What happened: The D.C. Council maintained funding for the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, the nation’s first publicly funded program intended to raise the pay of child care workers in the district and provide them with free or low-cost health insurance.

The back story: In the face of a $700 million budget shortfall, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed cutting the $87 million program to replenish the city’s diminished reserve fund. The final budget passed by the council in June keeps the $70 million of the funding in place. The budget was unanimously approved by the 13-member council on June 12.

What’s next: Several proposed rule changes are also expected to pass that could save money for the fund, including capping participants at 4,100 and limiting the program to workers with a child development credential or higher, said Adam Barragan-Smith, advocacy manager at Educare DC, which operates two centers in the city. Advocates are pushing to keep the salary increases and health benefits for child care workers in place, but expect to learn more about how the cuts will impact the program by September 3, when a task force is set to present its recommendations.

“We know some things are going to be cut, we just don’t know exactly what. We’re trying to keep it as whole as possible,” said LaDon Love, executive director of SPACEs in Action, a nonprofit organization that supported the fund.

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

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Growing up in an immigrant family, I was painfully aware of the sacrifices my parents made for me to be educated in the United States. Their love and support were boundless, embodied by their long hours of work and their emphasis on education from an early age.

One day, I remember taking it upon myself to try to give them the best of everything by chasing after the golden ticket to success: getting into an elite college. It had been emphasized to me that those schools had the best resources, and if I wanted to become a successful scientist, this was seemingly the only way.

The benefits of an Ivy-plus education were drilled into my head from early childhood. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and actress Natalie Portman went to Harvard. Sal Khan (founder of Khan Academy) went to MIT.

And the colleges referenced in popular media and literature are always the hardest to get into: In the popular television show The Summer I Turned Pretty, Conrad, one of the main love interests and heartthrobs, transfers from Brown to Stanford. Many of Ali Hazelwood’s bestseller books are centered around premier institutions like Stanford and MIT. And I haven’t even begun to mention the arbitrary U.S. News Rankings.

In addition, teen social media feeds are filled with reels like “Do these five things if you want to get into Harvard” and “You’ll never believe where this INSANE applicant got accepted to college!”

Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.

However, elite colleges aren’t a guaranteed means to success, and the immeasurable value we are placing on them sends harmful and dangerous messages to today’s youth.

From eighth grade on, I participated in activities that I loved and, of course, made me stand out. I even wound up on the news. College admission was always on my mind. I put everything I had into getting into one of the most prestigious colleges in the U.S.

This year, my senior year in high school, changed things. The Supreme Court’s ruling striking down affirmative action and changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) process induced an atmosphere of confusion and tension. Still, I applied to schools like Columbia and the California Institute of Technology.

My classmates and I vehemently expressed our frustrations with the FAFSA delays; some had to postpone making college commitments (early action) until they were sure that going to their school of choice wouldn’t place them under financial stress. Though we were encouraged to seek out help in school, we only had one counselor dedicated to helping a class of almost 800 seniors with their FAFSA and college application concerns.

For a family with no experience with American college admissions, the best free advice I could find was on platforms like Reddit, College Confidential and Instagram. When news hit that FAFSA had a calculation error, our physics group chat went wild.

The FAFSA errors and delays had the power to impact where we would spend ournext four years. And, from youth, we were taught that these four years had the sole power to determine the rest of our lives. I was lucky to have supportive friends and family and the luxury of a computer and internet at home. But without thousands to spend on expert advice and services, many of my classmates and I were often left in the dark.

Some of my friends expressed having no clue how to fill out the FAFSA with its tricky wording. My dad and I watched a step-by-step YouTube video and an Instagram reel I saved, “What NOT to do on the FAFSA,” to help us figure out how to fill it out.

As the months passed, rejections and waitlists hit me hard. I learned that college admission is not a meritocracy. On a popular Reddit community, I found posts of people lamenting their broken futures now that their Ivy dreams had been crushed.

I heard the stories of kids who stopped talking with friends and family and whose perceptions of themselves changed after getting rejection letters from elite schools. I felt the same. After six rejections, I wondered if I was good enough to pursue astrophysics, the subject I want to study in college.

My ambitious dreams felt foolish. After years of effort, I was planning to stay in my home state of Texas to attend UT Austin.

Just like that, some people changed their attitude toward me even though, in reality, I was the same girl. I had just been overwhelmed by an increasingly stressful and competitive process.

A person who goes to a state school is no less capable of success than a person who goes to Harvard. I’m tired of the college tutors, essay-writing companies and social media creators who are making some teenagers think otherwise.

Related: OPINION: Post-affirmative action, let’s look past our obsession with the Ivy Leagues and other elite schools

I got a call from one of my dream schools, the University of Chicago. I had been accepted off the waitlist, but it seemed likely that I wouldn’t be able to attend because of the cost.

Ultimately, with the help of financial aid, I’ll head there this fall.

We are forced to believe that only the very top colleges matter. When high schoolers are immersed in that mindset, it’s no wonder some feel like their world is ending if they can’t get in.

There is so much that goes into the college admissions process that we can’t control, but we can change the narrative of the culture surrounding it. We can start by providing free support to families who need it.

Siddhi Raut is graduating from Ronald Reagan High School in San Antonio, Texas, and she will be a freshman at the University of Chicago this fall.

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Rates of chronic absenteeism are at record-high levels. More than 1 in 4 students missed 10 percent or more of the 2021-22 school year. That means millions of students missed out on regular instruction, not to mention the social and emotional benefits of interacting with peers and trusted adults.

Moreover, two-thirds of the nation’s students attended a school where chronic absence rates reached at least 20 percent. Such levels disrupt entire school communities, including the students who are regularly attending.

The scope and scale of this absenteeism crisis necessitate the implementation of the next generation of student support.

Fortunately, a recent study suggests a promising path for getting students back in school and back on track to graduation. A group of nearly 50 middle and high schools saw reductions in chronic absenteeism and course failure rates after one year of harnessing the twin powers of data and relationships.

From the 2021-22 to 2022-23 school years, the schools’ chronic absenteeism rates dropped by 5.4 percentage points, and the share of students failing one or more courses went from 25.5 percent to 20.5 percent. In the crucial ninth grade, course failure rates declined by 9.2 percentage points.

These encouraging results come from the first cohort of rural and urban schools and communities partnering with the GRAD Partnership, a collective of nine organizations, to grow  the use of “student success systems” into a common practice.

Student success systems take an evidence-based approach to organizing school communities to better support the academic progress and well-being of all students.

They were developed with input from hundreds of educators and build on the successes of earlier student support efforts — like early warning systems and on-track initiatives — to meet students’ post-pandemic needs.

Related: Widen your perspective. Our free biweekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation in education.

Importantly, student success systems offer schools a way to identify school, grade-level and classroom factors that impact attendance; they then deliver timely supports to meet individual students’ needs. They do this, in part, by explicitly valuing supportive relationships and responding to the insights that students and the adults who know them bring to the table.

Valuable relationships include not only those between students and teachers, and schools and families, but also those among peer groups and within the entire school community. Schools cannot address the attendance crisis without rebuilding and fostering these relationships.

When students feel a sense of connection to school they are more likely to show up.

For some students, this connection comes through extracurricular activities like athletics, robotics or band. For others, it may be a different connection to school.

Schools haven’t always focused on connections in a concrete way, partly because relationships can feel fuzzy and hard to track. We’re much better at tracking things like grades and attendance.

Still, schools in the GRAD Partnership cohort show that it can be done.

These schools established “student success teams” of teachers, counselors and others. The teams meet regularly to look at up-to-date student data and identify and address the root causes of absenteeism with insight and input from families and communities, as well as the students themselves.

The teams often use low-tech relationship-mapping tools to help identify students who are disconnected from activities or mentors. One school’s student success team used these tools to ensure that all students were connected to at least one activity — and even created new clubs for students with unique interests. Their method was one that any school could replicate —collaborating on a Google spreadsheet.

Another school identified students who would benefit from a new student mentoring program focused on building trusting relationships.

Related: PROOF POINTS: The chronic absenteeism puzzle

Some schools have used surveys of student well-being to gain insight on how students feel about school, themselves and life in general — and have then used the information to develop supports.

And in an example of building supportive community relationships, one of the GRAD Partnership schools worked with local community organizations to host a resource night event at which families were connected on the spot to local providers who could help them overcome obstacles to regular attendance — such as medical and food needs, transportation and housing issues and unemployment.

Turning the tide against our current absenteeism crisis does not have a one-and-done solution — it will involve ongoing collaborative efforts guided by data and grounded in relationships that take time to build.

Without these efforts, the consequences will be severe both for individual students and our country as a whole.

Robert Balfanz is a research professor at the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University School of Education, where he is the director of the Everyone Graduates Center.

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During the pandemic shutdown, daycare owner Roxana Contreras sold her house when her income evaporated overnight. Maria Teresa Manrique nearly lost her business, and her life, when a family brought Covid into her home daycare.

As an education reporter and editor in Boston during the pandemic, I was struck by the starkly disparate treatment of the state’s strongly unionized K-12 teacher workforce and the less-organized child care workforce, which includes Contreras and Manrique. Those caring for the youngest children frequently had no guaranteed income when their businesses closed; far less access to protective equipment and supplies, like air filtration devices and free, regular Covid testing; and they were pressed to return to in-person work — the kind of hands-on work where social distancing was impossible — many months before the first vaccines were available.

“We were asking those with very low pay … to do these extraordinary things,” Martha Christenson Lees, former director of the Smith College Center for Early Childhood Education, told me at the time.

Nearly all of the half dozen women I interviewed for my 2021 story had been seriously debilitated by Covid in some way: financially, emotionally, medically. And this spring, three years later, with a new report from the RAPID Survey Project at Stanford Center on Early Childhood showing that child care providers are suffering from record rates of anxiety and depression, I decided to check in with this dedicated group of caregivers. Nationally, an estimated 1 million paid caregivers provide child care out of their homes to about 3 million children.

The two I reached, Contreras and Manrique, both immigrants living and working in the Boston area, have had mixed experiences trying to rebuild their businesses over the last four years. The women, who speak Spanish, were interviewed with the help of interpreter Iris Amador.

‘We have learned to value life’

For Contreras, business has slowly but steadily improved over the last three years. With no money coming in from families after mid-March 2020, she was forced to sell her house in Medford, Massachusetts, also home to her daycare, Gummy Bears, to support her family. She began rebuilding Gummy Bears from the basement of a nearby rental in the summer of 2020, yet struggled for over a year to recruit families reluctant to return to group care, and to hire assistants, many of whom, she says, switched in the pandemic to more highly paid jobs as nannies.

A turning point came in late 2021, when she and other Massachusetts child care providers started receiving monthly operations grants distributed by the state. Contreras used the money to increase pay for assistants, making it easier to hire them; and with the worst danger of the pandemic past, more families returned to group care.

Contreras had enough interest from families by early 2023 that she made plans to add a second site, Gummy Bears 2. It opened in another Medford rental space last September. Across the two locations, Gummy Bears serves 16 children. Although someday she hopes to be licensed for 20 across the two sites, “I am content and I am happy with the number we care for now, and I provide employment to other people who need it,” Contreras said. The continuation of the monthly grants since the fall of 2021 has been crucial to rebuilding and growth, she said.

Contreras has a new problem: turning away families. Gummy Bears’ current wait list stretches out to 2026, with families offering deposits on future spots. (Contreras doesn’t accept them.) There’s an increased demand from pre-pandemic days, possibly as a result of fewer child care spots overall, she said.

The pandemic’s major effect on Contreras was giving up home ownership; high interest rates and housing prices have put reclaiming that goal out of reach for now. But there have been gains, too. She is grateful every day for her health. “We have learned to value life,” she said. 

Elusive road to stability

For Maria Teresa Manrique, Covid’s devastating effects lingered, repeatedly upsetting her financial stability — and her health. She was hospitalized in late 2020 with a severe case of Covid and never fully regained her strength. “I am vulnerable now to infections in a way that I wasn’t before,” she said.

Manrique, a single mother of a teenage daughter, reopened in February 2021, spurred by financial duress. Twice since, she picked up Covid from a child or parent at her daycare. Most recently, in December, Manrique closed for a little over a week after contracting Covid. She not only ran out of the sick day allotment for providers who serve lower-income children on vouchers — meaning she got no pay for some of the time — but lost two students whose families were impatient about the closure. She now enrolls a total of five children.

“Whenever I achieve some balance, I am still behind,” she said. All of her income goes to cover rent and the family’s basic needs, Manrique added, making it impossible to fully pay off taxes she has owed for the last three years. Two months ago, one of her sisters, who also runs an in-home daycare, was diagnosed with a serious illness, and Manrique helps care for her.

She wanted to close the daycare to support her sister full time, but financially it was impossible.

The whole situation feels untenable — and intractable.

“This has been my work for 20 years and I am used to it,” she said. “It has allowed me to care for my own daughter, as I have been both Mom and Dad to her. But when you have been doing this work for 20 years, there is definitely some exhaustion. … There should be more consideration, I believe, for workers like us.”

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Jacqueline Strickland has spent nearly her entire life caring for children in Washington, D.C., starting at age 7, when she began babysitting her siblings after school, and then more formally at 14, when she began working at a daycare center.

Despite the low pay, Strickland, 59, has stuck with her career, even as colleagues left child care for better-paying jobs at the post office or driving school buses.

“People look at child care providers as, you know, babysitters,” Strickland said. “But early childhood is the foundation. It’s the most important part of a child’s life because of the brain development that takes place.”

Three years ago, the financial landscape changed. Her salary jumped from $57,000 to $75,000 a year, thanks to a massive experiment underway in the nation’s capital, which seeks to solve one of the major drivers of the child care crisis: Most educators don’t make a livable wage.

The city-funded $80 million Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund has been transformational for district child care providers like Strickland; they’ve been able to pay down credit cards, move into new apartments, buy or pay off cars, schedule overdue dental procedures, help care for family members and even buy first homes.

But earlier this year, the roughly 4,000 early educators who have benefited from the pay equity program were dealt a blow by Mayor Muriel Bowser’s 2025 budget proposal. Bowser is suggesting eliminating funding for the program — along with cuts to other agencies — because of a requirement from the District of Columbia’s chief financial officer that the city replenish its depleted reserve fund, she said. That would mean a pay cut for the people who have already received a salary bump.

The budget is scheduled to be approved by the D.C. Council in June. The mayor’s office did not return a request for comment about her proposal.

Strickland, who had started the process of buying a home, has now put it on hold. She said that, before the equity fund, she had been waiting for the city to do right by child care providers like her.

“Just to be able to know that you can meet your monthly bills on time and not juggle money. To know that you can buy groceries and buy medication. To be able to afford healthcare and go to the doctor. To be able to put a little aside for retirement. I feel like I’m healthier because I don’t have to stress as much,” said Strickland, who works at an Educare center in the city’s Deanwood neighborhood.

If the mayor’s budget proposal comes to fruition, Strickland will go back to waiting.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic toppled the country’s long-eroding child care system, policymakers in Washington had a vision for tackling the sector’s most intractable challenges, including access, recruitment, retention and pay.

That vision resulted in the pay equity fund, passed by  the D.C. Council in 2021. It provides supplemental payments to teachers in licensed child development centers and homes, with the goal of bumping up their pay to match the minimum salaries of D.C. public school teachers with the same credentials. The program has been funded through a tax on residents earning more than $250,000 a year.

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.

“It’s one piece of a larger law and larger suite of investments meant to support the whole child,” said Anne Gunderson, a senior policy analyst at the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. “Specifically, it’s a compensation program meant to disrupt pervasive and centuries-long undervaluing of caregiving, where, due to structural racism and sexism, that’s really disproportionately harming Black and brown women.”

The pay equity program requires teachers to earn more advanced certificates and degrees if they want their salaries to increase. The costs of their tuition and books are covered almost entirely by a child care scholarship from the district in tandem with the pay equity program.

Although the mandate to earn more credentials can be taxing and eats into the time early educators can spend caring for their own families, more than a dozen teachers interviewed for this story said it’s well worth the effort.

Artia Brown, who has been working at the Educare center in Washington’s Parkside neighborhood for 10 years, graduated with her associate degree this year from Trinity Washington University and is already enrolled in classes in the bachelor’s degree program. She plans to get her master’s degree and doctorate as well.

“I have a long journey ahead of me, but the pay equity really motivated me to go back to school and to make sure I get as much credentialing as I can,” Brown said. “It will pay a livable wage, and people are starting to understand how important early education is.”

The 41-year-old, who lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, with her college student son, saw her salary increase from $27,000 before the pay equity program to roughly $37,000 with the supplemental funding. It’s allowed her to pay off her car, start saving and support her two nieces.

The pay equity program also provides funding for child care facilities to offer free or low-cost health insurance to educators and other staff.

“Really what we’re seeing for the first time is an appropriate level of compensation and benefits for a workforce that has really been ignored for far too many years,” Gunderson said.

Early data suggests that the pay equity program has helped the city hire, recruit and retain child care employees.

The research firm Mathematica found that, by the end of 2022, the program’s initial payments had increased child care employment levels in Washington by about 100 additional educators, or 3 percent.  Moreover, nearly 2 in 3 educators said that, because of the program, they intend to work in the sector longer than they’d previously planned.

And the program’s impact has continued to grow. Comparing child care employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics between 2019 and 2023, Mathematica associated the program with an increase of 219 educators, or nearly 7 percent.

Child care center directors said that they believed the program’s payments were not only influencing their “best” educators’ decisions to stay at their centers, but helping them recruit qualified educators.

Early anecdotal data from the Urban institute shows that quality has increased alongside educator pay. When researchers asked early educators about the statement “Because of the Pay Equity Fund payments, I can better focus on the needs and development of children I work with,” 71 percent somewhat or strongly agreed.

Related: States stuck trying to fix early ed pay as feds drop the ball

Washington’s efforts to tackle pay equity in the child care sector are unique. While several states began experimenting with increasing the pay of child care employees following the pandemic, they’ve mostly focused on one-time bonuses, with funding from federal pandemic aid, rather than long-term solutions. Maine’s $30 million program, which provides an average monthly stipend of $400 to educators, is one of the largest responses from other states or cities, but doesn’t come close to matching the reach of Washington’s pay equity fund.

“It is really systems reform in a way that I don’t think other states have approached,” said Erica Greenberg, senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Center on Education Data and Policy.

Because of the unique nature of the program, Greenberg says that there’s been deep interest from the federal government, states, cities, counties, philanthropists and advocates — all of whom are trying to keep the child care sector afloat.

“They all want to understand how to do something like this,” she says. “D.C. has really been a beacon in that way.”

Yet, as with the rollout of any major new policy, the equity fund has had its share of implementation hiccups.

Chief among them — at least from the educators’ perspective — is that it has sometimes been a hassle to get the money they are due. In 2024, for example, the program switched from making direct payments to teachers to disbursing the money to child care providers, who were then in charge of getting the money to their employees. And the requirements to opt into the program can pose major financial hurdles for smaller centers and home-based providers.

Beyond the particular operating challenges, however, is the program’s solvency.

As educators earn more advanced credentials, the District of Columbia must pay them more — as much as $114,000 for the highest degree earners. As child care centers recruit more teachers, the costs will continue to rise. The mayor considers the natural growth of the program unsustainable, advocates say they’ve been told.

“What I would say is cutting the program or eliminating the program is what’s unsustainable,” said Adam Barragan-Smith, advocacy manager at Educare DC. “The early childhood system in this country is a market failure. Families can’t pay any more. Programs cannot pay teachers any less. The fund has been a really important and game-changing investment so that we don’t have to pass any costs on to families, and we are able to pay teachers what they deserve.”

Amber Hodges, 36, is a lead teacher at Bright Beginnings, a center in the southeast quadrant of the city. When her salary went from roughly $43,000 to $52,000 annually, she used the money to buy a car, move into a nicer apartment building closer to work and take her five nieces and nephews back-to-school shopping.

The supplemental funding makes her feel like, finally, after so many years in the industry, the work of early childhood educators is getting the respect it deserves.

“We have the most important age group, and a lot of people just look at us and say, ‘Oh, you’re daycare teachers or babysitters,’” she said. “There is nothing worse for me when you say that to me. What? I am not a babysitter. Not a babysitter. At all.”

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SPOKANE, Wash. — Before giving birth to her daughter, Kaleeya Baldwin, 19, had given up on education.

She’d dropped out of school as a seventh grader, after behavior problems had banished her to alternative schools. Growing up in foster homes and later landing in juvenile court had convinced her to disappear from every system that claimed responsibility for her.

“I was just really angry with everything,” said Kaleeya.

But in early 2020, during what would have been her freshman year in high school, Kaleeya discovered she was pregnant. At her first ultrasound appointment, a nurse handed her a stack of pamphlets. One, advertising a new school for pregnant and parenting teens, caught her attention.

“Something switched when Akylah got here,” Kaleeya said, referring to her daughter. “I was a whole different person. Now it’s high school that matters. It’s a legacy — and it’s hope for her.”

Four years ago, and two months pregnant, Kaleeya enrolled as one of the first students at Lumen High School. The Spokane charter school — its name, which means a unit of light, was selected by young parents who wished someone had shone a light on education for them — today enrolls about five dozen expectant and parenting teens, including fathers. Inside a three-story office building in the city’s downtown business core, Lumen provides full-day child care, baby supplies, mental health counseling and other support as students work toward graduation based on customized education plans.

When the Spokane school district authorized the charter school, it acknowledged that these students had been underserved in traditional high schools and that alternatives were needed. Nationwide, only about half of teen mothers receive a high school degree by the age of 22. Researchers say common school policies like strict attendance rules and dress codes often contribute to young parents deciding to drop out. In April, the U.S. Department of Education issued new regulations to strengthen protections for pregnant and parenting students, though it’s unclear whether the revisions, which also include protections for LGBTQ+ youth, will survive legal challenges.

Solutions for these young parents have become even more urgent after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling overturning the constitutional right to an abortion. Lumen is located about 20 miles from the Idaho border, which has one of the country’s strictest abortion bans. Recently, representatives from a network of charter schools in the state toured Lumen to evaluate whether they might bring a similar program to the Boise area. Researchers have also visited the school to study how educators elsewhere might replicate its supportive services, not only for pregnant students, but those facing crises like substance use.

“There are some bright spots. Lumen is one,” said Jeannette Pai-Espinosa, president of the Justice + Joy National Collaborative, which advocates for young women, including teen mothers, referring to support in K-12 schools for pregnant and parenting teens. “By and large it’s just not really a priority on the list of many, many things schools are challenged with and facing now.”

Related: If we see more pregnant students post-Roe, are we prepared to serve them?

Nationally, teenage birth rates have fallen for the past three decades, reaching an all-time low in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That same year, the decline in teen births skidded to a halt in Texas, one year after the state’s Republican lawmakers had enacted a six-week abortion ban. Experts fear Texas’ change in direction could foreshadow a national uptick in teen pregnancy now that adolescents face more hurdles to abortion access in red states.

Decades of research have revealed the long-term effects of adolescent pregnancy and childbearing: The CDC reports children of teen mothers tend to have lower performance in school and higher chances of dropping out of high school. They’re more likely to have health problems and give birth as teenagers themselves.

Shauna Edwards witnessed such outcomes as part of her work with pregnant and parenting teens for a religious nonprofit and in high schools along the Idaho-Washington border. She also learned the limits of trying to shoehorn services for those students into a school’s existing budget. At one campus, where Edwards helped as a counselor, she said the principal assigned just one teacher for all subjects and two classroom aides to handle child care for the babies of 60 students.

Frustrated, she tried to convince the superintendent of another school district to offer a similar teen parent program, but with more funding. He couldn’t justify the costs, Edwards said. Instead, he suggested she open her own school.

“I could serve all of Spokane, ideally, and wouldn’t have the risk of getting shut down by a school district trying to balance its budget,” said Edwards, executive director for Lumen.

Every morning, students from across Spokane County — at 1,800 square miles, it’s a bit larger than Rhode Island — trek to the Lumen campus downtown. Many take public transit, which is free for youth under 18, and end their rides at a regional bus hub across the street from the school. Once their children reach six months, Lumen students can drop them off at an on-site child care and preschool center, operated by a nonprofit partner, before heading upstairs to start their day. Before then, parents can bring their babies to class.

Funding for small schools in Washington state helps Lumen afford a full teaching staff — one adult each for English, history, math, science and special education. The charter also has a full-time principal, social worker and counselor. Other adults manage student internships or donations to the school’s food bank and “baby boutique,” where students can “shop” for a stroller, formula, diapers and clothes — all free of charge.

It’s common to see an infant cradled in a teacher’s arm, allowing students to focus on their classwork. On a recent afternoon, two couples traded cradling duties with their newborns during a parenting class on lactation.

“Delivering is something that happens to you. Not so with nursing. You have to do it,” said Megan Macy, a guest teacher, who introduced herself as “the official milk lady.”

Kaleeya shared a bit about her daughter Akylah’s delivery: “I was so depleted. I was her chew toy, her crying shoulder, her feeding bag. Once we got home, she wouldn’t latch at all.”

Her friend Keelah, 17, rocked her newborn in a car seat. (The Hechinger Report is identifying the parents who are minors by first name only to protect their privacy.) “It’s hard, and it’s scary,” she said of the first week home with the baby. “She lost a pound between the hospital and pediatrician.”

Related: ‘They just tried to scare us’: How anti-abortion centers teach sex ed in public schools

Lumen contracts with the Shades of Motherhood Network, a Spokane-based nonprofit founded to support Black mothers, to run the parenting classes. The school reserves space for health officials to meet with mothers and babies for routine checkups and government food programs. And founding principal Melissa Pettey has pushed — and paid for — teachers to make home visits with each student.

For each student, Lumen staff develops an individual graduation plan based on earned and missing credits from previous high schools. The school uses an instructional approach, called mastery-based learning, that allows students to earn credits based on competency in academic skills, often applied in projects. The parenting class, for example, counts as a credit for career and technical education, depending on how the contracted teachers evaluate each student.

The learn-as-you-go approach also allows Lumen to work around the instability in the lives of their students, who are often coping with children’s illnesses, daycare challenges, housing insecurity and other issues.

But the chaos in a young parent’s life can look like inconsistent attendance or even truancy on state accountability reports. Just a tenth of Lumen students attend school regularly, which the state defines as missing no more than two days of class each month.

Next year, the Spokane school district will review Lumen’s operations and performance to decide whether to renew the school’s charter. State data shows less than a fifth of Lumen’s students graduate on time, while a third dropped out. The state doesn’t publicly report testing data from Lumen, due to its size. But Edwards and Pettey said proficiency on state exams isn’t their main goal.

“One student attended 16 elementary schools. Six high schools before junior year,” Pettey said. “Think of the learning missed. How do we get that student to an 11th grade level?”

Added Edwards: “If you can grow them to read baby books to their kids, that’s a success.”

Lumen’s authorizer, Spokane Public Schools, will modify how it evaluates the charter’s performance to take its nontraditional students into account, according to Kristin Whiteaker, who oversees charter schools for the district.

She noted that about a third of Lumen’s incoming high schoolers test at an elementary level; another third test at middle school levels. But during the 2022-23 school year, 52 percent of students posted growth in math while at Lumen, and nearly two-thirds performed better on English language arts exams, according to the school. All of the students who make it to graduation have been accepted into college; 95 percent actually enrolled or started working six months after graduation.

“They’re serving such a unique population,” Whiteaker said. “If you can provide a pathway for students to the next stage of their lives, that’s accomplishing their goals.”

Lumen, she added, removes many of the barriers that pregnant and parenting teens face at Spokane’s traditional high schools. Some struggle to complete make-up work after missing weeks or months of classes for parental leave. Most have no access to child care, and regular schools don’t allow babies in the classroom.

Ideally, some experts say, expecting and parenting teens could remain in their original schools and receive these supports. That’s rarely the case, though, and the social stigma alone can keep young parents from finishing their education.

At the national level, a 2010 law that provided funding to help these students expired in 2019. Jessica Harding and Susan Zief, with the research firm Mathematica, studied the effectiveness of those federally-funded programs and found that successful ones work hard to provide flexibility, for excused absences or adding maternity clothes to dress codes. Others get creative, helping students navigate public transportation and modify their work schedules to meet with students after hours.

“Sometimes,” Harding said, “the solutions are not complicated.”

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

In 2022, when the Supreme Court upended abortion care nationwide, Edwards expected students without reproductive choice in Idaho to attempt to enroll in Lumen. A handful have inquired with the school, said Edwards, but to enroll they would have to move across the state border to Washington where housing costs are significantly higher.

In fact, Lumen recently lost one student whose father found a cheaper home in Idaho. Average rents across Spokane County have risen more than 50 percent over the past five years. And as of March, about half of Lumen students qualified as homeless. One young mother slept outside during winter break while her newborn stayed with a friend. Three students, asked what they would change about Lumen, cited affordable housing or temporary shelter that could help them.

Across Washington, pregnant and parenting teens account for 12 percent of all unaccompanied youth in the homeless system. But the state has a severe shortage of shelter beds available for youth under 18, with even fewer supportive housing options that allow young families to stay together, according to a February 2024 state report. Edwards, meanwhile, has talked with developers to see if they could reserve affordable units for students or loosen rules that prevent minors from signing a lease.

“We missed a whole month of class. It was a long month,” said Mena, a 17-year-old junior who convinced her boyfriend, Rene, to enroll before their son’s delivery, in January.

Rene Jr., or RJ, had already lived with the couple in several homes during his first few months. A restraining order with one set of RJ’s grandparents and guardianship battle with the other pushed Mena and Rene to couch-surf with friends.

“School was the only way we could see each other,” Rene said. “I’m surprised, honestly, they can get me to graduation,” he added, while burping RJ. “He’s going to have a future.”

Later, as Mena suctioned RJ’s stuffy nose in another classroom, Rene struggled to stay awake in math. He had forgotten what he’d learned in some earlier lessons on graphing linear equations, and retreated into social media on his phone. Another student badgered him to “put in some effort,” but Rene resisted.

His teacher, Trevor Bradley, intervened. “What’s special about today? Why don’t you want to try?” he said. “You told me you’re tired because the baby’s keeping you up at night.”

After drawing another set of equations on the whiteboard, Bradley asked Rene and the other student for help with finding the values of x and y. Rene barely whispered his answer.

“That’s it! You do remember,” Bradley said, as Rene yawned.

From the start, Lumen’s founders planned to include fathers in the school. Pai-Espinosa, with the National Collaborative, said it’s unusual for K-12 systems to focus on fathers, since mothers often have custodial rights. And at Lumen, the inclusion of “baby daddies” — as students and staff refer to them — sometimes adds teen drama to the mix of emotions and hormones already present at the school.

Lumen’s lack of diversity among adults there has also bothered some students, including Kaleeya. Only 40 percent of her peers identify as white, and all of the school’s teachers and administrators are white. Edwards said it has been difficult to recruit a diverse staff. As a temporary solution the school contracted with the Shades of Motherhood Network for parenting classes.

“It’s hard being in a white space with no Black teachers,” Kaleeya said.

Still, she said she liked the school’s emphasis on engaging students in semester-long projects in different subjects and on real-world problems. Last year, confronted with drug-use problems near the downtown campus, students researched and presented options for the city to consider on safe needle disposal in public places. Each student’s individual graduation plan also includes an internship.

Payton, 17, has wanted to be a school counselor since before giving birth to her daughter in late 2022. Her internship at nearby Sacajawea Middle School convinced her to stay on that career path. Another mother, Alana, started an internship this spring with a local credit union and plans to use the marketing experience to help her advocate for children with disabilities in the future.

Kaleeya recently turned her internship, with a downtown restaurant, into a part-time job. She planned to save for college, but no longer needs to. Gonzaga University notified her in March of a full-ride scholarship to study there this fall.

“Lumen didn’t change who I was,” Kaleeya said. “I did this for my daughter. I didn’t want to be that low-income family. So I got my ass up, got into this school and I got an education.”

This story about teen parents was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

The post Daycare, baby supplies, counseling: Inside a school for pregnant and parenting teens appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

PASADENA, Calif. — After starting elementary school in the late 1960s, Naomi Hirahara and three other girls formed a clique called the C.L.A.N., an acronym that represented each of the girl’s first initials. Hirahara said she and her friends didn’t consider the racial implications of their group’s name until one of their fathers objected: “The Klan is very bad!”

The group consisted of Hirahara, who is Japanese-American, two Black girls and a White Jewish girl. They attended Loma Alta Elementary, a racially diverse school in Altadena, Calif., that stood out from many others in the Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD), especially its high schools, which were more racially homogenous.

“I really treasured the fact that we could form these interracial and intercultural relationships,” Hirahara said of her school, where, she recalled, students acknowledged racial differences, but weren’t fixated on them.

By 1970, the racial makeup of PUSD schools would command the attention of the entire country. A U.S. district court judge determined the school system had “knowingly assigned” students to schools by race and ordered it to desegregate based on the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that “separate but equal” schools were unconstitutional. To racially integrate, PUSD launched what CBS News and The New York Times described then as the most substantial busing program outside the South.

Seventy years after the Brown decision on May 17, 1954, PUSD is still rebounding from the white flight that followed its desegregation order. More than 27,700 school-age youth live in Pasadena, Altadena and Sierra Madre, the communities served by the district, but only about half of them attend public school.

With 133,560 residents, Pasadena has one of the densest concentrations of private schools in the country, according to school officials. But the moms in the community who support public schools have organized to create a more equitable and diverse educational landscape.

They have teamed up with local educational organizations to advocate for the school district, and by extension, for racially and economically diverse schools. They have reached out to families with preschoolers, joined public school tours and gone door-to-door to reframe the narrative around PUSD. District officials, for their part, have expanded magnet and dual language immersion offerings, among other competitive programs, at schools to attract families from a wide range of backgrounds.

Families and officials have also worked together to educate realtors. It turns out that some of them dissuaded homeowners from enrolling children in PUSD, contributing to the exodus to private schools and, more recently, charter schools.

Changing negative perceptions that date back to school desegregation during the 1970s hasn’t been easy, they said. Back then, the backlash to the busing program occurred almost as soon as it started, with a recall campaign against school board members and a near 12-percentage-point drop in white student enrollment. Ronald Reagan, who was California’s governor at the time, stoked the fire when he signed legislation that prohibited busing without parental consent.

Today, advocating for Pasadena’s public schools is all the more challenging when considering that more than 40 private schools have been established in PUSD’s boundaries; the district has 23 public schools. In interviews, community members told The 19th that the proliferation of private schools has enabled white, middle- and upper-class families to evade public schools in the five decades since court-ordered desegregation.

“We really, truly haven’t recovered from the very pervasive belief in the area that PUSD schools are not up to snuff,” said Brian McDonald, who served as PUSD’s superintendent for nine years before stepping down in 2023.

California is not usually a place associated with segregation, though segregation has historically been a problem in the state. A 1973 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that school segregation there and elsewhere in the West is frequently “as severe as in the South.” A report released last month by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA — “The Unfinished Battle for Integration in a Multiracial America – from Brown to Now” —  ranked California as the top state in the country where Black and Latino students attend schools with the lowest percentages of white students.

“California has gone through a major racial transition,” said Gary Orfield, one of the authors of the report and the co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. “It was an overwhelmingly White state in terms of school enrollment at the time of the Brown decision, but it’s now, of course, a state that is overwhelmingly non-White in terms of student enrollment. That’s basically caused by tanking birth rates and immigration.”

Fueling segregation, Orfield said, is the fact that California has largely lacked state policies designed to racially balance schools since the 1960s and 1970s, when court orders brought about change.

In Pasadena, some residents say that the school district’s reputation is improving and more people want to invest and enroll their children in public schools. Although white and Asian-American students remain underrepresented in PUSD, the White student population has slightly increased over the past 20 years despite the drop in the city’s White population during that period.

After failed attempts, Pasadena voters have approved ballot measures to increase funding for local schools in recent years, enabling the district to make millions of dollars in upgrades. The district has also received national recognition for its academic programs, school tours are packed and young parents now tend to view diversity as an asset, its supporters say.

“Most school districts across the country have given up on integration. It’s not on the radar screen,” said Richard Kahlenberg, who has authored studies on PUSD and is director of housing policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. “Pasadena, along with a number of other forward-looking communities, is trying to do something about that. They haven’t reached all their goals, but I’m inspired that there is a critical mass of parents who recognize the benefits of diversity for all students.”

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During a recent information session for prospective public school parents, Nancy Dufford, executive director of the Pasadena Education Network (PEN), which works to get families involved in district schools, told the audience: “Probably, a lot of you were told when you moved here that you couldn’t send your kids to public school.”

She was stunned to find out that none of the families had actually heard such comments. It was the first time she had spoken to a group of parents who hadn’t been warned away. In Pasadena, Dufford said, it has been tradition for established families not to send their children to public schools. “So many people live here for long periods of time,” she said. “So you have generations of families here who have that message.”

The message ends up making its way to newer Pasadenans. Dufford said she heard it herself after becoming a mother in the 1990s, shortly after relocating to the city. In fact, PEN, the group she runs today, was started in 2006 by a group of preschool parents who had heard the same thing yet refused to listen.

They were among the parents who asked questions like, “Why do people say the schools aren’t good?”

Kimberly Kenne, president of the PUSD Board of Education and one of the founding members of PEN, said that she also wondered about this “pervasive narrative” when she moved to town in the early 1990s. She wasn’t aware of the bias against public schools in Pasadena, though her husband, who was raised in the city, attended private school when the desegregation order came down.

After their first child was born in 1997, Kenne considered enrolling him in the neighborhood public school — only to be admonished by fellow parents. “Are you sure you’re going to share the values of the other parents at public school?” she recalled them asking.

She enrolled her son in a private school, but changed her mind. One reason is that the school wasn’t equipped to meet his needs as a neurodivergent child. Another is that the private school lacked racial diversity in the student body, something that mattered to her.

Jennifer Hall Lee, vice president of PUSD’s Board of Education, also enrolled her daughter, who is now 20, in private school — regretting the decision when she realized her daughter didn’t seem comfortable interacting with people from a wide range of backgrounds.

Lee herself had gone to a public high school in Atlanta in the 1970s that had equal percentages of Black and White students. After switching her daughter to public school, Lee noticed that the child’s worldview changed.

“She would talk to me about the kids in the schools, from first-generation immigrant kids to foster youth,” Lee said. “She began to really understand the differences in socioeconomic status and understand that people lived in apartments and not everybody owned a home. She started understanding the full breadth of her community.”

In a city where the median home sale price is $1.1 million and the median household income is almost six figures, it’s confusing for newcomers to understand why the school system has a poor reputation since affluence in a community typically translates into quality in its public schools.

Pasadena, however, has become known as “a tale of two cities,” a place where the gap between the rich and the poor has only widened and the two groups don’t mingle socially or academically. At $97,818, the median household income is just above the state’s and $23,000 above the nation’s. At the same time, the city’s poverty rate of 13.4 percent is slightly higher than the state and national rate.

When the school district’s critics mention that its test scores are lower than those in surrounding school systems, supporters respond that the city has a wealth gap that’s largely absent from the more homogeneous neighboring suburbs. Many of the detractors, Dufford said, are also unaware that PUSD’s “bad” reputation coincided with the 1970 desegregation order that accelerated the departure of white, middle- and upper-income families from the district.

White flight out of Pasadena has been traced back as far as the 1940s. The reasons include lower birth rates among white families, an economic downturn in the aerospace industry that limited employment opportunities and the restructuring of neighborhoods to make way for freeways. By 1960, the racial demographics of the city were also changing, with communities of color expanding rapidly. The next year, PUSD lost about 400 students when the mostly white community of La Cañada broke away from the district to form its own separate school system, which to this day is ranked as one of the state’s best. In 1976, La Cañada Flintridge became its own city.

“The fact that people are willing to create whole new municipalities, so they don’t have to integrate — that should really wow people,” said Shannon Malone, PUSD’s senior director of principals, who added that her views were not the school district’s but her own. “You would rather create a whole new city than to let your child sit next to a person of color. I don’t think people have a full understanding of that at all.”

Having lived through the desegregation order, Hirahara, who is now an award-winning mystery writer, wishes more people knew about the history of the city’s schools. In 2016, she received a grant from the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division to present “Loma Alta: Tales of Desegregation,” a talk at a public library that featured her and two other district alumni sharing their experiences.

“So many people don’t even know that it was the first West Coast school district to get the order to desegregate, so it’s a very unique and telling experience of why we’re still dealing with issues of race today,” Hirahara said.

When Hirahara was enrolled in Loma Alta, about half of its students were Black. It was one of Pasadena’s top-performing elementary schools, which the 1973 report from the Civil Rights commission attributed to the fact that many of the students came from middle-class households. Other high-achieving schools in the district with large Black populations included Audubon Primary School and John Muir High School. Six students at John Muir were accepted into the elite California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1972, a rare feat that prompted Caltech’s then-president to write about the accomplishment in the local newspapers.

The Brown v. Board decision had the unintended consequence of costing tens of thousands of Black educators their jobs as many white schools did not want to employ these teachers and principals after integration. The consequences have endured for decades. In 2021, about 15 percent of public school students nationwide were Black, but only 6 percent of public school teachers nationwide were, according to a forthcoming report by the Southern Education Foundation, a nonprofit that works to advance equitable education policies.

“We really, truly haven’t recovered from the very pervasive belief in the area that PUSD schools are not up to snuff,”

Brian McDonald, the Pasadena Unified School District, former superintendent

Malone, who is Black and was bused to schools in Los Angeles, underscored the results of studies that show that students of color excel when they have Black teachers, demonstrating better academic and behavioral outcomes. But when Black children attend integrated schools, their support systems don’t usually accompany them, she said.

The achievements of students at racially diverse schools in the district didn’t stop the parents bent on leaving PUSD from doing so, administrators complained to federal officials in 1973. The biggest obstacle preventing the district from truly becoming integrated, the administrators said, was “white flight.” The Civil Rights commission’s report quoted one administrator making a remark that could have come from a PUSD supporter today: “White parents don’t take time to see whether the system is bad or not. They simply listen to people who criticize the district without foundation.”

What’s different is that now the district has an army of moms actively challenging these attitudes. Victoria Knapp is one of them, but it took time and trust in herself before she became a public school crusader.

Related: Revisiting Brown, 70 years later.

When Knapp entered grade school in Pasadena in the 1970s, she heard that children her age were being bused from one neighborhood to another, but she didn’t understand why it was being done or what it was like. Knapp did not attend the city’s public schools.

“My schools were predominantly white, predominantly Catholic and predominantly middle class or above,” she said.

She had some familiarity with public schools because her mother taught for the Los Angeles Unified School District, but she didn’t know that a contentious debate about integrating them had unfolded in her own community. Years later, after the birth of her older son, she felt pressure from fellow moms to send her children to private school. The aversion to public school in her moms’ group made her reflect on her city’s past. She thought to herself: “You mean to tell me that whatever was going on here 40 years ago is still going on?”

Still, her Catholic school upbringing and the nudging from the private school enthusiasts led Knapp, chair of the Altadena Town Council’s executive committee, to rule out PUSD. First, she and her husband enrolled their eldest son in a parochial school. Then they tried a nonsectarian private school. The couple felt that both schools exposed their children to experiences and behaviors they did not appreciate, like the sense of entitlement expressed by some of their classmates. Knapp, for the first time, began to consider an alternative.

“It did seem counterintuitive to me that I was going to have this relatively homogenous group of moms dictate what we were going to decide for our own kid,” she said.

After touring PUSD schools, Knapp questioned the idea that they were inferior to the city’s private schools. She wondered, “What’s not good? Is it that our public schools are predominantly Black and Brown children?”

When some parents raised safety concerns, she responded that elementary schools aren’t typically dangerous and that fights, gun violence and truancy occur at private and public schools alike. “They could never really articulate what safety meant,” Knapp said. “What safety meant was they didn’t want their child in an integrated, diverse school. They just didn’t. And that’s exactly where I wanted my privileged white sons to be.”

Both of her sons, a sixth grader and an 11th grader, have now attended public school for years. Her younger son attended Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson’s alma mater, Cleveland Elementary School.

Knapp became an active PUSD parent, serving as a PTA president at Altadena Arts Magnet, the school her younger son attended next, and an ambassador for the Pasadena Education Network, a role that has her regularly participate in school tours. Going on tours allows her to field questions from prospective parents. What the families see often surprises them, Knapp said.

“They think they’re going to see chaos and mayhem, then they come in,” she said. “Altadena Arts is an inclusion school, so kids of all neurodiversities are included in the same classroom. It’s socioeconomically diverse, it’s racially diverse, it’s gender diverse, it’s very integrated. You walk up there and it’s like, ‘This is what a school should look like.’”

Karina Montilla Edmonds, who moved to Pasadena in 1992 to attend Caltech, never doubted the city’s public school district. When her now 22-year-old daughter was entering kindergarten, Edmonds and her former husband turned down the chance to send her to the neighboring San Marino Unified School District (SMUSD), which ranks as one of the state’s top 10 school systems. Her then-husband taught for SMUSD, qualifying their eldest daughter for an interdistrict transfer to the suburb where the median household income is $174,253 and more than 85 percent of students are proficient in reading and math.

Edmonds wasn’t interested. “At the time, I was like, ‘That’s not my school. That’s not my community. I have a school two blocks away. Why wouldn’t I go there?’”

The decision appalled many of her fellow parents. “People thought I was nuts,” she said. “Luckily, I have a PhD in aeronautics from Caltech, so they knew I wasn’t stupid, but they definitely thought I was crazy.”

The mom of three from Rhode Island didn’t fear that her children wouldn’t get a good education in Pasadena’s public schools because she excelled in the public education system in her state while growing up in a household of few resources, raised by parents with limited formal education. “I thought I was rich because everybody around me was on public aid,” she said. When she attended a competitive public high school, she learned just how economically disadvantaged her family was. “I was like, ‘Oh, wait, I’m poor.’”

She now serves on the board of the Pasadena Educational Foundation, a nonprofit focused on developing community partnerships to help the city’s public schools excel. The organization also works with the Pasadena-Foothills Association of Realtors to educate real estate agents about the public schools since some realtors had a history of discouraging homebuyers from enrolling their children in PUSD. McDonald, the former superintendent, said that it happened to him when he was buying a home several years ago.

“She advised me to put my kids in every other school and district except for PUSD,” he said. “But I’m happy to say that through the efforts of the district and the Pasadena Educational Foundation, primarily utilizing the realtor initiative, we were able to change a few minds.”

Edmonds agrees that educating realtors is an important step. Her perspective on public schools and the surrounding communities, she added, also comes from the fact that her ex-husband taught in Pasadena before San Marino. Was he suddenly a better teacher because he moved from a less affluent school district to a more affluent one? She didn’t think so. She also didn’t compare the two district’s test scores because their populations are different. Pasadena Unified has significantly more low-income students, foster youth, English language learners and Black and Brown students than San Marino Unified, which is predominantly White and Asian American.

“To me, that’s part of the enrichment of getting to be with and learn from a broader part of our community,” she said, adding that children don’t suffer because they attend school in diverse environments.

The idea of seeking out or avoiding schools based on demographics concerns her.

“I feel like our democracy depends on an educated population,” she said. “I think every child should have access to excellent education and have an opportunity for success because I know the opportunities that I had given to me through the public school system.”

Related: Proof Points: 5 takeaways about segregation 70 years after the Brown decision.

The year after McDonald became the PUSD superintendent in 2014, he wrote a column in the local paper describing the difficulties the district was experiencing because of the high percentage of parents sending their children to private school. He estimated that the district was losing out on about $14 million because of declining enrollment, money that could help PUSD prevent school closures, teacher layoffs and cuts to student services.

But he also touted the district’s variety of programs for students such as dual language immersion schools and International Baccalaureate, as well as the piloting of a dual enrollment program with the local community college. Since then, the district has expanded its initiatives and created new ones. In addition to Spanish and Mandarin, the district’s dual language immersion tracks now include French and Armenian. From 2013 to 2022, PUSD also received three federal magnet assistance program grants that allow it to bring more academic rigor to its schools.

“We lose enrollment because people have a negative perception of our schools, so I think the idea of a magnet theme, whether it’s arts or early college, or a dual-language program, can really get people excited about something that their students are really interested in or maybe a value that their family has, let’s say, around the arts,” said Shannon Mumolo, PUSD’s director of

magnet schools, enrollment, and community engagement. Schools with themed magnet programs, she added, can sway families who weren’t interested in PUSD to consider at least going on a school tour.

Enrollment at PUSD’s John Muir High School has increased since it became an Early College Magnet in 2019, Mumolo said. Across the board, enrollment of students from underrepresented groups — white and Asian American — have gone up since the school district expanded its academic programs over the past decade.

“But I also want to make sure to emphasize that the schools have maintained their enrollment of their Black and Latino students,” Mumolo said. “We want to make sure that we’re keeping our neighborhood students and maintaining enrollment for those groups.”

The former superintendent also touts PUSD’s Math Academy, which The Washington Post in 2021 lauded as “the nation’s most accelerated math program.” The course allows gifted middle school students to take classes, such as Advanced Placement Calculus BC, that are so rigorous that only a small percentage of high school seniors take them.

Kenne, the school board president, said that her children, now both in their 20s, were gifted math students. The Math Academy was not available when they were in grade school. She and her husband switched them out of PUSD in high school, in part, because at the time they had more opportunities to excel in math in private school, she said, acknowledging that it was a controversial choice for a parent who advocates for public education. 

“People do have reasons,” Kenne said of some parents who choose private school. But she also said that private school overall wasn’t especially rigorous for her children. “My son calculated that he didn’t need to do homework for some classes to get a decent grade,” she said.

By introducing a wide variety of academic programs, including in math, PUSD has challenged the gap between what outsiders perceive it to be and what the district actually is, according to McDonald. “I think if we had not implemented those programs, the declining enrollment would have been much more acute,” he said.

Kahlenberg, the researcher, agrees. He said data suggests that when middle-class families get the right incentives to go to a public school, even one that’s outside their neighborhood, they do.

Since the busing integration program did not succeed in the district, Kahlenberg, in his studies of the school district, recommended that PUSD take creative approaches to lure in middle-income families. That includes introducing unique academic programs as well as developing or deepening partnerships with institutions in or around Pasadena — Caltech, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Pasadena Playhouse, Art College Center of Design, the Norton Simon Museum, the Huntington Library.   

But the focus on winning parents back has led to some tension, Kenne said.

“Sometimes a message that we’ve heard in the last 10, 20 years is, do we care more about marketing to the people who don’t come to our district, or working hard for the people who are already here?” Kenne said. “Because sometimes the public-facing message seems to be all about getting kids back, and it makes the people in the system go, ‘Am I not important to you? I’m already here.’”

Nationwide, Black students who attended school in the late 1960s were more likely to be in integrated classrooms than Black youth today. Supreme Court decisions, such as 1991’sBoard of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowelland 2007’s Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, have contributed to the resegregation of the nation’s schools by phasing out court-ordered busing and making it harder to racially balance schools, according to experts.

Kahlenberg said schools nonetheless have a duty to continue trying to integrate — if not by race, then by class.

“The children of engineers and doctors bring resources to a school, but so do the children of recent immigrants or children whose parents have struggled,” Kahlenberg said. “The more affluent kids benefit as well from an integrated environment. When people have different life experiences they can bring to the discussion novel ideas and new ways of thinking, and that nicely integrated environment is possible in a place like Pasadena.”

Hirahara, for one, still cherishes her childhood in the school district, back when she befriended the girls in the C.L.A.N. As schools across the nation have largely re-segregated, she fears that too few young people get to experience what she did.

“I’m so glad that I had that kind of upbringing,” she said, “and I think it prepared me better for life.”

The post 70 years later, schools — and moms — are still fighting segregation appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

For Janelle Bell, a 39-year-old working mom, completing her degree wasn’t financially or personally possible. Her priority was providing for her family on an annual salary of just $30,000. Drowning in $40,000 of student loan debt, she was forced to drop out of college and work full time.

Janelle’s story is all too familiar throughout the U.S. — stuck in a low-paying job, struggling to make ends meet after being failed by college. Roughly 40 million Americans have left college without completing a degree — historically seen as a golden ticket to the middle class.

Yet even with a degree, many fall short of economic prosperity.

Data from 1 in 4 higher education institutions shows that, a decade after enrolling, the average salary for college attendees is less than the average salary of high school graduates.

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A majority (56 percent) of Americans don’t think that a college degree is worth the cost, a recent survey found. College enrollment dropped by 8 percent from 2019 to 2022, and Americans are sending a clear message: They need and want more options than just a college degree to make a good living. With the average price of tuition and fees across private and public universities increasing over 130 percent in the last two decades, who can blame them?

These factors prompt Americans like Janelle to seek alternative paths into the middle class.

As college enrollments fell over the last decade, the number of apprenticeships increased by more than 50 percent, and nearly half of American workers now say they have some form of alternative credentials. Clearly, Americans want affordable, fast, flexible options with a high return on investment.

Policymakers must respond to this overwhelming shift in public opinion and start helping Americans pay for these college alternatives.

One approach: Expand the federal Pell Grant program in order to give Americans greater ownership of their education journeys and the financial freedom to pay for alternative programs that lead to a better life.

Since its authorization in 1965, Pell has awarded need-based federal financial aid to more than 80 million low-income students to pay for college. In the 2022-23 academic school year, 34 percent of undergraduate students received a Pell Grant.

Yet, research shows that Pell students graduate at a rate of 18 percentage points less than their non-Pell peers. In short, the large number of Pell aid recipients is not leading to a significantly higher number of lower-income Americans earning college degrees.

In its current state, the program is not meeting its founding goals. That’s why it’s time to update this nearly 60-year-old federal program to meet the educational needs and demands of Americans today.

During his State of the Union speech, President Biden signaled his intent to “continue increasing the Pell Grants to working- and middle-class families” and ensure that college remains affordable. His fiscal year 2025 budget proposal includes a $2.1 billion increase in federal funding as part of the administration’s plan to double the maximum Pell Grant award by 2029.

But this doesn’t go far enough. We must also expand this access to Americans like Janelle, who need to be able to pay for short-term, nondegree education options.

Related: OPINION: Here’s why a costly college education should not be the only path to career success

Thankfully, the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act, expected to be up for a full vote in the House of Representatives this year, would expand the Pell Grant program to include affordable and flexible short-term career education programs.

The bill would also create standards for these programs, to ensure that they provide the training necessary for today’s most in-demand industries and meet employer hiring requirements.

Giving Americans more access to educational routes without the high price tag of a four-year degree would create a new, more diverse and skilled talent pool that we could easily connect to employers looking to fill in-demand jobs.

This modern talent pool would benefit the entire economy. Manufacturing, for instance, is still recovering from the pandemic and is hungry for skilled talent. The National Association of Manufacturers recently projected that roughly 2.1 million manufacturing jobs could go unfilled by 2030.

Many of these jobs require training beyond a high school diploma, and short-term programs have proven successful at filling that gap. This is particularly important as more sectors become increasingly tech driven. For example, there is a pressing need for data analytics and digital skills that we know can be quickly taught by nondegree programs.

The median salary for U.S. high school graduates with no college experience is a little over $44,000 — which doesn’t cover the roughly $4,300 a month that a single person needs to afford today’s living expenses.

Americans who completed programs at the national workforce development nonprofit we run are earning wages that are higher than those of U.S. high school grads without a college degree, according to our latest Wage Gain Analysis.

In a study of 2018-22 program completers, University of Virginia researchers found that three-plus months after completion, our learners’ average annual wages had increased from $26,000 to $50,000 — more than 92 percent.

These are life-changing wage increases that can help a family afford long-term housing, allow a parent to go from working two jobs to one or enable these Americans to pay for basic medical care.

After Janelle completed her training with us and landed a job, her annual wages increased by 66 percent, and today she’s a successful technical project coordinator earning $50,000 a year. Her career promises continued upward mobility, opening new financial opportunities that seemed unattainable just a few years ago, so that she and her family can thrive.

Moving Americans from low-wage jobs into family-sustaining careers is possible. Imagine how many more lives could be changed if we gave more people the power to use federal Pell aid to pay for these pathways.

College degrees should remain one of the many learning options available to Americans wanting to further their education. But it’s time for policymakers, workforce development leaders and businesses to advocate for lower-cost, short-term education opportunities, and that starts with passing the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act.

Connor Diemand-Yauman and Rebecca Taber Staehelin are co-CEOs of Merit America.

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

The post OPINION: Americans need help paying for new, nondegree programs and college alternatives appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

LAS VEGAS and RENO, Nev. — They exist in places like an airport, a resort, and a distribution center, tucked away from the public eye but close enough for easy access. They often emit laughter – and the sound of tumbling blocks, bouncing balls, and meandering tricycles.

They’re child care centers based at workplaces. And in the increasingly fraught American child care landscape, they are popping up more frequently.

Skyrocketing child care costs and staffing shortages have complicated arrangements for working parents. Some have left their jobs after struggling to find quality care. Employers, in turn, view their entry into the child care realm as both a competitive advantage and a workplace morale-booster.

“In the absence of government intervention and investment, a lot of businesses have been stepping up to make sure that their employees can access affordable child care,” said Samantha Melvin, an assistant research professor at the Erikson Institute, an independent graduate school for early childhood education.

Parents benefiting from child care at their work sites praise the model, given its convenience, affordability, and peace of mind. They can stop by to breastfeed or eat lunch with their little ones. And it doesn’t add time to their morning commutes.

Frances Ortiz, who works in accounting at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas, can’t imagine a better option. She says her 3-year-old daughter has gained independence and language skills – with Mom not far away – at the property’s on-site child care center for employees.

“She runs in here,” Ms. Ortiz said. “She grabs my badge. She has to open the door for herself.”

In September, the Pittsburgh International Airport added its own on-site child care. The center, which is run by a child care operator, serves children of Allegheny County Airport Authority employees as well as those of select airport workers, such as food and beverage workers, ground handlers, and wheelchair attendants.

Airport officials say the idea stemmed from wanting to bring more women and people of color into the aviation workforce. Plus, the airport sits 17 miles outside of downtown Pittsburgh, making child care logistics challenging for employees. So far, it’s operating at about half capacity, with more enrollments expected over the next few months.

“It’s certainly an important proof point to our team that we mean it when we say that we’re invested in them and in what they need,” said Christina Cassotis, CEO of the Allegheny County Airport Authority, which operates the Pittsburgh airport.

An added bonus for the children: windows with views of planes taking off and landing.

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.

The average American family spends nearly a quarter (24 percent) of its household income on child care, according to a survey this year from Care.com. The cost can eclipse rent or mortgages, if parents can access care in the first place. Many find themselves on waitlists.

As employers contemplate entering the child care realm, Ms. Melvin encourages them to find out what their workers want. What hours do they most need care? Are they looking for center- or home-based care?

The Care.com survey suggested that 30 percent of parents would like to see their employers provide on-site day care, while others identified child care subsidies (28 percent), flexible spending accounts (22 percent), and backup care (21 percent) as desirable workplace benefits.

More public and private employers appear to be heeding the call, though how they assist runs the gamut. Some fully run their own centers. Others outsource the operations and management to providers.

The financial arrangements also differ. Many companies and organizations don’t disclose the exact discounts offered to employees, but they tend to be more affordable than or at least competitive with local rates.

Walmart, for instance, recently opened an on-site child care center at its massive Bentonville, Arkansas, campus. The Little Squiggles Children’s Enrichment Center chargesa monthly rate of $1,117 to $1,258, based on the child’s age, which company officials tell the Monitor in an email is “at market rate or below regional levels for comparable care.”

Related: ‘I can be mom and teacher’: Schools tackle child care needs to keep staff in classrooms

Another method gaining steam: employers providing subsidies for families to use toward child care options within their own communities.

KinderCare, a large child care operator with locations nationally, partners with more than 600 businesses and organizations to provide employee-sponsored child care, up from 400 in 2019, says Dan Figurski, president of KinderCare for Employers and Champions. Those employers represent the technology, medical, banking, academic, and public service industries, among others.

The amount of financial assistance they’re extending to employees varies, he says, with some covering up to 90% of child care costs.

Mr. Figurski expects more companies to view child care as a benefit for their employees, not unlike health care.

“I do think the future is some blended model of government-subsidized and employer-subsidized child care moving forward so that every child has access,” he says.

Experts who study child care, however, caution against an overreliance on businesses filling the void. Philip Fisher, director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, says doing so could undercut efforts to recognize child care as a public good.

“There’s a lot of well-intentioned people who are thinking this is a really good idea, and for those who would benefit from it, it could be,” he says. “Again, there are lots of downsides even in the short term.”

One of those potential pitfalls, he says, is instability if a parent suddenly loses their job and then has to find new child care and a new job.

Related: What convinces voters to raise taxes: child care

In Nevada, The Venetian Resort’s child care center, run by KinderCare, sits in a back-of-house hallway steps away from the famous Las Vegas Boulevard.

All employees can enroll their children, as long as space allows, at a cost that’s generally 35% to 40% lower than KinderCare’s normal rate, says Matt Krystofiak, the Venetian’s chief human resources officer. The company also offers subsidies for employees who want to enroll their children in an off-site KinderCare closer to their homes.

“We’re doing this because this is what our team members want,” he says. “This is what our team members need.”

Businesses such as Patagonia, another longtime leader in the space, also view child care as a reflection of their company culture.

The clothing retailer’s foray into child care began organically in 1983 when some of the company’s original employees started having children. As Patagonia grew, so did its child care footprint. Nowadays, the clothing company operates three child care centers – two in Southern California and one in Reno, Nevada – serving roughly 200 children.

The company conducts research annually to determine the cost to employees in each location, which leaders describe as an “average market rate.” Subsidies are available based on household income, says Sheryl Shushan, Patagonia’s director of global family services. The child care teachers are employed by Patagonia, so they receive corporate benefits as well.

On a recent morning, a 16-month-old boy toddled up a small embankment to touch wind chimes hanging from trees. His teachers watched from a short distance away in the outdoor classroom at Patagonia’s distribution center in Reno.

“We believe that risk-taking builds character,” says Terry Randolph, program manager for the site. In this play-based environment, children spend hours outside, digging in sand, riding bikes, playing with water, or climbing natural and human-made objects.

Patagonia leaders say the benefits on their end are stronger employee retention, a can-do spirit in the workplace, and a greater sense of community.

“There’s an opportunity to see co-workers as parents instead of just employees,” she says. “It just creates connection and purpose beyond the project you’re working on.”

For Alyssa Oldham, a classroom manager in Reno, the job and child care benefit meant rethinking her family size. She and her husband originally envisioned being a one-child family, given child care costs.

Now she comes to work holding two tiny hands belonging to her 4-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter.

“Working here, I was like, ‘We could have another child,’” she says.

Jackie Valley is a staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor.

This story is part of a series on how the child care crisis affects working parents — with a focus on solutions. It was produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.

© 2024 The Christian Science Monitor

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PITTSBURGH — Maria Hubal sent one student back to class just as another walked in. The sixth grader, slouched over with his hood pulled low, made a beeline to a hammock chair and curled up.

Hubal, Bellevue Elementary’s behavioral health school educator, gently asked if everything was OK and what she could do to help. He said he was at a “red” — based on a color thermometer posted by the door that students can use to describe their stress level.

“OK. Give me something so I know what’s going on,” Hubal responded.

The student finally mumbled, “I’m very, very stressed.” He sighed, continuing, “There’s a lot of stuff going on at my home, and also here at school.”

Conversations like this are common in Hubal’s class, the school’s appointed “Chill Room,” where students know her as the chill therapist. The room has an open-door policy — students who are feeling anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, or just need to reset can ask for a room pass at any time during the school day. They have 10 minutes in the room before they have to head back to class, unless Hubal decides they need more.

Bellevue Elementary is one of three school buildings in the Northgate School District, a district of 1,100 students two miles from downtown Pittsburgh. As Northgate returned fully to in-person learning in 2021, educators here noticed that student mental health had worsened, and decided to dedicate nearly a fifth of the district’s federal Covid-relief funds — about $800,000 — to building out its mental health programs.

It contracted with the Allegheny Health Network’s Chill Project, a school-based mindfulness and behavioral health initiative, enabling the district to add six full-time therapists to its staff. The district also partnered with a nearby farm specializing in equine-assisted therapy, and in February, hired a full-time horticulture therapist to expand a horticulture therapy initiative launched last year.

Three years in, educators and district leaders say they’ve seen a noticeable change in their students — both in their academics and their behavior and mental well-being. Behavioral incidents, particularly physical confrontations between students, have dropped in the past three years, according to Caroline Johns, the district’s superintendent. The district’s graduation rate has increased by nearly 11 percent in that time, to 94 percent.

That said, the effort has come with challenges: Northgate spent many months getting buy-in from school staff and families at a time when school-based mental health had become a target of the culture wars elsewhere. The federal funding that propelled these programs is set to expire this year, so the district will need to find other ways of sustaining the work.

“Covid lit the house on fire,” said Jeff Evancho, Northgate’s director of partnerships and equity. “In a lot of ways, this became a method to tackle that problem.”

Related: The school psychologist pipeline is broken. Can new federal money fix it?

The Northgate school district serves students from two small boroughs nestled along the Ohio River, about 90 percent of whom are eligible for the free and reduced-price meal program. Even before the pandemic, the district was dealing with poor academic performance, low attendance, disengaged family members, and student mental and behavioral health challenges.

When students returned to school after months of social isolation, many were grieving family members lost to Covid or coping with parents who had lost their jobs or homes, according to district officials. The district’s guidance counselors had to shift from academic to mental health counseling.

“The needs we saw when the kids came back were more significant than anything we’d ever seen,” said Johns, the superintendent.

A few months before the pandemic, Johns had seen a presentation about AHN’s Chill Project, launched in 2019, and longed to bring it to her district. Its founder and director, William Davies, had worked in urban and suburban schools and seen firsthand the lack of mental health supports. In the 2022-23 academic year, counselors nationwide served an average of 385 students; the numbers were even more stark for school psychologists — 1 to 1,119 students.

“There’s this perfect recipe and perfect storm for an absolute disaster scenario where kids are falling through the cracks, and they’re suffering greatly,” Davies said.

Davies sought to help schools create a culture that prioritized student and teacher mental health in several ways: by establishing universal interventions such as monthly lessons on coping with peer conflict, self harm and other issues; by providing a dedicated space that allows students and teachers to decompress or get immediate help from a therapist; and providing in-school therapy or crisis therapeutic sessions of the sort that are typically offered by a hospital or clinic.

When federal Covid relief funds became available, Johns was able to plow some of the money into bringing the AHN model to her district. Nationwide, other districts made similar calculations: More than a third of 5,000 school districts surveyed by the group FutureEd in 2022 said they planned to use at least some of their Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds on mental health programs or staff. That said, the overall share of spending on those programs appears to be low, according to the group.

Today, Northgate’s three school buildings each have two full-time therapists who, like Hubal in Bellevue, are AHN Chill Program employees, in addition to three school counselors. One therapist at each school provides traditional talk therapy, while the other manages the Chill room and teaches monthly Chill lessons to help students develop strategies for dealing with stress and anxiety.

Sydney Jackson, a senior who has been a regular in the middle/high school’s Chill room since it opened, comes in every day to water the plants that line the window sills. There’s also a “nest” filled with bean bags, and comfy couches and chairs framing an electric fireplace.

Before the Chill room, Sydney said she would often go into the bathroom and cry. Now she visits “Miss Krissy” — Krissy Rohr, the middle/high school’s Chill therapist and educator — who helps her manage her feelings and develop coping skills.

“I’ve gotten so much better at identifying my feelings,” she said. “The thing that I do the most is called “catastrophizing,” which is finding the worst possible outcome of any situation. Miss Krissy has taught me what it is and how to deal with it. I’ve learned how to challenge those thoughts and feelings.”

The regular chill lessons have helped too, she said. On a Tuesday morning, Sydney sat in a classroom with the nine other students in her advisory group, listening as Rohr taught a lesson on healthy relationships.

Rohr opened the discussion by asking the class what friendship meant to them, then asked them to consider what they expect from their friends and the qualities they’re drawn to.

Later, Rohr divided the students into smaller groups and asked each to come up with answers to two questions: “What do you say to a friend that’s pressuring you to do something that you aren’t comfortable with?” and “Why is it better to talk something out with a person as opposed to talking about them with other people?”

As Rohr walked around the class observing, she told one group, “No matter what you do your whole life, you’re never going to be everybody’s cup of tea, somebody is always going to take an issue with something.”

Nevaeh Bonner, a senior, responded: “I try to remind myself of that every day. Just do what you do, do what you want to do, because someone’s just gonna find a reason.”

Related: A surprising remedy for teens in mental health crises

About a 20-minute drive away, Orchardview Stables sits on an expanse of green fields home to 16 horses, two goats, chickens and a resident cat.

Each semester, the district selects eight or nine middle schoolers to care for a horse on the farm — feeding, cleaning and riding it. Mary Kay Soergel, a riding instructor and the director of Orchardview Stables, said when kids come to work with the horses, “they learn compassion” and how to be responsible for another living being.

The farm is a family business for the Soergel family, who not only work but live on the farm. Soergel’s daughter, Tessa Maxwell, is a former special education teacher who serves as the farm’s executive director and the lead certified therapeutic riding instructor. The farm also employs a clinical trauma mental health professional, who also offers expertise as an equine-assisted psychotherapist.

“Horses are pretty honest through their body language. Horses are very accepting as long as you respect them,” said Maxwell. “It’s very therapeutic because kids don’t have to pretend to be something they’re not. They don’t have to worry about the shoes they’re wearing or the clothes they have on or the grades they’re getting.”

This year, the district is trying to align the equine therapy program more closely with the Chill program by having Maxwell and other professionals at the stables work with the district’s Chill therapists. The Orchardview staff try to keep the same themes and lessons the kids might be working through in school in their conversations with kids at the farm, while the Chill therapists help students debrief lessons or emotions they experienced in their work with horses.

The district has also started to embrace horticulture therapy, thanks to a $70,000 “moonshot” grant in 2022 from the organization Remake Learning. Horticulture therapy uses plant-based and gardening activities to help individuals struggling with stress, anxiety and depression.

Through a donation from nearby Chatham University, Northgate received its first greenhouse, built next to the football field outside the middle/high school. Chill therapists have run summer camps there and a gardening club started by the high school art teacher now numbers more than 55 members.

In January, the district hired a certified horticulture therapist to lead the program, including working in the greenhouse with ninth graders who participate in a mandatory life skills class.

Aside from building out specific mental health programs, the district’s elementary schools launched a “Kindness Club” in 2022 and the high school has a “No Place for Hate” club.

Related: Mental health: Is that a job for schools?

Northgate leaders know their level of investment in mental health programs is unusual.  It has also come with risks: School districts in Pennsylvania and across the country have faced opposition from community and school board members when they’ve tried to create programs that address students’ emotional and behavioral needs. Groups such as Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education have sued districts and targeted social-emotional learning programs in Bucks County and Cumberland County.

But Northgate has avoided that so far, in part by taking a gradual approach and being transparent with parents and school board members, say administrators. The district first invested in professional development to educate teachers about, and train them on, the Chill program. The district also started holding family engagement nights to showcase the mental health services and acquaint parents with the Chill lessons.

Cheryl Patalano, who serves on the district’s board of directors, said she is glad that her middle schooler and her high schooler have a safe space in the school they can visit to decompress.

Patalano said that the Chill Room is a place where students can go during the school day when they can’t go home to “get away from things.”

“Now we have this whole room, so I think it’s great,” she said. “They are very non judgmental, and I feel like just knowing that it’s there is also a huge help.”

Evancho, the partnerships and equity director, said the programs have begun to create an atmosphere where students feel comfortable talking about mental health. “There’s no problem for a kid to leave class and say ‘I gotta go to the Chill Room.’ The kids don’t feel weird about it, it’s just built into our school culture in a pretty authentic way.”

Nearly three times as many students access therapy now than before the district partnered with the Chill Project, according to Johns, the superintendent. The district is still collecting data to determine the programs’ effectiveness, and will spend the next school year analyzing the information collected over the past two years, Johns said.

The changes the district has seen in its students are driving it to find funding to keep the programs going when ESSER money evaporates later this year. So far it has secured some additional funding through statewide grants for mental health and school safety, and it is applying for other federal and philanthropic support. Eventually, Johns said, the district will have to find ways to fund the programs directly out of its own budget, which is about $28.5 million a year. All told, Northgate has dedicated about $920,000 in private and public money to the new programs, the vast majority of it for the Chill Project.

On a Tuesday afternoon just after recess, first grader McKenna ran into Bellevue Elementary’s Chill Room for a quick chat with Hubal. She pulled a tub of Lego bricks over to the table and sat down — it’s her favorite activity when talking with Hubal. McKenna said the room is calming, especially if she hugs a Squishmello, one of the many stuffed animals in the room.

She comes into the room when she has a “really, really bad attitude or is angry with somebody,” she said. But she said going to the Chill Room — and the lessons she gets there — has helped her learn to control her emotions and better communicate with her mother and classmates even when she’s frustrated.

Just knowing the room and Hubal are near reassures her, McKenna said: “I can come in here whenever I need and she helps me.”

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

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