By Liz Willen

For many high school seniors and others hoping to attend college next year, the last few months have become a stress-filled struggle to complete the trouble-plagued, much-maligned FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

The rollout of this updated and supposedly simplified form was so delayed, error-ridden and confusing that it has derailed or severely complicated college decisions for millions of students throughout the U.S., especially those from low-income, first-generation and undocumented families.

The bureaucratic mess is also holding up decisions by private scholarship programs and adding to public skepticism about the value of higher education — threatening progress in efforts to get more Americans to and through college.

To see the impact in person, The Hechinger Report sent reporters to schools in four cities — San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore and Greenville, South Carolina — to hear students’ stories. Because we found them through schools, most of those we interviewed had counselors helping them; for the millions of students who don’t, it’s an even more daunting task.

“It was stressing me every day,” said one San Francisco senior who was accepted to 16 colleges but could not attend without substantial financial aid. Some became so frustrated they gave up, at least for now. Others said they will turn to trade schools or the military.

Students whose parents are undocumented had special worries, including concern that naming their parents would bring immigration penalties (although the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act forbids FAFSA officials from sharing family information).

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To give students more time to weigh options, more than 200 colleges and universities pushed back their traditional May 1 commitment deadlines, some until June 1, according to the American Council on Education, which keeps an updated list.

Despite heroic efforts by counselors and a slew of public FAFSA-signing events, just 40.2 percent of high school seniors had completed the FAFSA as of May 10, in contrast to 49.6 of last year’s seniors at the same time, according to the National College Attainment Network. The numbers do not bode well for college enrollment, nor for the many high school graduates who will not get the benefits of higher education. 

No one in Damiana Beltran’s family went to college, so she didn’t picture it in her future. But at the end of her junior year, “everybody” at Mission High School in San Francisco started talking about applying, so she did. San José State University admitted her, as did a few other schools. Excited, Beltran entertained visions of becoming a psychologist and showing her younger brother that “you don’t have to be from the wealthiest family” to go to college.

But the online FAFSA form wouldn’t let Beltran, who is a U.S. citizen, submit her application because her mother, who isn’t, doesn’t have a Social Security number. They tried using her individual taxpayer identification number but got an error message. Leaving the field blank didn’t work either. Beltran’s mother skipped work to get help at the school’s Future Center, but still, no dice. Eventually, they mailed in a paper version.

When May 1 passed with no offer of aid — or even an indication that her FAFSA had been received — Beltran decided to give up on attending the schools that would require her to pay for housing and a meal plan. If she went to nearby San Francisco State University, living at home would mean not asking her mother to take on debt. “I want to go to San José, but I don’t want to do that to her,” a teary Beltran said in April. “I think about it a lot during classes. During the whole school day, it’s in the back of my head.” She’s had trouble sleeping.

Her classmate Josue Hernandez also lost sleep over the FAFSA. It took him about a month and two submission attempts to access the part of the online form that would allow him to upload his undocumented parents’ IDs to verify their identity, he said. Once he did, it took about three more weeks to process. The senior, who had received local news coverage for being accepted into 16 out of 20 schools, said he thought to himself, “It was 12 years of hard work, and I finally got in, but I might not even be able to go.”

Hernandez’s other hope was scholarships. He cut back his hours at an after-school job to work on the applications and had to stay up late into the night to do the homework he’d pushed aside. Most of his free periods, including lunches, went to figuring out how to pay for college. “It was stressing me every day,” Hernandez said.

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Finally, the University of California, Berkeley, told him that his FAFSA had gone through, and financial aid would pay for almost everything; the SEED Scholars Honors Program would likely take care of the rest. “It’s finally over,” he said.

But it was not over for Jocelyn, another Mission High senior, who asked to be referred to by first name only, to protect her family’s privacy. She said that her father had been working two jobs waiting tables and her mother had been saving what she could from the household budget for quite some time; they had amassed $1,000.  Jocelyn had saved $200 from working at an organic bagel shop. Room and board at San José State, her top choice too, runs $20,971 a year.

But that gap wasn’t her sole source of anxiety. By sending her undocumented parents’ names to the government in the FAFSA form, she feared she’d put them at risk, even though federal regulations forbid FAFSA officials from sharing private data with others.

Jocelyn, who wants to be a neonatal intensive care nurse, didn’t share the FAFSA difficulties with her dad, who only went to middle school in Mexico, or her mom, who never got to go to school. “They’re just gonna say, ‘Stay in San Francisco, problem solved,’ ” she said. But she already takes a class at City College of San Francisco, a community college, and finds the idea of enrolling there, with so many “grown adults,” discouraging. A friend of the family who did that and then transferred to a four-year school told Jocelyn she felt lonely having missed out on the first-year bonding. Now Jocelyn thinks she’ll go to San Francisco State, live at home for a year, and then move into an apartment. But she’d still need financial aid to make that work. “It’s like, back to square one,” Jocelyn sighed — and then said she might forgo college and get a full-time job instead.

That’s not too far from Alessandro Mejia’s plan. As a senior in the challenging Game Design Academy at Balboa High School, he has the coding skills to major in computer science at one of the four-year colleges he got into. “College is my first choice,” Mejia said in late April, but he was eyeing trade school. Financing college “would just be much harder on our family,” he said, and “being an electrician or a car mechanic doesn’t seem too bad.” Of abandoning a tech career, he said, “I’m a little frustrated, but I feel like I developed a good work ethic in school so … it’s not completely a waste.”

School counselor Katherine Valle listened to Mejia with carefully concealed horror. “It’s shocking to hear,” she said. The Game Design Academy “is our hardest pathway, and we don’t have a lot of Latino males in it. To know he did that and is going to end up being a mechanic is just …” She couldn’t find words.

Valle said that for her students whose parents have white-collar jobs, the new FAFSA was everything promised: “easier process, less questions.” But it took kids in Mejia’s family income bracket many attempts to complete. He has the same potential as his wealthier peers, but those kids are “10 steps ahead,” she said. “It’s not fair.”

Mejia finally submitted his FAFSA on April 29. He said if he didn’t hear back by the new decision deadline for California State University institutions, May 15, he wouldn’t enroll.

With less than a week to spare, Mejia learned his FAFSA had been processed. He committed to San Francisco State. Jocelyn did, too, though she would have preferred San José State. For Beltran, though, the May 15 deadline came and went; she was “still waiting for my FAFSA to come in,” she said, and hadn’t submitted an intent to register.

Samaya Acker stayed on top of her college plans all year. She applied for early action admission at 17 colleges, submitted her FAFSA application for financial aid two days after the window opened and came up with a backup plan to join the military, just in case.

Most of those preparations went well.

Acker, an 18-year-old senior at Air Force Academy High School on Chicago’s South Side who has “Power” tattooed in script on her arm, was accepted by 16 colleges (her top choice, the University of Chicago, was the only one to turn her down) and planned to spend a few months in the Air National Guard to help pay for college. But as scholarship and deposit deadlines approached, her FAFSA application was still classified as “pending” three months after she submitted it.

“It really put me on edge,” said Acker, whose high school years were interrupted first by Covid and then by the birth of her son halfway through her sophomore year, but who still is graduating with a weighted grade-point average over 4.0.

With Acker’s college decision deadlines looming, her counselor, Ashley Spencer, pulled her from class one day in mid-April to look over her options, whatever FAFSA results she got. “We are getting close to the end with you, slowly but surely,” Spencer said.

About a week later, Acker was awarded a Gates Scholarship, which pays the full cost of college attendance for high-achieving students from underrepresented groups. Acker, who is Black, accepted her offer of admission from Chicago’s Loyola University, where tuition alone is more than $52,000 per year. She plans to become an anesthesiologist. (The Gates Foundation is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

A few miles away, a group of students at Hubbard High School in southwest Chicago were not as lucky.

The FAFSA delays have created unique challenges for students with undocumented immigrant parents — including students at Hubbard. At a late-April meeting with Dulcinea Basile, the school’s college and career coach, four seniors whose parents are undocumented said they had spent months waiting for the federal government to fix a glitch that prevented parents without Social Security numbers from submitting financial information. “How many times have we logged in and it says ‘FAFSA not available’?” Basile asked rhetorically.

The glitch was finally fixed, but all four were still waiting, in early May, to find out how much financial aid they might receive.

“There’s really not much I can do,” said Javier Magana, 18, who was still trying to figure out whether he could afford any of the colleges that had accepted him. “It’s definitely been frustrating because I’ve been trying my best.”

Ixchel Ortiz, 17, plans to go to a Chicago community college, but said if she didn’t receive financial aid, even that would have to wait.

Isaac Raygoza and Octavio Rodriguez, both 18, said they had a few four-year college options but likely wouldn’t be able to pursue any of them without a FAFSA answer.

Rodriguez said he had been repeatedly frustrated by trying to complete the FAFSA. “I would go home and wait 20 to 30 minutes on hold, and we didn’t get anywhere,” he said. In late April he was notified that he had misspelled his own name on the application; in mid-May, he was still waiting to hear whether he needed to re-apply from scratch.

“I’m slightly stressed,” he said in mid-May.

Raygoza said he had submitted his application on time but had failed to notice an error message that prevented it from being processed. He resubmitted it in late April.

“I was just shocked it was never processed,” he said. “I had to do it all again.”

All four said they would likely take a year off to work if they didn’t get aid.

At the Academy for College and Career Exploration in Baltimore, juniors and seniors have weekly class, run by the nonprofit organization iMentor, to help them understand and pursue postsecondary options, including colleges and various types of financial aid. Counselor LaToia Lyle worries about the long delays with FAFSA, because most of her students are low-income and will be first-generation college students, so they don’t always have someone to help them at home, and the delays could mean decisions had to be made quickly.

She helps them compare tuition costs and reminds them that housing deposits are not refundable and book fees add up. “Even gaps as small as $500 can make a difference,” she said.

For Zion Wilson and Camryn Carter, both seniors, the delays and the need to constantly try to log into FAFSA accounts that froze were frustrating, but both students said they were relieved when glitches with the forms meant their college commitment deadlines got pushed back.

“The last thing I wanted to do was make a fast-paced decision,” said Wilson, an ebullient 17-year-old with a wide smile. “I kept bouncing between different things. I felt the FAFSA delay gave me more of a chance to decide what I actually wanted to do.”

She had applied for computer science programs at several colleges but was nervous about taking out loans. Even though Baltimore City Community College would be tuition-free for her, she worried she wouldn’t have enough money to spend if she wasn’t working. But her family wanted her to go to college, especially because her elder sister had enrolled but dropped out after the first year.

Wilson was admitted to her top three choices — BCCC, University of Maryland Eastern Shore and Coppin State University — but even with scholarships, she decided not to go. Instead, Wilson plans to go straight into the workforce through a program called Grads2Careers, where she will get training in information technology.

“It kind of sounded like I can just do the exact same thing that I would be doing if I went to college, but I can just start now versus waiting two years to start,” Wilson said. After a two-week training period, she will be paid between $15 and $17 an hour, she said.

In the end, she filled out her portion of the FAFSA, but told her parents not to do theirs. “Why make my parents do this long thing and put in their tax information, if I’m not going anywhere that requires it?”

Wilson is relieved not to have to think about college anymore. “I think I made the right choice, and having some money in my pocket will also be a good push for me to continue to advance up.”

Her classmate Carter, 18, is a serious student who is also on the baseball, wrestling and track teams. He has never wavered from his childhood decision to study biology. It began, he said, when he was about four years old, and his grandmother tuned to the National Geographic channel on TV.

“I was like, ‘stop, stop, stop,’ ” he said, recalling the video of a lion attacking a zebra. Carter was hooked. He started watching the channel every day. “I fell in love with ants, ecosystems, that just sparked my interest in biology.”

Carter applied to 14 colleges. He said filling out all the forms was challenging because the delayed release of the FAFSA meant he was doing it at the same time as he was taking a demanding course load, including AP Literature and AP Calculus. “It was really time-consuming and really work-heavy with a lot of essays, a lot of homework,” he said. “It’s pretty tough to do that at the same time while I’m doing college supplemental essays and my personal statement.”

But the FAFSA delay also meant that his mother had more time to finish the form, something she had been putting off for months. Because he is the oldest of four children, his mom hadn’t had to complete a form like this that asks for a lot of personal information, including tax data, he said.

“My mom was just brushing over it,” he said. “But I was like, ‘No, you really have to do this because this is for my future. Like, you don’t do this, I’ll have so much debt.’ So I was just telling her to please do this and please get on it.”

She did, but Carter said it likely wouldn’t have happened without the delay.

Carter got into his dream school, the University of Maryland, College Park, with a full scholarship, including tuition, meals and accommodation. His second choice, McDaniel College, also offered him a generous scholarship, but he says he still would have ended up paying $6,000 a year, which he didn’t want to do. “Definitely money was a big factor,” he said. He said he’s excited about starting a new chapter in September: “I feel like UMD is the perfect fit for me.”

Chylicia and Chy’Kyla Henderson worked hard to graduate early from Eastside High School in Greenville, South Carolina. The sisters filled their schedules and took virtual classes as well, so that Chylicia, now 18, could be done with school a semester early and Chy’Kyla, 17, could graduate after her junior year. Both want to attend college but need financial aid to afford it.

Their mom, Nichole Henderson, said the stress of trying to fill out both their FAFSA forms at once led her to take her daughters and two other graduating seniors she knew to a FAFSA workshop at a local college in April. Even with help from someone there, she found the forms confusing — Chylicia’s asked for Nichole’s tax information, she said, but Chy’Kyla’s did not.

“I don’t think there was a lot of help surrounding the whole FAFSA process,” Nichole said. “As a parent, it’s stressful. Especially when you have two.”

Chylicia is thinking about pursuing a degree in nursing or social work, and leaning toward starting at Greenville Technical College, a community college. But the school emailed her saying they needed more information on her financial aid application; it wasn’t clear if the issue stemmed from the FAFSA form or something else, she said.

Then, on May 8, she got an email from South Carolina Tuition Grants, a program that provides up to $4,800 in need-based scholarships, saying she was tentatively approved for the full amount. She still hasn’t resolved the paperwork issue at Greenville Technical College, though, and so isn’t sure yet whether she’ll be able to enroll there.

And if Chylicia’s application is missing information, the family worries that Chy’Kyla’s will have the same issue. Like her sister, she’s considering starting out at a community college, but Chy’Kyla also applied to a handful of schools in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia. By May 8, she said, she hadn’t received word about financial aid from any schools or any need-based scholarship programs.

“We’re just playing the waiting game,” their mother said.

Heather Williams, a school counselor at Riverside High School in Greenville, said students told her they struggled simply to complete and correct errors in their forms.

“Some of the errors they’ve had were just missing a signature,” Williams said. “Trying to circumvent that and fix it was hard for students because you can make corrections, but it was hard to get back in and [do it]. It was a lot of, ‘If I click this, then what?’ And being aware there’s an error, but not sure how to fix it.”

The FAFSA process has always been complicated, but the truncated timeline this year made it significantly more stressful, said Nicole Snow, a school counselor at J.L. Mann High School, also in Greenville County. Normally, her students and their families start filling out their FAFSA forms in the fall, but this year, they couldn’t access the form until January.

“By January and February, we’ve almost kind of lost those seniors that have already done their [college] applications,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh, let’s pull you back three months later and open up FAFSA.’”

The delay created some challenging decisions for students like Braden Freeman. Freeman, who is the student body president at J.L. Mann, submitted his financial aid application in January, right after it opened up. In March, he was told he got a full scholarship to attend Southern Methodist University in Texas, but by May 1, he still hadn’t heard back from his other top choices — the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia — on how much need-based and merit-based aid he would get. Those colleges had pushed back their decision deadlines because of FAFSA delays.

Instead of waiting to hear back from UNC and UVA, Freeman decided to put a deposit down at Southern Methodist, whose deadline was May 1. The full scholarship was a big factor in his decision. “With the rising cost of tuition, I just can’t take on that much alone,” he said.

Both UNC and UVA eventually sent Freeman his financial aid packages a week before their deadline to enroll, which was May 15. Freeman said he still planned to attend Southern Methodist.

“I’m fortunate enough to not be incredibly dependent on need-based aid,” Freeman said. “For kids that are waiting on that and don’t know, I can imagine that would be way worse.”

This story about FAFSA applications 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 Four cities of FAFSA chaos: Students tell how they grappled with the mess, stress appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

MORGAN CITY, La. — Jenna Gros jangles as she walks the halls of Wyandotte Elementary School in St Mary’s Parish, Louisiana. The dozens of keys she carries while she sweeps, sprays, shelves and sorts make a loud sound, and when children hear her coming, they call out, “Miss Jenna!” 

Gros is head custodian at Wyandotte, in this small town in southern Louisiana. She’s also a teacher-in-training.  

In August 2020, she signed up for a new program designed to provide people working in school settings the chance to turn their job into an undergraduate degree in education, at a low cost. There’s untapped potential among people who work in schools right now, as classroom aides, lunchroom workers, afterschool staff and more, the thinking goes, and helping them become teachers could ease the shortage that’s dire in some districts around the country, particularly in rural areas like this one. 

In two and a half years, the teacher training program, run by nonprofit Reach University, has grown from 50 applicants to about 1,000, with most coming from rural areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama and California. The “apprenticeship degree” model costs students $75 dollars a month. The rest of the funding comes from Pell Grants and philanthropic donations. The classes, which are online, are taught by award-winning teachers, and districts must agree to have students work in the classroom for 15 hours a week as part of their training.

“We have overlooked a talent pool to our detriment,” said Joe Ross, president of Reach University. “These people have heart and they have the grit and they have the intelligence. There’s a piece of paper standing in the way.” 

Efforts to recruit teacher candidates from the local community date back to the 1990s, but programs have “exploded” in number over the past five years, said Danielle Edwards, assistant professor  of educational leadership, policy and workforce development at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Some of these “grow your own” programs, like Reach’s, recruit school employees who don’t have college degrees or degrees in education, while others focus on retired professionals, military veterans, college students, and even K12 students, with some starting as young as middle school.

“‘Grow your own’ has really caught on fire,” said Edwards, in part because of research showing that about 85 percent of teachers teach within 40 miles of where they grew up. But while these programs are increasingly popular, she says it isn’t clear what the teacher outcomes are in terms of effectiveness or retention. 

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

Nationwide, there are at least 36,500 teacher vacancies, along with approximately 163,000 positions held by underqualified teachers, according to estimates by Tuan Nguyen, anassociate professor of education at Kansas State University. At Wyandotte, Principal Celeste Pipes has three uncertified teachers out of 26. 

“We are pulling people literally off the streets to fill spots in a classroom,” she said. Surrounding parishes in this part of Louisiana, 85 miles west of New Orleans, pay more than the starting salary of $46,000 she can offer; some even cover the full cost of health insurance. 

Data suggests not having qualified teachers can worsen student achievement and increase costs for districts. An unstable workforce also affects the school culture, said Pipes: “Once we have people here that are years and years and years in, we know how things are run.”

As Gros walks the hallways, she stops to swat a fly for a scared child, ties a first grader’s shoelaces and asks a third about their math homework. Her colleagues had long noticed her calm, encouraging manner, and so, when a teacher’s aide at Wyandotte heard about Reach, she urged Gros to sign up with her. 

Gros grew up in this town — her father worked as a mechanic in the oil rigs — and always wanted to be a teacher. But with three children and a salary of $22,000 a year, she couldn’t afford to do so. The low cost and logistics of Reach’s program suddenly made it possible: Her district agreed to her spending 15 hours of her work week in the classroom, mentoring or tutoring students. She takes her online classes at night or on weekends.

Current employees are also in the retirement system, meaning the years they’ve already worked count toward their pension. For Gros, who has worked for 18 years in her school system, that was an important consideration, she said. 

Pipes said people like Gros understand the vibe of this rural community — the importance of family, the focus on church, the love of hunting. And people with community roots are also less likely to leave, said Chandler Smith, the superintendent in West Baton Rouge Parish School System, a few hours’ drive away. 

His district is the second-highest paying in the state but still struggles to attract and retain teachers: It saw a 15 percent teacher turnover rate last year. Now, it has 29 teacher candidates through Reach. 

Related: Uncertified teachers filling holes across the South 

In West Baton Rouge Parish, Jackie Noble is walking back into the Brusly Elementary school building at 6:45 p.m. She’d finished her workday as a special education teacher’s aide around 3:30 p.m., then babysat her granddaughter for a few hours, spent time with her husband, and picked up a McDonald’s order of chicken nuggets, a large coffee and a Coke to get her through her evening classes. Some Reach classes go until 11 p.m. 

Noble was a bus driver in this area for five years, but she longed to be a teacher. When she mustered the courage to research options for joining the profession, she learned it would cost somewhere between $5,000 to $15,000 a year over at least four years. “I wasn’t even financially able to pay for my transcript because it was going to cost me almost $100,” she said. 

When Noble heard about Reach and the monthly tuition of $75 a month, she said, “My mouth hit the floor.”

Ross, of Reach University, said he often hears some variation of: “I had to choose between a job and a degree.” 

“What if we eliminate the question?” he said. “Let’s turn jobs into degrees.”

Brusly Elementary is quiet as Noble settles down in a classroom. She moves her food strategically off camera and ensures she has multiple devices logged in: her phone, laptop and desktop. Sometimes the internet here is spotty, and she doesn’t want to take any chances. 

It’s the night of the final class of her course, “Children with Special Needs: History and Practice.” Her 24 classmates smile and wave as they log on from different states. They’ve been taking turns presenting on disabilities such as dyslexia, brain injuries and deafness; Noble gave hers, on assistive technologies for children with physical disabilities, last week. 

Reach began in 2006 as a certification program for entry-level teachers who had a degree but still needed a credential. It then expanded to offer credentials to teachers who wanted to move into administration as well as graduate degrees in teaching and leadership. In 2020, Reach University started the program focused on school employees without a degree.

Kim Eckert, a former Louisiana teacher of the year and Reach’s dean, says she was drawn to the program because, as a high school special education teacher, she saw how little opportunity there was for classroom aides in her school to boost their skills. She started monthly workshops specifically for them.  

In growing the Reach program, Eckert drew from her teacher-of-the-year class, hiring people who understood the realities of classroom management and could model what it’s like to be a great teacher. She shied away from those who haven’t proven themselves in the classroom, even if they have degrees from top universities. “Everybody thinks they can be a teacher because they’ve had a teacher,” she said, but that’s not true. 

The 15 hours a week of “in-class training,” which can include observing a teacher, tutoring students or helping write lessons, is designed to allow students to test out what they’re learning almost immediately, without having to wait months or years to put their studies into practice. Michelle Cottrell Williams, a Reach administrator and Virginia’s 2018 teacher of the year, recalls discussing an exercise in class about Disney’s portrayal of historical events versus the reality. One of her students, a classroom aide, shared it with the fifth graders she was working with the next day. 

Noble says she’ll carry lessons about managing students from the bus to her classroom. She was responsible for up to 70 students while driving 45 miles an hour — so 20 in a classroom seems doable, she said. 

She can’t wait to have her own classroom where she is responsible for everything. “Being with the students approximately eight hours a day, you make a very, very larger impression on their lives,” she said. 

Related: In one giant classroom, four teachers manage 135 kids — and love it 

In May, Reach graduated its first class of teachers, a group of 13 students from Louisiana who had prior credits. The organization’s first full cohort will walk across the stage in spring 2024. 

There are promising signs. Nationwide, about half of teacher candidates pass their state’s teaching licensure exam; more than 60 percent of the 13 Reach graduates did. All of them had a job waiting for them, not only in their local community, but in the building where they’d been working. 

But Roddy Theobald, deputy director of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research and researcher at the American Institutes for Research, says far more research is needed on “grow your own” programs. “There’s very, very little empirical evidence about the effectiveness of these pathways,” he said. 

One of the challenges is that the programs rarely target the specific needs of schools, he said. Some states have staffing shortages only in specific areas, like special education, STEM or elementary ed. “Sometimes they result in even more teachers with the right credentials to teach courses that the state doesn’t actually need,” he said. 

Edwards, one of the first researchers to study “grow your own” programs, is investigating whether teachers who complete them are effective in the classroom and stay employed in the field long term, as well as how diverse these educators are and whether they actually end up in hard-to-staff schools. 

“States are investing millions of dollars into this strategy, and we don’t know anything about its effectiveness,” she said. “We could be putting all this money into something that may or may not work.” 

Ross, of Reach University, says his group plans to research whether its new teachers are effective and stay in their jobs. In terms of meeting schools’ specific labor needs, Reach has agreements with other organizations such as TNTP (formerly The New Teacher Project) and the University of West Alabama to help people take higher-level courses in hard-to-fill specialties such as high school math. But while Reach staff look at information on teacher vacancies before partnering with a school district, they don’t focus on matching the district’s exact staffing needs said Ross: “Our hope is the numbers work themselves out.”

In Louisiana, Ross said he believes the organization could put a serious dent in the teacher vacancy numbers statewide. Some 84 percent of all parishes have signed on for Reach trainees, he said, and 650 teachers-in-training are enrolled. That amounts to more than a quarter of the teacher vacancy numbers statewide, 2,500.

“We’re getting pretty close to being a material contribution to the solution in that state,” he said. 

His group is also looking to partner with states, including Louisiana, to use Department of Labor money for teacher apprenticeships. At least 16 states have such programs. Under a Labor Department rule last year, teacher apprenticeships can now access millions in federal job-training funds. Reach is in talks to use some of that money, which Ross says would allow it to make the programs free to students and rely less on philanthropy.  

A straight-A student since her first semester, head custodian Jenna Gros expects to graduate without any debt in May 2024. She expects to teach at this same elementary school. At that point, her salary will almost double.

She said she loves how a teacher can shape a child’s future for the better. “That’s what a teacher is — a nurturer trying to provide them with the resources that they are going to need for later on in life. 

I think I can be that person,” she said. She pauses. “I know I can.” 

This story about grow your own programs 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 To fight teacher shortages, schools turn to custodians, bus drivers and aides  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

SALINAS, Puerto Rico — Fue poco lo que su familia pudo rescatar. Solamente unas sillas plásticas, algunas fotos, su uniforme escolar.

La inundación el pasado otoño que devastó el hogar de Deishangelxa Nuez Galarza, estudiante de quinto grado en esta área costera del sur de Puerto Rico, también provocó en el cierre de su escuela primaria, El Coquí, durante tres días mientras el personal limpiaba un pie de agua lodosa de cada salón del primer piso. Deishangelxa siempre cuidaba sus útiles escolares.

“Cuido mis cosas de la escuela”, dijo, “porque un día yo quiero ser enfermera”.

Deishangelxa perdió dos semanas de clases, algo que le disgustó.

Se trataba de la más reciente pausa en una educación que ha sido caracterizada por interrupciones casi constantes. Deishangelxa comenzó el kinder en la Escuela Ana Hernández Usera en el 2017, año en el que el huracán María azotó la isla. Las escuelas en todo Puerto Rico permanecieron cerradas por un promedio de cuatro meses.

Ana Hernández Usera nunca volvió a abrir. Como más de 260 escuelas en Puerto Rico con una matrícula baja, cerró de manera permanente como parte de medidas más amplias para reducir costos. Deishangelxa se trasladó a El Coquí, pero la isla no tendría tregua de los desastres naturales. Tenía 8 años en enero del 2020 cuando terremotos estremecieron la isla, obligando el cierre de su escuela durante tres meses mientras los ingenieros inspeccionaban las estructuras físicas del edificio para asegurarse de que no hubiera peligro para que los estudiantes regresaran.

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Cuando se reanudaron las clases, no fue por mucho tiempo. Pocas semanas después, las escuelas volvieron a cerrar por el Covid-19. A Deishangelxa, que tenía 9 años en ese momento, se le hizo difícil el aprendizaje virtual y se retrasó considerablemente. En agosto del 2021, después de olas sucesivas de infección durante las que las escuelas abrieron y cerraron, la instrucción en persona se reanudó para los estudiantes de la isla, pero duró poco. Apenas un año después, el huracán Fiona desató su furia contra la isla, causando inundaciones extensas y daños a la infraestructura. Deishangelxa tenía 10 años cuando las escuelas volvieron a cerrar en septiembre del 2022 — en esta ocasión por dos semanas.

Los percances que ha tenido Deishangelxa se reflejan en todo Puerto Rico. Desde el 2017, varios desastres naturales han golpeado a la isla — diezmando casas, devastando la red eléctrica y destruyendo la infraestructura. Ese trauma recurrente, lo que un residente llama el “TEPT colectivo de la isla”, ha sido agravado por la pobreza extensa y los desafíos burocráticos.

El sistema escolar de Puerto Rico es excepcionalmente vulnerable a los desastres naturales que se están volviendo más comunes en los Estados Unidos debido al cambio climático, y al mismo tiempo está extraordinariamente mal preparado para ayudar a los niños a recuperarse de los contratiempos de aprendizaje que conllevan. La isla ha enfrentado corrupción y mal manejo por parte del gobierno local, miles de millones en deuda y emigración masiva que ha resultado en una pérdida crítica de profesionales y en esencia ha reducido a la mitad la población estudiantil de la isla, de casi 550,000 en el 2006 a 276,413 en el 2021.

El distrito escolar de Puerto Rico, el sexto más grande en los Estados Unidos, suele ser ignorado en conversaciones sobre la educación en el país. Sin embargo, los expertos dicen que se trata de un aviso temprano del cual otros distritos podrían aprender a medida que luchan con los efectos del cambio climático en el aprendizaje, la salud y la infraestructura.

“¿Cómo compensamos el impacto de esas interrupciones de escuela y cómo hacemos que las escuelas sean más resistentes?” dijo John King, ex secretario de educación de EE.UU. que es co-presidente de This is Planet Ed, una iniciativa del Instituto Aspen que trabaja en soluciones climáticas a través del sector educativo. “Es un problema agudo para Puerto Rico hoy en día, pero es un problema que estamos viendo en otras partes del país que va a seguir creciendo”.

La población estudiantil de Puerto Rico se ha reducido por casi la mitad en 15 años, de aproximadamente 550,000 en el 2006 a 276,413 en el 2021, una disminución causada por los desastres, la mala administración y la emigración.

Miguel Cardona, el secretario de educación bajo el Presidente Biden, prometió “un nuevo día” para Puerto Rico. Entre los últimos dos años, ha aprobado más de $6 mil millones en fondos federales para el sistema escolar de la isla. Casi mil millones de ese financiamiento se hicieron posibles revirtiendo una decisión de la administración Trump de restringir asistencia por la pandemia a Puerto Rico por lo que ha sido caracterizado como “problemas de largo tiempo” con la mala administración de fondos federales en la isla. El gobernador de Puerto Rico, Pedro Pierluisi, prometió implementar “una mayor rendición de cuentas” y contratar a un tercer partido independiente para administrar los fondos.

Hasta ahora, el dinero se ha utilizado para costear aumentos temporales en los salarios de los maestros, contratar a cientos de profesionales de salud mental escolares y financiar programas de tutoría. Pero, pese a la Ley de Reforma Educativa de Puerto Rico del 2018 que permite más control local, el departamento de educación de Puerto Rico sigue estando fuertemente centralizado, lo que impide que se reparta el dinero rápidamente.

Chris Soto, asesor senior de Cardona que encabeza el esfuerzo federal por mejorar las escuelas de Puerto Rico, dijo que es importante abordar no solamente las necesidades del sistema a corto plazo, sino también alguno de sus problemas sistémicos, como una burocracia sofocante y la infraestructura deteriorada, que han plagado al departamento durante décadas.

“De esa manera no estaremos hablando de lo mismo en 20 años”, dijo.

“Antes teníamos tiempo para recuperarnos, ahora no hemos tenido para recuperarnos. Entonces crees que estás saliendo adelante y pasa otra cosa. Es una crisis”.

Yadira Sánchez, psicóloga escolar y directora de Lectores para el Futuro

Puerto Rico, que ha estado bajo control de Estados Unidos desde que terminó la guerra hispano-estadounidense en 1898, por largo tiempo ha ocupado una posición nebulosa como un “territorio no incorporado”. Sus residentes son ciudadanos estadounidenses, pero no pueden votar por el presidente y no tienen representación en el Congreso. Las políticas federales aún ponen en desventaja a la isla, el resultado de una “relación cuasi-colonial”, dijo King.

La porción federal del financiamiento del Medicaid, por ejemplo, tiene un límite de 55 por ciento (si Puerto Rico fuese un estado, podría recibir 83 por ciento), a los residentes se les niega ciertos beneficios por discapacidad y se restringe el acceso a otros fundos, como el crédito tributario por hijos. La pobreza infantil es extensa: En los 50 estados, 17 por ciento de los niños viven debajo del umbral de pobreza; en Puerto Rico, esa cifra es de 55 por ciento y aún más alta en áreas rurales.

Los resultados académicos en Puerto Rico son bajos y han ido disminuyendo a un paso constante desde el huracán María. En un examen de matemáticas que toman niños en todo Estados Unidos (la Evaluación Nacional de Progreso Educativo, comúnmente conocida como la Libreta de Calificaciones de la Nación), aproximadamente a un tercio de los estudiantes de cuarto grado y a un cuarto de los estudiantes de octavo grado en Estados Unidos continental se les consideraba “aptos” en el 2022. En comparación, tan pocos estudiantes estuvieron a la altura de los estándares en Puerto Rico en cualquiera de los dos grados ese año que el porcentaje se redondea a cero.

“¿Cómo compensamos el impacto de esas interrupciones de escuela y cómo hacemos que las escuelas sean más resistentes? Es un problema agudo para Puerto Rico hoy en día, pero es un problema que estamos viendo en otras partes del país que va a seguir creciendo”.

John King, ex secretario de educación de EE.UU. y co-presidente de This is Planet Ed

Entre el 2017 y el 2022, el porcentaje de niños con un rendimiento considerado a nivel de grado en español, matemática, inglés y ciencia disminuyó por al menos 10 puntos porcentuales en cada materia, como lo mide la evaluación local, META-PR. En el 2021, funcionarios escolares revelaron que 13,000 estudiantes habían reprobado todas sus materias.

El aprendizaje virtual se le hizo particularmente difícil a los estudiantes puertorriqueños. Aun en el 2017, antes del huracán María, aproximadamente un cuarto de los niños de la isla carecían de acceso al internet y la mitad no tenían computadoras en el hogar. A los que cuentan con esos recursos hoy en día los entorpece un servicio eléctrico intermitente.

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A los estudiantes les costó encaminarse cuando se reanudó el aprendizaje en persona: Más de la mitad de todos los estudiantes estaban “desinteresados” entre febrero y mayo del año pasado, según un cálculo en un reporte del Departamento de Educación de Estados Unidos. En El Coquí, la escuela de Deishangelxa, el director Jorge Luis Colón González dijo que un tercio de sus estudiantes tienen dificultades ahora, pese a que reciben algo de ayuda adicional.

Fondos federales le pagaron a una compañía privada para operar un programa de recuperación académica extraescolar en El Coquí durante el presente año escolar. Más de 75 niños, incluyendo Deishangelxa, se quedan después de la jornada escolar todos los días para recibir dos horas de tutoría adicional en español, inglés, matemática y ciencia. Colón dijo que espera que este apoyo adicional les permita a sus estudiantes ponerse al día. “Me preocupa mucho su aprendizaje”, dijo.

Yiria Muñiz, maestra en una escuela católica para niñas, Academia María Reina, en San Juan, dijo que los estudiantes de Puerto Rico han tenido cinco años completos de aprendizaje interrumpido, y que se nota. Muñiz dice que antes les enseñaba el sistema métrico decimal a sus estudiantes en una semana; ahora, le toma más de dos meses.

“Los niños del 2017 y del 2022 no son iguales. Si piensas en mis estudiantes de séptimo grado ahora mismo, han estado pasando por algo desde el segundo grado. Entonces, han perdido muchas, muchas oportunidades para desarrollar destrezas sociales, académicas, de conducta y emocionales”, dijo.

Muñiz se ve obligada a cambiar su currículo constantemente para acomodar a sus estudiantes. “Todo lo que había hecho anteriormente ya no sirve”, dijo.

Maestros en todo Puerto Rico dicen que han recibido poca asistencia para satisfacer las necesidades cambiantes de sus estudiantes. El desarrollo profesional suele ser irregular, opcional u organizado apresuradamente, y muchos maestros no han recibido ese tipo de apoyo en años, dijo Víctor Manuel Bonilla Sánchez, presidente de la Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico, un sindicato que representa a los maestros.

Algunas organizaciones sin fines de lucro han intervenido para llenar la brecha. Por ejemplo, una coalición de organizaciones enfocadas en la alfabetización, encabezada por la organización de fines de lucro Flamboyan Foundation, realiza talleres para entrenar los maestros sobre cómo enseñar la lectura, llena las bibliotecas escolares con libros culturalmente adecuados y educa a la comunidad general sobre la importancia de la lectura. Yadira Sánchez, una psicóloga escolar que también encabeza la organización sin fines de lucro Lectores para el Futuro, dijo que los maestros están “hambrientos” por este apoyo; una reciente sesión de capacitación que ayudó a organizar estuvo atestada. Ahora, la coalición está luchando por expandir su alcance a más maestros gracias a una esperada infusión de nuevos fondos federales.

Quizás aún más preocupante que las interrupciones académicas es la crisis de salud mental entre los niños de la isla. En una evaluación reciente, el Programa de Trabajadores Sociales del Departamento de Educación de Puerto Rico determinó que más de 500 niños habían perdido a un familiar durante el año académico del 2020-21 y que aproximadamente 68,000 niños, casi un tercio de todos los estudiantes, fueron identificados como necesitados de ayuda debido a una situación emocional, mental o de comportamiento.

El trauma compuesto por el torrente de desastres perdura. Los maestros cuentan de niños que se echan a llorar cuando un camión que pasa hace vibrar el suelo, porque les recuerda un terremoto. Algunos niños se distraen en clase al más leve sonido de gotas de lluvia, mientras que otros esconden comida en sus bolsillos y sus medias.

El plan de Puerto Rico incluía el uso de los $6 miles de millones proporcionados por el departamento de educación federal para fortalecer los equipos escolares de salud mental, en parte con la contratación de más de 420 enfermeras y 110 psicólogos escolares para abordar la severa escasez de empleados entre el personal de salud escolar. El dinero también ayudará a pagar cientos de facturas atrasadas por evaluaciones y terapias que ya se les realizaron a niños en programas de educación especial.

Dinelys Rodriguez, de 14 años, estudia en la Escuela Delia Dávila de Cabán en Toa Baja, aproximadamente a 25 minutos de San Juan. Recuerda haber hecho fila con su madre por más de tres horas simplemente para entrar a un supermercado después del huracán María. Ahora, cada vez que hay una tormenta, se preocupa por no tener suficiente para comer. Fueron tiempos difíciles, pero ella y su hermano, Jadniel, de 11 años, también recuerdan que jugaron a las cartas en familia después de los huracanes y se bañaron en la lluvia, recuerdos que los hacen sonreír.

Pero a medida que han ido creciendo, se han empezado a preocupar por perder tantos días de escuela. Dinelys quiere ser abogada. “Quiero ser alguien en la vida”, dijo. “¿Cómo voy a aprobar mis exámenes y graduarme si no puedo ir a la escuela?” Jadniel también se preocupa. “Es difícil estudiar cuando los adultos a mi alrededor siempre están preocupados”, dijo. “Siempre estoy en alerta”.

Ambos niños participan en un programa de salud mental que se ha ofrecido por mucho tiempo en su escuela, que es administrado por la organización sin fines de lucro Instituto Nueva Escuela. Luz Rivera Ocasio, una trabajadora social que pertenece al programa, dijo que apoya a las familias, sea que necesiten consejería o ayuda práctica como dinero para alimentos o ropa. Pero el programa, Casa Familiar, solamente está disponible en 13 escuelas, brindándole ayuda a sólo una pequeña fracción de quienes la necesitan.

Rivera describe su función como “el pañuelo que seca todas las lágrimas”. Los niños entran y salen de su salón para darle — y recibir — un abrazo caluroso y acogedor. Entre huracanes, la pandemia y todo lo que ha pasado, “le ha afectado emocionalmente”, dijo. “O sea, esto han seguido rastrando, poco a poco.”

El Coquí emplea a una trabajadora social escolar; hace dos años, sumó a una psicóloga escolar. Colón, el director, dice que los estudiantes aún se están recuperando emocionalmente del aislamiento del aprendizaje virtual. Y las maestras también. No podían dar con los estudiantes que no tenían internet, o que estaban haciendo cuidado a sus familias, y fue difícil. “La ansiedad fue una de los factores que afectó a nuestros maestros”. No solamente anima a los maestros a que hablen con la psicóloga de la escuela, sino que a veces él mismo se desahoga con ella.

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Sánchez, la psicóloga escolar que encabeza Lectores para el Futuro, dijo que la gente de la isla se enorgullece de su fortaleza, pero que los implacables desastres naturales han hecho imposible sostener esa actitud. Aconseja a maestros que se culpan por no estar con familiares que se están muriendo, que se sienten muy mal por haberles gritado a los estudiantes en un momento de frustración, y hasta a los que han dejado la profesión.

“Antes teníamos tiempo para recuperarnos, ahora no hemos tenido para recuperarnos. Entonces crees que estás saliendo adelante y pasa otra cosa”, dijo. “Es una crisis”.

“Los niños del 2017 y del 2022 no son iguales. Si piensas en mis estudiantes de séptimo grado ahora mismo, han estado pasando por algo desde el segundo grado. Entonces, han perdido muchas, muchas oportunidades para desarrollar destrezas sociales, académicas, de conducta y emocionales”.

Yiria Muñiz, maestra, Academia María Reina, en San Juan

Aunque las escuelas públicas de la isla habían visto una disminución constante en las matrículas durante casi dos décadas, en el año escolar inmediatamente después del huracán María hubo un bajón abrupto de más de 42,000 niños. Los funcionarios escolares ya habían cerrado 167 escuelas el año anterior y decidieron seguir consolidando otras 260 escuelas locales. Los maestros fueron reasignados, los viajes diarios de los niños se hicieron más largos y los edificios escolares quedaron vacantes. Desde entonces, la matrícula ha seguido disminuyendo, cayendo por otros 16,878 desde el 2021.

Ana Díaz, maestra de tercer grado en la Escuela Delia Dávila de Cabán en Toa Baja, ha presenciado el desplome en la matrícula de primera mano. Hace cinco años, antes del huracán María, tenía 28 alumnos en su aula. Comenzó el presente año escolar con apenas 14.

Díaz dijo que muchos estudiantes se han ido a Estados Unidos continental, usualmente a la Florida a hospedarse con familiares. Pero no es un camino fácil — no solamente deben acostumbrarse a un nuevo lugar, nuevas amistades y un nuevo idioma, sino que el currículo no está alineado con el de Puerto Rico, y los niños suelen tener problemas académicos, dijo. A veces regresan a la isla, y se les dificulta reajustarse y ponerse al día con lo que se han perdido.

“Es bien frustrante porque yo veo el potencial que ellos tienen”, dijo Díaz. Esta transmigración también podría tener consecuencias para el empleo de Díaz. Si se van más estudiantes, es posible que sea trasladada a otra escuela.

Los educadores también se han visto afectados por medidas de austeridad. Una junta de supervisión establecida por el gobierno federal para reestructurar la deuda masiva de Puerto Rico anunció en enero del 2022 que los educadores ya no recibirán una pensión garantizada, que sus beneficios serían reducidos y que ya no serían elegibles para recibir beneficios de retiro antes de los 63 años. Fue un golpe para los maestros de la isla a los que ya se les pagaba poco: El sueldo promedio en el 2018 fue de $27.000; los maestros en Estados Unidos tuvieron un sueldo promedio de $61.730.

La insuficiencia del pago de los maestros se manifestó de forma severa a principios del 2022, cuando un maestro falleció en un accidente automovilístico luego de quedarse dormido mientras conducía a casa de su empleo nocturno como guardia de seguridad, uno de dos trabajos adicionales que necesitaba para hacer alcanzar el dinero. En respuesta a la tragedia y otros sucesos, los educadores llevaron a cabo huelgas masivas, incitando al gobierno a aprobar un aumento temporal de $1.000 mensuales para todos los educadores y bonificaciones para algunos maestros, pagados con fondos federales.

Pero no está claro qué sucederá una vez que se agote el dinero. Dijo que nunca va a poder jubilarse.

“Nunca me voy a rendir. Siempre voy a estar buscando estrategias. Las que no funcionan, las cambiamos.”

Jorge Luis Colón González, director de la escuela El Coquí en Salinas

Bonilla, del sindicato de maestros, dijo que la máxima prioridad del grupo es mayor apoyo para la salud mental de los maestros. El departamento de educación de Puerto Rico recientemente firmó un acuerdo con una universidad local para brindarles terapia virtual a los educadores, pero Bonilla dice que debe hacer mucho más, por la escala del problema.

El secretario de educación de Puerto Rico, Eliezer Ramos Parés, quien está comenzado su segundo año en el cargo, reconoce que les espera un camino difícil. Pero se siente optimista de que el dinero federal ayudará y que el gobierno estadounidense, las organizaciones sin fines de lucro y el departamento de educación local encontrarán la manera de trabajar en conjunto. Ramos Parés dijo que su departamento ya ha hecho algunos cambios — por ejemplo, están usando más récords electrónicos, en lugar de papeles; recopilando más datos y documentando sus actividades.

“La confianza es importante y para que haya confianza, tiene que haber transparencia”, dijo. “Puerto Rico no lo puede lograr solo; tenemos que ser un equipo”.

Afuera de El Coquí — la escuela lleva el nombre de la pequeña especie de rana con voz grande que es tan querida en la isla — miles de mariposas amarillas y blancas aletean como confeti. Pero a pesar de la belleza que los rodea, los residentes del área exudan una ansiedad palpable, temerosos del próximo desastre natural. Los residentes locales están en estado de alerta por señales de advertencia: Aquí en el sur de Puerto Rico, si de pronto aparecen ciertas aves marinas en el interior, la gente cree que viene otro desastre, dijo Colón.

La ansiedad podría ser un factor en el reciente aumento en los casos de asma entre los estudiantes de El Coquí, dijo la trabajadora social de la escuela. También ha aumentado el número de estudiantes en El Coquí con problemas de la piel. Los padecimientos podrían ser consecuencia del molo al que los niños estuvieron expuestos en sus hogares después de las inundaciones, o de la contaminación ambiental que ha sido una preocupación en esta área durante años, agregó.

Algunos de los fondos federales se utilizarán para remover moho, asbestos y plomo de los edificios y proveerles a los estudiantes pupitres que estén libres de moho u óxido. También hay planes para reemplazar sistemas de aire acondicionado anticuados.

El ingreso por cápita en esa región costera de Salinas es menos de $10.000 al año; apenas un poco más de un tercio de las personas de edad para trabajar forman parte de la fuerza laboral. Colón, quien se crio pobre en un pueblo cercano, dice que la educación fue su salida. Es un camino que anhela con fervor para sus estudiantes.

“Es la única herramienta que tienen para salir de la pobreza”, dijo. “Puede cambiar vidas”. Es por eso que, pese a los desafíos de los últimos años, Colón dijo estar más decidido que nunca a seguir trabajando en el ámbito de la educación.

“Nunca me voy a rendir”, dijo. “Siempre voy a estar buscando estrategias. Las que no funcionan, las cambiamos”.

Este artículo acerca del sistema escolar de Puerto Rico fue producido por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente sin fines de lucro enfocada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación. Lea sus otros artículos en español.

The post ¿Son las dificultades de las escuelas en Puerto Rico un avance de lo que enfrentarán otros distritos? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

SALINAS, Puerto Rico — There was little her family could salvage. Just a few plastic chairs, some photos, her school uniform.

The flooding last fall that devastated the home of Deishangelxa Nuez Galarza, a fifth grader in this coastal area of southern Puerto Rico, also closed her elementary school, El Coquí, for three days while staff cleaned out a foot of muddy water from every first floor room. Deishangelxa missed two weeks of classes, which upset her.

“School is very important to me because I want to keep studying,” she said. “I want to become a nurse.”

It was just the latest interruption in schooling that’s been characterized by near constant disruption. Deishangelxa started kindergarten at Ana Hernandez Usera elementary school in 2017, the year Hurricane Maria struck the island. Schools across Puerto Rico were closed for an average of four months.

Ana Hernandez Usera never reopened. Like more than 260 other schools across Puerto Rico with low enrollment, it was closed permanently as part of wider cost cutting measures. Deishangelxa transferred to El Coquí, but the island would not get a break from natural disasters. She was 8 in January 2020, when earthquakes rocked the island, closing her school for three months while engineers inspected its physical structures to make sure they were safe for students to return.

When classes finally resumed, it wasn’t for long. A few weeks later schools closed again because of Covid-19. Deishangelxa, 9 years old at the time, struggled with virtual learning and fell far behind. In August 2021, after successive waves of infection saw schools open and close, in-person schooling finally resumed for students on the island, but not for long. Just a year later, Hurricane Fiona unleashed a furious attack on the island, causing widespread flooding and infrastructure damage. Deishangelxa was 10 when schools shut again in September 2022 — this time for two weeks.

The troubles Deishangelxa has faced are mirrored across Puerto Rico. Since 2017, natural disasters have pounded the island — decimating homes, crippling the power grid and gutting infrastructure. That repeated trauma, what one resident called “collective island PTSD,” has been compounded by widespread poverty and bureaucratic challenges.

Puerto Rico’s school system is both uniquely vulnerable to natural disasters that are becoming more common across the U.S. because of climate change, and unusually ill-equipped to help children recover from the learning setbacks that come with them. The island has faced corruption and mismanagement in local government, billions of dollars in debt and mass emigration that has caused a critical loss of professionals and essentially halved the island’s student population in 15 years, from almost 550,000 in 2006 to 276,413 in 2021.

The Puerto Rican school district, the sixth largest in the U.S., is often ignored in conversations about U.S. education. Yet experts say it is the canary in the coal mine that other districts could learn from as they grapple with the effects of climate change on learning, health and infrastructure.

“How do we make up for the impact of those disruptions of school and how do we make schools more resilient?” said John King, a former U.S. secretary of education who is co-chair of This is Planet Ed, an initiative of the Aspen Institute that works on climate solutions through the education sector. “That’s an acute problem in Puerto Rico today, but it’s a problem we’re already seeing in other parts of the country that’s going to grow.”

Miguel Cardona, the secretary of education under President Biden, promised “a new day” for Puerto Rico. Over the past two years, he has signed off on almost $6 billion in federal dollars for the island’s school system. Almost a billion of that funding was made possible by reversing a Trump administration decision to restrict pandemic aid to the island because of what had been called “longstanding challenges” with the island’s mismanagement of federal funds. The Puerto Rican governor, Pedro Pierluisi, promised to implement “greater accountability” and enlist an independent third party to administer the funds.

“We’ve never seen such a need in the history of Puerto Rico. We are making a clarion call for help.”

Victor Manuel Bonilla Sánchez, president of the Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico

The money has so far been used to pay for temporary teacher salary increases, hire hundreds of school mental health professionals and fund tutoring programs. But, despite a 2018 education reform law that allows for more local control, the Puerto Rico department of education is still heavily centralized, making it difficult to get the money out the door quickly.

Chris Soto, a senior advisor to Cardona who heads the federal effort to improve Puerto Rican schools, said it’s important to tackle not only the system’s short-term needs, but also some of its systemic issues, such as the stifling bureaucracy and crumbling infrastructure that have plagued the department for decades.

“That way we’re not having the same conversation in 20 years,” he said.

Related: In Puerto Rico, the odds are against high school grads who want to go to college

Puerto Rico, which has been under U.S. control since the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898, has long occupied a nebulous position as an “unincorporated territory.” Its residents are U.S. citizens but lack a presidential vote and representation in Congress. Federal policies still disadvantage the island, the result of a “quasi-colonial relationship,” said King.

The federal share of Medicaid funding, for example, is capped at 55 percent (if Puerto Rico were a state, it could receive 83 percent), residents are denied certain disability benefits and there are restrictions on access to other funding, such as the child tax credit. Child poverty is widespread: In the 50 U.S. states, 17 percent of children live below the poverty line; in Puerto Rico, that figure is 55 percent and even higher in rural areas.

Puerto Rico’s student population has dropped by almost half in 15 years, from almost 550,000 in 2006 to 276,413 in 2021, a decline caused by disasters, mismanagement and migration.

Academic outcomes in Puerto Rico are poor and have been on a steady decline since Hurricane Maria. On the math test that children all over the U.S. take (the National Assessment for Educational Progress, commonly called the Nation’s Report Card), about a third of fourth graders and a quarter of eighth graders on the mainland were considered “proficient” in 2022. By comparison, so few students made the cut in Puerto Rico in either grade that year that the percentages rounded to zero.

Between 2017 and 2022, the percentage of children considered on grade level in Spanish, math, English and science decreased by at least 10 percentage points in each subject, as measured by the local assessment, META-PR. In 2021, school officials announced that 13,000 students had failed all their classes.

Online learning was particularly challenging for Puerto Rican students. Even in 2017, before Hurricane Maria, about a quarter of the island’s children lacked internet access and half lacked computers at home. Those who do have them now often struggle with intermittent power.

Students struggled to get back on track after in-person learning resumed: More than half of all students were “disengaged” between February and May last year, according to an estimate in a 2021 U.S. Department of Education report. At El Coquí, Deishangelxa’s school, principal Jorge Luis Colón Gonzalez said a third of his students are now struggling, despite some extra help.

Federal funds paid for a private company to run an afterschool academic recovery program at El Coquí this school year. More than 75 children, including Deishangelxa, stay behind after school every day for two hours of extra tutoring in Spanish, English, math and science. Colón said he hopes this additional support can help his students catch up. “I’m very worried about their learning,” he said.

Yiria Muñiz, a teacher at a Catholic girls’ school, Academia María Reina, in San Juan, said Puerto Rico’s students have experienced a full five years of disrupted learning, and it shows. Muñiz said she used to teach her students the metric system in a week; now, it takes more than two months.

“2017 and 2022 children are not the same. If you think about my seventh graders right now, they’ve been going through something ever since second grade. So, they have missed on many, many opportunities to develop social, academic, behavioral, emotional skills,” she said.

Muñiz is constantly having to change her curriculum to accommodate her students. “Everything I’ve done before is no good anymore,” she said.

Teachers across Puerto Rico say they have received little assistance in meeting their students’ changing needs. Professional development is often spotty, optional or hastily put together, and many teachers have not received any such support for years, said Victor Manuel Bonilla Sánchez, the president of the Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico, a union that represents teachers.

Some nonprofits have stepped in to fill the gap. For example, a coalition of organizations focused on literacy, headed by the nonprofit Flamboyan Foundation, holds workshops to train teachers in how to teach reading, stocks school libraries with culturally appropriate books and educates the broader community on the importance of reading. Yadira Sánchez, a school psychologist who also heads a nonprofit Lectores para el Futuro (Readers for the Future), said teachers are “hungry” for this support; a recent training session she helped organize was packed. Now, the coalition is working to expand its outreach to more teachers thanks to an expected infusion of new federal funds.

Related: Climate change is sabotaging education for America’s students — and it’s only going to get worse

Even more worrying than the academic disruptions, perhaps, is the mental health crisis among the island’s children. In one recent assessment, the Puerto Rican Department of Education’s Social Worker Program found that more than 500 children had lost a family member during the 2020-21 academic year and approximately 68,000 kids, almost a third of all students, were identified as needing help because of an emotional, mental or behavioral situation.

Compounded trauma from the barrage of disasters lingers. Teachers speak of children crying when a passing truck makes the ground vibrate, because it reminds them of an earthquake. Some kids become distracted in class at the slightest sound of rain drops, while others hide food in their pockets and socks.

Puerto Rico’s plan included using the $6 billion recovery money provided by the federal education department to beef up existing school mental health teams, in part by hiring more than 420 school nurses and 110 school psychologists to address severe staff shortages among school health personnel. The money will also help pay for hundreds of overdue invoices for evaluations and therapy already conducted for children in special education programs.

Dinelys Rodriguez, 14, studies at Delia Dávila de Cabán School in Toa Baja, about 25 minutes from San Juan. She remembers waiting in line with her mother for more than three hours just to enter a supermarket after Hurricane Maria. Now, every time there’s a storm, she worries she won’t have enough to eat. That time was challenging, but she and her brother, Jadniel, 11, also remember playing cards with family in the aftermath of the hurricanes and taking showers in the rain, memories that make them smile.

But as they’ve grown, they’ve started to worry about missing so much school. Dinelys wants to be a lawyer. “I want to be someone in life,” she said. “How will I pass my school exams and graduate if I can’t go to school?” Jadniel worries as well. “It is difficult to study when all the adults around me are always worried,” he said. “I am always on alert.”

Both children participate in a longstanding mental health program in their school, run by the nonprofit Instituto Nueva Escuela. Luz Rivera Ocasio, a social worker with the program, said she supports families whether they need counseling or practical help such as money for food or clothes. But the program, Casa Familiar, is only in 13 schools, reaching just a tiny fraction of those who need help.

Rivera described her role as “the cloth that absorbs all the tears.” Children come in and out of her room to give — and get — a warm, enveloping hug. Everyone is “holding, carrying or covering up” their emotions, she said. “And it’s accumulating.”

El Coquí employs a school social worker; two years ago, it added a school psychologist.  Colón, the principal, said students and teachers are still recovering emotionally from the isolation of virtual learning. “Anxiety is the biggest issue,” Colón said. Not only does he encourage teachers to speak to the school psychologist, he sometimes confides in her as well.

Sánchez, the school psychologist who leads Lectores para el Futuro, said people on the island pride themselves on being resilient, but the unrelenting natural disasters have made that attitude impossible to sustain. She counsels teachers who blame themselves for not being with dying family members, who feel terrible for having yelled at students in frustration, and even those who have left the profession.

“Before we had time to recover, now we haven’t had time to recover. So, you think you’re getting out of it and something else happens,” she said. “It’s a crisis.”

Related: When the children leave: What’s left after a mass exodus of young people from Puerto Rico?

While public schools on the island had seen a steady decline in enrollment for almost two decades, the academic year immediately after Hurricane Maria saw a precipitous drop of more than 42,000 children. School officials had already closed 167 schools the year before and decided to further consolidate by closing more than 260 additional neighborhood schools. Teachers were reassigned, children had longer commutes and school buildings were left vacant. Since then, enrollment has continued to decline, falling by another 16,878 since 2021.

Ana Díaz, who teaches third graders at Delia Dávila de Cabán School in Toa Baja, has experienced the plummeting enrollment first hand. Five years ago, before Hurricane Maria, she had 28 students in her class. This school year she started off with just 14. 

Díaz said many students have gone to the mainland, usually to Florida to stay with relatives. But that’s not an easy path — not only must they get accustomed to a new place, new friends and new language, but the curriculum isn’t aligned with that in Puerto Rico, and kids often struggle academically, she said. Sometimes they return to the island, and it’s often hard for them to readjust and catch up with what they’ve missed.

“The poor outcomes are super frustrating,” said Díaz. “Because I see the potential in a lot of them.” This migration has implications for Díaz’s job as well. If more students leave, she could be transferred to a different school.  

Educators have also been affected by austerity measures. An oversight board established by the federal government to restructure Puerto Rico’s massive debt announced in January 2022 that educators would no longer receive a guaranteed pension, their benefits would be cut and they would no longer be eligible for retirement benefits before age 63. This was a blow to teachers on the island who are already poorly paid: The average pay in 2018 was $27,000; teachers in U.S. states averaged $61,730.

The inadequacy of teacher pay was harshly illustrated in early 2022, when a teacher died in a car crash after he fell asleep while driving home from night work as a security guard, one of two moonlighting jobs he needed to make ends meet. In response to the tragedy and other events, educators staged massive walk outs, prompting the government to approve a temporary $1,000-a-month bump for all educators, and bonuses for some teachers, paid for with federal relief funds.

But it isn’t clear what will happen once the money runs out. “I may never be able to retire at this rate,” Díaz said.

Bonilla, of the teachers’ union, said the group’s top priority this year is better mental health support for teachers. Puerto Rico’s education department recently signed an agreement with a local university to provide virtual therapy for educators, but Bonilla said it needs to do much more. “We’ve never seen such a need in the history of Puerto Rico,” he said. “We are making a clarion call for help.”

Related: Communities hit hardest by the pandemic, already struggling, could face a dropout cliff

Puerto Rico’s secretary of education, Eliezer Ramos Parés, who is beginning his second year on the job, acknowledges the tough road ahead. But he is optimistic that the federal money will help and that the U.S. government, nonprofits and the local education department will find ways to work together. Ramos Parés said his department has already made some changes — for example, using more electronic records, rather than paper; collecting more data and documenting its actions.

“Trust is important and for trust, there needs to be transparency,” he said. “Puerto Rico can’t do it alone; we need to be a team.”

Outside El Coquí — the school was named after a tiny species of frog with an outsized voice that is beloved on the island — thousands of yellow and white butterflies flutter around like confetti. But despite the beauty around them, the area’s residents exude a palpable sense of anxiety, fearing the next natural disaster. Locals are always on the alert for warning signs: Here in southern Puerto Rico, if certain ocean birds are suddenly found inland, people believe another disaster is coming, Colón said.

Anxiety could be a factor in a recent increase in the cases of asthma among the students at El Coquí, the school’s social worker said. The number of students at El Coquí with skin conditions has also risen. The maladies could result from the children’s exposure to mold in their homes after the floods, or from environmental contamination that has been a concern in this area for years, she added.

Some of the federal funds will be used to remove mold, asbestos and lead in buildings and provide students with desks that are free of mold or rust. There are also plans to buy or replace outdated air-conditioning systems.

The per capita income in this coastal region of Salinas is less than $10,000 a year; just over a third of working-age residents are in the workforce. Colon, who grew up poor in a nearby town, said education was his way out. It’s a path he fervently wants for his students.

“It’s the only tool they have to rise above poverty,” he said. “It can change their lives.” Because of that, even with the challenges of the past few years, Colon said his resolve to keep working in education is stronger than ever.

“When something isn’t working, we change strategies,” he said. “But we will never give up.”

This story on schools in Puerto Rico 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 Are the challenges of Puerto Rico’s schools a taste of what other districts will face? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

LaTavia BigBack was 17, a high school junior, when she and her friends were in a car crash. In the hospital, the doctor asked if she minded her friends being in the room — he had some news for her. BigBack said no; she thought maybe she had a concussion. But the doctor told her she was pregnant. Years later, she still cries when she remembers her friends’ expressions. “I felt embarrassed and terrified, because me and my friends were so young.”

She considered an abortion, but her 23-year-old boyfriend disappeared and she didn’t have any money. “It’s expensive to get the procedure, and he just kept flaking on the appointments,” she said. “So I had kind of no choice but to go along with the pregnancy.” 

As word of her pregnancy spread at her school in Colorado, so did the unkind comments and judgmental attitudes. Except for one friend, even those who had been in the accident with her pulled away. When her classes were assigned group projects, no one wanted her in their group. Her teachers never acknowledged her growing belly, and the school counselor had no suggestions for outside resources.

Never a good student, she started falling even further behind. Finally, at four and a half months, she confided in her dad. BigBack’s mom guessed several weeks later when she developed a craving for strawberries. BigBack found herself growing more and more isolated at school and dropped out in her junior year.

“If there was anyone who encouraged me, who gave me support, I would have stayed,” she said. Instead, at seven and a half months, with swollen feet and an anxious heart, BigBack began working two part-time jobs — as a server in a restaurant and a cashier at Walmart. She bounced between her divorced parents’ houses and felt hopeless. “I honestly felt like my life was over.”

BigBack’s story is disturbingly common.

Related: How are college campuses preparing for a post-Roe world?

Fifty years have passed since Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 went into effect.  While the law is perhaps best known for requiring schools to provide women with equal opportunities in sports, it was intended to prohibit discrimination based on sex in any educational programs and activities — including academic, athletic and extracurricular — that receive federal funds. The law guarantees the right to an education for pregnant and parenting students.

But the federal civil rights law is often ignored, misunderstood or blatantly violated in public schools. A charter school in Louisiana required students to take a pregnancy test and then forced them out if they refused or tested positive. Administrators at a school in New Mexico forced a middle schooler to stand in front of her classmates at an assembly while they announced that she was pregnant. Two teens in Michigan were told they couldn’t show their baby bumps in their school yearbook photos.

While these incidents got a lot of attention, most pregnant students, like BigBack, talk of more subtle “pushouts” that make them discontinue their education: a guidance counselor suggesting they transfer to an online program that is less rigorous; a teacher removing them from an honors course or extracurricular activity; a principal ignoring reports of harassment. All are illegal, yet commonplace. Some educators still believe that having pregnant or parenting teens in school or providing services like nurseries will encourage other students to get pregnant.

Partly as a result, educational outcomes for these students are bleak. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only about half of teen mothers receive a high school diploma by age 22, compared with approximately 90 percent of their peers who do not give birth. Fewer than 2 percent of mothers under 18 complete college by age 30, according to a 2006 report published by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy (now Power to Decide).

Schools already fail this population of students. And recently, the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the longstanding constitutional right to abortion, leaving it up to states to decide. About half of states are expected to ban abortion or allow other restrictions on the procedure to go into effect, and advocates worry the number of pregnant and parenting students will increase.

Wendy Luttrell, a professor of urban education at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the book “Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds: Gender, Race and the Schooling of Pregnant Teens,” said an increase in pregnant and parenting teens is a “commonsense prediction.” But she warned that schools are just as unprepared to support these students as when she wrote the book, two decades ago.

“It is alarming, because if we haven’t been able to do that in 20 years, what’s in place for us to be able to even address an uptick?” she said. “Even though there is data that shows how pregnant teens can be supported and can be definitely on an educational trajectory of success.”

Related: How parents of young kids make it through college

In 1995, during his State of the Union speech, President Bill Clinton called teen pregnancy “our most serious social problem.” In the decades since, the number of teens becoming mothers  has fallen dramatically. In 1991, there were 61.8 births for every 1,000 women ages 15 to 19 in the United States, compared with 15.4 per 1,000 in 2020. That’s a 75 percent drop.

Some of the reasons for the decrease include teens waiting longer to have sex, increased access to contraception and popular reality TV shows such as “16 and Pregnant,” which depicted the struggles of young moms.

But advocates say the declining rate of teen pregnancy has been a double-edged sword; while a welcome development, it also means the issue has been getting less attention and fewer resources. For example, the Pregnancy Assistance Fund, a $25 million federal grant program that supported services for young parents so they could finish school, ended in 2020.

Programs that helped prevent pregnancy in the first place have also come under fire. For example, the Title X Family Planning Program funds clinics that provide contraception and other care (except abortion) to millions of low-income and uninsured women. In 2019, the Trump administration prohibited providers in the program from referring patients for abortion except in rare cases, leading almost 1,000 clinics to leave the program. Although the Biden administration reversed the rule last year, it’s unclear how many clinics have returned.

“[Those clinics] were a major place where young people go to get care,” said Rachel Fey, vice president of policy and strategic partnerships at Power to Decide. “So damage to the Title X program has had a real reverberating effect for young people.”

Only about a third of states mandate that schools provide students with sex education that is medically accurate. As Jennifer Driver, senior director of reproductive rights for the State Innovation Exchange, a nonprofit that works with state legislators, put it: “This country has repeatedly failed young people and their access to comprehensive sex education. Most receive an abstinence-only education, if they receive sex education at all.” But these same students who don’t have access to medically accurate, up-to-date information have to live with the consequences.

Related: Teen pregnancy is still a problem — school districts just stopped paying attention

And despite the decrease in the U.S. teen pregnancy rate, it is still one of the highest in the developed world. There were almost 160,000  births to 15- to 19-year-olds in 2020.

Now, educators and nonprofit staff who work with pregnant and parenting teens are expecting an uptick in the number of young mothers they serve.And even those in states that aren’t restricting abortion are making plans to expand.

Shauna Edwards is the founder of Lumen High School in Spokane, Washington, which serves pregnant and parenting teens. She’s preparing for “quite a few more students” from neighboring Idaho, a state where providing an abortion will soon be a felony in most cases. Edwards said not enough thought has been given to how this ruling would affect young mothers.

“No matter where you stand on the side of pro-choice or pro-life, if we are going to have access to abortion peeled back, states need to be prepared and provide more services,” she said. “Pro-life has to mean someone’s whole life, and that would mean increases to state support systems and your schooling options.”

The school offers classes five days a week to about 60 students and provides full-day child care on site, a full-time social worker, medical and mental health care and clothing and resource banks. 

Lisa Steven, who founded and runs Hope House Colorado, which has a residential program and other supports for teenage mothers, is also preparing for an influx of applicants, even though Colorado just passed a law allowing abortions in the state. “Teenage moms don’t have access to that type of information,” she said, “and they believe everything they read or hear on social media. So if social media is blowing up with ‘You’re no longer going to be able to get an abortion,’ they’re just going to believe that.”

Steven is in the process of opening a Hope House affiliate in Nashville and said because of Tennessee’s much stricter abortion laws, she expects to see a higher number of teen pregnancies there as well.

Hope House offers all kinds of wraparound services, from parenting classes and counseling to education and financial programs. Steven, a former teen mom, said her staff has helped several mothers buy their first house. They also offer free legal support, as many of the women have custody and child support issues with their children’s fathers. The teens learn how to apply for their birth certificates and get a driver’s license or social security card. Many struggled in the classroom setting, so at Hope House they work with tutors, one on one.

Steven said educators don’t understand the Title IX requirements and offer almost no accommodations for students who may not be sleeping through the night because of their newborn, or experiencing postpartum depression, or trying to get to class on time carrying a backpack as well as a baby carrier and a stroller. Most of the teens she works with drop out in ninth grade. “School is not made to feel like a safe place for them,” she said.

Like other advocates, she said poor outcomes for students don’t have to be the norm, if only schools would recognize these students’ strengths. “Teenage moms are incredibly motivated by their children — we call it ‘mommy motivation,’ ” said Steven. “They have grit; they’re problem solvers; they’re extremely flexible. And they will do just about anything to create a better life for their child than what they had. But they can’t do it without assistance.”

Sometimes those obstacles are transportation, child care or health issues. But often the problem is the school environment itself.

A 2015 report by the American Civil Liberties Union of California found that teen moms felt “pushed out” of their schools by educators’ shaming behavior. Another study, by the National Women’s Law Center, found that more than half of pregnant and parenting girls said they felt that other students didn’t want them at school, and almost 40 percent said they felt that way about their teachers. And they said they often faced harassment in school, which made them feel school was unsafe for them.

Analidis Ochoa, now a doctoral candidate in social work and sociology at the University of Michigan, was formerly a tutor at an alternative school for pregnant and parenting girls in Florida’s Miami-Dade school district. She said a negative cultural judgment prevailed there, even in a school specifically for these students. Ochoa, who was often called in to translate for Spanish-speaking parents, recalled a mother saying that the school had phoned repeatedly about her absent daughter. The mother explained that her daughter had just had a miscarriage and wasn’t doing well, and the response she got was: “ ‘Well, tell her this, then she can’t come back. Because if she doesn’t have a baby, she can’t come back to the school.’ ”

As a former teen parent herself, Ochoa knows how hard it is to stay in school, so she was determined to help her students get into college. But Ochoa said she was shocked by the staff’s low expectations for the young mothers academically; there was no expectation that they would pursue any sort of further education. She couldn’t understand why. “I always thought, you’re not just improving the mother’s life, you’re improving the child’s life as well,” she said. “And so it’s a way of kind of intervening to mitigate intergenerational poverty.”

Wendy Luttrell, the CUNY professor of urban education, said there is still a bias against these students. “There continues to be a way of thinking about being pregnant, as being at odds with being intellectually engaged,” she said. She said that programs designed specifically for pregnant and parenting teens, in either alternative schools or separate classes, rarely offer access to the same curriculum. “When you don’t get access to all the same kinds of coursework, then your future is limited to the kind of coursework that you do have access to,” she said.  

The social and economic implications for these teenagers when they drop out are profound. Those without a high school diploma have lower lifetime earnings, higher unemployment and greater reliance on social service programs. And perhaps even more worrisome are the outcomes for the children of teenage mothers, who score lower than children of older parents in health, intellectual and behavior assessments. Research finds babies of teen mothers are more likely to have a low birth weight and higher rates of abuse and neglect; they are less likely to complete high school and more likely to become teen parents themselves.

But with proper supports, teen moms can thrive. BigBack heard about Hope House and took parenting classes there. When she got pregnant again, she moved into the Hope House residential program, where she now lives. She decided to complete her high school diploma online. “Because it’s not about me anymore. It’s really about them and their future,” she said. “Another thing that was super huge for me is I don’t want them to have any excuse to not finish. Like I had two kids and I was able to finish high school. I think both of them should be able to finish.”

Today BigBack is 21, with a 3-year-old daughter and an 8-week-old son. Her eyes shone as she proudly held up her son, dressed in a Mickey Mouse onesie, during a Zoom interview. She has met with the career and college coordinator and filled out applications to colleges. In July, she learned that she was accepted to the Metropolitan State University of Denver, where she plans to enroll this fall.

Without all the extra supports, BigBack said her life would be very different. The biggest change is that she thinks she would have lost custody of her beloved children. “I honestly wouldn’t have had them with me,” she said.

Related: Child care, car seats and other simple ways to keep teen parents in school

As the Biden administration reviews Title IX this year, advocates say this is an opportunity to strengthen existing protections for pregnant and parenting students. In a 2012 survey of state laws and policies by the National Women’s Law Center, almost half the states had no statewide program, grant or support designed specifically for pregnant and parenting students, and fewer than half the states explicitly made homebound or hospitalized instruction services available to pregnant and parenting students.

“How are we going to educate all these young parents? I feel that that’s not in the dialogue,” said Janet Max, the president and CEO of the nonprofit Healthy Teen Network. She said anti-abortion advocates who pushed to overturn Roe aren’t talking about supporting these young parents or their babies. “There does not seem to be any plan about the implications of this beyond just ending Roe and ending access to abortion.”

Laura Echevarria, the communications director for the National Right to Life organization, agrees there should be more supports for young mothers. “These programs that should have existed, many of them never got the opportunity to get off the ground,” she said. “But this can change now. The mantra needs to change. Instead of saying, ‘Get an abortion,’ it needs to be, ‘What can we do for you?’ ”

She said a lot of work is being done now that the Supreme Court decision has overturned Roe. Echevarria calls it “a halfway mark” where the group’s more than 3,000 chapters in the U.S. are gearing up to grow programs and services for these young mothers. “This gives them the opportunity now to say, ‘How can we help now that we don’t have our hands tied with restrictions based on Roe?’”

Echevarria said some states are already responding to the anticipated increase in pregnancies in ways that will help teen mothers. For example, South Dakota launched a new website for women facing an unexpected pregnancy with information on parenting, adoption and financial assistance. West Virginia recently passed legislation  connecting parents who know their child will be born with a disability like Down syndrome with resources in the community, as part of a ban on abortions based on a diagnosis of such a disability. Georgia passed a law making it easier for nonprofits to operate group homes for pregnant and parenting women. Some states are looking at ways to expand and fund pregnancy centers that offer prenatal care and education, using tax dollars. Echevarria soon expects more legislation across the country that’s “protective of unborn babies.”

Related: The Biden presidency could finally mean more help for student parents

 The U.S. Department of Education has released proposed changes to Title IX, which it recently opened to public comments. Several advocates, including Cassandra Mensah, a counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, called the proposed protections “overall, a really positive and necessary step” that could significantly help pregnant and parenting students stay in school.

For example, the current regulations are silent on lactation rooms, but Mensah said the proposed rules require schools to provide support for breastfeeding students, including a clean, private space in school that is not a bathroom.

Also, Mensah said currently schools have to give students time off for pregnancy and childbirth but sometimes don’t take into consideration other related issues that might affect their attendance. “Their grades can go down, they can be found truant if they miss a certain number of days, even if their kid’s child care fell through, the kid has a doctor’s appointment, they have their own doctor appointment,” said Mensah.

Under the proposed rules, schools will have to give teens time off for pregnancy for as long as a health care provider, not just a physician, deems necessary. And while current Title IX rules don’t explicitly mention a school’s role when pregnant or parenting students are harassed, the proposed changes make clear any pregnancy-related harassment is prohibited under Title IX and that schools would be required to investigate complaints in a “prompt and equitable manner.”

Some advocates want additional regulations they say will help, such as better data collection; currently, there is no requirement that schools collect even basic information on this population. “A lot of districts actually don’t know how many of their students are pregnant or parenting — that’s part of the problem,” said Lisette Orellana Engel, a vice president at National Crittenton, a nonprofit that supports teen parents. That makes it hard to track how many teen moms are graduating or dropping out and determine what services they need.

Others, like Lisa Steven, of Hope House, said it’s vitally important that schools also designate an advocate for teen parents, a trusted adult in whom they can confide. Steven said teen moms just want to belong. “They’re looking for a place where they don’t feel judged, where they feel welcome and loved, and it feels warm and accepting,” she said.

And finally, advocates would like to see more accountability and consequences for schools that don’t follow Title IX. They said the law needs to mandate and enforce tougher penalties for school staff who ignore the rules. 

Related: Why Black student parents are at the epicenter of the student debt crisis

There was no adult in any of Lanitta Berry’s schools who intervened to help her get out of a challenging home situation. She was 10 when her mom died. Overnight, she took on the adult responsibilities of keeping house. She went from being an honors student to fighting in school. All the while, Berry said, no one at her schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, asked her what was going on. And she would have been too scared to say anything, even if they had.

When she became a teenager, she had a crush on a 15-year-old boy in her apartment building, and was thrilled when he showed an interest in her. Berry said whatever she knew about sex was from school and church, which focused heavily on abstinence. “Like, you shouldn’t have sex. It’s wrong. It’s bad. But I wish they would have told me why. Why shouldn’t I have sex before marriage? Why?”

She didn’t have an adult to speak to about sex, and her middle school classmates assured her she couldn’t get pregnant if her boyfriend pulled out. Berry became pregnant at 13. When she and her sister tried to find a doctor, no one would treat her because she was so young, Berry recalled. So she went into the foster care system, which connected her with treatment.

School was hard — not because of classes, which she found easy, but because of her classmates’ parents. When she began to show, Berry said, they were mean to her. “They gave me side eye and dirty looks. I remember hearing one parent say, ‘if I ever see my child get pregnant, I’ll beat her A-S-S.’ ”

She also saw a double standard in the whispered conversations at middle school. “There were white children that got pregnant, it’s just that their parents had enough money to get them abortions so no one will find out about it,” she said. “But you have less fortunate children that get pregnant, it’s always, ‘Oh, look at them. They’re too fast.’ “ When she got to high school, she changed foster homes and went to a school across town so none of her teachers even knew she had a child.

Berry said being a foster child paradoxically helped her, because the state paid for her food, shelter and a voucher for day care. She received a state-funded scholarship to attend the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, from which she graduated this spring with a degree in business administration and finance. Berry said she’s the only teen parent she knows who finished college; the others dropped out to get full-time jobs to provide for their children. But they tell her that when there’s an opportunity to get a promotion or a raise, they find they need more schooling. She said many feel stuck.

“Young parents are one of the most hardworking groups of people I know, because they know that not just their lives, but their children’s lives, depend on their next few moves,” she said. “And I tell people all the time, the worst pain that a parent can experience is knowing that you are unable to give your child a great life. That is the most heart-wrenching pain.”

Berry always dreamed her daughter would have a very different life from her. That’s why she named her Violet. “I landed on Violet because purple is the color of royalty,” she said. “And I just wanted to be symbolic.”

With support, students like Berry can be the norm. Steven, of Hope House, said they should be. “If we want to reduce the number of abortions, then we should not just reduce the number of abortions, but also see the trajectory of those children’s lives that were not aborted be safe and stable,” she said. “Then we have to, as a society, provide the support that the mom needs in order to raise a child in a safe and stable environment.” 

“I would say, ‘Put your money where your mouth is.’ ”

Neal Morton and Caroline Preston contributed to this story.

This story about pregnant students 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 If more students become pregnant post-Roe, are we prepared to support them? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

WASHINGTON — May helped care for her elderly aunt for years. When her aunt died, May, who is 41, decided to leave her part-time job as a telemarketer and become a full-time home health aide.

She said the thought of making other people like her aunt more comfortable felt like a calling. “Just the joy of helping,” May said.

In the 11 years she worked as a home health aide, May estimates she looked after 100 elderly clients in their homes. Some just needed a light meal prepared, but others required much more help. “They couldn’t move at all. I had to change them, feed them, bathe them, everything.” 

Tens of millions of older Americans want to age at home. But the critical shortage of people to take care of them will require more than the Biden administration’s proposed billions of federal dollars for home-based long-term health care. It will take a complete and substantial change in the training system, career pipeline, pay and work conditions of home health aides, experts and advocates say.

If those things aren’t fixed, the suffering will be felt not only by the “millions and millions of people [who] work very hard at very difficult and important jobs and get poverty wages,” said Paul Osterman, a professor of human resources and management at MIT and author of the book  “Who Will Care for Us?” It will affect everyone who wants to age at home or has a loved one who does, he said. The burden of caregiving will fall on unpaid relatives, affecting their financial and mental health.

“It’s a real problem for society,” Osterman said.

The need for home health aides is projected to grow by 34 percent between 2019 and 2029

It’s also an example of how job training in the United States is not well ordered, lacks incentives for people to take on critical work and often leaves consumers to fend for themselves and spend more money on their educations than is justified by what they’ll earn.

There are about 54 million Americans over 65, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That number is expected to rise to 95 million by 2060. Older adults have shown a clear preference for remaining in their homes, for the independence but also the comfort and community connections.

Aging in place is typically more cost effective than moving into long-term nursing facilities and proved a far safer option during the Covid-19 pandemic, when more than 184,000 residents and staff died in nursing homes and assisted living.

Related: When nurses are needed most, nursing programs aren’t keeping up with demand

Key to enabling more older adults to remain at home is expanding the number of home health aides, workers usually seen as being on the lowest rung of the health-care ladder. These aides provide day-to-day support such as feeding and dressing as well as doing shopping and laundry, and a much-needed respite for overwhelmed or absent relatives.

There is already a shortage of health aides, and demand is skyrocketing; one study estimated that 70 percent of adults over 65 are expected to need some form of basic assistance. But attracting and retaining home health aides is challenging; it’s exhausting work, with low pay, often no benefits and little respect and is overwhelmingly done by women of color and a dwindling number of immigrants.

President Joe Biden wants to increase the supply through an infusion of $400 billion into home- and community-based care for the elderly and people with disabilities over the next eight years, close to doubling what’s being spent now.

The president’s goal of “creating new and better jobs” will mean overhauling the current system of training, which is disorganized and overpriced and blocks home health aides from advancing to the next level, according to Matt Sigelman, CEO of Emsi Burning Glass, a labor analytics firm. He said training programs are often run by for-profit players that charge far more than is merited by what the jobs pay.

Most of the time, May loved working with her clients. They talked to her about trips abroad and gave her relationship advice. One taught her to sew, another how to make deviled eggs. “They had so much wisdom. They taught me a lot about life,” she said.

But it was hard to make a living. May started at $7 an hour and eventually got up to $12, but with no benefits. She and other home health aides asked that their last names not be used for fear of retaliation at work or in case they applied for new jobs.

When the pandemic hit, she wasn’t offered “hazard pay,” even though she was a designated essential worker. Then schools shut down and she decided to stay home with her children. Now she isn’t sure if she’ll return to her old job because it doesn’t cover her bills. “I can’t live on my salary,” she said.

In a Zoom class at a nonprofit training center for adults, instructor John McIntyre was giving his 17 students a verbal quiz. The class, at the Opportunities Industrialization Center of D.C., or OIC-DC, trains people to be home health aides. It’s 15 weeks long and is held at 6 p.m. because many of the students have jobs or need to look after their children during the day.

“When you’re helping a client who has a stroke, on which side should the home health aide stand ­— the stronger side or the weaker side?” McIntyre asked.

Twenty-four-year-old Dashia raised her hand. “The stronger side?”

“Hmm. Think about it for a minute.” Dashia did, and changed her answer.

“That’s good! That’s good!” said McIntyre. “We always assist on the weaker side.”

McIntyre praises his students often. He knows they have overcome obstacles to be here. The minimum requirement is that they test at the eighth grade reading level and seventh grade math. Some students who apply need extra tutoring before they can enroll.

Related: Biden’s infrastructure plan would create plenty of jobs, but who will do them?

Dashia was laid off from two restaurant jobs during the pandemic. She’s now working as a teacher’s aide while taking classes in the evenings to be a home health aide.

“There is such a shortage,” she said. “So I thought, why not take a course?”

Dashia called all seven District of Columbia-approved home health aide training programs for information. They cost between $1,500 to $2,100, she said. Dashia would also have to pay for transportation, her home health aide certification ($105), first aid and CPR certification ($85) and a background check ($25). “I definitely don’t have that money,” she said.

She ultimately got into the one free program in the district, OIC-DC, which is subsidized by the district government and private funds. Otherwise, she said, she wouldn’t have been able to enroll. “My credit is bad so I can’t get a loan, and my family doesn’t have money, either,” she said. “Everyone is struggling.” 

The cost of training can be prohibitively expensive for students who are among the most vulnerable and poorly paid workers.

“It wouldn’t even be something they consider, because it’s just out of their range.,” said DyAnne Little, director of training at OIC-DC.

Even though her program is free,  Little said, some of the students have to save for months to be able to afford their scrubs, white Crocs and watches with a second hand. Advocates say having these students take out loans or borrow from family members is unjust, unfair and exploitative,  because it’s unlikely they will be able to pay back that money even after they start working.

Home health aide is the fifth lowest-paying among the 25 lowest-paid jobs held disproportionately by people of color, according to a 2020 study of workforce equity in the United States. Other jobs near the bottom include dining room attendant and dishwasher.

The median wage for a home health aide is $24,000 a year, said Sigelman — about $500 more than for a fast-food cook. “So the notion of taking out a loan and going into debt to get into a job that pays you the same as you would make in a fast-food restaurant is pretty hard to swallow.”

Communities across the country are realizing it’s essential to increase the numbers of home health aides. In Washington alone, 16,700 people 65 and over are unable to live independently without support, a study found. Those numbers are expected to rise by at least 10 percent every five years, according to the D.C. Coalition on  Long Term Care, which conducted that study.

“It’s a full-fledged crisis,” said Neil Richardson, who works on aging issues for DC Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, a nonprofit in Washington.

This shortage of direct care workers mirrors the national demand, said Johan Uvin, who was acting assistant secretary for the Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education under President Barack Obama. That demand has increased “exponentially” because of Covid, he said. “It’s exacerbated the shortage that already existed.”

And the need is expected to grow, up by 34 percent between 2019 and 2029, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, far outpacing the less than 4 percent projected growth, on average, for other jobs.

For years the U.S. relied on immigrants to fill the roles of long-term care workers, said Gail Kohn, coordinator of Age-Friendly DC, a government program. But “what we’re seeing recently, at least in the last four years, is the reduction in the number of people who immigrate to this country, which has made it almost impossible to get people into the field.”

Almost 40 percent of home health aides are immigrants, according to the Migration Policy Institute, many of them from the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Jamaica.

Related: How a decline in community college students is a big problem for the economy

Being a home health aide can be physically exhausting. Some clients need to be turned every two hours to prevent bedsores; others have to be lifted out of their beds to be bathed. Not all private homes are equipped with devices such as lifts and slings that can help with these tasks.

Thalia, who worked for five years as a home health aide before she stopped because of Covid, said she hurt her foot lifting a client but didn’t have health insurance to pay for physical therapy. She had to stop working for months. “You don’t work, you don’t get paid,” she said.

But Thalia considers herself lucky because, with rest, her foot healed. Her neighbor, also a home health aide, injured her back on the job and had to stop working because her agency refused to pay for treatment and she had no insurance.

“The notion of taking out a loan and going into debt to get into a job that pays you the same as you would make in a fast-food restaurant is pretty hard to swallow.”

Matt Sigelman, CEO, Emsi Burning Glass

Aides also have to deal with the irascible nature of some elderly clients. Many have dementia or are frustrated that they need assistance. Others, as May put it, “for whatever reason, just don’t like you. They cuss at you and call you names.” One home health aide said a client accused her of stealing her glasses and didn’t apologize when she later found them on a bedside table. Another, an immigrant from Nigeria, said clients would complain her “food smelled” when she was eating lunch. Yet another said a client mocked her accent. Then there is the emotional impact on aides who become close to clients who eventually have to be taken away and institutionalized or die.

Home health aides also feel disrespected by other medical workers. Some say they are routinely ignored by nurses when they give updates on their clients’ health and aren’t seen as part of the health care team. In general, these positions are “poorly trained, poorly compensated, disrespected and restricted in their duties,” MIT’s Osterman said.

Osterman argues for expanding the duties of home health aides. In many states they cannot give a client medication or change a bandage.  Expanding the scope of their jobs would help clients with chronic illnesses stay healthier and stay out of hospitals. “That would also save money, by taking over some of the work from much higher-paid nurses.” Osterman said those savings could go toward better salaries.

Aides are also at the mercy of their staffing agencies for assignments. Thalia said she has seen family members of clients doing drugs and has felt unsafe in some houses, but has never reported anything because she needed the work hours. Working conditions can be harsh, she said.

“Sometimes,” Thalia said of one client’s home, “the kitchen would be a disaster, and in order for me to get her meals prepared, I would have to clean up the mess that was left by family members.” Clients’ families have also asked her to do their laundry and clean their rooms. Thalia said she did whatever she was told, for fear the families would ask her agency to send someone else.

Related: ‘Millions upon millions’ in employer-funded education benefits go unused

The disrespect affected May’s decision to quit. “No one believes this is a real job,” May said. She’d like the title “home health aide” to be “changed to something with ‘medical’ in it,” in the hope of getting more respect. “We do a lot of work, and we’re not recognized for it.”

When she graduates from her home health aide class, Dashia said, she wants to continue studying and move up in the health care field. She hopes she can one day earn a degree. “I want to do something that’s not just for the moment,” she said.

Experts say showing students such as Dashia a clear career path is one way to increase the supply of home health aides and make the profession more desirable. But that doesn’t happen often.

One study Emsi Burning Glass conducted with the nonprofit JFF looked at health care jobs that didn’t require a college degree and put them in three buckets. Two allowed people to move up the career ladder. The third, Sigelman said, were usually “dead-end jobs.“ Home health aides, he said, fall “squarely in that category.”

Sigelman said home health aides are just a few training courses away from gaining additional skills to move up and into jobs that pay a living wage with benefits, such as certified nursing assistant ($31,000), medical assistant ($36,000), health information technician ($44,000) or licensed practical nurse ($49,000). None of these professions requires a college degree. But he said upward mobility doesn’t happen by accident. “It requires that we help people make that jump. And unfortunately, that doesn’t happen too often.”

Johan Uvin said if there isn’t this “supported progression” for home health aides, they may move out of health care altogether and look for different occupations. In some cities, “you can get a job cleaning rooms at a hotel for $22 an hour.”

Uvin said there are encouraging signs of innovation. Some training institutions offer clear pathways from, say, home health aide to certified nursing assistant to licensed practical nurse to registered nurse. “It’s a very worker-centered way of thinking about it,” he said.

Uvin said this moment presents an opportunity to change things not just at the grass roots, but also at the policy level.

For example, students could be given access to federal financial aid such as Pell grants for short-term career training programs. Other inducements for training programs could create more comprehensive pathways for their home health aide students. “There’s a lot we can do with incentives through policy,” Uvin said.

He said the current system, requiring home health aides to go through a training program and get certified in order to get a job that doesn’t even pay “survival” wages, will just “magnify the inequities that already exist.”

“And that’s just unjust.” 

This story about home health aides 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.

This story was supported by the Higher Education Media Fellowship at the Institute for Citizens & Scholars. The Fellowship supports new reporting into issues related to postsecondary career and technical education.

The post ‘We’re aides, not maids.’ How one high-demand job shows education system’s failings appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

WASHINGTON — Durante años, May se dedicó a cuidar a su tía anciana. Tras la muerte de su tía, May, quien hoy en día tiene 41 años, decidió renunciar a su trabajo como vendedora telefónica a tiempo parcial y desempeñarse a tiempo completo como asistente de salud a domicilio.

Relata que la idea de brindarles comodidad a otras personas como su tía se sentía como una vocación para ella. “Por el simple placer de ayudar”, señala May.

Durante los 11 años en los que trabajó como asistente de salud a domicilio, May calcula que cuidó a 100 clientes de la tercera edad en sus hogares. Algunos no requerían más que la preparación de algún platillo ligero, pero otros necesitaban mucha más ayuda. “No podían valerse por sí mismos. Tenía que cambiarles la ropa, alimentarlos, bañarlos y todo lo demás”.

“Es un problema serio para la sociedad”

Paul Osterman,profesor de administración y recursos humanos, MIT

Decenas de millones de estadounidenses de la tercera edad desean envejecer en casa. Sin embargo, solucionar la alarmante escasez de personal que se haga cargo de ellos exigirá más que los miles de millones de dólares federales propuestos por la administración de Biden para el área de asistencia médica a domicilio y a largo plazo. Será necesario un cambio radical y trascendental en el sistema de capacitación, ofertas académicas con oportunidad de empleo, salarios y condiciones laborales de los asistentes de salud a domicilio, afirman los expertos y simpatizantes.

De no solucionar esos problemas, los “millones y millones de personas [que] trabajan muy duro en empleos difíciles e indispensables y reciben salarios míseros” no serán los únicos en sufrir las consecuencias, señala Paul Osterman, profesor de administración y recursos humanos en el MIT y autor del libro “Who Will Care for Us” (“¿Quién nos cuidará?”). Afectará a todos los que quieran envejecer en casa o tengan a algún familiar que lo haga, indica. La carga de estos cuidados recaerá en familiares que no reciben remuneración alguna, afectando su salud mental y su situación económica.

“Es un problema serio para la sociedad”, afirma Osterman.

Este problema es, además, un ejemplo de que la capacitación laboral en Estados Unidos es desorganizada, carece de incentivos para que las personas acepten puestos vitales y suele causar que los consumidores queden a su suerte y gasten más dinero en su formación de lo que sus futuras ganancias justifican.

Aproximadamente, existen 54 millones de estadounidenses mayores de 65 años, de acuerdo con la Oficina de Censos de los Estados Unidos. Se espera que esa cifra alcance los 95 millones para el 2060. Los adultos mayores han demostrado una clara preferencia por permanecer en sus hogares, no solo por la independencia, sino por la comodidad y los vínculos sociales dentro de su comunidad.

Generalmente, envejecer en el hogar es más rentable que mudarse a un asilo y demostró ser una opción mucho más segura durante la pandemia del Covid-19, cuando más de 184.000 residentes y trabajadores murieron en asilos y en viviendas de residencia asistida.

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Un aspecto fundamental para permitir que los adultos mayores permanezcan en casa es aumentar el número de asistentes de salud a domicilio, trabajadores que suelen ser vistos como el estrato más bajo en el campo de la asistencia médica. Estos asistentes brindan ayuda diaria en cuanto a alimentación, vestuario, compras y lavado de la ropa, y suponen un importantísimo alivio para familiares ocupados o ausentes. 

Ya existe una escasez de asistentes de salud, y la demanda se dispara cada vez más; un estudio calculó que un 70 por ciento de adultos mayores de 65 años necesitará alguna forma de atención básica. Sin embargo, atraer y conservar asistentes de la salud no es tarea fácil; es un trabajo duro, mal pagado, muchas veces sin beneficios y poco respetado, y es realizado en su gran mayoría por mujeres de color y un menguante número de inmigrantes.

El presidente Joe Biden quiere aumentar la contratación de profesionales al destinar $400 mil millones para la atención al cuidado domiciliaria y comunitaria de personas de la tercera edad y con discapacidad para los próximos ocho años, siendo casi el doble de lo que se destina actualmente para tal fin.

“La idea de pedir un préstamo y contraer deudas para obtener un empleo que te paga lo mismo que ganarías en un restaurante de comida rápida es bastante difícil de digerir”.

Matt Sigelman, director ejecutivo de Emsi Burning Glass

El objetivo del presidente de “generar nuevos y mejores empleos” implicará reformar el sistema de capacitación actual, el cual es desorganizado y demasiado costoso, e impide que los asistentes de salud a domicilio avancen al siguiente nivel, de acuerdo con Matt Sigelman, director ejecutivo de Emsi Burning Glass, una empresa de análisis laboral. Sigelman señaló que los programas de capacitación suelen estar a cargo de agentes con fines de lucro que cobran muy por encima de lo que paga el empleo en cuestión. 

La mayor parte del tiempo a May le encantaba trabajar con sus clientes. Ellos le contaban historias sobre viajes al extranjero y le daban consejos amorosos. Un cliente le enseñó a coser y otro a preparar huevos rellenos. “Tenían tanta sabiduría. Me dieron muchas lecciones de vida”, relata.

Sin embargo, era difícil ganarse la vida con este empleo. May comenzó ganando $7 por hora y con el tiempo aumentó a $12, pero sin beneficios. Tanto ella como otros asistentes de salud a domicilio pidieron que no se revelasen sus apellidos por miedo a sufrir represalias en el trabajo o en caso de que se postulasen para nuevos empleos.

Cuando comenzó la pandemia, no le ofrecieron un “pago de peligro”, a pesar de ser considerada como una trabajadora indispensable. Posteriormente, cerraron las escuelas y decidió quedarse en casa con sus hijos. Hoy en día, no está segura de si regresará a su antiguo empleo pues este no cubre sus gastos. “No puedo sobrevivir con mi salario”, explicó.  

En una clase a través de Zoom de un centro de capacitación sin fines de lucro para adultos, el instructor John McIntyre les hacía una prueba oral a sus 17 estudiantes. La clase, en el Opportunities Industrialization Center de D.C. (OIC-DC, por sus siglas en inglés), capacita a las personas para ser asistentes de salud a domicilio. Dura 15 semanas y comienza a las 6 p.m., pues muchos de los estudiantes trabajan o necesitan cuidar a sus hijos durante el día.

“Cuando estás ayudando a un cliente que sufre de una apoplejía, ¿de qué lado debería pararse el asistente: del lado más fuerte o del lado más débil?”, preguntó McIntyre.

Dashia, de 24 años, levantó la mano. “¿Del lado más fuerte?”.

“Mmm. Reflexiona un poco más al respecto”. Así lo hizo Dashia, y cambió su respuesta.

“¡Excelente! ¡Excelente!”, dijo McIntyre. “Siempre brindamos apoyo por el lado más débil”.

McIntyre felicita a sus estudiantes de forma regular. Es consciente de los obstáculos que han superado para estar ahí. El requisito mínimo es aprobar un examen de nivel de lectura de octavo grado y un examen de nivel de matemáticas de séptimo grado. Algunos estudiantes que se postulan necesitan clases particulares adicionales antes de poder inscribirse.

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Dashia fue despedida de dos restaurantes durante la pandemia. Actualmente, trabaja como auxiliar de maestro mientras toma lecciones por las noches para convertirse en asistente de salud a domicilio.  

“Hay una gran escasez”, explica. “Así que pensé: ¿por qué no tomar un curso?”.

Con el propósito de obtener información, Dashia llamó a los siete programas de capacitación para asistentes de salud a domicilio aprobados por el Distrito de Columbia. Los precios iban de $1.500 a $2.100, señala. Dashia también hubiera tenido que pagar el transporte, su certificado como asistente de salud a domicilio ($105), el certificado de RCP y primeros auxilios ($85) y la verificación de antecedentes ($25). “Definitivamente no tengo ese dinero”, dijo.

Al final, ingresó al único programa gratuito del distrito, OIC-DC, que es subsidiado por el gobierno del distrito y por fondos privados. De otro modo, señala, no hubiese logrado inscribirse. “Mi crédito es malo, así que no puedo pedir un préstamo y mi familia tampoco tiene dinero. Todos tienen dificultades”. 

El precio de la capacitación puede ser exorbitante para los estudiantes más vulnerables y los trabajadores peor pagados.

“Ni siquiera lo pensarían, pues sencillamente está fuera de su alcance”, indica DyAnne Little, directora de capacitación en OIC-DC.

Aunque el programa es gratuito, explica Little, algunos estudiantes tienen que ahorrar durante meses para comprarse el uniforme médico, las sandalias blancas y un reloj que marque los segundos. Los simpatizantes señalan que permitir que los estudiantes hagan préstamos a instituciones o familiares es injusto y explotador, pues es poco probable que sean capaces de pagar el dinero incluso después de comenzar a trabajar.

La asistencia de salud a domicilio es el quinto empleo peor pagado entre los 25 empleos con peor salario y que son desempeñados de manera desproporcionada por personas de color, de acuerdo con un estudio del 2020 sobre la igualdad entre empleados en Estados Unidos. Otros empleos en la parte más baja de la lista incluyen asistente de comedor y lavaplatos.

El salario promedio de un asistente de salud a domicilio es de $24.000 al año, indica Sigelman; unos $500 más de lo que gana un cocinero de comida rápida. “La idea de pedir un préstamo y contraer deudas para obtener un empleo que te paga lo mismo que ganarías en un restaurante de comida rápida es bastante difícil de digerir”.

Las comunidades de todo el país comienzan a darse cuenta de la importancia de aumentar el número de asistentes de salud a domicilio. Nada más en Washington, 16.700 personas de 65 años en adelante son incapaces de vivir por su cuenta sin asistencia, según los hallazgos de un estudio. Se espera que esta cifra aumente al menos en un 10 por ciento cada cinco años, según la Coalición por la Atención Médica a Largo Plazo de D.C., la cual dirigió el estudio.

“Es una crisis en todo el sentido de la palabra”, señala Neil Richardson, encargado de problemas asociados a la vejez en DC Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, una organización sin fines de lucro ubicada en Washington.

Esta escasez de trabajadores en el ámbito de la atención médica refleja la demanda nacional, indica Johan Uvin, quien fungía como secretario adjunto interino para la Oficina de Educación Profesional, Técnica y para Adultos durante el mandato del presidente Barack Obama. Esta demanda ha aumentado “exponencialmente” a raíz del Covid, señala Uvin. “Agravó la escasez que ya existía”.

Y se espera que la necesidad aumente un 34 por ciento entre 2019 y 2029, de acuerdo con la Oficina de Estadísticas Laborales de Estados Unidos, superando por mucho el crecimiento de menos del 4 por ciento que se proyecta, en promedio, para otros empleos.

Durante años, Estados Unidos ha dependido de los inmigrantes para cumplir el rol de asistentes de salud a largo plazo, señala Gail Kohn, coordinador de Age-Friendly DC, un programa gubernamental. Sin embargo, “lo que hemos visto últimamente, al menos en los últimos cuatro años, es una reducción en el número de personas que inmigra al país, lo que ha hecho prácticamente imposible destinar a más personas al campo de la salud”. Casi el 40 por ciento de los asistentes de salud a domicilio son inmigrantes. Según el Instituto de Políticas Migratorias, muchos de ellos son originarios de República Dominicana, México y Jamaica.

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Trabajar como asistente de salud a domicilio puede ser agotador. Algunos clientes necesitan cambiar de posición en la cama cada dos horas para evitar escaras, otros necesitan ser levantados para que los bañen. No todas las residencias privadas están equipadas con herramientas como elevadores y arneses que pueden ayudar con esas tareas.

Thalia, quien trabajó durante cinco años como asistente de salud a domicilio antes de que lo dejara a raíz del Covid, relata que en una ocasión se lesionó el pie mientras levantaba a un cliente, pero no contaba con seguro médico para costear la fisioterapia. Tuvo que dejar de trabajar por varios meses. “Si no trabajas, no te pagan”, señaló. 

Sin embargo, Thalia se considera afortunada porque, con descanso, su pie sanó. Su vecina, que también trabajaba como asistente de salud a domicilio, se lastimó la espalda en el trabajo y tuvo que dejar de trabajar porque su agencia se negó a pagar el tratamiento y ella no tenía seguro.

Los asistentes de salud también deben lidiar con la naturaleza irascible de algunos clientes de la tercera edad. Muchos sufren de demencia o se sienten frustrados ante el hecho de necesitar ayuda. A otros, en palabras de May, “por algún motivo, no les agradas. No paran de insultarte”. Una asistente de salud a domicilio relató que un cliente la acusó de haberle robado los anteojos y no se disculpó tras encontrarlos poco después sobre la mesa de noche. Otra asistente, inmigrante de Nigeria, contó que sus clientes se quejaban de que “su comida olía mal” mientras ella almorzaba. Otra reveló que un cliente se burlaba de su acento. También está el impacto emocional que sufren los asistentes de salud cuando se encariñan con un cliente que al final fallece o debe ser internado.

Los asistentes de salud a domicilio también se sienten ofendidos por otros trabajadores de la salud. Algunos aseguran ser ignorados constantemente por los enfermeros al informar sobre la salud de sus clientes y que no son considerados parte del equipo de asistencia médica. En general, este puesto es “mal capacitado, mal pagado, poco respetado y limitado en cuanto a sus funciones”, afirma Osterman, del MIT.   

Osterman aboga por expandir las funciones de los asistentes de salud a domicilio. En muchos estados se les prohíbe administrar medicamentos a sus clientes o cambiarles las vendas. Expandir el alcance de su trabajo ayudaría a que los clientes con enfermedades crónicas estén más saludables y se mantengan fuera del hospital. “Este cambio, además, ahorraría dinero al asumir parte del trabajo que de otra forma correspondería a enfermeros mucho mejor pagados”. Osterman argumenta que estos ahorros podrían destinarse a mejorar el salario.

Los asistentes de salud también se encuentran a merced de las agencias de empleo en cuanto a las asignaciones. Thalia relata que ha visto drogarse a los familiares de algunos clientes y se ha sentido insegura en algunas casas, pero nunca reportó nada porque necesitaba las horas de trabajo. Las condiciones laborales pueden ser duras, señala.

 “En ocasiones”, cuenta Thalia sobre la casa de un cliente, “la cocina estaba hecha un desastre, y para poder prepararle la comida a mi cliente tenía que limpiar el desorden que habían dejado los familiares”. Los familiares de los clientes también le han pedido que les lave la ropa y limpie sus habitaciones. Thalia explica que hacía todo lo que le pedían por miedo a que los familiares le pidieran a la agencia que enviaran a alguien más.

Relacionado: “Millones y millones de dólares” en beneficios educativos financiados por empresas son desaprovechados

La falta de respeto influyó en la renuncia de May. “Nadie lo ve como un trabajo serio”, afirma May. Le gustaría que el título “asistente de salud a domicilio” fuera “reemplazado por uno que incluya el término ‘médico’”, con la esperanza de que el trabajo sea más respetado. “Trabajamos muy duro y nadie reconoce nuestro esfuerzo”.

Cuando se gradúe de su clase de asistente de salud a domicilio, cuenta Dashia, quiere seguir estudiando y elevar su posición en el campo de la asistencia médica. Espera obtener un título algún día. “Quiero lograr algo que no es solo por ahora”, afirma.

Los expertos piensan que mostrarles a estudiantes como Dashia un trayecto profesional bien definido es una forma de aumentar la cantidad de asistentes de salud a domicilio y hacer que la profesión resulte más atractiva. Sin embargo, esto no ocurre muy seguido.

Un estudio dirigido por Emsi Burning Glass junto con la organización sin fines de lucro JFF analizó los empleos de asistencia médica que no exigían un título universitario y los dividió en tres grupos. En dos de esos grupos las personas pueden evolucionar a nivel profesional. El tercer grupo, indica Sigelman, suele estar compuesto por “empleos sin futuro”. Los asistentes de salud a domicilio, señala, encajan “perfectamente en esa categoría”.  

Sigelman señaló que los asistentes de salud a domicilio no están a más de unos pocos cursos de obtener habilidades adicionales para ascender en su campo y tener acceso a empleos que pagan un salario mínimo con beneficios, tales como asistente certificado de enfermería ($31.000), asistente médico ($36.000), técnico en información médica ($44.000) o enfermero con licencia práctica ($49.000). Ninguna de estas profesiones exige un título universitario. Sin embargo, resalta que estos ascensos no ocurren por accidente. “Es necesario que ayudemos a las personas a dar el paso. Lamentablemente, esto no ocurre muy seguido”.

Johan Uvin dijo que de no existir este “progreso respaldado” para los asistentes de salud a domicilio, estos podrían abandonar por completo el campo de la asistencia médica y buscar profesiones distintas. En algunas ciudades, “puedes conseguir trabajo limpiando habitaciones en un hotel por $22 la hora”.

Uvin destacó que existen señales alentadoras de innovación. Algunas instituciones de capacitación ofrecen programas que parten, por ejemplo, como asistente de salud a domicilio, avanzando hasta asistente de enfermería certificado, enfermero con licencia práctica y finalmente enfermero titulado. “Es un enfoque centrado en los trabajadores”, agregó. 

Uvin dijo que este momento representa una oportunidad para lograr un cambio no solo en las bases, sino a nivel de políticas.

Por ejemplo, los estudiantes podrían tener acceso a ayuda financiera federal, como la beca Pell, la cual va dirigida a programas de capacitación para profesiones a corto plazo. La inclusión de otros incentivos en los programas de capacitación podría generar trayectos profesionales más completos para los estudiantes de asistencia de salud a domicilio. “Podemos hacer una gran diferencia al generar incentivos a través de las políticas”, dijo Uvin. 

Señaló que el sistema actual (el cual exige que los asistentes de salud a domicilio realicen un programa de capacitación y obtengan un certificado que les permita obtener un trabajo cuyo salario ni siquiera alcanza para sobrevivir) no hará más que “aumentar la desigualdad que ya existe”.

“Y eso es injusto”.

Este artículo fue producido por The Hechinger Report, una organización informativa independiente y sin fines de lucro enfocada en la desigualdad e innovación en la educación. Lea sus otros artículos en español.

Este artículo contó con el respaldo de la asociación Higher Education Media Fellowship del Instituto de Ciudadanos y Académicos. Esta asociación apoya los nuevos reportajes sobre asuntos relacionados a la carrera profesional y a la educación técnica.

The post “Somos asistentes, no sirvientes”. Uno de los empleos más solicitados de Estados Unidos expone los fracasos del sistema educativo appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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

AURORA, Colorado — When 12-year-old Jayla heard a friend had died by suicide during the pandemic, she was terribly upset. The loss was bad enough, but Jayla carried an extra weight. 

“He told me he was having a bad day earlier that week and I didn’t ask him why. I told myself it was my fault because if I wasn’t so fixated on myself and if I would have called him to check up on him, he would still be here,” she said. She was in a “bad place.” 

While no one person or factor causes suicide, guilt is a common reaction among family and friends, experts say.

After her friend’s death, Jayla began having anxiety attacks andfoundher thoughts spiraling out of control. And she couldn’t really turn to anyone at home. “My mom works a lot and my dad really isn’t around, so I really don’t have somebody to talk to. And I don’t want to stress my grandma, she’s too old to worry about what I’m doing.” 

She said having someone at school who could help was “really, really important.” And she knew exactly whom to turn to. 

Jayla goes to Columbia Middle School in Aurora, Colorado, a school that doesn’t just have one counselor on hand, but a full mental health team — plus teachers who have received training in how to respond to mental health issues. The school also offers an array of specialized online programs and curricula at every grade level. These supports were paid for with funding the community had approved for such programs, even before the pandemic made children’s mental health a top national concern.  

As schools across the country bring back thousands of students reeling from unprecedented mental health challenges, Aurora offers some lessons and evidence-based strategies they could look to in devising support. One of the district’s key strategies doesn’t cost any money at all: letting every student choose a “trusted adult.”

At the beginning of each semester, Jayla’s school sends every child a survey with photos of every adult in the building, asking the kids to name someone who they feel they can confide in, who cares for them as a person and who will find them the support they need.

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

Jayla’s trusted adult happened to be one of her school counselors, Katie Humphrey; during hallway conversation Jayla confided her guilt and anxiety over her friend’s suicide to Humphrey. The counselor then checked in on her every day to ask how she was doing and scheduled visits in her office. “That really helped because I was not able to talk about him without crying,” Jayla said. Talking with Humphrey helped Jayla understand the suicide wasn’t her fault; without that heavy burden of guilt, she’s now able to focus more on her school work. “If it wasn’t for them asking me if I was OK and checking on me mental-health wise, I don’t think I would be in the place I am now.”

“Before we were just winging it. Now we have some signs to look for.”

Jessica Hyatt, a receptionist at Columbia Middle School

Even before the pandemic, one in five children in the U.S. showed signs or symptoms of a mental health disorder in any given year, a situation experts call a “silent epidemic.” Now, new studies warn of the pandemic’s potentially “debilitating effects” on children’s psychological, developmental and educational progress as anxiety, depression and loneliness increased over the last year. Federal and state governments have allocated extra money for mental health services and school districts across the country are scrambling to beef up supports. 

But communities that had already prioritized mental health were in a better position to deal with the unique challenges of the pandemic. In Aurora, Superintendent Rico Munn said the focus on mental health started years ago, to deal with an array of challenges schools faced there.

“We had some of the highest expulsion rates in the state. We had one of the lowest graduation rates in the state. And we had a whole host of indicators that we were not connecting with our students in the right way,” he said. 

District leaders decided the solution was to form better relationships with students. “Mental health supports play very much into that. Knowing who they are, what challenges they face and what supports they need, is fundamental to the way we think about our work,” he said.

The new focus has paid off. Since he started as superintendent in 2013, Aurora schools have seen a 23 point increase in graduation rates, from 56 percent in his first year to 79 percent in 2019, and a 55 percent decrease in police referrals, from 489 in 2013 to 220 in 2019 — improvements educators in Aurora say are a direct result of their work to connect with kids and better address students’ mental health needs. And while additional funding has been a significant factor in the district’s success, Munn said any district could replicate some of the simple strategies used by APS schools. 

“We were very actively involved in this work before we got the money. The money allowed us to go to a deeper level,” he said.

In November 2018, the school district in Aurora, a suburb 10 miles east of Denver, asked the community to increase local property taxes to help schools hire more teachers, pay for seatbelts in buses and provide a big boost to the district’s mental health program. The owner of a house worth $100,000 would pay approximately 100 dollars more each year. 

Aurora isn’t a wealthy community, but 60 percent voters supported the tax increase. The reasons for the support were varied: One teacher said they had been asking for more mental health services for years; a school administrator said the shooting in a Parkland, Florida earlier that year was fresh in voters’ minds; a principal suggested that the shooting in a local cinema five years prior, which killed 12 people and injured 70, still haunted the community. A parent believed people were motivated by memories of the 1999 Columbine high school shooting, which happened a half hour drive away. 

The influx of money — $35 million annually, 40 percent of which was earmarked for mental health programs — allowed district leaders to hire more than 100 additional mental health professionals; contract with private health care organizations for specialized treatment; provide training and mental health supports for educators and expand mental health programming for all children.

Before the tax hike, just 10 percent of elementary school children had access to a mental health professional, now there’s at least one mental health care professional in every school building, and in some cases a team with multiple counselors, social workers and psychologists. At every middle and high school in Aurora, the ratio of mental health providers to students is 1:250. The national average ratio of school counselors to students, by contrast, is 1:430. 

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

Katie Lafave, a school psychologist at the middle school, said that before the district received the additional funding, her work was purely reactive. “It was putting out fires a lot.” Now, she can do preventive work for all kids, plus spend time making sure her building has appropriate reading materials, designated calm spaces, stress balls and fidget toys. 

“If it wasn’t for them asking me if I was OK and checking on me mental-health wise, I don’t think I would be in the place I am now.” 

Jayla, 12

Previously, social worker Dawn Glassman would split her time between two schools. “I wasn’t able to be consistent,” she said. Now, she’s at just one high school — APS Avenues — and is part of a team consisting of four social workers, two counselors and an outside therapist. The ratio of staff to students is 1 to 44. “Honestly, it’s unheard of,” she laughs. Andrew Springsteen, a counselor at Rangeview High School said he used to have a case load of over 550 students, now it’s half that. In his school of 2,000 kids, there are 10 mental health professionals. “Before I would never have been able to actually introduce myself and have a one-on-one personal conversation with every student,” Springsteen said. Now, he can and does.

Glassman said being part of a mental health team enables counselors, social workers and therapists to lean on and learn from one another, just as teachers do.“We meet regularly, we brainstorm solutions, we do case reviews. That really increases the quality of care and services that we provide for our students,” she said. 

In Columbia Middle School’s student support center, six students sit in a little circle, talking about what they call “small and big world problems.” Signs with cheery messages like “Shine Bright!” and “All About That HUG Life,” decorate the walls of the center, a repurposed administration space with six smaller offices for private conversations surrounding the main room. The kids in the circle offer their reasons for their first visit to the center: Taylor stopped by for a quiet space when her classmates were being “really annoying.” Sofia started to come by when she was stressed about getting good grades and was ready to “explode on somebody.” And Rose spoke to a counselor when her long-time friend began to withdraw.

The middle schoolers say they don’t feel any stigma about speaking to a counselor. “It’s scary at first talking to someone when you never have before, but it is definitely worth it,” said Rose. 

During the pandemic, families have faced hunger, homelessness, layoffs and health challenges. They may not have the time or even the words to talk about mental health. Sometimes the adults at home are the cause of the stress. Just 60 percent of children in the district’s Covid student survey this year agreed that “home is a safe place.”

The students at the center, like many kids, say that some grownups might think they’re being lazy if they don’t complete school work. “They don’t understand that some kids can get depressed, some kids can have anxiety. It’s like something that happens in real life,” said Rose. Or as Taylor said, “Even parents say things like ‘What do you have to be stressed out about? You don’t pay the bills.’ And that kind of sucks.” 

Taylor said her parents are divorced but still live in the same town house. “They argue a lot because of the rent, the light bill, the water bill and everything. I feel stressed out because my mom cries and then it just makes me want to cry,” she said.

During those moments, she sits in her bedroom and texts her school counselors.

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

The district has tried to normalize the concept of asking for mental health support, both for children and parents. “I tell our students, it’s like tutoring. If you need help in math, you go get a tutor. You go to your teacher for help. We’re kind of your tutors for mental health,” said Humphrey, who counsels seventh graders.

Sofia Kent, the school social worker at Montview Elementary School, saidwhen the topic of mental health is presented in a very open, nonjudgmental manner it makes a big difference. “If we say it in a way that feels shameful or we kind of shy away from it, then students pick up on that.” 

Mental health staff try to be visible, whether they’re giving high fives to kids when the buses arrive, sitting in on academic classes, or doing home visits, during or after school. They also organize fun activities like dunk tanks, dance battles and games. Jordan Glaude, a social worker at Elkhart Elementary, said just being around helps normalize her role. “The label ‘social worker’ can scare a lot of our parents.” But she said the stigma is reduced when they see her interacting with other school staff every day. 

Jennifer Rice, a social worker at Crossroads Transition Center, said she has open conversations early on with any parent who seems hesitant. “I think the biggest thing [they’re worried about] is ‘I’m not crazy.’ Or ‘my kid isn’t crazy.’ And so we just talk about it. What are your worries about it? What has you concerned about receiving these services? And then let’s move forward.” 

Jessica O’Muireadhaigh, who is in charge of mental health for the district, said the efforts are working. She said there has been an increase in the number of suicide assessments in the district this year, which she sees as a positive. “That’s somebody saying ‘Help,’ right? They know where to go. The staff know what to look for. They’re catching it and having conversations and providing supports.” 

For kids who need more individualized, intensive support, the district has contracted with two medical institutions — Aurora Mental Health and HealthONE — to provide free mental health support for students. Twice a week, children and families can see their therapist in an office in the school building so they don’t have to travel. 

O’Muireadhaigh said the partnerships mean “families aren’t left trying to navigate a complicated system.” 

Liam, 11, is not yet back in school in person because he suffers from several health conditions, including acompromisedimmune system. He’s very isolated, so counselor Jay Brown, a sixth grade counselor, checks in on him weekly via Zoom to help provide a connection to school. He’s also Liam’s trusted adult. 

Brown keeps an eye out for any changes in Liam’s moods. “It can start as ‘I’m a little bit sad,’ but that could certainly change and get more severe and become more of a depression,” he said. 

On a recent visit, they talked about gaming club, exchanged recommendations on TV shows to watch and Liam vented about his little sister. “Everysinglenight at 8, when she’s going to bed, she yells. Loudly,” he complained. “It’s her bed time routine.” “Do you yell back?” asked Brown. “Nah, I just turn my TV waaaaay up.”

Liam said, in passing, that he might need more surgery this summer. He and Brown talked about how he feels. “OK,” Liam said matter of factly. “I’ve had many surgeries already.” Brown asked whether the Chromebook he dropped off is working; he made a note to check with Liam’s mother about the visit. But he was pleased Liam seemed in good spirits. 

Mental health staff say casual conversations with children — in hallways, during lunch time, at the bus stop, online — are key to building trust and relationships. Even without multiple counselors on hand, they say schools can build these kinds of relationships if every adult in the building is taught how to help support children’s mental health. 

Every year, all Aurora teachers and staff are required to receive training on how to recognize the signs a student might be struggling and how to refer the student for extra help. Certified trainers from the District’s mental health team of 43 offer the training sessions. In addition, before the 2020-21 school year, all teachers and staff were also required to take multiple sessions on how to give support to students in the classroom. The district also provides specialized training for certain teachers and staff members on inclusive environments, brain development and suicide and crisis prevention and response. 

Dawn Ganaway, a middle school counselor at Columbia, said even when staffed at the recommended ratios, there is no way to meet the needs of kids with severe issues while trying to create relationships with a caseload of hundreds of students. “And so we slowly started to change the thinking [to realizing] that we’re all in this together. They’re all our kids, and that everyone has a responsibility to make sure that our kids feel safe,” she said. 

Jessica Hyatt, Columbia Middle School’s receptionist, recently joined a three-hour session on how to recognize symptoms of suicidality and de-escalate behavior. “Before we were just winging it,” she said. “Now we have some signs to look for.” 

Hyatt said she’s learned that she plays a crucial role in helping students who have been sent to the main office stay calm. She’s also learned how to better read children. “There’s some that come just completely shut down and they don’t even look me in the eye. Then I’ll back off. Others seem to want to engage. And then I’ll say, ‘Can I get you some water?’ or ‘Is there anything that you need?’” 

Timothy Hall, a custodian, said he’s started asking kids how their day is going. “Sometimes they’ll let you in, sometimes they won’t,” he said. Either way, he sees his role as an extra pair of eyes in the building. “It’s important to keep notice of kids, to relay information to counselors.” 

Craig Lyle, Columbia Middle School’s principal, said that buy-in for the district’s mental health initiatives is something he looks for when hiring all new staff. “I say, ‘I know you’re a math teacher and we’ll talk about core curriculum and we’ll talk about how to teach math,” he said. “But math is a highly stressful class. And so when students become upset, when students shut down, how do you respond?’ So that is a very, very specific question we ask teachers in the interview process.”

Humphrey, the seventh grade counselor, said it’s now a point of pride to be named as a child’s trusted adult. “Our teachers take it very seriously when they say so-and-so’s named me a trusted adult.” The process also identifies kids who don’t feel connected, which sets off some soul-searching among the adults as they try to form connections with those children. “Like, why is this student not finding someone that they feel like they can trust?” said Humphrey.

O’Muireadhaigh said she’s proud that 89 percent of the students responding to a 2020-21 district survey said they felt connected to at least one adult in their school during the pandemic, an increase of 13 percentage points over the previous year. And 83 percent agreed with the statement, “I know where to get support if I need help with my feelings.” 

“That’s huge because that’s the number one protective factor that’s going to help kids feel connected and safe and a sense of belonging in school,” she said.

Research suggests there are benefits to investments in mental health services, including improved attendance, better test scores and higher graduation rates as well as lower rates of suspensions and expulsions. And that having mental health providers improves outcomes for students and can improve overall school safety.

Research suggests there are benefits to investments in mental health services, including improved attendance, better test scores and higher graduation rates as well as lower rates of suspensions and expulsions. And that having mental health providers improves outcomes for students and can improve overall school safety.

This year, Superintendent Munn said it’s hard to show benefits quantitively because there is a “dearth of data.” The school year was so atypical, traditional measures such as attendance, behavior and course completion are skewed. “It doesn’t exist or it doesn’t make any sense because of the pandemic,” he said.  

But counselors said they have data for their individual schools showing fewer children are self-harming or being suspended. Some said their work is successful because the atmosphere in their buildings is noticeably calmer, others pointed to the fact their students never miss a mental health support group meeting — even though it’s voluntary. Still others said the difference is obvious in the connections they see every day. “There’s just a constant flow of students wanting to come say hi or what’s upsetting them, what’s making them happy,” said Kent, the social worker at Montview Elementary. 

Aurora administrators said the pandemic’s impact on kids and families has given them even more to do — hire more staff, collect more data, train more teachers. Superintendent Munn said the pandemic disrupted a lot of the district’s plans and the mental health team is trying to get back on track. There are groups working to vet different social and emotional curricula, to infuse discussions about how to cope with feelings and trauma into academic classes, ensure the lesson plans are culturally responsive and create a community mental health advisory group. 

Lyle, the principal at Columbia Middle School, said when he started as a teacher in the district 20 years ago, mental health “wasn’t something you talked about.” If students were having trouble, they were either sent home or isolated in a room, he said. “This year especially, it’s not an afterthought,” he said. “It’s the first thing we think about.” 

Lyle said the issues schools must deal with before and after Covid are essentially the same —anxiety, homelessness, grief, trauma — but the volume and intensity of students and families needing help has increased significantly. 

Counselors, like Jennifer Rice, say they feel grateful for the foundation that was already in place in the district. “So when Covid hit, it did not feel as heavy as it could have and as it probably did in other districts,” she said. 

If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or reach the Crisis Text Line by texting HELLO to 741741

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

The post When kids pick their ‘trusted adult,’ it pays off appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Alexis, 17, has always been close to her parents. But since the pandemic began, they have been arguing a lot. “We snap at each other more,” she said. “And because there’s more negative emotion with the virus and we’re all trapped in the house together, the stress is definitely amplified.”

Both her parents have been working from their Maryland home since March last year. For most of that time, Alexis’ sister, who has graduated from college, has also been living at home. Last April, their grandmother also came to stay with the family for a while, when the Covid cases in Florida, where she lives, were skyrocketing. Until this past year, Alexis, who has her own bedroom, said she had always thought of her house as “normal” sized.

But with her family at home all the time, seeing each other at every meal, the house began to feel awfully small. Problems that in normal times would blow over instead blew up into conflicts. “That’s a clear memory I have of them just getting very, very upset very quickly,” she said of her parents. “I remember they got extremely, extremely mad.”

Her experiences aren’t unique. The parents of the more than 50 million children who attend public schools in the U.S. are facing an unprecedented amount of stress. They worry about keeping their families healthy and how to juggle work and childcare. Some face financial anxieties because of furloughs or unemployment, and nearly everyone is feeling isolated and lonely.

Teachers are in a similar boat, Alexis has noticed. In her online classes, they can seem on edge. She burst out laughing when she heard that some adults think children don’t notice — and aren’t affected by — how stressed they are. “Parents and teachers aren’t fooling us,” she insisted. “Not even close.”

Jennifer Greif Green, an associate professor in the Wheelock College of Education and Human Development at Boston University, said most of a child’s interactions with adults are with their parents and teachers, “so any disruption to that is really going to have an impact on that whole ecosystem and all those relationships.”

She said that as everyone heals from the disruption of the past year, the education system needs to recognize that adult stress has affected children and must put in place a plan to support adult mental health and rebuild trust in relationships. “When parents and teachers who are around children are doing well and are feeling good, then the children who they’re with will have better mental health and better academic outcomes.”

“We know from decades of research on parent and child relationships, that when, for example, mothers are depressed, children are much more likely to be depressed. And there’s similar research coming out in schools where teachers who are depressed have students who don’t do as well,” Greif Green said.

Related: Isolation, panic and constant juggling — A year in the life of three moms

Adults who are stressed may not pay close attention to the needs of children, she said. And even if adults try to hide it, that stress trickles down to children and affects how they do academically, psychologically and emotionally.

Lisa Sanetti, a professor of educational psychology at the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut, said recent research shows adult stress affects children’s bodies. “When children are in the presence of really stressed adults, that they actually have a physiological reaction,” she said. “Their cortisol levels, the stress hormone levels, go up.”

This stress can disrupt children’s relationships with adults, including their teachers. “And we know that relationships between teachers and students are essential to students feeling connected and engaged in school and frankly, just staying in school.”

Sanetti said the “levels of heightened stress and waves of uncertainty” adults have experienced during this past year have very real effects on children. “I’d say that it’s not possible to focus on the children without making sure that the adults around them are healthy as well.”

Alexis said that early on in the pandemic most of her parents’ stress was because no one knew a lot about how the virus was transmitted or what would keep them safe. They washed groceries and stocked up on supplies. Now, she said, her parents’ concerns relate to other stressors.

When her parents worry about her grandmother or struggle with work demands or get frustrated when the Wi-Fi crashes, Alexis said the whole energy at home changes. “You can see them getting upset, just being snippy or sulking around the house, like a teenager would.” She said it doesn’t happen often but when it does, it affects her a lot. “With parents, their mood changes the mood of the whole house.”

Stress in adults is higher among parents, according to a poll by the American Psychological Association. And one of those stressors is trying to teach their kids: Almost three-fourths of adults with children recounted that managing online learning was a “significant source of stress.” A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found parents of children studying online were more likely to report work loss, job stability concerns, child care challenges, emotional distress and trouble sleeping, than parents whose children studied in person. Parents of students learning virtually were also more likely to indicate that their children’s mental or emotional health had worsened since the start of the pandemic.

Dorina Bekoe, the mother of two children, ages 9 and 12, knows that stress well. She’s been very careful about following all the recommended Covid-19 protocols because her daughter has a pre-existing condition. Bekoe said she’s been dealing with the stress of trying to keep her family safe on top of the constant juggling act of managing her own work as a social science researcher with her children’s online school work.

“Parents and teachers aren’t fooling us.”

Alexis, 17

That means waking up at 4:30 a.m. to get some work in before her children wake up. And staying awake working after the children go to bed at about 10 p.m. “It’s kind of grueling,” she said.

Bekoe no longer has time to go on daily runs, an activity she said is a huge stress reliever. She also no longer reads for pleasure. “If I need to choose between sleep and reading, then I will just sleep. So those outlets don’t exist anymore,” she said. And she no longer has much social contact, even something as simple as chatting with her kids’ friend’s parents at soccer practice or a birthday party, because all their activities have been canceled or are online. “That kind of community is just not there anymore.”

When she has deadlines that have to be met, Bekoe said she tries to block everything else out so she can get her work done. But she feels torn because when she successfully focuses on her own work, she knows that her son’s school work isn’t getting done. “Part of what makes it so difficult is I can see the stress on my kids, and more so for my younger child. That stress will manifest in tantrums or crying or just not wanting to do the work,” Bekoe said.

She’s not sure her children can articulate, ‘“You know, Mom, I’m stressed because you’re feeling stressed,’” she said. “But I know that when I have the time to really pay attention, everything’s a lot calmer.”

Parents with children who have disabilities are especially affected by the pandemic. They’ve experienced more anxiety, depression and loneliness than their peers whose children do not have special needs, according to a December 2020 report from the University of Oregon. The report, based on the months-long “Rapid Assessment of Pandemic Impact on Development Early Childhood Household Survey,” indicated these parents worry about delayed screenings for disabilities, cancelled therapies and their children regressing.

A number of studies have found the pandemic has created a range of parental stressors, such as school closures, job losses and interruptions in care for children with chronic diseases. Parents have reported high levels of stress, clinical anxiety and depression — all of which are associated with a higher child abuse potential.

“When children are in the presence of really stressed adults, that they actually have a physiological reaction.”

Lisa Sanetti, of Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut

Even early on in the pandemic, surveys showed parental stress was affecting children. In March 2020, a University of Michigan study found parents with at least one child under the age of 12 reported they were disciplining their children more during the pandemic. At the time of the study, a majority of parents (61 percent) had “shouted, yelled, or screamed” at their children at least once in the previous two weeks; 20 percent of parents had spanked or slapped children at least once in the previous two weeks.

Byron McClure, a school psychologist at a high-poverty school in Washington, D.C., said he hears every day from students whose families are struggling with basic needs like food and electricity. Many of the families at the majority Black school have lost their jobs and have been disproportionately affected by Covid. He said that an “insurmountable amount of stress” permeates everything.

“Parents are without a doubt bringing that stress into the house. And whether they know it or not, children are receptive and they’re picking up on that,” McClure said.

The high schoolers he works with report trouble sleeping, changes in their eating patterns and say they are more likely to have temper tantrums or crying fits. “And some of the times the children might not be able to tell you why that’s happening, but without a doubt it’s from that stress that is happening inside that environment.”

Malika, a high school senior, understands that stress. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her father, a driver, and grandparents. Her father has been working long hours since the pandemic began, mostly delivering food. “He’s tired a lot. And he is more irritable about small things,” she said. If she left dishes in the sink pre-pandemic it wouldn’t have bothered him, but now he gets upset. And this, in turn, affects her, she said, because she’s dealing with her own challenges. “It makes me agitated and irritated,” she said, which makes it harder to get school work done.

“I take longer to complete it because I’m so frustrated that I can’t really focus,” Malika said. “It gives me a headache and I have to take a break and come back to it.”

The American Psychological Association has warned the negative mental health effects of the coronavirus will be “serious and long lasting.”

Across the river in Maryland, Alexis tries not to think about how different her last two school years would have been if not for Covid. She’s a straight-A student, takes part in several extra-curricular activities and has always enjoyed good relationships with her teachers.

The pandemic has made her teachers seem more like regular people.

“It was definitely weird to see moments of weakness in my teachers. They’re stressed about grading, they’re stressed about the pandemic, they’re stressed about their kids,” she said. She also noticed her teachers look tired all the time. “You can just see like bags under their eyes, a little glassy look, just visual cues of being exhausted.”

She said one of her teachers has to take breaks from her Zoom class to help her own children with their online work. One day, her teacher got a call telling her that her son was ill. “I saw her face change and I saw her getting emotional. It was a very vulnerable moment for her,” Alexis said. She understood then why that teacher had seemed frantic when presenting a lesson earlier.

When Alexis has asked for an extension because she is struggling, some teachers are very understanding. Her math teacher, for example, wrote back to her immediately saying, “I understand. I’m feeling similarly.” But in other cases, she said, “some teachers get a little mean, a little more on edge. A lot of times they just want things done their exact way.”

“I’ve been working with this teacher for 20 years. I’ve never seen her ever even come close to losing her cool before.”

Gregg Weiczorek, a high school principal in Hartland, Wisconsin

Having teachers who are patient and relaxed makes a difference in how she feels about herself and her school work. “A bad interaction with a teacher can definitely ruin a day,” she said. 

Heidi Crumrine, who teaches high school English in Connecticut, said this is the most challenging year she’s ever had. “And I say [that] as someone who started her first day of teaching on 9/11 in the Bronx in New York City,” she said.

She said she’s working harder than she ever has and yet feels a constant sense of guilt. “That I’m not a good enough teacher for my students and I’m not a good mother for my own children,” she said. “It just feels like a constant wave of never feeling like I can do what I know I’m good at.”

Crumrine’s husband is a teacher as well, and they’re constantly juggling schedules. Her district has switched often between online and in-person classes, and she sometimes has to be in school while her children are at home. She doesn’t want to put them in child care and increase their exposure to the virus, yet doesn’t have family who can easily help out. It feels, she said, “like we’re building the plane while we’re flying it and the destination keeps changing on us.”

Crumrine said that when she speaks to teacher friends across the country they say they are eating more, drinking more and working more. For her part, Crumrine said she’s sleeping more, but it doesn’t help. “I’m tired all of the time,” she said.

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

Sanetti, at the University of Connecticut, said even before the pandemic, teaching was stressful. “They’re tied with nurses as the number one most stressed occupation in the United States,” she said.

Gregg Weiczorek, the principal of a high school in Hartland, Wisconsin, said Covid has just exacerbated that pressure. He has witnessed first-hand how pandemic-related stress affects students, too. Weiczorek, who is also the president-elect of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said most students in his school have been attending school in person almost the entire pandemic, while about 20 percent are on online. The stress of teaching in a dual format is exhausting, he said.

61 percent of parents with at least one child under the age of 12 reported they had “shouted, yelled, or screamed” at their children at least once in the previous two weeks, according to a University of Michigan Study conducted in March 2020. The figure represents an increase over pre-pandemic behavior.

“Teachers are working exorbitant hours. Some of them are working in school all day, and then they’re working for four or five hours from home,” he said. “So there’s significant burnout that’s occurring.”

He realized teacher stress was becoming a problem when he saw an interaction between a teacher and student in class, when the student questioned something the teacher had said.

“This teacher started crying. Then she took her glasses and smashed them on the table, broke them and raised her voice and said, ‘This is it. I’m going to quit. I can’t deal with this anymore,’” Weiczorek recounted. “I’ve been working with this teacher for 20 years. I’ve never seen her ever even come close to losing her cool before.”

Weiczorek said his role this year has been less as principal and more as a counselor. He’s had many teachers cry in his office and has already had conversations with some teachers who plan to retire early at the end of the school year.

Experts say helping teachers manage their stress is essential for kids, too. But figuring out how to provide that support is tough. Crumrine said her district has offered a “self-care” webinar which she appreciates, but said it just feels like one more thing she needs to do.

“I didn’t want to spend the whole day on Zoom doing that,” she said. “The reality is when you’re living it, you’re just trying to get to the end of the day successfully and try again tomorrow.”

The ideal situation for children is for the adults in their lives — parents and teachers — to be partners. But the push to reopen schools has exposed the tension between families who want their children to return to school and teachers who are concerned schools are not yet safe. Greif Green, of Boston University, said this has set up an unfortunate dynamic, where the adults are at odds with one another. And this further exacerbates the stress everyone feels.

“It’s made it much harder for teachers and parents to stay focused on the needs and mental health and well-being of children. And that has created a huge challenge,” she said. 

Leonda Archer, who teaches middle school math in Virginia, said she misses her students, both as a teacher and as a basketball coach. “I miss the vibe of school, the energy, all of that. But I also love humans and I don’t want to people to be sick,” she said. She’s had family members die of Covid and she’s worried about her daughter getting infected.

Related: The ‘invisible’ front line workers of education

She said that when schools closed, teachers were lauded — initially. “We were seen as angels like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been home with my child for two months, how do teachers do it?’ And now the narrative is totally flip-flopped,” she said. “All I hear is people telling us what we need to do, but not recognizing what we are doing.”

Sarahi Monterrey, who teaches English learners in Waukesha, Wisconsin, knows how scary the illness can be:Her entire family, including her 7 and 8 year old daughters, got Covid. She worries that her colleagues — some of whom have pre-existing conditions — might become infected.

Monterrey said she’s surprised by how contentious the issue has become: “It’s stressful because there seems to be a huge divide. It’s almost us against them,” she said.

At one school board meeting she attended, she was placed in a virtual room with parents and students, rather than with educators. “There was a teacher who spoke about her husband getting Covid,” said Monterrey, “and a parent in my room said, ‘Who cares?’ And I was like blown away. Like, someone just said her husband had Covid and your response in front of kids is ‘Who cares?’”

Sanetti, the educational psychology professor, said reopening will be difficult, not just because of the logistics involved but because a sense of trust has been broken. For schools to truly get back to normal, she said that trust needs to be rebuilt. “The relationships between the school and the community and making sure that we can repair that, is going to be an important part of coming back,” she said.

Alexis has noticed what she calls this “weird” divide among the adults she sees the most. “It’s like a disconnect, where neither side wants to understand the other,” she said. She’s heard many parents blame teachers for schools not reopening, which she thinks is hypocritical because they are still working from home. At the same time, she said, it’s hard not to wonder how much better her education and social life would have been had teachers agreed to in-person classes this year.

She said kids are dealing with their own pressures and sense of loss; when adults don’t agree, it just adds to students’ anxiety. “You feel caught in the middle. Like there are two voices in my own head that are telling me different things,” Alexis said. “You’re always taught, ‘Respect your parents and respect your teachers.’ But when they want completely different things what do you do?”

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

The post Parents fighting, teachers crying: Grownup stress is hitting kids hard appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

ADELPHI, Maryland. — Cuando Nando estaba en cuarto grado, las pandillas de El Salvador asesinaron a su hermano mayor. Su madre vivía aterrorizada por su seguridad, por lo que Nando dejó de ir a la escuela y permaneció dentro de la casa durante años.

“Era como estar preso”, dijo.

La familia de Nando tenía dificultades para comprar comida. Cada día se desesperaban más. Por lo cual, a los 16 años, decidió emprender la peligrosa jornada hacia Estados Unidos, dejando atrás a sus padres y a su hermano menor.

“Conocí a un coyote que me estaba ayudando, pero a mitad de camino me robó todo el dinero y desapareció”, dijo Nando. Entonces trabajó dos meses en una finca en México para reunir suficiente dinero y continuar la jornada. “Estaba triste. Estaba cansado. Me sentía desesperado”.

Solicitó asilo político al llegar a Estados Unidos y después de pasar seis meses en centros de detención, su tía en Maryland lo reclamó y se hizo cargo de él. Nando es su segundo nombre. Para proteger su privacidad y su seguridad, pidió que no lo llamaran por su nombre completo. Cuando apenas estaba acomodándose a una rutina en la escuela, se enteró que las pandillas habían asesinado a su otro hermano.

“Éramos tres. Ahora solo quedo yo”, dijo.

Desde el año 2013, ha aumentado significativamente el número de niños como Nando que han escapado de la pobreza y la violencia en Centroamérica. La administración de Trump ha ampliado las detenciones, ha aumentado las separaciones familiares, ha restringido el criterio para conceder asilo y ha dejado de costear la representación legal de niños indocumentados. Así y todo, entre octubre de 2018 y septiembre de 2019 más de 75,000 menores de edad solos — niños que llegaban sin ninguno de sus padres o un guardián — y casi 475,000 otras personas, incluyendo niños, fueron arrestadas cuando cruzaban la frontera sur.

La mayor atención se ha enfocado en las pésimas condiciones y las experiencias traumáticas de niños en centros de detención. Pero si piden asilo y los ponen en libertad a cargo de familiares o patrocinadores en Estados Unidos, sus casos pueden demorar hasta cinco años en atravesar el gran atraso que existe en el proceso legal. Durante ese tiempo, al igual que otros inmigrantes sin estatus oficial en Estados Unidos, se les considera “indocumentados”. Entretanto, la mayoría de los niños se matricula en escuelas públicas, donde probablemente por primera vez conocen americanos que no son policías o agentes encargados de la ley. Y en tanto no todos les dan la bienvenida, es en la escuela donde por primera vez los niños dicen que son tratados con amabilidad.

Incluso antes de que llegara la pandemia, en algunos distritos escolares ya los educadores habían comenzado a ir más allá, adaptando intencionalmente sus clases y moviendo recursos para ayudar a esos niños a triunfar en sus estudios.

En el Condado Prince George, Maryland, en las afueras de Washington, D.C., donde Nando se matriculó, los líderes escolares reconocen que el futuro de su distrito depende de que a los alumnos indocumentados les vaya bien. En 2019, fue el cuarto condado en todo Estados Unidos en el número de alumnos llegados solos entregados a patrocinadores, superado solamente por el Condado Harris en Texas, el de Los Ángeles y el de Miami-Dade. Pat Chiancone, encargada de los alumnos extranjeros en las Escuelas Públicas del Condado Prince George, dice que hace 10 años había menos de 4,000 alumnos extranjeros en el distrito. Este año, aun con las restricciones de viajar por causa del coronavirus, Chiancone dice que en el distrito la matrícula es el doble de ese número.

“Para mí la razón más importante es que es moralmente, y espiritualmente, inapropiado no tratar bien a los niños que vienen de estas familias”.

Alvin Thornton, presidente de la Junta de Educación del Condado Prince George

Tener tantos niños llegados durante el año enfrentando un nuevo idioma, una nueva cultura y una nueva vida familiar puede generar tremendo estrés. Muchos alumnos indocumentados tienen dificultades para satisfacer necesidades básicas como comer, tener donde vivir y seguro de salud. Chiancone dice que muchos también han tenido grandes lagunas en su educación y están académicamente atrasados aun en su propio idioma. Pero lo que puede tal vez ser la característica que más define a esta población es el enorme trauma que han sufrido en sus países de origen, en sus jornadas hacia acá y después de haber llegado a Estados Unidos.

Alvin Thornton, que ha presidido la Junta de Educación del Condado Prince George, enumera varias razones que hacen importante hacer lo que sea necesario para apoyar a estos niños, además de ser una ley federal. “Pero para mí la razón más importante es que es moralmente, y espiritualmente, inapropiado no tratar bien a los niños que vienen de estas familias y no darles iguales oportunidades”, dijo.

La madre de Nando le manda textos que se asegure de cuidarse y estar vivo todavía. Vive solo en una habitación rentada y tiene un trabajo a tiempo parcial después de la escuela donde trabaja de 4 p.m. a 1 a.m. “Necesito dinero para la renta, para comprar comida y ropa. Le envío $300 a mi madre todos los meses y tengo que pagarle $6,000 a mi abogado para que se ocupe de mi caso”. Se ríe con ironía. “Sí, ando muy cansado”.

Ha pensado varias veces dejar la escuela, pero siempre ha regresado.

En octubre de 2019, los educadores de Prince George se reunieron voluntariamente en un centro comunitario en un seminario de cinco horas sobre “el cuidado informado de traumas” para poblaciones de inmigrantes, dirigido por una experta de la Universidad de Harvard. La Dra. Margarita Alegria es jefa de la Unidad de Investigaciones sobre Disparidades del Hospital General de Massachusetts y profesora en el Departamento de Psiquiatría de la Escuela de Medicina de Harvard. El distrito la trajo por avión con la ayuda de dos organizaciones sin fines de lucro, Caridades Católicas y la Coalición Interreligiosa para la Equidad Educacional, a fin de ayudar a sus educadores a entender cómo apoyar las grandes olas de estudiantes que cruzan la frontera y se matriculan en el distrito escolar. Los maestros estaban hambrientos de información; 150 renunciaron a un sábado soleado para participar en la sesión.

Kevin O’Donnell, un psicólogo de la escuela, quería sugerencias prácticas. “Muchos de mis alumnos han sufrido trauma y tienen dificultades. Yo quería aprender más maneras de apoyar ese trabajo”, dijo. Andrea Stutzman es una maestra que quería aprender cómo mejor conectar culturalmente con los padres: “Creo que me ayudaría a comprender mejor las experiencias de mis alumnos”. Y Jeffrey Ramírez, un guardia de seguridad, buscaba conocer mejor las experiencias de los alumnos para poder asegurarles que él no les haría daño. “Yo les digo, ‘Yo no sé lo que ustedes han pasado en su país, pero aquí es diferente’. Si salieron de allá huyendo de la violencia, aquí pueden sentirse seguros, y protegidos conmigo”, dijo.

No es raro que los niños hablen de haber visto violaciones de mujeres o personas que han quedado en el camino por no haber podido continuar la jornada hacia Estados Unidos. Berta Romero es una consejera de niños que están aprendiendo inglés en la escuela primaria Mary Harris Mother Jones en Adelphi. Las historias que ella oye son horribles. Una alumna de segundo grado contó que su mamá tuvo que taparse los ojos porque la gente se estaba ahogando en un río que estaban cruzando. Otro niño hablaba de la jornada hacia Estados Unidos en un camión repleto y que su papá tenía que empujar por encima de los demás para poder respirar. Una madre llorando le contó a Romero cómo miembros de la pandilla MS-13 abusaban de su hija en el camino hacia la escuela. Romero dice que el peso de estas experiencias es como si los niños estuvieran “cargando una enorme mochila llena de piedras”.

Después de llegar a Estados Unidos, en muchos casos el trauma continuó cuando la administración de Trump separó a las familias que estaban en centros de detención donde las celdas a veces se mantenían frías, la comida era inadecuada y los niños no tenían acceso a la higiene básica. Algunos niños decían que los adultos allí los amenazaban cuando no cumplían con las reglas de no hablar, no tener amigos y no jugar.

Kerri Bogart es una maestra de kindergarten que ha trabajado con muchos de estos niños. Ella dice que algunos “lloran en silencio”: se sientan con lágrimas rodándoles por las mejillas porque extrañan a sus familias. A veces son ocasionales exabruptos de ira o de llanto: “¿Mami va a estar esperándome en la parada del autobús? Me preocupa que no vaya a estar allí”. Un alumno de kindergarten se enoja y se esconde debajo de la mesa y la maestra tiene que interrumpir la lección para convencerlo de que salga. “Cuando eso ocurre tres, cuatro o cinco veces al día y se pierden partes de la lección, eso puede hacer mucho daño”. 

Los maestros tienen que entender la raíz de estas conductas y cómo manejarlas antes de lograr cualquier tipo de enseñanza. En el seminario, Alegria explicó la “pérdida compuesta” que los niños sufrieron cuando salieron de sus hogares. “Perdieron el idioma que les resultaba familiar, perdieron sus costumbres, sus hábitos, sus redes sociales. Y muchos de ellos han perdido su estatus social”, dijo ella. Alegria dijo a los maestros que tenían un papel crítico que jugar. “La escuela es el lugar donde los niños pasan la mayor parte de su tiempo. Es realmente el sistema de cuidado donde podemos lograr el mayor progreso”, dijo.

Alegria advirtió a los educadores que el trauma puede manifestarse con problemas físicos: dolores de cabeza y de estómago, insomnio, además de problemas de aprendizaje. Ella dice que los maestros no deben asumir que una falta de concentración es un trastorno de déficit de atención o hiperactividad; puede ser que los alumnos estén haciendo un gran esfuerzo por lidiar con su trauma. Para la juventud mayor, dice Alegria, el estatus social es muy importante. Les dijo a los educadores que la ayuda a estos niños a hacer nuevos amigos tiene un “efecto súper poderoso”.

Beth Hood, una trabajadora social de la Escuela Secundaria High Point en el Condado Prince George, dice que a veces un niño puede parecer que está bien pero entonces algo le recuerda algo de su pasado. Una alumna tuvo un ataque de pánico al ver una pequeña pelea que surgió en la cafetería. “Después de ese episodio, sufrió una completa recaída en espiral que le impedía concentrarse y a veces lloraba en la clase”. Hood dijo que cuando habló con la alumna sobre lo que le había causado el ataque de pánico, la niña se mostró dispuesta a hablar.

“Contó que en su país había presenciado el asesinato de su mejor amigo”, dijo la trabajadora social. “Nuestros alumnos no son alumnos que uno pueda esperar que simplemente vayan a sus aulas, aprendan inglés y estén perfectamente bien”.

Los niños indocumentados ingresan en las escuelas públicas con muchos desafíos que superar, pero también con mucha fortaleza. Los maestros dicen que son muy trabajadores, muy dedicados, se protegen unos a otros y están ávidos de aprender. Las escuelas de Prince George se han enfocado en tres áreas de apoyo hacia esos niños: mejorar su habilidad para el idioma, ser inclusivos y desarrollar resiliencia.

Aprender inglés es un paso obvio pero crítico. Además de ayudar a los alumnos a triunfar académicamente, es una manera de hacer amigos, traducir para sus padres y navegar en su nueva cultura. Es asimismo una manera de compartir sus historias y sentirse incluidos.

Hay más de 27,000 alumnos aprendiendo inglés en este sistema escolar, por lo cual el distrito ha dado un gran impulso a maestros de aulas regulares. A ellos se les enseñan estrategias como el uso de recursos visuales y el aprendizaje práctico de participación personal.

Christian Rhode es el jefe de despacho del superintendente de las escuelas públicas del Condado Prince George. Dijo él que priorizar iniciativas para estos niños es una cuestión de equidad porque “para muchos de ellos la escuela equivale a un refugio”. Pero Rhode también dice que es una cuestión demográfica. Niños considerados “subgrupos” en muchos distritos suburbanos, tales como los que aprenden inglés y los que viven en la pobreza, forman colectivamente la mayoría de los estudiantes del condado. “Ese es el núcleo de nuestra base”, dijo. “Y tomamos decisiones como un sistema escolar basado en la población de estudiantes que tenemos”.

Rhode dice que es un “error” creer que tenemos una gran cantidad de recursos adicionales para ayudar a educar a estos niños. Más bien “el presupuesto es una función de prioridad”. El distrito también ha permitido a los directores de las escuelas un nivel de autonomía fiscal para que puedan costear prioridades basadas en las necesidades de las escuelas. Además, dice que el distrito se asocia de manera extensa con agencias del condado y organizaciones sin fines de lucro del área. Y mientras los distritos de Maryland recibieron en efecto fondos adicionales para alumnos vulnerables como un “pago inicial” después de que el estado aprobó la Ley del Diseño del Futuro de Maryland, Rhode dice que esos fondos expirarán en junio de 2021 si los legisladores no toman acción. Añade que los legisladores deben actuar ahora porque dadas las tendencias de inmigración y los desafíos adicionales causados por el coronavirus, “pienso que cada distrito del país va a ver el año próximo un aumento en las necesidades”.

El año pasado, las escuelas del Condado Prince George crearon un “currículo para recién llegados”, un curso de 12 semanas que debe tomar cada alumno que no hable inglés y sea nuevo en el país a fin de crear rápidamente un vocabulario en inglés.

Tanya Gan Lim enseña esta clase a alumnos de kindergarten. Se enfoca en temas prácticos, como el transporte, el clima, los alimentos. Pero ella también se enfoca en la formación de confianza. Lim anima a sus alumnos a hablar. “Cuando están en las aulas regulares se sienten tímidos, no quieren hablar porque no quieren cometer errores”, dice Lim.

Ana, una alumna de kindergarten, se siente más confiada después de solamente dos meses en el curso de recién llegados, aunque todavía necesita práctica con el sonido de ciertas sílabas. Ella quiere aprender inglés para “ser inteligente” y utiliza a Google Translate para buscar palabras que no entiende. Existe también una razón más práctica: A la edad de 7 años ella necesita traducir para su madre en el supermercado. “Si vamos a algún sitio y mi mamá dice “¿Cuánto vale?” y yo le digo que son tres dólares o cuatro dólares. Ella se pone contenta y me dice ‘Te quiero’”

Celebrar los puntos fuertes que estos niños traen consigo cuando vienen es otra manera de formarles confianza en la escuela. En la Escuela Primaria Mary Harris Mother Jones, la directora Karen Woodson era una autoridad en hacer que todos se sientan bienvenidos, documentado o no. La escuela ha visto aumentos significativos en el número de recién llegados, que ahora constituyen el 16 por ciento del cuerpo escolar, dijo.

Woodson se jubiló recientemente, pero muchas de sus normas continúan. El invierno pasado, cuando todavía era directora, caminaba por el edificio señalando las banderas grandes en el atrio, lo primero que veían los niños al entrar a la escuela. “Van a reconocer enseguida la bandera de El Salvador. Todos los países de Centroamérica y Sudamérica están representados aquí”, decía. Ella abriga la esperanza de que cuando los niños reconozcan su bandera, van a saber que son bienvenidos. Hay también letreros en toda la escuela que dicen, “Ser bilingüe es mi poder superior”.

Woodson es afroamericana y cambia sin esfuerzo entre inglés y español. Dice que padres y alumnos se quedan asombrados cuando la oyen por primera vez hablando en distintos idiomas. “La primera reacción es, ‘Eh, ¿por qué está hablando en español?’ Y la próxima pregunta es, ‘¿Y de dónde es usted?’ Y yo les digo, ‘De Nueva York’, y ellos dicen ‘¿Qué dice?’ Ella aprovecha esa oportunidad par explicarles que ella no creció hablando español, sino que lo estudió, igual que ellos están estudiando inglés. “Yo hice lo mismo y aproveché el tiempo. Ustedes también pueden hablar otro idioma con fluidez”.

Las personas que trabajan en la oficina de la escuela son también bilingües y todos los letreros en inglés también se presentan en español, desde la entrada a la escuela hasta los bidones de basura. La biblioteca también tiene varios libros en español, y Woodson estimula a los niños a que no descuiden su español. Woodson dice que esos pequeños esfuerzos ayudan a los alumnos a ver que no hay jerarquías en los idiomas.

Alegria dice que el respeto hacia la cultura de la familia de un niño no es simplemente un acto de “bondad”, también es mejor para el desarrollo de los alumnos. Dice que los niños pueden llegar a aprender a navegar ambas culturas muy bien. Pero al principio tienen que sentirse “anclados” en su propia cultura.

La directora Woodson también amplió el personal de apoyo. Con la flexibilidad que tenía en su presupuesto el año pasado contrató a tres adicionales asistentes bilingües de maestros. La escuela también contrató a un consejero bilingüe que puede dar apoyo a los maestros, visitar las casas de los alumnos y reunirse individualmente con alumnos que tienen dificultades, y ser un enlace bilingüe con la comunidad que puede conectar las familias recién llegadas a servicios exteriores.

Pero Woodson, que ahora es una consultora que apoya a líderes en escuelas con un alto número de alumnos aprendiendo inglés, advirtió que aun con estos apoyos, nada de esto es fácil para los educadores. “Con esta afluencia, tengo que ser muy honesta. Los maestros están cansados. Es mucho”.  Añadió que ella anima a los maestros a expresar cómo se sienten y que se apoyen unos a otros. “¿Y sabe qué? Estamos cansados pero dedicados. Descansamos, pero de ningún modo abandonamos la tarea”.

Poder crear relaciones y tener una voz es una manera crítica para que los alumnos indocumentados se integren y contrarresten parte del trauma que han vivido. El Condado Prince George está enfocado intencionalmente en la salud mental.

La trabajadora social Beth Hood dice que hay aproximadamente 300 recién llegados a la escuela secundaria. Ella organiza “círculos” para darles apoyo. El inglés de ellos es muy limitado, por lo que ella habla en español y comienza con algunos aspectos muy básicos de la educación en Estados Unidos, desde el plano del edificio a la función de las enfermeras de la escuela hasta la expectativa de que los alumnos vengan a clase todos los días. Pero ella también los anima a compartir sus historias sobre de dónde vienen y cómo eran sus vidas anteriormente.

“Es importante que ellos hablen de cómo antes cuidaban a las vacas o cocinaban tortillas y acompañaban a sus abuelas al mercado”, dijo ella. “Estos son puntos fuertes de su realidad cotidiana y experiencias que traen”.

Muchos de estos alumnos son menores que llegaron solos y a veces no confían en adultos. De modo que Hood dice que los círculos son una forma de que los adolescentes se hagan amigos de otros como ellos para no sentirse solos. La capacidad de sobrellevar esas situaciones los ayuda a sanar. Hood les enseña ejercicios de respiración y discuten cómo resolver conflictos. En una fría mañana de invierno trabajaron en grupos haciendo listas de factores que les ayudan a progresar.

Un alumno lee su lista. “Confianza, amor de familia, paciencia, consejos de los padres y aprender inglés.

Otra alumna comparte lo que la motiva a hacer las cosas bien. “Salir con nuevas amigas, apoyarse mutuamente, continuar esforzándose cada día, nuevas oportunidades, nuevos sitios”.

En cada oportunidad, Hood los elogia por compartir y los anima a ser optimistas. Es una manera de crearles resiliencia, recordándoles lo mucho que han avanzado. A veces ella trae antiguos alumnos que son también indocumentados o que también llegaron como menores solos y permanecieron en la escuela hasta graduarse.

En 2014, cuando hubo una ola grande de menores solos en el Condado Prince George, los maestros le pidieron a la directora que creara la posición de trabajadora social, en vez de contratar a otro maestro. La directora estuvo de acuerdo y el año pasado la escuela agregó otra trabajadora social.

“Es ahí donde les llega la tentación, de poder ganar dinero que nunca han ganado en sus vidas y que pueden de cierta manera ayudar a las familias que quedaron atrás”.

Beth Hood, trabajadora social, hablando sobre algunos de sus alumnos indocumentados.

Hood dice que el enfoque en apoyar la salud mental de los alumnos es clave para que logren triunfar académicamente. La causa de esto es la constante dificultad de muchos adolescentes recién llegados a permanecer en la escuela. Sienten una enorme responsabilidad hacia los familiares que quedaron atrás en sus países. Por lo cual buscan empleos en fábricas, restaurantes, o haciendo limpiezas. “Son los trabajos más arduos y horribles que hay”, dice Hood. “Es ahí donde les llega la tentación, de poder ganar dinero que nunca han ganado en sus vidas y que pueden de cierta manera ayudar a las familias que quedaron atrás”.

Uno de los alumnos de Hood, Luis, tenía 16 años cuando escapó de la violencia en Guatemala hace casi dos años y llegó a Estados Unidos. Su primer idioma era la lengua indígena mam. Hablaba muy poco español y nada de inglés. Luis trabaja ahora en un mercado de víveres. “Termino la escuela a las 2:30 y trabajo de 3:30 a 11”, dijo Luis. Necesita cada dólar para pagarle al coyote que lo trajo de contrabando, pagarle al abogado, pagar la renta. Y envía dinero a la familia en su país. “Un dólar es una gran cantidad de dinero en Guatemala.”

Al principio, cuando los clientes le preguntaban algo a Luis, él no podía responder. “Entonces practiqué más, más y más. Y ahora les ayudo en todo, ¡sin problemas!” dijo. Luis hace sus tareas escolares después del trabajo. Pero admite que a veces le cuesta trabajo despertarse.

Hood dice que la mayoría de los alumnos recién llegados comienzan muy motivados a progresar en la escuela. “Pero llega el momento en que sus cuerpos físicos solamente pueden resistir cierto límite de trabajo y estudios”.

“Termino la escuela a las 2:30 y trabajo de 3:30 a 11. Un dólar es una gran cantidad de dinero en Guatemala.”

Luis, alumno indocumentado que trabaja en un mercado de víveres.

“En cuanto a los alumnos menores que llegan solos”, añade ella, “los vemos abandonar la escuela en mayor número”.

Al final de la clase los alumnos comienzan a bromear entre ellos mientras completan su trabajo de clase y Hood está visiblemente contenta. El ambiente es completamente diferente de cuando comenzó el curso escolar, cuando apenas hablaban entre ellos y todos estaban aterrorizados.  Ella dice que su escuela crea intencionalmente oportunidades para que los recién llegados se diviertan. El año pasado, la directora organizó un almuerzo en los días de fiesta especialmente par ellos, hasta con un disc jockey encargado de la música, porque los días de fiesta — y el recuerdo de los años celebrados con sus familias — son difíciles.

“Todos bailaron, y los alumnos bailaron con los empleados. Fue pura diversión”, dijo Hood. “Trae ese sentido de compasión y amor y diversión a la escuela. Y sabemos bien que cada experiencia positiva de un inmigrante joven crea resiliencia y confianza”.

El Condado Prince George ha demostrado una verdadera dedicación para educar a estos niños indocumentados, pero todo resulta más difícil ahora que el distrito ha cambiado hacia clases remotas por internet debido a la pandemia. Los maestros hablan de lo difícil que es desarrollar relaciones por internet. Algunas de las iniciativas sobre idiomas en todo el distrito que se valen de elementos visuales y enseñanzas prácticas resultan casi imposibles para alumnos que tienen malas conexiones de internet, sin elementos básicos como papel y lápices o con un bebé llorando como sonido de fondo.

La maestra Tanya Gan Lim dice que le preocupa que los alumnos no estén oyendo inglés en los pasillos o en el patio de juegos ahora que no están yendo a la escuela. El Condado Prince George distribuyó cuadernos gratis y unidades móviles de Wi-Fi pero a veces estos niños y sus familiares no saben cómo entrar a una página electrónica o resolver una dificultad técnica. Los trabajadores sociales dicen que pasan el tiempo dándoles apoyo técnico o tratando de localizar a niños que no están asistiendo a clases durante la pandemia. Muchos padres o guardianes han perdido sus trabajos o les han reducido las horas, por lo que estos alumnos indocumentados se sienten presionados a buscar trabajo para ayudar a pagar las cuentas.

“Estamos cansados pero dedicados. Descansamos, pero de ningún modo abandonamos la tarea”.

La exdirectora Karen Woodson, cuya escuela tuvo un aumento brusco de alumnos indocumentados.

El número de personas cruzando la frontera está ahora aumentando. El número de arrestados, que a menudo se utiliza para saber si la inmigración está aumentando o no, descendió bruscamente este año en parte por las restricciones de emergencia de salud de la administración de Trump de expulsar a todos los que llegan a la frontera, incluyendo niños, para prevenir el contagio de coronavirus. Recientemente, un juez restringió esa orden.

El presidente-electo Biden ha señalado que promoverá varios cambios en la inmigración, incluyendo un “camino hacia la ciudadanía” para los millones de inmigrantes indocumentados en el país. Pat Chiancone, que dirige la oficina internacional de estudiantes, dice que prevé que las cifras de niños que cruzan la frontera y se matriculan en escuelas del área va a aumentar. “Creo absolutamente que las cifras van a volver a aumentar cuando pase la pandemia. Sin duda alguna”, dijo ella.

Pero está claro que los alumnos indocumentados quieren aprender y pueden tener éxito. Tras años de atravesar dificultades, Nando se graduó de la escuela secundaria este año. Quiso demostrarle a su madre que él podía lograr algo. “Quise hacer esto por ella. Nos echamos tanto de menos”.

Él tenía sueños de ser médico, pero por ahora trabaja de pintor. Está agradecido de sus maestros que lo apoyaron y quisiera que todas las personas lo vieran a él como lo hacían ellos. “Estamos aquí porque queremos mejorar nuestras vidas. Tener una vida mejor”.

Este artículo sobre estudiantes indocumentados lo produjo The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente sin fines de lucro enfocada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación.

The post ‘Mochilas llenas de piedras’: Cómo un distrito maneja el trauma que los niños indocumentados traen a la escuela appeared first on The Hechinger Report.