’s 138 school districts and two of eight charter schools employed a social worker during the 2021-22 school year.

No school district meets the National Association for School Social Workers’ recommendation to employ one social worker in every school building with a ratio of no more than 250 students per school social worker.

Ozark City has no school-based social workers, which means all adults are expected to help keep an eye on students, said Bruce, the district coordinator. 

“A lot of times, the guidance counselors will call me to ask me, ‘Hey, do you just mind speaking to this young lady or this young man?’”

“Someone who is focused on customizing and coordinating supports to better meet students’ evolving needs is an important function.”

Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center for Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education

Bruce goes into each school at least once a week to hold small group workshops with students who have had discipline problems. “I’m there to encourage them to make better choices,” she said.

Alabama schools have also struggled to provide enough counselors.  The statewide ratio is 389-to-1, well above the American Counseling Association’s recommended ratio of 250-to-1.

Just eight school districts met the recommended ratio during the 2021-22 school year.

Related: Counseling kids during the coronavirus: A tough job made even tougher

Balfanz said tracking outcomes should help state leaders “figure out if the student supports are making a difference, and if not, then they get feedback that says perhaps a plan B is needed.”

COVID made it difficult to collect hard data on attendance, Warfield said, so she’s wary of using data from the past two school years to evaluate the coordinators’ effectiveness so far, but hopes to evaluate their efforts this fall.

Coordinators will be in every school district, charter school and statewide magnet school for the 2022-23 school year, Warfield said, with salaries funded by various pots of state money: $4.7 million in direct funding and the rest from money directed to improve school climate and culture.

Lawmakers also have funded district coordinators for the 2023-24 school year.

“We all have mental health,” Bruce said. “How do you cope with bad news, good news? How do you look at your day? Do you look at it half full? Half empty?”

AL.com education editor Ruth Serven Smith contributed to this story.

This story on mental health coordinators was produced by The Education Lab at AL.com, as part of the project “Supporting students: What’s next for mental health,” in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, The Christian Science Monitor and the Education Labs at The Dallas Morning News, The Fresno Bee, The Post and Courier and The Seattle Times. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post To improve student wellbeing, Alabama invests in mental health coordinators appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Teachers are exhausted.

Last summer, Alabama schools were asked to provide in-person and remote options for learning, effectively doubling the teaching responsibilities for the same amount of staff.

At least two Alabama school districts gave teachers the option to either teach remote students or in-person students. Not both.

A year later, the districts, Baldwin and Talladega counties, say the decision to segment teachers was the right one. Teachers might well still be worn out from the stress and demands of the coronavirus pandemic — but officials hope they won’t be stretched to the breaking point in the same way educational staff across the country are reporting.

“Our way was definitely best,” Baldwin County’s Robertsdale High School Principal Joe Sharp told AL.com. “Anytime you can lessen a teacher’s workload, you’re going to get better results from the teacher. And the overall morale is going to be better.”

That’s not the case in most districts in the state, according to Marianne Hayward, the Central Alabama president of the Alabama Federation of Teachers. Hayward said most teachers she represents are either teaching both types of students at the same time or are teaching in-person and then recording live lessons for remote students to watch on their own.

Related: Tears, sleepless nights and small victories: How first-year teachers are weathering the crisis

Learning from Lockdown

This story is a part of Learning from Lockdown, a series about education solutions in the pandemic, produced in partnership with the Education Labs at AL.com, the Dallas Morning News, Fresno Bee and Seattle Times partnered with The Christian Science Monitor, Hechinger Report and Solutions Journalism Network.

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Alabama, like many states, already had a teacher shortage in many disciplines before the pandemic. It’s too early to know what the rate of resignations and retirements may be this summer, but mid-year retirements were high. And national reporting suggests that burnout is high, and resignations are particularly high in districts offering both remote and in-person instruction.

“You’re trying to teach to students remotely and in a classroom all in the same class session. That seems to be a real struggle.”

Thomas Arnett, the Christensen Institute

National think tanks already are putting forth policy proposals to address the long-term strains on the teacher workforce, including burnout. Experts fear the stress of a year of double duty may make shortages worse.

“Doing both is killing teachers,” Hayward said.

Leaning on existing expertise

“I can’t imagine having to do both,” said Abby Bjornson, a fourth-grade teacher at Munford Elementary School in Talladega County.

Bjornson didn’t know what to expect when she volunteered to teach students remotely last August; she was motivated, she said, by an interest in learning new technology.

The year has been difficult, she said, but an overall positive experience has led her to apply to a program for a master’s degree in educational technology from the University of West Alabama.

Talladega County Schools, a 7,000-student district in east Alabama, has a dozen years of digital learning under its belt. Longtime Superintendent Suzanne Lacey understood the potential challenges facing teachers when the district started considering its options last summer.

Lacey took $700,000 of the district’s $1.8 million in federal CARES Act money and dedicated it to infrastructure for Beacon Virtual Academy, a standalone virtual school. Some money went to stipends for teachers to learn new skills to teach online and some went to hire facilitators to help monitor students in middle and high school to make sure they stayed on track while learning virtually.

At the start of the school year, 1,700 students among the district’s 17 schools chose remote learning. Thirty-five of the district’s 420 teachers chose to teach remote-only.

Unlike some Alabama districts, Talladega County has not returned to five days of in-person instruction each week, but follows a “blended” model, in an effort to space out classrooms; two groups of students alternate in-person attendance.

Related: Teachers forced to “MacGyver” their own tech solutions

While there have been bumps along the way, being able to focus on remote teaching and learning the technology and mechanisms to create and track assignments has been a blessing, she said.

Bjornson stressed the importance of communicating with parents.

“Elementary kids need a little help sometimes,” she said, adding that parents have been very supportive. “They’re always there to back me up, as I am them. I just think that’s one of the biggest keys to virtual learning being successful.”

Winterboro High School teacher Vonda Ashley, also in Talladega County, teaches in-person. The district’s blended model allows her to work with students directly, but still gives students a chance to learn independently at home.

“My greatest fear in the beginning was that I was going to be asked to do virtual,” Ashley said. “I was thinking Lord, how would I do that. I was so grateful when they said I’m just doing blended.”

Ashley teaches math to sixth, seventh and eighth grade students.

Her students have a weekly plan, including a list of assignments they can do at home. And even while students are working at home, Ashley is available to meet when students or parents need help.

Expanding virtual school to younger students

In Baldwin County schools, segmenting the teaching force was a no-brainer.

Other options wouldn’t have been good for students, Baldwin County’s Renee Carter said. She has nearly 30 years of experience in teaching, but this year is her first as dean of academics for the 30,000-student district.

“I felt like our children would suffer on both sides because our teachers would have been very stressed,” Carter added.

Related: How to improve schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to students

Principal Joe Sharp said asking teachers to work both in-person and remotely would have pulled them in too many different directions. Monitoring remote learners requires a lot of energy, he said, as does teaching students in person.

Students worried about returning to classrooms could choose to enroll in the district’s existing virtual school.

“Doing both is killing teachers.”

Marianne Hayward, the Central Alabama president of the Alabama Federation of Teachers

Baldwin County has had a virtual school for middle and high schoolers for seven years, but previously did not allow younger students to enroll. Enrollment at the virtual school ballooned from 300 students before the pandemic to 8,000 students in the current school year.

Carter said the district didn’t pull many teachers away from classrooms to teach remote students, but instead posted virtual teaching positions and hired as needed.

The majority of remote students moved back to in-person learning after a short buffer in the start of the spring semester, Carter said. Enrollment in Baldwin’s virtual school is down to 3,200 for the start of the second semester.

‘Real struggle’ to manage different types of teaching

It comes as no surprise that the national transition to remote and hybrid learning models was not easy, according to a recent report. Many remote teachers simply replicated their classroom teaching style through video calls, a pattern researchers at the Christensen Institute, a nonprofit organization that researches technological innovation, called “striking.”

Thomas Arnett, an analyst with the group, said remote instruction requires different skills and types of teaching. Teachers doing both types, understandably, struggled.

“My greatest fear in the beginning was that I was going to be asked to do virtual.”

Winterboro High School teacher Vonda Ashley

“You’ve got a class in front of you and you’ve got a video camera and you’re trying to teach to students remotely and in a classroom all in the same class session,” he said. “That seems to be a real struggle.”

Teachers are reluctant to publicly discuss the challenges of doing both in-person and remote live teaching, but one elementary teacher in a large county district who is managing both told AL.com her anxiety levels have skyrocketed since the start of the school year. She said she has broken down in tears after teaching in-person and remote students simultaneously.

“I went in the closet so they wouldn’t hear me cry,” she wrote in a message to AL.com.

Related: Who ya gonna call? Remote learning helpline for teachers…and parents

Why didn’t every district segment teachers?

Despite some apparent successes in districts that separated teachers into remote or in-person learning responsibilities, state leaders say such an approach may not have made sense everywhere.

Last summer, the state Department of Education asked all districts to offer a virtual and an in-person option for students, but didn’t mandate how to do it.

School Superintendents of Alabama Executive Director Ryan Hollingsworth said schools were essentially left on their own to figure out how to get schools reopened this fall. Under the best conditions, getting teachers and schools ready for remote learning would take a year of training, he estimated.

“We didn’t have that,” Hollingsworth said. “We had what, maybe 90 days?”

Districts with some experience in digital learning, like Baldwin and Talladega counties, were ahead of the pack, he said, when it came to setting up classrooms and teachers in the most practical ways. Larger school districts also naturally had more teachers and other personnel to work with, giving them more flexibility when it came to assigning teachers to students.

AFT’s Hayward said letting local principals handle the decision — rather than focusing on the district as a whole — and not knowing how many students would choose remote learning undermined schools’ ability to make good decisions.

“There should have been more of a conscious effort to [assign teachers to] do one or the other,” Hayward said.

By requiring teachers to do double duty, she said, districts have pushed teachers to their limits.

Talladega plans to return to in-person learning on March 15; all students will return to campus except those that have chosen to do all of their learning remotely.

Superintendent Lacey said Talladega’s decision to segment teachers into two workforces was the right one.

“Overall, teachers have been positive and appreciative of the blended learning model this year.”

It’s too early to assess teacher retention rates or standardized testing rates statewide, but teachers who were able to focus on one method of instruction said they feel better, and they feel like their children learned better, than juggling both.

“I have noticed a lot of growth in my students,” Bjornson said.

She said she hopes everyone will give students, teachers and parents and extra measure of understanding for the difficult year.

“I don’t think it’s fair to compare this year to last year,” Bjornson said. “Not only is this a new learning experience for me, but it also is for the students and parents. We have to give them grace, too.”

This story is a project from The Alabama Education Lab, a new initiative from AL.com, and was supported through funding from the Solutions Journalism Network, and was reprinted with permission. To learn more about the Ed Lab and to get alerts about future work and events, sign up for its newsletter, Ed Chat.

The post As teacher morale hit bottom, these Alabama districts looked for ways to ease workload appeared first on The Hechinger Report.