Every time educators suspend students from school, they have to select a formal reason.

In Texas, they have 42 options to pick from — fighting, school-related gang violence, even arson. Despite those choices, 88 percent of suspensions in Texas last year were marked in state reports as a “violation of student code of conduct” with no additional detail.

That’s more than a million suspensions last school year alone.

Many states have these nebulous categories, designed for behavior that isn’t captured by another, more specific, reason set by their departments of education. These categories are often used at high — and potentially problematic — rates. Texas districts reported the highest number of these vague suspensions, but a review of five years of data across 15 other states for which The Hechinger Report obtained data showed school officials citing a broad category such as “other” nearly a million times when suspending students.

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.

School discipline experts warn that these ambiguous categories lack guardrails and can be used to justify suspensions for any misconduct, including minor infractions. They’re often available in addition to other subjective options such as willful defiance and insubordination, yet are even more indefinite, further obscuring why students are kicked out of school.

The very existence of these types of “catchall” categories sends a troubling message to educators, said Dan Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law.

“It’s a way to say you can suspend basically for any reason whatsoever,” he said. “It gives carte blanche to administrators.”

In Texas, the catchall category captures almost 9 out of every 10 suspensions. In Mississippi, the similarly imprecise category of “noncriminal behavior” accounts for 3 out of every 4 — 232,000 out of a total of 303,000 suspensions over five years. In Indiana, Alabama and Vermont, a similarly broad category accounted for more than a quarter of all suspensions in that time.

In all these states, there are at least 25 more clearly defined categories of suspensions, such as fighting, stalking and sexual misconduct.

Studies show that Black students, in particular, are more likely to be suspended for vague reasons, an indication that bias may play a larger role in suspensions than behavior. Research has also long demonstrated that kids who are suspended have negative outcomes, including lower academic performance, higher dropout rates and increased involvement with the criminal justice system. Because there are such serious consequences, experts say transparency about the discipline process is key.

Related: Vague school rules at the root of millions of student suspensions

In Mississippi, districts may soon need to note specifics about the kind of behavior that leads to suspensions in its noncriminal-behavior category, Shanderia Minor, spokesperson for the state’s education department, said in an email. The form districts use to record discipline incidents will be updated over the summer and may require additional information for these types of suspensions.

The Texas Education Agency said that discipline decisions are made at the local level. It did not respond to follow-up questions about the agency’s oversight. This means districts have complete control over determining what behavior is considered a violation of the student code of conduct.

In the Fort Worth Independent School District in Texas, almost 91 percent of suspensions were labeled a violation of the student code of conduct, or “Code 21” last year. Sandra Benavidez, executive director of guidance and counseling, oversees the district’s approach to discipline. She pointed out that the majority of Texas’ 41 other categories are for extreme behavior — think felonies rather than misdemeanors. The student code of conduct, she said, is where infractions such as horseplaying and skipping class are defined.

“They’re still infractions. They’re still undesirable behaviors,” Benavidez said. When students are suspended for them, the misconduct is labeled “Code 21.” Benavidez uses the same language as Losen: “In some cases, Code 21 has become, for lack of a better word, a catchall.”

She added that better guidance from the state about what kinds of behavior merit suspension would be useful, citing a lack of training on when educators should turn to such punishment. “If you asked 20 administrators, they would each give you a different response,” she said.

Jason Okonofua, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies school discipline, said that more specific categories and clear guidelines are needed.

“Don’t leave any ambiguity,” Okonofua said. “Not only don’t have an ‘other’ box, but make clear instructions, like clear classifications for things, such that it’s very transparent for a teacher.”

Related: ‘It was the most unfair thing’: Disobedience, discipline and racial disparity

Transparency could help reduce inequities in suspension rates under vague categories, Okonofua said. In all states with available data, Black students were more likely to be suspended than their white peers for “other” reasons.

Russ Skiba, a professor emeritus at Indiana University, who has studied the racial and ethnic disparities in exclusionary school discipline for decades, said the more subjective a category, the greater the chance it will be applied unevenly. 

“When we have very broad categories, you can have subjective decisions and those subjective decisions really are more likely to tap into pre-existing stereotypes that exist in all of us,” he said.

In the Fort Worth ISD last year, Black students received 48 percent of all suspensions for violations of the student code of conduct. They made up just 20 percent of the student body.  

When Benavidez joined Fort Worth ISD last summer, one of the first things she did was look at the district’s discipline data. She noted racial disparities in alternative school placements, which follow misbehavior, and convened a group to help rethink the district’s strategy for dealing with students at risk of getting kicked out of their schools. Benavidez acknowledged that giving educators too much discretion can let bias creep into disciplinary decisions.

“We, as district leaders, have to identify those vulnerabilities and put systems in place that minimize those opportunities,” she said. “That’s the work I’ve been doing with the team this year.”

Tara García Mathewson contributed reporting.

This story about school discipline data 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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Editor’s note: Substituting for Jill Barshay is Sarah Butrymowicz, The Hechinger Report’s investigations editor. Jill will return next week.

Every school day, thousands of students are suspended for vague, subjective reasons, such as defiance and disorderly conduct. Our investigative team recently took a deep dive into these punishments, based on 20 states for which we were able to obtain data. Our analysis revealed more than 2.8 million suspensions and expulsions from 2017-18 to 2021-22 under these ambiguous categories. 

Here’s a closer look at some of what we found:

1. Suspensions for these categories of behavior are incredibly common. 

Our analysis found that nearly a third of suspensions and expulsions reported by states was meted out under these types of categories, which also included insubordination, disruptive behavior, and disobedience. 

In Alabama, educators have 56 categories to choose from as justification for student punishment; a full third in our sample were assigned for one of four vague violations. This is what the state calls them: “defiance of authority,” “disorderly conduct — other,” “disruptive demonstrations,” and “disobedience — persistent, willful.” 

In North Carolina, Ohio and Oregon, about half or more of all suspensions were classified in similar categories. 

There are a few reasons why these categories are so widely used. For one, they often capture the low-level infractions that are most common in schools, such as ignoring a teacher’s direction, yelling in class or swearing. By comparison, more clearcut and serious violations, such as those involving weapons or illegal substances, are rarer. They made up only 2 percent and 9 percent of the discipline records, respectively. 

But experts also say that terms such as disorder or defiance are so broad and subject to interpretation that they can quickly become a catchall. For instance, in Oregon, the umbrella category of disruptive behavior includes insubordination and disorderly conduct, as well as harassment, obscene behavior, minor physical altercations, and “other” rule violations.

2. Educators classify a huge range of behavior as insubordination or disruption. 

As part of our reporting, we obtained more than 7,000 discipline records from a dozen school districts across eight states to see what specific behavior was leading to suspensions labeled this way. It was a wide range, sometimes even within a single school district. Sometimes students were suspended for behavior as minor as being late to class; others, because they punched someone. And it was all called the same thing, which experts say prevents school discipline decisions from being transparent to students and the greater public. 

There were some common themes though, behaviors like yelling at peers, throwing things in a classroom or refusing to do work. We developed a list of 15 commonly repeated behaviors and coded about 3,000 incidents by hand, marking whether they described that type of conduct. We used machine learning to analyze the rest. 

Related: Young children misbehave. Some are suspended for acting their age

In fewer than 15 percent of cases, students got in trouble for using profanity, or for talking back, or for yelling at school staff. In at least 20 percent of cases, students refused a direct order and in 6 percent, they were punished for misusing technology, including being on their cell phones during class or using school computers inappropriately.

3. Inequities can be even more pronounced in these ambiguous categories. 

We know from decades of research and federal data collection that Black students are more likely to be suspended from school than their white peers. In many places, that is especially true when it comes to categories like insubordination. 

In Indiana, for example, Black students were suspended or expelled for defiance at four times the rate of white students on average. In 2021-22, eight Black students received this punishment per 100 students, compared with just two white students. In all other categories, the difference was three times the rate. 

Research suggests that teachers sometimes react to the same behavior differently depending on a child’s race. A 2015 study found that when teachers were presented with school records describing two instances of misbehavior by a student, teachers felt more troubled when they believed a Black student repeatedly misbehaved rather than a white student.

They “are more likely to be seen as ‘troublemakers’ when they misbehave in some way than their white peers,” said Jason Okonofua, assistant professor at University of California-Berkeley and a co-author of the study. Teachers are usually making quick decisions in situations where they are removing a child from the classroom, he said, and biases tend to “rear their heads” under those circumstances.

Related: What happens when suspensions get suspended?

Similar disparities exist for students with disabilities. In all states for which we had demographic data, these students were more likely to be suspended for insubordination or disorderly conduct violations than their peers. In many states, those differences were larger than for other suspensions. 

4. Suspension rates vary widely within states. 

Further underscoring how much educator discretion exists in determining when or whether to suspend a student, individual districts report hugely different suspension rates. 

Take Georgia, for instance, which allows for students to be punished for disorderly conduct and “student incivility.” In 2021-22, the 3,300-student McDuffie County School System cited these two reasons for suspensions more than 1,250 times, according to state data. That’s nearly 40 times per 100 students. Similarly sized Appling County issued so few suspensions for disorderly conduct and student incivility that the numbers were redacted to protect student privacy. 

Editors’ note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. Read about the internship fund created to honor his legacy as a data reporter. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

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

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For the first 57 minutes of the basketball game between two Bend, Oregon, high school rivals, Kyra Rice stood at the edges of the court taking yearbook photos. With just minutes before the end of the game, she was told she had to move.

Kyra pushed back: She had permission to stand near the court. The athletic director got involved, Kyra recalled. She let a swear word or two slip. 

Kyra has anxiety as well as ADHD, which can make her impulsive. Following years of poor  experiences at school, she sometimes became defensive when she felt overwhelmed, said her mom, Jules Rice. 

But at the game, Kyra said she kept her cool overall. Both she and her mother were shocked to learn the next day that she’d been suspended from school. 

“OK, maybe she said some bad words, but it’s not enough to suspend her,” Rice said. 

The incident’s discipline record, provided by Rice, lists a series of categories to explain the suspension: insubordination, disobedience, disrespectful/minor disruption, inappropriate language, non-compliance. 

Broad and subjective categories like these are cited hundreds of thousands of times a year to justify removing students from school, a Hechinger Report investigation found. The data show that students with disabilities, like Kyra, are more likely than their peers to be punished for such violations. In fact, they’re often more likely to be suspended for these reasons than for other infractions.

For example, between 2017-18 and 2021-22, Rhode Island students with disabilities were, on average, two and a half times more likely than their peers to be suspended for any reason, but nearly three times more likely to be suspended for insubordination and almost four times more likely to be suspended for disorderly conduct. Similar patterns played out in other states with available data including Massachusetts, Montana and Vermont. 

Federal law should offer students protections from being suspended for behavior that results from their disability, even if they are being disruptive or insubordinate. But those protections have significant limitations. At the same time, these subjective categories are almost tailor-made to trap students with disabilities, who might have trouble expressing or regulating themselves appropriately.

Districts have wide discretion in setting their own rules and many students with disabilities quickly earn reputations at school as troublemakers. “Unfortunately, who gets caught up in a lot of the vagueness in the codes of conduct are students with disabilities,” said attorney Robert Tudisco, an expert with Understood.org, a nonprofit that provides resources and support to people with learning and attention disabilities.

Related: When your disability gets you sent home from school

Students on the autism spectrum often have a hard time communicating with words and might yell or become aggressive if something upsets them. A student with oppositional defiant disorder is likely to be openly insubordinate to authority, while one with dyslexia might act out when frustrated with schoolwork. Students with ADHD typically have a hard time controlling their impulses.

Kyra’s disability created challenges throughout her school career in the Bend-La Pine School District. “Nobody really understood her,” Rice said. “She’s a big personality and she’s very impulsive. And impulsivity is what gets kids in trouble and gets kids suspended.” 

Kyra, now 17, said that too few teachers cared about her individualized education program, or IEP, a document that details the accommodations a student in special education is granted. She’d regularly butt heads with teachers or skip class altogether to avoid them. Her favorite teacher was her special ed teacher. 

“She understood my ADHD and my other special needs,” Kyra said. “My other teachers didn’t.”

Scott Maben, district spokesperson, said in an email he could not comment on specific disciplinary matters because of privacy concerns, but that the district had a range of responses to deal with student misconduct and that administrators “carefully consider a response that is commensurate with the violation.” 

In Oregon, “disruptive conduct” accounted for more than half of all suspensions from 2017-18 to 2021-22. The state department of education includes in that category insubordination and disorderly conduct, as well as harassment, obscene behavior, minor physical altercations, and “other” rule violations. 

Disruptive behavior is the leading cause of suspensions because of its “inherently subjective nature,” the state department of education’s spokesperson, Marc Siegal, said in an email. He added that the department monitors discipline data for special education disparities and works with school districts on the issue. 

The primary protections for students with disabilities come from the federal government, through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA. But that law only requires districts to examine whether a student’s behavior stems from their disability after they have missed 10 total days of school through suspension. 

At that point, districts are required to hold a manifestation hearing, in which officials must determine whether a student’s behavior was the result of their disability. “That’s where it gets very gray,” Tudisco said. “What happens in the determination of manifestation is very subjective.”

In his experience, he added, the behavior is almost always connected to a student’s disability, but school districts often don’t see it that way. 

“Manifestation is not about giving Johnny or Susie a free pass because they have a disability,” Tudisco said. “It’s a process to understand why this behavior occurred so we can do something to prevent it tomorrow.” 

Related: Senators call for stronger rules to reduce off-the-books suspensions

The connections are often much clearer to parents. 

A Rhode Island mother, Pearl, said her daughter was easily overwhelmed in her elementary school classroom in the Bristol Warren Regional School District. (Pearl is being referred to by her middle name because she is still a district parent and fears retaliation.) 

Her child has autism and easily experiences a sensory overload. If the classroom was too loud or someone new walked in, she might start screaming and get out of her seat, Pearl said. Teachers struggled to calm her down, as other students were escorted out of the room. 

Sometimes, Pearl was called to pick up her daughter early, in an unrecorded informal removal. A few times, though, she was suspended for disorderly conduct, Pearl recalled. 

Between 2017-18 and 2020-21, students with disabilities in the Bristol Warren Regional School District made up about 13 percent of the student body, but accounted for 21 percent of suspensions for insubordination and 30 percent of all disorderly conduct suspensions. 

The district did not respond to repeated requests for comment. 

The Rhode Island Department of Education collects data on school discipline from districts, but special education and discipline reform advocates in the state say that the agency rarely acts on these numbers. 

Department spokesperson Victor Morente said in an email that the agency monitors discipline data and is “very clear that suspension should be the last option considered.” He added that the department has published resources about alternatives to suspension and discipline specifically for students with disabilities. 

A 2016 state law that limits the overall use of out-of-school suspensions also requires that districts examine their data for inequities. Districts that find such disparities are supposed to submit a report to the department of education, said Hannah Stern, a policy associate at the Rhode Island American Civil Liberties Union.

Her group submits public records requests for copies of their reports every year, but has never received one, she said, “even though almost every single school district exhibits disparities.”

Related: Sent home early: Lost learning in special education

Pearl said that her daughter needed one-on-one support in the classroom instead of punishment. “She’s autistic. She’s not going to learn her lesson by suspending her,” Pearl said. “She actually got more scared to go back. She actually felt very unwelcome and very sad.”

Students with autism often have a hard time connecting their actions to the punishment, said Joanne Quinn, executive director of The Autism Project, a Rhode Island-based group that offers support to family members of people with autism. With suspension, “there’s no learning going on and they’re going to do the same thing incorrectly.”

Quinn’s group provides training for schools throughout Rhode Island and beyond, aimed at helping teachers understand how the brain functions in people with autism and offering strategies on how to effectively respond to behavior challenges that could easily be labeled disobedient or disorderly. 

Federal law provides a road map for schools to improve how they respond to misconduct related to a student’s disability. Schools should identify a student’s triggers and create a behavior intervention plan aimed at preventing problems before they start, it says. 

Related: How a disgraced method of diagnosing learning disabilities persists in our nation’s schools

But, doing these things well requires time, resources and training that can be in short supply, leaving teachers feeling alone, struggling to maintain order in their classrooms, said Christine Levy, a former special education teacher and administrator who works as an advocate for individual special education students in the Northeast, including Rhode Island. 

Levy recently worked with a student with disabilities who was suspended after he tickled a peer at a locker on five straight days. But, she said, the situation should have never reached the point of suspension: Educators should have quickly identified what the boy was struggling with and set a plan in motion to help him, including modeling appropriate locker conduct. 

Had this boy’s teachers done that, the suspension could have been avoided. “The repair of that is so much longer and so much harder to do versus, let’s catch it right away,” she said.

Many parents described similar situations, though, in which a child routinely got in trouble for repeated behavior. When Michelle Gomes’s daughter became upset in her kindergarten classroom, she’d often run out and refuse to come back in. Sometimes, she’d tear things off the walls.

“Whenever she gets like that, it’s hard to see,” Gomes said. “I hurt for her. It’s like she’s not in control.”

Gomes received regular calls from Cranston Public School officials to come pick her daughter up. A couple of times, the child was formally suspended, Gomes said. The school described her as a safety risk, Gomes recalled.

“She obviously doesn’t feel safe herself,” she said. 

Cranston Public Schools did not respond to requests for comment. 

Gomes’s daughter had a speech delay and anxiety and qualified for special education services. A private neurological evaluation concluded that she was compensating for that delay with her physical responses, Gomes said. 

This can be a common cause of behavior challenges for students with disabilities, experts say.

“Behavior is communication,” said Julian Saavedra, an assistant principal and an expert at Understood.org.* “The behavior is trying to tell us something. We as the IEP team, the school team, have to dig deeper.” 

On her own, Gomes found strategies that helped. Gomes’ child struggled with transitions, so they’d go over her day in advance to prepare her for what to expect. A play therapist taught both her and her daughter breathing exercises. 

Her daughter was switched to another district school where a social worker would sometimes walk the girl to class. When the child got worked up, she’d sometimes be allowed to sit with that social worker or in the nurse’s office to calm down. That helped, but sometimes, those staff members weren’t available. 

In the end, Gomes moved her daughter to a school outside the district that was better equipped to help the girl deescalate. Her behavior problems lessened and she started enjoying going to school, Gomes said.

But Gomes still can’t understand why more teachers weren’t able to help her child regulate herself. “Do we need retraining or do we need new training?” she said. “Because this is mindblowing to me, not one of you can do that.”

Note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

CORRECTION: This article has been updated with the correct spelling of Julian Saavedra’s name.

This story about suspension of students with disabilities 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 Students with disabilities often snared by subjective discipline rules appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

A Rhode Island student smashed a ketchup packet with his fist, splattering an administrator. Another ripped up his school work. The district called it “destruction of school property.” A Washington student turned cartwheels while a PE teacher attempted to give instructions. 

A pair of Colorado students slid down a dirt path despite a warning. An Ohio 12th grader refused to work while assigned to the in-school suspension room. Then there was the Maryland sixth grader who swore when his computer shut off and responded “my bad” when his teacher addressed his language. 

Their transgressions all ended the same way: The students were suspended.

Discipline records state the justification for their removals: These students were disorderly. Insubordinate. Disruptive. Disobedient. Defiant. Disrespectful. 

At most U.S. public schools, students can be suspended, even expelled, for these ambiguous and highly subjective reasons. This type of punishment is pervasive nationwide, leading to hundreds of thousands of missed days of school every year, and is often doled out for misbehavior that doesn’t seriously hurt anyone or threaten school safety, a Hechinger Report investigation found. 

Districts cited one of these vague violations as a reason for suspending or expelling students more than 2.8 million times from 2017-18 to 2021-22 across the 20 states that collect this data. That amounted to nearly a third of all punishments recorded by those states. Black students and students with disabilities were more likely than their peers to be disciplined for these reasons. 

Many discipline reform advocates say that suspensions should be reserved for only the most serious, dangerous behaviors. Those, the analysis found, were much less common. Violations of rules involving alcohol, tobacco or drugs were cited as reasons for ejecting students from classes about 759,000 times, and incidents involving a weapon were cited 131,000 times. Even infractions involving physical violence — such as fighting, assault and battery — were less common, with about 2.3 million instances. (Learn more about the data and how we did our analysis.)

Because categories like defiance and disorderly conduct are often defined broadly at the state level, teachers and administrators have wide latitude in interpreting them, according to interviews with dozens of researchers, educators, lawyers and discipline reform advocates. That opens the door to suspensions for low-level infractions.  

“Those are citations you can drive a truck through,” said Jennifer Wood, executive director for the Rhode Island Center for Justice. 

The Hechinger Report also obtained more than 7,000 discipline records from a dozen school districts across eight states through public records requests. They show a wide range of behavior that led to suspensions for things like disruptive conduct and insubordination. Much of the conduct posed little threat to safety. For instance, students were regularly suspended for being tardy, using a phone during class or swearing. 

Decades of research have found that students who are suspended from school tend to perform worse academically and drop out at higher rates. Researchers have linked suspensions to lower college enrollment rates and increased involvement with the criminal justice system.

These findings have spurred some policymakers to try to curtail suspensions by limiting their use to severe misbehavior that could harm others. Last year, California banned all suspensions for willful defiance. Other places, including Philadelphia and New York City, have similarly eliminated suspensions for low-level misconduct. 

Elsewhere, though, as student behavior has worsened following the pandemic, legislators are calling for stricter discipline policies, concerned for educators who struggle to maintain order and students whose lessons are disrupted. These legislative proposals come despite warnings from experts and even classroom teachers who say more suspensions — particularly for minor, subjective offenses — are not the answer. 

Roberto J. Rodríguez, assistant U.S. education secretary, said he was concerned by The Hechinger Report’s findings. “We need more tools in the toolkit for our educators and for our principals to be able to respond to some of the social and emotional needs,” he said. “Suspension and expulsion shouldn’t be the only tool that we pull out when we see behavioral issues.”

In Rhode Island, insubordination was the most common reason for a student to be suspended in the years analyzed. Disorderly conduct was third. 

In the Cranston Public Schools, these two categories accounted for half of the Rhode Island district’s suspensions in 2021-22. Disorderly conduct alone made up about 38 percent. 

Behavior that led to a such a suspension there in recent years included:

• Getting a haircut in the bathroom;
• Putting a finger through the middle of another student’s hamburger at lunch;
• Writing swear words in an email exchange with another student;
• Throwing cut up pieces of paper in the air;
• Stabbing a juice bottle with a pencil and getting juice all over a table and peers; and
• Leapfrogging over a peer and “almost” knocking down others.

Cranston school officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Rhode Island Department of Education spokesperson Victor Morente said in an email that the agency could not comment on specific causes for suspension, but that the department “continues to underscore that all options need to be exhausted before schools move to suspension.” 

The department defines disorderly conduct as “Any act which substantially disrupts the orderly conduct of a school function, [or] behavior which substantially disrupts the orderly learning environment or poses a threat to the health, safety, and/or welfare of students, staff, or others.”

Related: In New York state, students can be suspended for up to an entire school year

Many states use similarly unspecific language in their discipline codes, if they provide any guidance at all, a review of state policies found. 

For education departments that do provide definitions to districts, subjectivity is frequently built in. In Louisiana’s state guidance, for instance, “treats authority with disrespect” includes “any act which demonstrates a disregard or interference with authority.”

Ted Beasley, spokesperson for the Louisiana Department of Education, said in an email that discipline codes are not defined in state statutes and that “school discipline is a local school system issue.” 

Officials in several other states said the same.

The result, as demonstrated by a review of discipline records from eight states, is a broad interpretation of the categories: Students were suspended for shoving, yelling at peers, throwing objects, and violating dress codes. Some students were suspended for a single infraction; others broke several rules. 

In fewer than 15 percent of cases, students got in trouble for using profanity, according to a Hechinger analysis of the records. The rate was similar for when they yelled at or talked back to administrators. In at least 20 percent of cases, students refused a direct order and in 6 percent, they were punished for misusing technology, including being on the cell phones during class or using school computers inappropriately. 

“What is defiance to one is not defiance to all, and that becomes confusing, not just for the students, but also the adults,” said Harry Lawson, human and civil rights director for the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union. “Those terms that are littered throughout a lot of codes of conduct, depending on the relationship between people, can mean very different things.”

But giving teachers discretion in how to assign discipline isn’t necessarily a problem, said Adam Tyner, national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. “The whole point of trusting, in this case, teachers, or anyone, to do their job is to be able to let them have responsibility and make some judgment calls,” he said.

Tyner added that it’s important to think about all students when considering school discipline policies. “If a student is disrupting the class, it may not help them all that much to take them and put them in a different environment, but it sure might help the other students who are trying to learn,” he said. 

Johanna Lacoe spent years trying to measure exactly that — the effect of discipline reforms on all students In Philadelphia, including those who hadn’t been previously suspended. The district banned out-of-school suspensions for many nonviolent offenses in 2012. 

Critics of the policy shift warned that it would harm students who do behave in class; they’d learn less or even come to school less often. Lacoe’s research found that schools faithfully following the new rules saw no decrease in academic achievement or attendance for non-suspended students. 

But, the policy wasn’t implemented consistently, the researchers found. The schools that complied already issued the fewest suspensions; it was easier for them to make the policy shift, Lacoe said. In schools that kept suspending students, despite the ban, test scores and student attendance fell slightly.

Overall, though, students who had been previously suspended showed improvements. Lacoe called eliminating out-of-school suspensions for minor infractions a “no brainer.”

“We know suspensions aren’t good for kids,” said Lacoe, the research director of the California Policy Lab’s site at the University of California, Berkeley.* The group partners with government agencies to research the impact of policies. “Kicking kids out of school and providing them no services and no support and then returning them to the environment where nothing has changed is not a good solution.” 

Related: Hidden expulsions? Schools kick students out but call it a ‘transfer’

This fall, two high schoolers in Providence, Rhode Island, walked out of a classroom. They later learned they were being suspended for their action, because it was disrespectful to a teacher.

On her first day back after the suspension, one of the students, Sara, said she went to her teacher to talk through the incident. It was something she wished she’d had the chance to do without missing a couple days of school.

“Suspending someone, not talking to someone, that’s not helping,” said Sara, whose last name is being withheld to protect her privacy. “You’re not helping them to succeed. You’re making it worse.”

In 2021-22, disorderly conduct and insubordination made up a third of all Providence Public School suspensions. 

District spokesperson Jay Wegimont said in an email that the district uses many alternatives to suspension and out-of-school suspensions are only given to respond to “persistent conduct which substantially impedes the ability of other students to learn.”

Some parents and students interviewed asked not to have their full names published, fearing retaliation from their school districts. But nearly all parents and students who have dealt with suspension for violations such as disrespect and disorderly conduct also said that the punishment often did nothing but leave the student frustrated with the school and damage the student’s relationships with teachers. 

At a Cincinnati high school in 2019, Yousuf Munir led a peaceful protest about the impact of climate change, with about 50 fellow students. Munir, then a junior, planned to leave school and join a larger protest at City Hall. The principal said Munir couldn’t go and threatened to assign detention.

Munir left anyway.

That detention morphed into suspension for disobeying the principal, said Munir, who remembers thinking: “The only thing you’re doing is literally keeping me out of class.”

The district told The Hechinger Report that Munir was suspended for leaving campus without written permission, a decision in line with the district’s code of conduct. 

The whole incident left Munir feeling “so angry I didn’t know what to do with it.” They went on to start the Young Activists Coalition, which advocated for fair discipline and restorative practices at Cincinnati Public Schools.

Now in college, Munir is a mentor to high school kids. “I can’t imagine ever treating a kid that way,” they said. 

Parents and students around the country described underlying reasons for behavior problems that a suspension would do little to address: Struggles with anxiety. Frustration with not understanding classwork. Distraction by events in their personal lives. 

Discipline records are also dotted with examples that indicate a deeper cause for the misbehavior.

In one case, a student in Rhode Island was suspended for talking back to her teachers; the discipline record notes that her mother had recently died and the student might need counseling. A student in Minnesota “lost his cool” after having “his buttons pushed by a couple peers.” He cursed and argued back. A Maryland student who went to the main office to report being harassed cursed at administrators when asked to formally document it. 

To be sure, discipline records disclose only part of a school’s response, and many places may simultaneously be working to address root causes. Even as they retain — and exercise — the right to suspend, many districts across the country have adopted alternative strategies aimed at building relationships and repairing harm caused by misconduct. 

“There needs to be some kind of consequence for acting out, but 9 out of 10 times, it doesn’t need to be suspension,” said Judy Brown, a social worker in Minneapolis Public Schools.

Related: Preventing suspensions: Tackle discipline problems with empathy first

Some educators who have embraced alternatives say in the long run they’re more effective. Suspension temporarily removes kids; it rarely changes behavior when they return. 

“It’s really about having the compassion and the time and patience to be able to have these conversations with students to see what the antecedent of the behavior is,” Brown said. “It’s often not personal; they’re overwhelmed.” 

In some cases, students act out because they don’t want to be at school at all and know the quickest escape is misbehavior. 

On Valentine’s day 2022, a Maryland seventh grader showed up to school late. She then refused to go to class or leave the hallway and, according to her Dorchester County discipline record, was disrespectful towards an educator. “These are the behaviors [the student] typically displays when she does not want to go to class,” her record reads. 

By 8:30 she was suspended and sent home for three days.

Dorchester County school officials declined to comment. In 2021-22, 38 percent of suspensions and expulsions in the district were assigned for disrespect and disruption.

Last year, administrators in Minnesota’s Monticello School District spent the summer overhauling their discipline procedures and consequences, out of concern that students of color were being disproportionately disciplined. They developed clearer definitions for violation categories and instituted non-exclusionary tools to deal with isolated minor misbehaviors.

Previously, the district suspended students for telling an “inappropriate joke” in class or cursing, records show. Those types of behavior will now be dealt with in schools, Superintendent Eric Olsen said, but repeated refusals and noncompliance could still lead to a suspension.

“Would I ever want to see a school where we can’t suspend? I would not,” he said. “Life is always about balance.”

Olsen wants his students — all students — to feel valued and be successful. But they’re not his only consideration. “You also have to think of your employees,” he said. “There’s also that fine line of making sure your staff feels safe.” 

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

Monticello, like most school districts across the country, has seen an increase in student misconduct since schools reopened after pandemic closures. A 2023 survey found that more than 40 percent of educators felt less safe in their schools compared with 2019 and, in some instances, teachers have been injured in violent incidents, including shootings. 

And even before 2020, educators nationwide were warning that they lacked the appropriate mental health and social service supports to adequately deal with behavior challenges. Some nonviolent problems, like refusal to put phones away or stay in one’s seat, can make it difficult for teachers to effectively do their jobs. 

And the discipline records reviewed by The Hechinger Report do capture a sampling of more severe misbehavior. In some cases, students were labeled defiant or disorderly for fighting, throwing chairs or even hitting a teacher. 

Shatara Clark taught for 10 years in Alabama before feeling too disrespected and overextended to keep going. She recalled regular disobedience from students. 

“Sometimes I look back like, ‘How did I make it?’” Clark said. “My blood pressure got high and everything.” 

She became so familiar with the protocol for discipline referrals that she can still remember every step two years after leaving the classroom. In her schools, students were suspended for major incidents like fighting or threatening a teacher but also for repeated nonviolent behavior like interrupting or speaking out in class. 

Clark said discipline records often don’t show the full context. “Say for instance, a boy got suspended for talking out of turn. Well, you’re not going to know that he’s done that five times, and I’ve called his parents,” she said. “Then you see someone that’s been suspended for fighting, and it looks like the same punishment for a lesser thing.”

In many states, reform advocates and student activists pushing to ban harsh discipline policies have found a receptive audience in lawmakers. Many teachers are also sympathetic to their arguments; the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers support discipline reform and alternatives to suspension. 

In some instances, though, teachers have resisted efforts to curtail suspensions, saying they need to have the option to remove kids from school.

Many experts say the largest hurdle to getting teachers to embrace discipline reforms is that new policies are often rolled out without training or adequate staffing and support. 

Without those things, “the policy change is somewhat of a paper tiger,” said Richard Welsh, an associate professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University. “If we don’t think about the accompanying support, it’s almost as if some of these are unfunded mandates.”  

In Monticello, Olsen has focused on professional development for teachers to promote alternatives to suspension. The district has created space for students to talk about their actions and how they can rebuild relationships. 

It’s still a work in progress. Teacher training, Olsen says, is key. 

“You can’t just do a policy change and expect everyone to magically do it.”

Reporting contributed by Hadley Hitson of the Montgomery Advertiser and Madeline Mitchell of the Cincinnati Enquirer, members of the USA TODAY Network; and Amanda Chen, Tazbia Fatima, Sara Hutchinson, Tara García Mathewson, and Nirvi Shah, The Hechinger Report. 

Editors’ note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. Read about the internship fund created to honor his legacy as a data reporter. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

*CLARIFICATION: This article has been updated to clarify Johanna Lacoe’s title. She is the research director of the California Policy Lab’s site at the University of California, Berkeley.

This story about classroom discipline 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 Vague school rules at the root of millions of student suspensions appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The Hechinger Report spent the last year investigating a major subset of school discipline: suspensions and expulsions for vague, subjective categories like defiance, disruption and disorderly conduct. 

We started this project with some basic questions: How often were states suspending students for these reasons? What kinds of behavior do educators say constitute defiance or disorder, anyway? And were some students more likely to be punished for these kinds of things than others?

Answering these questions revealed how overwhelmingly common these types of suspensions are for a broad range of behavior, including minor incidents. Here’s how we did it.

How did we get state and district level suspension data?

We attempted to get data from all 50 states, but there is no single place to get school discipline data broken down by suspension category. States do not report this information to the federal government. In fact, some states don’t even collect it from their districts. 

When possible, we downloaded the data from the state’s department of education website. When it wasn’t readily available we submitted public records requests.

In the case of New Mexico, we used data obtained and published by ProPublica.

What did we ultimately collect? 

In the end, we obtained the data we were looking for from 20 states: Alabama, California, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Vermont, Washington, Minnesota, Mississippi, Massachusetts, Alaska, Colorado, Louisiana, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon and Rhode Island.

In most cases, we received data from 2017-18 to 2021-22. In the case of Vermont, however, we did not have data for 2021-22 and in North Carolina, we had data only for 2019-2020 and 2020-2021.

We had demographic data that allowed us to examine the racial and special education disparities in California, Indiana, Vermont, New Mexico, Montana, Maryland, Ohio, Rhode Island, Mississippi and Massachusetts.

Was the data uniform?

Far from it. Each state has its own categories for student discipline, ranging from just six reasons a student can get suspended in California to more than 80 in Massachusetts. 

First, we identified any of the categories that had to do with disrespect, disorder or disruption and singled them out. These were the primary focus of our analysis. But we also wanted to know how suspensions for these reasons compared to others. 

To do that, we looked for common threads among suspension categories and created our own larger categorizations. For example, any offense category that had involved alcohol, drugs or tobacco was grouped into the category “alcohol/drugs/tobacco.”  Any offense  that involved fighting or physical aggression we put into a category called “physical violence.” These groupings were made following research into state discipline codes and discussion. We also showed our groupings to experts to get their feedback. In the end, we had 16 unique categories. We added the numbers from all state categories that fell into one of our larger groups. 

This allowed for an overall look at how many punishments were assigned for broad types of behavior. Yet because of discrepancies in discipline definitions in each state, direct comparisons between states are not advisable.

How did we deal with missing or redacted data?

In all of the states, suspensions below a specific count (generally fewer than 10 but in some cases fewer than five) were redacted to make sure no student could be identified. We considered them as zero since there was no way to accurately assess that number. In most states, this did not affect the overall findings. In smaller states or districts, where we saw or expected significant redactions, we only looked at grand totals.

Did the data have any other limitations?

Yes, once again, we had to contend with a lack of uniformity in how states gather this information. In some places, we obtained information only for suspensions. In others, the data included expulsions. In Alabama, instances of corporal punishment and alternative school placement were also included.

Some states only allowed districts to report a single reason for a suspension. Others allow several reasons to be selected. And, muddying the waters further, some states reported numbers of students who were suspended, while others reported the number of incidents that led to suspension. We’ve made a list available with details about individual states. 

How did we analyze demographic disparities?

We calculated the rate of suspension by looking at the number of students of a particular race suspended per 100 students of that race in a state or district. The comparisons between rates of suspensions of Black students and white students were made by dividing the rate of suspension for the former by the rate of suspension for the latter. For instance, if Black students were suspended at a rate of four students per 100 Black students in a state and white students were suspended at a rate of two students per 100 white students, then Black students were suspended at twice the rate of suspension of white students (4/2 = 2).

We did the same analysis for students with disabilities relative to their general-education peers.

How do we know what kind of behavior students were suspended for?

We submitted public records requests to dozens of school districts across the country asking for the most recent year or two years of discipline records for any suspensions assigned in their category of defiance or disorderly conduct.  

Most districts denied our request or never responded. Some estimated it would cost tens of thousands of dollars for them to pull the records. In all, 12 districts in eight states granted our request for free or for a more affordable cost. This gave us more than 7,000 discipline records to analyze.

So how did you analyze them? 

After reading through many of the records to begin to identify patterns, we once again made some broad categories of behavior that kept coming up, including talking back to an educator, swearing or refusing a direct order. 

About 1,700 of the records were in PDFs (including some with handwritten notes) that could not easily be converted to a spreadsheet. We coded all of these by hand, checking if the incident contained any of our categories and marking yes or no. We also hand-coded 1,500 of the remaining records. Each incident could have as many “yeses” as merited. We checked each other’s work to make sure we were being consistent. 

We then used a machine-learning library and trained a model with our labeled dataset and used the trained model to predict the remaining incident reports for the same categories. The accuracy of the model in predicting the incidences (on a test dataset which was taken out from the labeled dataset) varied across categories but, overall, the model had a low rate of false positives. We also spot checked the findings to make sure records were not being miscategorized. 

This story about discipline data 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 Hechinger’s school discipline project: How we did it appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

College decisions used to depend mostly on an institution’s academic reputation and its social life. Today, many other factors influence a prospective student’s thinking. We’ve gathered those into this interactive College Welcome Guide, to help you assess how receptive colleges are to students from a variety of backgrounds, and to map state laws that affect college students.

If you have a question about the information here, or would like to share your perspective with us, email us at editor@hechingerreport.org. 

The table above has data for more than 4,000 colleges and universities. You can explore this data by clicking the buttons at the top of the table. After selecting a  category, enter the name of a college or university in the search bar. The table resets when the data type is changed, so if you change the category, you need to enter the college name again. If you search for a college that shares its name with other colleges, only one of them will show up in the table. You can view the data for each of them by clicking on the page arrows in the bottom center of the table.

Colored dots under some college names indicate whether the institution is religiously affiliated and/or serves a significant portion of particular types of students, including those who are Black, Hispanic, Asian-American and Indigenous. We also mark institutions that are in rural places or serve students from those areas. A key at the bottom of the table describes what each colored dot represents.

The map below shows laws and policies that affect students, across nine categories in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. 

You can explore categories by clicking on the buttons. (By default, the map shows which states restrict the teaching of critical race theory, or CRT, in higher education.) Click on any state to see additional information for particular categories. The sources of information for each category are noted at the bottom of the map, and linked so you can learn more.

Among other things, these maps show whether states offer resident tuition or free tuition to veterans even if they aren’t using GI Bill benefits. (The federal government requires that veterans qualify for in-state tuition if they’re on the GI Bill, regardless of where they live.)

In addition to constraining or banning the use of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, some states have ordered that public universities disclose how much they spend on DEI efforts — a step that has historically served as a precursor for legislatures to cut public institutions’ budgets by those amounts.

Anti-trans laws shown here are those passed since 2022 and include measures restricting trans athletes or medical procedures for people including those of college age.

State laws allowing or restricting the use of student IDs to vote can also affect students. In Georgia, for example, students at public universities can use a student ID to vote, but those at private universities – including several historically Black institutions – cannot. 

LGBTQ+ Profile scores from the Movement Advancement Project reflect the proportion of adults in a state who are LGBTQ+ and state policies and laws around LGBTQ+ issues.

In addition to the reproductive rights laws listed in our maps, total or near-total abortion bans have been signed into law but are so far enjoined by courts in these states: Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Prospective students might also care about how likely they are to succeed at a given college. The graphic below shows graduation rates, both for the entire student body and broken out by race or ethnicity, and you can compare up to five colleges on any of these measures. 

Choose a category from the dropdown at the top of the graphic and then enter a college or university in the search bar; institution names will appear as you begin to type.

You can learn more about all our data sources here or download the data here.

Design and development by Fazil Khan

Additional reporting by Meredith Kolodner, Jon Marcus, Olivia Sanchez, Amanda Chen and Sarah Butrymowicz

Illustration by Camilla Forte

The post Beyond the Rankings: The College Welcome Guide appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

To create our College Welcome Guide we relied on more than a dozen data sources. If you haven’t seen our tool, you can find it here. Read on to learn more about where the information comes from.

Campus-level data

All of the data other than what is shown on the maps or otherwise noted comes from IPEDS, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. IPEDS data is reported directly by colleges to the U.S. Department of Education. Our dataset includes all two- and four-year colleges.

Figures for total enrollment and enrollment by race/ethnicity and gender show the 12-month unduplicated undergraduate student numbers in 2021-22, the latest year for which the information is available. When 12-month enrollment was unavailable, as was the case for enrollment by age and attendance status (part- or full-time), data from the fall 2021 semester has been used. Pell Grant enrollment data is from 2020-21.

Institutional affiliation indicates whether a private, nonprofit institution is associated with a religious group or denomination.

Graduation rates were calculated using the most recent five years of data. In the case of institutions for which those five full years were not available, the graduation rate was calculated from the available years. This figure represents the percentage of students who complete a bachelor’s degree within six years or an associate degree within three years.

The proportion of students with disabilities represents the percentage of undergraduates in the fall who formally registered with their institutions’ offices of disability services.

Under the IPEDS definition, a point of contact for veterans refers to whether a school has dedicated support services for veterans, military service members and their families. An institution is shown as having services for student veterans if it offers at least one of the following: the Yellow Ribbon Program, academic credit for military training or a recognized student veteran organization; or if it is a member of the Department of Defense Voluntary Education Partnership Memorandum of Understanding. The number of students receiving Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits and tuition assistance includes spouses and dependents. Only benefits awarded through or certified by the institution are shown.

Hate crimes are reported by institutions to the U.S. Department of Education and are defined as crimes for which there is evidence “that the victim was intentionally selected because of the perpetrator’s bias against the victim.” The data, which was downloaded from the department’s Campus Safety and Security Data Analysis Cutting Tool, includes hate crimes committed in any building owned or controlled by an institution or student organization or on any public property within or adjacent to a campus, such as streets, sidewalks and parking facilities.

Data about first-generation students came from the Department of Education’s College Scorecard, which gets it from the National Student Loan Data System. Under the federal definition, students are considered first generation if they do not have a parent who graduated with a four-year degree. First-generation status is self reported by the student.

Data about whether or not there is an LGBTQ+ student resource center on a campus comes from the Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals.

In addition to indicating which institutions are designated as historically Black, Hispanic-serving or affiliated with a religion, we used data from the MSI Data Project to show colleges and universities that have Black, Hispanic, Asian-American and Indigenous enrollments that exceed the proportion of the general population for those categories. We also used data from the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges to indicate which institutions are considered rural-serving, meaning they’re in rural places or serve students from those places.

State-level data

Information about whether a state allows undocumented immigrants residing in that state to pay in-state tuition comes from the Higher Ed Immigration Portal.

Veterans’ tuition status was determined on a state-by-state basis by a review of policies of public higher education institutions, as well as state higher education and veterans’ agencies.

States that restrict the teaching of critical race theory are tracked by PEN America. Legislatures that have constrained or banned the use of diversity, equity and inclusion programs were identified through legislative tracking services and news reports. Some states that have not yet limited or banned DEI have ordered that public universities disclose how much they spend on those programs. We included this measure because it is a step that has historically been a precursor for legislatures to cut public institutions’ budgets by those amounts.

Anti-LGBTQ+ laws affecting college students are monitored by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Trans Legislation Tracker. Anti-trans laws are those passed since 2022 and include legislation restricting trans athletes or medical procedures for trans people including those of college age.

Information on state laws allowing or restricting the use of student IDs to vote comes from the Voting Rights Lab.

LGBTQ+ Profile scores produced by the Movement Advancement Project are based on measures including the proportion of adults and of workers who are LGBTQ+ and a state’s policies and laws around LGBTQ+ issues.

Data from the Center for Reproductive Rights has been used to show abortion laws by state.

Download the data here.

This College Welcome Guide 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 How we made our College Welcome Guide appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

As college admission decisions pour in and students weigh their options, some institutions are putting the poorest students at a surprising disadvantage: There are 17 colleges and universities where the lowest-income students may end up paying more out of pocket than the highest-income ones.

At these 17 colleges and universities in 2020-21, students from families earning under $30,000 actually paid more in net price – which is the amount students pay after discounts and financial aid – than those from families making $110,000 a year or more, the latest available federal data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) showed. 

The additional amount ranged from just $152 at Texas College in Tyler, Texas, to more than $5,000 at Brenau University in Gainesville, Georgia. Those figures reflect what was paid by students in the lowest-income quintile compared with what was paid by students in the highest-income quintile.

The 17 institutions are spread across 14 states; two are public universities. Generous financial aid to the higher-income students often accounts for the difference.

All but one of these 17 are among the 700 universities across the U.S. where the net price has risen more for the lowest-income students over the last decade than for their higher-income peers, as USA TODAY and The Hechinger Report reported recently. (At Mississippi Valley State University, the price declined for both groups but dropped significantly more for the highest-income students.)

Trends in net price by income and other information about universities and colleges nationwide can be found in The Hechinger Report’s newly updated Tuition Tracker.

“It provides a further reflection on what’s the purpose of higher education as a whole. Is it to reward and provide opportunity for the few and the fortunate or is it actually to lift this generation up and leave them better off than the previous?”

Michael Itzkowitz, education consultant and former director of College Scorecard, an online federal government tool

At Brenau, the lowest-income students paid $24,640 out of pocket in 2020-21 after all the discounts, grants, and scholarships. This was over $5,000 more than what the highest-income students had to pay. Lowest-income students at Brenau, in fact, have paid more in net price than highest-income ones every year since 2017-18, and the gap has been more than $3,000 in all those years.

In response to questions, Brenau sent a statement saying that it “is working to rebalance net price across income categories.”

“The majority of institutional aid for first‐time, full‐time freshmen students at Brenau is merit‐based; students seeking lower direct cost also have the option to enroll in online courses at a significantly reduced tuition rate,” the university statement read, noting that around 13 percent of its first‐time, full‐time students were enrolled online. Brenau only reports tuition prices for in-person students to IPEDS, which the university’s statement said “skewed” the net-price calculations.

Higher-income students received more financial aid, on average, at all but one of these colleges in 2020-21, likely because more institutional merit aid went to them. This is mainly due to colleges competing for students from high-income families, who are able to pay high tuition and bring in needed revenue but expect to receive scholarships and discounts.

“[It] begs the question of why and what kind of college are they?” said Michael Itzkowitz, an education consultant and the former director of College Scorecard, an online federal government tool to compare the cost and value of higher education institutions. “It provides a further reflection on what’s the purpose of higher education as a whole. Is it to reward and provide opportunity for the few and the fortunate or is it actually to lift this generation up and leave them better off than the previous?”

Many universities provide significant amounts of aid to students who may not necessarily need it. Between 2001 and 2017, 339 public universities spent $32 billion in institutional aid on students who did not have financial need, according to a New America study. Overall, about 40 percent of all the institutional aid at these universities went to students whom the federal government deemed able to afford college without aid. Since there’s only so much money to go around, discounts for non-needy students may leave the low-income students with larger funding gaps and a higher net price.

While many colleges and universities have their own tools to allow prospective students to calculate net price, federal net price data available through IPEDS is the only way students and parents can compare colleges and universities nationally to decide how much they will need to pay to attend any particular college or university. The Hechinger Report’s Tuition Tracker tool, which uses IPEDS data, allows the students and parents to navigate the federal information more easily.

An audit published by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) last November found that nine out of 10 colleges in a nationally representative sample either do not include or understate the net price in their aid offers. While the exclusion of the net price leaves students guessing how much they’d need to pay, an underestimation makes a college appear less expensive than it is, the report noted.

IPEDS’ net price data could contain inaccuracies at times since the calculations are based on self-reported data from colleges and universities. For example, according to the IPEDS data, The College of Idaho in Caldwell, Idaho, appeared to have charged the lowest-income students about $9,000 more than the highest-income students in 2020-21. But Joe Hughes, the college’s director communications, said by email that the college had made an error while reporting financial aid data to the agency. When that error was corrected, the net price for the lowest-income students in 2020-21 at the college came out to be about $3,300 less than the price for the highest-income students. This made sense, because the net price at the college for the lowest-income students has historically been lower than for the highest-income ones.

But at Columbia College in Columbia, Missouri, and at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), the lowest-income students have had a higher net price than their highest-income peers consistently since 2012-13, the IPEDS data show.

Lowest-income students at Columbia College have been paying more in net price over that period, and in many of those years, the gap was $5,000 or more. The college did not respond to a request for comment.

At SNHU, the lowest-income students paid between $5,000 and $10,000 more than the highest-income students in every year from 2012-13 to 2019-20. Students in the lowest-income quintile paid $22,903 in net price in 2020-21 compared to the $22,741 that the highest income students paid. According to the university, the $162 gap remained after cuts made in tuition to align the cost of on-campus programs with online programs, which are cheaper, and after one-time scholarships were given to all incoming campus freshmen covering the first year’s tuition.

SNHU’s president, Paul LeBlanc, argued that IPEDS data does not accurately represent what students pay there, because most of SNHU’s 100,000 undergraduates are enrolled in online programs, which cost significantly less than on-campus programs. In fall 2020, it reported just under 1,800 students as first-time, full-time, and half of those were enrolled online. These were the ones IPEDS accounted for when calculating net price.

“IPEDS forces us to report in a very skewed way,” said LeBlanc. “You're only allowed to report the one [number] so we have to take the high one, which is campus tuition.”

IPEDS calculates the net price at an institution based on the cost of attendance, which includes tuition and required charges, such as books and living expenses, for first-time, full-time students for the academic year.  The tuition amount is left to the discretion of the institution.

Cost of attendance at SNHU could be lower for online students since they may not incur living expenses. However, even if that were to bring the average cost of attendance down, the average financial aid (which is deducted from the cost of attendance to arrive at the net price figure) for the lowest-income students consistently remained less than half of what the highest income students got between 2014-15 and 2019-20. This means that the overall net price for the university might have come down if the cost adjustments were to be taken into account, but the lowest-income students would have still paid more, since they received less aid, on average.

The average aid to students in both income quintiles was more aligned in 2020-21, hence the relatively smaller gap of $162 in net price.

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

The post Where poor students pay more than rich ones appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Even in high school, Miguel Agyei worried about how he’d pay for college.

The son of parents who work at a hospital and for UPS, Agyei wanted to go to a school away from his home state of Illinois, but that was too expensive. He instead picked close-by Bradley University and worked during the summer to pay the costs his financial aid didn’t cover.

An athlete who ran track and field, he set the university record in the 60-meter hurdles, but the conference meet that determined who would get athletic scholarships was canceled because of Covid.

He asked his coaches if there was money to help him buy textbooks, but they said there wasn’t. He had to get help from an advocacy group called College Possible to pay his rent. To cover his other expenses, he took a job answering phones five days a week for a call center for people applying for unemployment benefits.

“It was very, very stressful,” said Agyei, who also borrowed $25,000 in student loans. “I would go to practice, go to class, work five or six hours, do my homework, go to bed and get up and do it again.”

Meanwhile, he noticed that his bills from the college kept going up.

Bradley is among nearly 700 universities and colleges that, over the last decade, have raised the prices paid by their lowest-income students more than the prices paid by their highest-income ones, according to federal data analyzed by The Hechinger Report.

Lower-income students generally still pay less than higher-income ones. But the increase in college costs is falling more heavily on families that are likely the least able to absorb it, as federal and state financial aid fails to keep up with rising prices, and colleges shift institutional aid to wealthier families they know can pay at least a part of the tuition.

“Those increases can really make or break a student staying in college,” said Scott Del Rossi, vice president of college and career success at College Possible, which helps low-income and racial minority students go to and through college. “Do they put it on their credit card? Do they just give up?”

Historic trends in net price by income and other information about universities and colleges nationwide are available in the Hechinger Report’s newly updated Tuition Tracker tool.

At two out of three colleges and universities where the net price increased for both low- and high-income students over the last decade — that is, the amount paid after discounts and financial aid — it rose faster for the lowest-income ones, increasing by about 70 percent versus 27 percent, on average, the federal data show.

At 80 universities and colleges, net price more than doubled for the lowest-income students, while at 19 it more than tripled and at 10 it quintupled. At 90, including 14 public universities, net price went up for the lowest-income students while going down for the highest-income ones.

Bradley increased the net price for its students from families earning under $30,000 by 36 percent, more than three and a half times the rate of increase for its students from families that make $110,000 a year or more.

Asked about this, Justin Ball, Bradley’s vice president of enrollment management, said in a statement: “Filtering financial aid packages by a few key metrics alone does not paint the full picture of what can be offered to prospective students.” A university spokeswoman said Ball was not available to elaborate on what that meant.

Related: As enrollment falls and public skepticism grows, some colleges are cutting their prices

“As low-income students, we’ve grown to know that this is just the way the system works, and we’ve had to figure out ways to navigate through it,” said Agyei, who ultimately graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sports communications and got a part-time internship with the Chicago Fire Major League Soccer team.

“You can’t keep raising the price of tuition for students who are barely making it. It’s just not fair,” he said.

As their costs rise, lower-income students become more reliant on student loans to pay for college, but struggle to repay their debt. Students who got federal Pell grants, which generally go to families earning $40,000 or less, are five times more likely to default on their loans within 12 years of entering college than their higher-income classmates, according to The Institute for College Access and Success. Black students and students who were the first in their families to go to college are also more likely to default.

The most common reason cited for this trend of rising costs for poorer students — even by several of the colleges themselves — is the intensifying competition for students from high-income families, who contribute badly needed revenue and who increasingly expect to receive scholarships and discounts that siphon financial aid away from students who meet the federal definition of financial need.

Colleges and universities depend on money coming in, said Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, or NASFAA. That’s “the bottom line and the real challenge.” Sophisticated enrollment management strategies, he said, “are driving at one thing: staying afloat.”

Trying to attract students from one socioeconomic category “might decrease them [from] another,” Draeger said. “It would be natural, then, that in this enrollment-constrained environment, the people bearing a disproportionate impact of that would be needy students.”

Related: Some people going into the trades wonder why their classmates stick with college

Montreat College in North Carolina, for example, has “shifted to prioritize merit-based awarding,” said Sara Baughman, the college’s vice president of marketing and communications, using the term for the type of financial aid that goes to students who don’t meet the federal definition of financial need.

Montreat has increased its net price for its lowest-income students by 42 percent while lowering it by 16 percent for its highest-income students.

“There’s only so much money to spread around,” said Duane Bonifer, associate vice president for communications at Monmouth College in Illinois, a small, private liberal arts institution that has raised the net price for its lowest-income students by 57 percent while lowering it by 3 percent for its highest-income students.

At 90 universities and colleges, including 14 public universities, net price went up in the last decade for the lowest-income students while going down for the highest-income ones.

“For every college in America that’s like Monmouth, which is a lot of them, they’re struggling to deal with the same issue,” Bonifer said. “Your heart breaks that you can’t do more, but there are certain economic realities. You have to be well in order to do good, and that’s a harsh reality for a lot of colleges.” Monmouth has just completed an $80 million fundraising campaign, $11 million of which will go to financial aid, he said.

Some institutions, such as Wheaton College in Massachusetts, are also consciously trying to move more financial aid to middle- and upper-middle-income families who may also struggle to pay, said Jeff Cutting, Wheaton’s associate vice president for enrollment and strategic analyst. And small colleges’ resources, Cutting pointed out, are finite. Wheaton has increased the net price for its lowest-income students by 35 percent while lowering it by 17 percent for its highest-income students, federal figures show.

The federal Pell Grant, which mostly goes to families with annual incomes under $40,000, now covers about 25 percent of college costs, down from 70 percent in the 1970s.

The proportion of financial aid awarded by Michigan's Kalamazoo College on the basis of merit, as opposed to need, “increase[s] yearly to keep up with market trends,” said Becca Murphy, its dean of financial aid.

Federal data show that the net price for Kalamazoo’s highest-income students fell 5 percent while rising 26 percent for its lowest-income students. But Murphy said that those figures do not account for money that goes to low-income students who qualify for the Kalamazoo Promise program, under which resident graduates of local public schools get all or part of their tuition paid for. If that money were included, Murphy said, the net price for students from families earning less than $30,000 would decrease by an average of $1,300.

Even after subtracting this amount, however, Kalamazoo’s average net price for its lowest-income students has still increased by about 15 percent since the Promise program started in the 2015-16 academic year, the federal figures show. Asked if Murphy would discuss this further, a spokesman did not respond.

Related: Bachelor’s degree dreams of community college students get stymied by red tape — and it’s getting worse

The federal data shows that Beloit College in Wisconsin increased the net price for its lowest-income students by 82 percent while reducing it by 19 percent for its highest-income students. The college said the information it had submitted to the federal government was incorrect, but did not respond when asked to provide the correct figures.

The net price for the lowest-income students at Connecticut College rose 235 percent in the last decade, compared to 9 percent for the highest-income students. The lowest-income students at Oklahoma Wesleyan University saw their net price go up by 69 percent while it fell by 37 percent for their highest-income classmates. At Gustavus Adolphus College, the net price went up by 45 percent for the lowest-income and down by 27 percent for the highest-income students.

None of the schools responded to repeated requests for comment.

Like these private universities, a few public universities have also raised the net price for their lowest-income students while lowering it for their highest-income ones. At Louisiana State University of Alexandria, for instance, net price fell for the highest-income students by 22 percent while rising 4 percent for the lowest-income students. After agreeing to speak about this, the university’s vice chancellor for finance and administration stopped responding to requests to schedule a conversation.

One more major reason lower-income students are seeing their net prices rise more quickly than higher-income students is that the principal federal grant meant to help them pay for college hasn’t kept up with the cost of it.

The federal Pell Grant, which mostly goes to families with annual incomes under $40,000, now covers about 25 percent of college costs, down from 69 percent in the 1970s, according to the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education and the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania.

The maximum Pell Grant this year is $6,895 per student. That’s up 15 percent since the mid-1970s, when adjusted for inflation, a period during which the inflation-adjusted cost of four-year public colleges rose 157 percent, the Pell Institute and University of Pennsylvania report. Advocacy and professional organizations including NASFAA have called for the maximum Pell Grant amount to be doubled.

“We’re largely just treading water,” NASFAA’s Draeger said. “Meanwhile, costs keep going up. And when the Pell Grant fails to keep up with inflationary costs, that’s often going to be felt by the neediest students. It’s doubly unfortunate because for those students, price sensitivity doesn’t just impact their choice of where they’ll go to college, it impacts whether they’ll go to college.”

Related: Why aren’t flagship universities enrolling more of their own states’ Black students?

Most states have financial aid programs, too, which in many cases also have not kept pace with the rising cost of college.

In Massachusetts, for example, state-funded financial aid has been cut by 47 percent in the last two decades, when adjusted for inflation, a period during which tuition and fees at public universities and colleges rose by 59 percent, a new study by the Hildreth Institute shows.

While the largest state grant was enough in 1988 to pay for 80 percent of the average recipient’s cost for public higher education in the state, the research and policy center says, today it covers only 12 percent. That leaves the overwhelming majority of students at public four-year universities with $12,000 or more per year in unmet financial need.

Other state financial aid has shifted to increasingly benefit higher-income more than lower-income families.

At two out of three colleges and universities where the net price increased, it rose faster in the last decade for the lowest-income students than for the highest-income ones.

After an income cap was removed from the principal state scholarship for students in Louisiana, the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students, the money started flowing disproportionately to the children of higher-income families who are more likely than lower-income ones to live in places with well-resourced public schools whose graduates meet the scholarship’s academic requirements.

The number of recipients from families earning $150,000 or more has increased 56 percent since 2010, while the number from households with incomes under $15,000 fell by 11 percent, the Louisiana Board of Regents reported in late 2021. More than twice as many students whose parents make more than $100,000 get the money than students whose parents earn less than $35,000. The median household income in Louisiana is $53,571, the Census Bureau says.

After criticism of this trend, the legislature and the governor imposed the solution last year of ordering that the state stop reporting the family income of the scholarship’s recipients.

Among the students who get the Arkansas Academic Challenge Scholarship, which is funded largely by state lottery proceeds, three out of four are from families that make $103,000 a year — nearly twice the state’s median household income — the Arkansas Times reports.

Higher-income students enjoy several other little-known advantages in the financial aid process.

The federal formula used to calculate financial aid, for example, does not take into account home equity and retirement savings, disproportionately benefiting higher-income families, who are increasingly more likely to have such assets. This reduces the amount the formula determines they can afford to pay, thereby awarding them more financial aid, according to researchers from Wellesley College and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, resulting in a subsidy worth thousands of dollars annually for families earning above the national median income.

College junior Chase Brown has been watching her wealthier classmates enjoy advantages like that from the time she was in high school. While she was spending her free time searching for colleges with the most generous financial aid, for example, her friends would tell her, “We’re going to take a flight down to Florida and go on some campus tours.”

Related: Rural universities, already few and far between, are being stripped of majors

Brown ended up at Rice University, one of a minority of universities and colleges where federal data show the price for the lowest-income students has stayed flat while it’s gone up for the highest-income students. The university’s Rice Investment program guaranteed her free tuition, and she also got some financial aid toward room and board.

Even with that, however, Brown had to work at Target in the summer to cover the rest of her food and housing, plus her other expenses, and at one point balanced three jobs with her studies.

“All those costs pile onto you, while your peers have the resources to pay for them,” said Brown, whose parents are a teacher and a graphic designer and who is majoring in political science and Spanish with plans to get a graduate degree in public policy or political science.

“I used to think the education system was going to close the gaps between social levels. It’s supposed to be the great equalizer,” she said. But “it can put an even bigger divide between those groups.”

That this gap is getting wider “doesn’t entirely surprise me,” Brown said. “My entire life, my educational experience has been that the very privileged are always getting the benefits and getting a leg up. It reflects on what’s happening everywhere: The poor are getting poorer, and the rich are getting richer.”

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

The post Why are prices rising more for lower-income college students than their higher-income peers? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

In April 2020, as the death toll from COVID mounted across New York City, an elementary school teacher at P.S. 343, the Children’s Lab School, in Sunnyside, Queens, organized a virtual dance party to give her second-grade class some levity. One student, 8-year-old Yarely, had trouble signing on to the remote classroom.

“My dad is the one who is good with computers,” she told her teacher, “but he’s sick in bed.”

The student’s father, 32-year-old Diego Vintimilla, was a fixture at parent-teacher conferences and often helped Yarely with her classwork. That day, Vintimilla, an immigrant from Ecuador, managed to fix his daughter’s computer connection from his bed. He was hospitalized with COVID the next day.

Vintimilla died two weeks later.

Yarely returned to school the day after she was told of her father’s death, confused by what had happened to him. She asked her teacher where her father was.

Wanting to support her student, Yarely’s teacher met on video calls with the school social worker, parent coordinator and principal, but no one knew what to do, she recalls. She searched online, using phrases like “how to help grieving students” and cobbled together handouts. But she found herself struggling to help.

Yarely is one of more than 8,700 children in New York City who have lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19 since the pandemic began in March 2020, nearly double the national rate.

These losses, like the coronavirus itself, have disproportionately struck families of color and immigrants. Black, Hispanic and Asian children in the city were roughly three times more likely to lose a caregiver in the home to COVID compared to white children, according to an analysis done in May by the COVID Collaborative, a public health effort to address the pandemic.

THE CITY, Columbia Journalism Investigations, Type Investigations and City Limits have spent a year documenting the NYC Department of Education’s response to COVID-bereaved children in public schools. We discovered that decades of underfunding mental health care left schools unprepared to handle the spike in needs during the pandemic. Amid that crisis, grieving students were largely overlooked and often didn’t get the help they needed.

Grief at School

We contacted dozens of immigrant families with children who lost parents or caregivers to COVID, using THE CITY’s Missing Them project and the GoFundMe pages that friends and families set up for funeral expenses. Of the 10 families we interviewed, roughly half said they had little to no grief-related support from their schools. Some sought help and didn’t receive it. Others were provided with counseling through their school, only to lose it a few months later.

Still others said they did not inform their schools of the loss because they doubted that they would get any support. Children who did find support, including Yarely, relied on individual teachers and school staff who used their own resources and personal time to tend to their grieving students.

A parent’s death is a monumental event in a child’s life. Research shows that most children can cope if they have support from their family and community. But for some children, losing a caregiver will have long-term consequences. They may struggle to stay in school, or face depression and anxiety as adults.

Experts say that schools can help mitigate such harms by providing immediate care and access to clinical assistance. Noting that schools are a “nearly universal touchpoint for school-aged children,” a December 2021 report from the COVID Collaborative recommends that schools be part of a “coordinated strategy” to identify and support COVID-grieving students.

New York City schools have yet to do that. In a recent interview with THE CITY and its partners, former mayor Bill de Blasio acknowledged that the Department of Education didn’t try to distinguish these students’ mental health needs from those of their peers at first.

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

“The situation was so profoundly troubling across the board,” de Blasio said. “The idea was that the need was so great: set up a system for everyone, and then individualize the solutions.”

But it’s not clear that an individualized response ever materialized. In interviews and survey responses, more than a dozen public school teachers, social workers and administrators described inadequate staffing for mental health support, limited training and a lack of clear guidance from the department. Many said the problems persist even now, nearly three years later.

Still Lacking Social Workers

The dearth of care for grieving students partly stems from an overall shortage of mental health support in New York City schools. Before the pandemic, the DOE employed only one full-time social worker for every 648 students attending public schools, a ratio more than twice as high as what is recommended by the National Association of Social Workers.

When the pandemic hit, zip codes with high concentrations of people of color and immigrants bore the brunt, seeing more cases of COVID illness ending in death than elsewhere, our analysis of city health and demographic data shows. And many schools in these areas were among those with inadequate staffing.

Western Queens, where the Children’s Lab School is located, had one of the highest COVID death rates in the city, and the worst ratio of school social workers to students in the city, before the pandemic. Across the city, 40 percent of traditional public schools had no full-time social worker, city data shows.

De Blasio said he knew about these deficiencies. As COVID-19 continued to spread, it became even more apparent to him and DOE officials. “Everyone was already perfectly [aware] that we were sitting on top of a huge problem,” he said.

In April 2021, a full year into the pandemic, he announced measures to tackle this shortfall. His administration budgeted approximately $300 million in COVID-relief federal funding over four years for school-based mental health services that could help all pandemic-impacted children. The DOE promised to hire 500 additional social workers and conduct social-emotional screenings of students.

Related: ‘Right now is not my time’: How Covid dimmed college prospects for students who need help most

Despite hiring hundreds of social workers in the fall of 2021, however, the ratio is still significantly higher than recommended. The number of bilingual-licensed social workers employed by the DOE has actually declined slightly during the pandemic even as the number of English language learners increased.

Recent reports reinforce our findings. An August 2022 audit by the New York state comptroller’s office found DOE officials haven’t hired enough mental health professionals or provided adequate training to school staff to address New York City students’ mental health issues.

Bereaved but Unknown

Tamara Mair, a senior director with the department, said DOE officials worked to tailor mental health support for grieving children to address what she calls “the tremendous amount of loss that was happening through the pandemic.” In an interview, the department highlighted the presence of crisis teams and voluntary teacher and staff trainings on grief sensitivity.

But crisis teams and other school staff can’t respond to grieving children if they aren’t identified. Crucially, the DOE did not implement universal screenings to identify bereaved students.

“I know that the Department of Education cares deeply about figuring out how to identify and serve these children,” said Catherine Jaynes, a senior director with the COVID Collaborative. “But they have to know about them to serve them.”

For some families we interviewed, children fell through the cracks due to this lack of screening. These families said they were reluctant to confide in school staff and received little encouragement to do so.

One mother from Queens, whose family is from Mexico, said her 17-year-old son floundered in his studies after his grandfather and two great-uncles died from the coronavirus over a span of months in 2020. She noticed her son growing more aloof and withdrawn at home; he had trouble concentrating on school work and his grades dropped. Yet she avoided telling his teachers about the deaths, she said, partly because she felt that educators at the Richmond Hill high school were overwhelmed by the challenges of remote learning and gave no indication of offering any resources to COVID-bereaved students.

“The schools did not give any emotional support to the children who lost family members,” she said. “They didn’t send emails or anything. There was no communication.”

Grasping for Support

In cases where the schools did know about the students’ losses, some families said staff failed to respond in a sensitive way.

Eleven-year-old Ibrahim started acting out in school after his mother, Fatma Atia, died of COVID in April 2020. He became loud and disruptive in class and got into arguments with other kids. At times, he felt the need to get out of his chair. “I would just think of my mom and just have a little mental breakdown,” said Ibrahim, who was born in the U.S. to parents who immigrated from Egypt.

The staff at his South Bronx middle school often complained about his behavior, said his father, Ashraf. A guidance counselor suggested counseling off-site, but the recommended psychologist had a wait list.

Related: Schools use art to help kids through trauma

Ibrahim began counseling four months later and was prescribed medication. Since then, he has had fewer behavioral issues at school, Ashraf said, but the family is still struggling. “We try to live, we try to keep up with schoolwork,” he said, “but deep inside we’re all destroyed.”

Other families who did receive mental health support at school had trouble maintaining it.

Fourteen-year-old Carol had trouble sleeping for almost two months after her stepfather died from COVID in April 2020. She spent her days and nights watching TV with her mother, an immigrant from Ecuador, making sure that her mother ate. “I don’t remember cooking for a long time,” said Margarita Rivas, Carol’s mother. “She was the one giving me spaghetti. And she told me: ‘Eat. I prepared this for you.’”

Carol saw a counselor through her high school in Fresh Meadows, Queens, Rivas said. But the arrangement only lasted a few months. When the sessions ended, Rivas struggled to find a private therapist that took her insurance. Carol saw a string of different therapists but gave up, Rivas said, because she was tired of “repeating the same thing every single time.”

Thirteen-year-old Joshua had been visiting a guidance counselor at his Washington Heights middle school every week to help him adjust to seventh grade. But Joshua lost his regular sessions when his counselor took a leave of absence — just before his stepfather died of COVID in April 2020. “He was distant,” said his mother, Charlene Budreau Simon. Joshua often skipped out on remote learning or refused to turn on his web camera when his teachers asked. “He was just like, ‘I can’t function like this right now.’”

The school’s only other counselor reached out to Joshua a few times, Budreau Simon said. But Joshua found it hard to communicate with her, and the school had no social workers on staff. Neither his school nor the others referenced above responded to requests for comment.

After Joshua finished eighth grade, the family moved to New Jersey where Budreau Simon said Joshua has access to a guidance counselor, a social worker, and a caseworker. “It’s so different from New York.”

Training Educators

The last time New York City schools faced widespread grief among students was after 9/11, when about 3,000 children, many of whom lived in the city, experienced the death of a parent.

The city moved quickly. In Staten Island, for instance, schools were told to report the names of children who lost someone close, according to Dominick Nigro, former director of the Office of Student Services for Staten Island Public Schools, who managed the borough’s response after the attacks. Those families were then offered individual and group grief counseling at school or within the DOE, Nigro said.

DOE also commissioned Dr. David Schonfeld, a pediatric bereavement specialist, to hold more than 50 full-day crisis response trainings for superintendents and other DOE staff members over the next two and a half years.

Related: Homeless students set adrift by school closures face crisis after crisis

“I remember somebody came up to me and said, ‘We really should give this training for all the educators in the school system,’” Schonfeld said.

For a moment, given the sheer scale of 9/11, it seemed like that might come to pass, but DOE didn’t offer widespread grief-sensitivity training until more than a decade later.

In 2018, some city schools began to participate in the “Grief-Sensitive Schools Initiative,” a national program to train educators to recognize signs of grief and potential triggers, and improve access to relevant services. In 2019, it tapped Schonfeld and the New York Life Foundation to offer that training to all city schools.

Then in early 2020, New York City quickly became the epicenter of the COVID pandemic. With DOE’s blessing, Schonfeld adjusted the trainings to focus on pandemic-related stress and grief. He said his work was particularly challenging at a time when children were attending school remotely, and when people dying of COVID or other conditions were isolated from their family members, putting traditional mourning rituals on hold.

More than 6,500 DOE staff members participated in the trainings between March 2020 and June 2022, according to the department. The DOE also has offered professional development seminars for school staff on how to support students coping with grief and loss, a spokesperson said. The agency estimates that approximately 75,000 staff and community members participated in those sessions from 2021-2022. (It declined to specify how many of those were school staff.)

Related: Will the students who didn’t show up for online class go missing forever?

Yet trainings like these are optional — a problem highlighted in the comptroller’s report, which recommended mandatory mental health training for all school staff members who interact with students daily.

Even Schonfeld’s initiative has failed to reach most staff, a disappointing coda to a bold plan. The organizers reported that just over 1,000 city schools underwent the training between April 2020 and June 2021, but only 20 percent of participating schools managed to train five or more employees.

‘Our Kids Are All in Crisis’

Many school staff members say their struggles to help COVID-grieving students were compounded by the education department’s failure to supply clear guidelines. No one we spoke with expected to see such standards handed down during the pandemic’s early days. But as it dragged on, the continued lack of guidance felt more surprising, they said.

DOE confirmed that it has avoided what it calls a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Instead, it noted that crisis teams, composed of school social workers, counselors and administrators, often are a “first line of defense” for grieving students.

Emily George, a former school social worker, remembers school social workers turning to the professional listserv that she moderates to find help during the pandemic. Many sought to fulfill urgent requests from their students’ families for food, housing and funeral assistance. Some wanted advice on legal services for immigrants; others on grief counseling for teens.

“Once the pandemic hit, everyone was like ‘Oh, mental health, what are we going to do?’” George said. “Our kids are all in crisis.”

Related: Parents fighting, teachers crying — Grownup stress is hitting kids hard

Among the families we interviewed, 8-year-old Alejandro’s experience represented a rare example of a student who got adequate and consistent support at school. Alejandro lost his uncle, Victor Humberto Heras, to COVID-19 in April 2020. They were close: Humberto dropped him off at school every day and would make meals for him.

Alejandro has been receiving counseling through his elementary school in Washington Heights — individual sessions two times a week at first, and now group sessions. The sessions have helped him manage his grief and anger and come to terms with his uncle’s death, he said.

Most families who had a positive experience, however, attributed it to a teacher or social worker who extended themselves personally, often outside of regular working hours.

At the Children’s Lab School, Yarely’s teacher said she tried her best to help. After her father’s death, Yarely often showed up early to her online classes, clutching a stuffed animal. Frequently, she asked her teacher to stay behind after lessons had ended.

“Usually we would talk about my dad and how I felt about all that,” said Yarely.

Yarely took her teacher on virtual tours of her home, pointing the camera toward candles and photos in memory of her dad. She worried about how her mother would manage family finances, including payments for her father’s truck. “She was clearly just soaking up all kinds of fears and worries and concerns from everyone around her,” said Yarely’s teacher.

Yarely was obviously suffering. With her father gone and her mother working full time, she struggled to understand her schoolwork and stay motivated, said her mother, Adriana Culcay. The situation became dire in the summer of 2020, when a relative told her mother that Yarely had threatened to jump out the window to be with her father.

“She was just crying, crying, crying,” Culcay said.

Speaking Your Language

Not long after that incident, Culcay arranged virtual counseling sessions for Yarely through school. At the time, our analysis shows, the Children’s Lab School had one full-time social worker on staff — relatively uncommon among its west Queens counterparts. In the 2020-21 school year, DOE data shows that more than a quarter of traditional public schools did not have full-time or part-time social workers; another 11 percent of schools only had access to a part-time social worker.

In March 2021, de Blasio appointed Meisha Porter — a former Bronx teacher, principal and administrator — as education chancellor. In an interview, Porter said she had seen how COVID losses overwhelmed schools in her district and felt strongly about incorporating mental health support into DOE’s reopening plan.

Related: How one school is coping with mental health — Social workers delivering technology, food and counseling to kids at home, and open office hours all day — even when school is out

Under Porter’s guidance, the department rolled out a plan to hire the 500 social workers, targeting schools hardest-hit by the pandemic.

By December 2021, eight months into the plan, around a third of public schools in neighborhoods hit hardest by COVID still did not have a full-time social worker, according to our analysis of DOE data.

Others had social workers but struggled to meet the needs of non-English speaking families. Studies show counseling is twice as effective if it’s in the language of the person seeking it.

DOE offers comprehensive translation services by phone that allowed social worker Jessica Chock-Goldman, who worked at Stuyvesant High School until July 2021, to communicate with non-English speaking parents about getting support for their children. But speaking through a translator makes it harder to talk about sensitive topics, like grief. “I remember in the beginning, we had so many kids who lost parents” to COVID, Chock-Goldman said, but she found it difficult to help them.

Typically, she arranges for clinicians with a shared ethnicity to talk with parent groups about ways their kids can work through stigmas related to mental health.

“A lot of these families, in their country of origin for the parents, therapy is not the norm,” she said.

Carolina Nudo, the former social worker at Yarely’s school, has seen the benefits of language-specific counseling firsthand. At Children’s Lab School, more than half of the nearly 450 students are Latino and around a quarter are learning English. Nudo speaks Spanish and was able to communicate with Yarely’s family directly, including her mother Culcay, whose primary language is Spanish.

Yarely remembers learning breathing exercises during counseling sessions and being encouraged to do something that she loved as a way to feel better. She enjoys painting, so she recreated a beach sunset that she once watched with her father.

But Yarely missed some counseling sessions and her grades dropped while her mother worked at a new job for nearly 12 hours a day to make up for her late husband’s income. “I hardly paid attention,” Culcay said.

Related: A year like no other: The class of 2021 played ‘the hand we were dealt’

For grieving children from undocumented families, it can be harder to get help, said Jeanette Rodriguez, a counselor through a partner organization at I.S. 145 in Jackson Heights, where more than 90 percent of students are Hispanic. At least five of her students lost a parent or caregiver to COVID, she said. Undocumented parents may not know how to access health insurance, for instance, and can be too afraid to enroll their children in public services, for fear that the information might be shared with authorities.

“We tell them, ‘When you come here, you’re protected,’” Rodriguez said of undocumented parents. “We want them to feel safe.”

‘Grief is Not a Behavioral Problem’

Though some families we spoke with had positive encounters with their schools, others say they encountered obstacles that left them feeling stigmatized for seeking grief support.

Veronica Fletcher lost her husband, Joseph Trevor Fletcher, an MTA worker and immigrant from Grenada, to COVID in April 2020. When her three children returned to their Brooklyn public schools for in-person learning more than a year later, they each demonstrated signs of trouble.

Her oldest, Joshua, then 16, became hyper-focused on his studies, determined to graduate from high school early. His brother, Ziggy, then 13, had nearly failed a class soon after their father’s death, and continued to be sad and distracted in school. And Maddie, then 9, seemed increasingly lonely. Frequently, she visited the schoolyard’s “buddy bench” to signal that she wanted company.

In October 2021, just weeks into the new academic year, Fletcher received a phone call from her younger children’s school, P.S. 207 in southeast Brooklyn, where COVID deaths have ranked among the highest in the city. She learned that Maddie had started crying during recess and, hours later, was still inconsolable. The teacher advised her to wait until pick-up to see her daughter, which struck Fletcher as insensitive. “When she came in the car, I just held her,” said Fletcher. “Her body was just racking with sobs.”

The school counselor referred Fletcher to a nonprofit that offers bereavement support and held a virtual meeting with Maddie in fall 2020. But for the sessions to continue, Fletcher said she was asked to submit a letter stating that her children needed “at-risk” support. Concerned that could harm her children’s school records, Fletcher said she was reluctant to do it.

In April 2022, she wrote to P.S. 207 Principal Neil McNeill, again asking about bereavement support. “Please, let me know what programs are in place at either the school or with DOE for my grieving children,” she wrote in the April 14 email. “If full grown adults often have difficulty with grieving a lost parent, imagine how much more traumatic it is for children to do so in a pandemic.”

Related: ‘I can’t do this anymore’: How four middle schoolers are struggling through the pandemic

In response, McNeill reminded Fletcher that she had effectively declined “at-risk grief counseling.” He invited her to tell him if the children wanted to speak with the school counselor or needed to walk out of their classrooms for a break. “We are here to support the kids in any way that we can,” he wrote. (The DOE declined to make McNeill available for an interview or respond to questions about the policy.)

But Fletcher’s position wouldn’t change. “Grief is not a behavioral problem,” she said, explaining why she objected to submitting an official request. “It’s not a mental illness.”

Fletcher had similar concerns when she heard about a new multimillion-dollar screening tool being used to evaluate children for mental health needs, known as the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment or DESSA.

Launched in 2021, the social-emotional assessment consisted of teachers filling out an online questionnaire using a five-measure scale from “never” to “very frequently” to rate a child’s behavior in roughly 40 scenarios. The questions include things like: “During the last four weeks, how often did the child carry himself/herself with confidence?” and “How often did the child show good judgment?”

But teachers and parents say these types of questions can fail to identify students who are experiencing the unique struggle of grieving a family loss. Instead, the COVID Collaborative recommends screenings designed specifically to find children who are bereaved.

De Blasio noted that the DESSA screener was always meant to be only one step in the process. “There was not an assumption that a single universal screener would answer all questions, but it would be the beginning of identifying who needed further evaluation,” he said.

Former schools Chancellor Porter defends the DESSA, noting that she chose it, in part, because it emphasized positive traits like confidence and self-esteem rather than negative behaviors. But she said that schools could have used more support in implementing it. “It was a lot that had to happen,” she said.

New Administration Slashes School Budgets

Since Eric Adams took over as mayor in January 2022 and appointed David Banks as education chancellor, the two have said little about how the new administration will address the city’s COVID-grieving schoolchildren. The Department of Education declined to make Banks available for an interview for this story.

In September, Adams and Banks announced that 110 social workers would be reassigned from the early childhood division to the city’s public schools, a DOE spokesperson said. It is unclear what, if any, impact the move will have on schools in the neighborhoods hit hardest by COVID-19.

Related: Middle school is often difficult. Try experiencing it under quarantine

Last fall, Yarely started fifth grade. She enjoys math, she said — it reminds her of how her father used to help her with homework.

Culcay said her daughter’s academic performance is still not at the level it was at before her husband died. And since social worker Nudo has retired, Yarely stopped receiving any counseling in school. “I only tell her the stuff,” Yarely said.

But she has grown to accept her father’s death —something Culcay credits the school with helping her realize.

In February 2021, Yarely and one of her father’s cousins traveled back to Ecuador with her father’s ashes. Recently, Yarely has learned to cook rice with sausage and eggs and fold her laundry while her mother is at work. People comment on how mature she’s become, Culcay said. “I say, ‘Yes because [her] father is no longer there and it’s just me.’”

Veronica Fletcher says her children are beginning to adjust to life without their father. She moved to Georgia in August. When the new school learned that their father had died, the counselor recommended a weekend-long grief camp, which her kids all attended in October. “I had to move to another state for someone to offer my children an opportunity that I asked for in New York.”

Fletcher still feels disappointed by the lack of support she received from the city’s school system. “They are children who have suffered loss. They get through it with support,” she said, “and the support should not be absent in a place where they spend most of their day.”

Liz Donovan and Fazil Khan produced this story as reporters, respectively, for City Limits and Columbia Journalism Investigations, an investigative reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School. It was produced in partnership with THE CITY and Type Investigations, two nonprofit newsrooms that provided reporting, editing, fact-checking and other support.

Type Investigations freelance reporter Muriel Alarcón and CJI reporting fellow Chris Riotta contributed reporting. Research by Columbia Journalism School’s Shannon Rose Geary, Shelby Jouppi, Amanda Torres and Jessica Vadillo and THE CITY’s intern Emi Tuyetnhi Tran. Translation by freelance journalist Lila Hassan and City Limits reporter Daniel Parra. Fact-checking by Paco Alvarez and Ethan Corey for Type Investigations.

THE CITY’s MISSING THEM project is supported, in part, by the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia Journalism School. Do you know a child who has lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19? Tell us more here. If you know someone who died due to COVID, share their story here or email us at memorial@thecity.nyc.

THE CITY is an independent, nonprofit news outlet dedicated to hard-hitting reporting that serves the people of New York.

Reproduction of this story is not permitted.

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