Reports about schools squandering their $190 billion in federal pandemic recovery money have been troubling.  Many districts spent that money on things that had nothing to do with academics, particularly building renovations. Less common, but more eye-popping were stories about new football fields, swimming pool passes, hotel rooms at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and even the purchase of an ice cream truck. 

So I was surprised that two independent academic analyses released in June 2024 found that some of the money actually trickled down to students and helped them catch up academically.  Though the two studies used different methods, they arrived at strikingly similar numbers for the average growth in math and reading scores during the 2022-23 school year that could be attributed to each dollar of federal aid. 

One of the research teams, which includes Harvard University economist Tom Kane and Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon, likened the gains to six days of learning in math and three days of learning in reading for every $1,000 in federal pandemic aid per student. Though that gain might seem small, high-poverty districts received an average of $7,700 per student, and those extra “days” of learning for low-income students added up. Still, these neediest children were projected to be one third of a grade level behind low-income students in 2019, before the pandemic disrupted education.

“Federal funding helped and it helped kids most in need,” wrote Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, on X in response to the two studies. Lake was not involved in either report, but has been closely tracking pandemic recovery. “And the spending was worth the gains,” Lake added. “But it will not be enough to do all that is needed.” 

The academic gains per aid dollar were close to what previous researchers had found for increases in school spending. In other words, federal pandemic aid for schools has been just as effective (or ineffective) as other infusions of money for schools. The Harvard-Stanford analysis calculated that the seemingly small academic gains per $1,000 could boost a student’s lifetime earnings by $1,238 – not a dramatic payoff, but not a public policy bust either. And that payoff doesn’t include other societal benefits from higher academic achievement, such as lower rates of arrests and teen motherhood. 

The most interesting nuggets from the two reports, however, were how the academic gains varied wildly across the nation. That’s not only because some schools used the money more effectively than others but also because some schools got much more aid per student.

The poorest districts in the nation, where 80 percent or more of the students live in families whose income is low enough to qualify for the federally funded school lunch program, demonstrated meaningful recovery because they received the most aid. About 6 percent of the 26 million public schoolchildren that the researchers studied are educated in districts this poor. These children had recovered almost half of their pandemic learning losses by the spring of 2023. The very poorest districts, representing 1 percent of the children, were potentially on track for an almost complete recovery in 2024 because they tended to receive the most aid per student. However, these students were far below grade level before the pandemic, so their recovery brings them back to a very low rung.

Some high-poverty school districts received much more aid per student than others. At the top end of the range, students in Detroit received about $26,000 each – $1.3 billion spread among fewer than 49,000 students. One in 10 high-poverty districts received more than $10,700 for each student. An equal number of high-poverty districts received less than $3,700 per student. These surprising differences for places with similar poverty levels occurred because pandemic aid was allocated according to the same byzantine rules that govern federal Title I funding to low-income schools. Those formulas give large minimum grants to small states, and more money to states that spend more per student. 

On the other end of the income spectrum are wealthier districts, where 30 percent or fewer students qualify for the lunch program, representing about a quarter of U.S. children. The Harvard-Stanford researchers expect these students to make an almost complete recovery. That’s not because of federal recovery funds; these districts received less than $1,000 per student, on average. Researchers explained that these students are on track to approach 2019 achievement levels because they didn’t suffer as much learning loss.  Wealthier families also had the means to hire tutors or time to help their children at home.

Middle-income districts, where between 30 percent and 80 percent of students are eligible for the lunch program, were caught in between. Roughly seven out of 10 children in this study fall into this category. Their learning losses were sometimes large, but their pandemic aid wasn’t. They tended to receive between $1,000 and $5,000 per student. Many of these students are still struggling to catch up.

In the second study, researchers Dan Goldhaber of the American Institutes for Research and Grace Falken of the University of Washington estimated that schools around the country, on average, would need an additional $13,000 per student for full recovery in reading and math.  That’s more than Congress appropriated.

There were signs that schools targeted interventions to their neediest students. In school districts that separately reported performance for low-income students, these students tended to post greater recovery per dollar of aid than wealthier students, the Goldhaber-Falken analysis shows.

Impact differed more by race, location and school spending. Districts with larger shares of white students tended to make greater achievement gains per dollar of federal aid than districts with larger shares of Black or Hispanic students. Small towns tended to produce more academic gains per dollar of aid than large cities. And school districts that spend less on education per pupil tended to see more academic gains per dollar of aid than high spenders. The latter makes sense: an extra dollar to a small budget makes a bigger difference than an extra dollar to a large budget. 

The most frustrating part of both reports is that we have no idea what schools did to help students catch up. Researchers weren’t able to connect the academic gains to tutoring, summer school or any of the other interventions that schools have been trying. Schools still have until September to decide how to spend their remaining pandemic recovery funds, and, unfortunately, these analyses provide zero guidance.

And maybe some of the non-academic things that schools spent money on weren’t so frivolous after all. A draft paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research in January 2024 calculated that school spending on basic infrastructure, such as air conditioning and heating systems, raised test scores. Spending on athletic facilities did not. 

Meanwhile, the final score on pandemic recovery for students is still to come. I’ll be looking out for it.

This story about federal funding for education was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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Teacher layoffs are likely this fall as $190 billion in federal pandemic aid expires. By one estimate, schools spent a fifth of their temporary funds on hiring new people, most of them teachers. Those jobs may soon be cut with many less experienced teachers losing their jobs first. The education world describes this policy with a business acronym used in inventory accounting: LIFO or “Last In, First Out.” 

Intuitively, LIFO seems smart. It not only rewards teachers for their years of service, but there’s also good evidence that teachers improve with experience. Not every seasoned teacher is great, but on average, veterans are better than rookies. Keeping them in classrooms is generally best for students.

The problem is that senior teachers aren’t evenly distributed across schools. Wealthier and whiter schools tend to have more experienced teachers. By contrast, high-poverty schools, often populated by Black and Hispanic students, are staffed by more junior teachers. That’s because stressful working conditions at low-income schools prompt many teachers to leave after a short stint. Each year, they’re replaced with a fresh crop of young teachers and the turnover repeats. 

When school districts lay teachers off by seniority, high-poverty schools end up bearing the brunt of the job cuts. The policy exacerbates the teacher churn at these schools. And that churn alone harms student achievement, especially when a large share of teachers are going through the rocky period of adjusting to a new workplace. 

“LIFO is not very good for kids,” said Dan Goldhaber, a labor economist at the American Institutes for Research, speaking to journalists about expected teacher layoffs at the 2024 annual meeting of the Education Writers Association in Las Vegas.

The last time there were mass teacher layoffs was after the 2008 recession. Economists estimate that 120,000 elementary, middle and high school teachers lost their jobs between 2008 and 2012. The vast majority of school districts used seniority as the sole criteria for determining which teachers were laid off, according to a 2022 policy brief published in the journal Education Finance and Policy. In some cases, state law mandated that teacher layoffs had to be done by seniority. LIFO rules were also written into teachers union contracts. In other cases, school leaders simply decided to carry out layoffs this way. 

Economists haven’t been able to conclusively prove that student achievement suffered more under LIFO layoffs than other ways of reducing the teacher workforce. But the evidence points in that direction for children in poverty and for Black and Hispanic students, according to two research briefs by separate groups of scholars that reviewed dozens of studies. For example, in the first two years after the 2008 recession, Black and Hispanic elementary students in Los Angeles Unified School District had 72 percent and 25 percent greater odds, respectively, of having their teacher laid off compared to their white peers, according to one study. 

Districts with higher rates of poverty and larger shares of Black and Hispanic students were more likely to have seniority-based layoff policies, according to another study. “LIFO layoff policies end up removing less experienced teachers, sometimes in mass, from a small handful of schools,” wrote Matthew Kraft and Joshua Bleiberg in their 2022 policy brief for the journal, Education Finance and Policy.

Budget cuts can create some messy situations. Terry Grier, a retired superintendent, who ran the San Diego school district following the 2008 recession, remembers that his district cut costs by eliminating jobs in the central office and reassigning these bureaucrats, many of whom had teacher certifications, to fill classroom vacancies. To avoid additional layoffs, his school board forced him to transfer teachers in overstaffed schools to fill classroom vacancies elsewhere, Grier said. The union contract specified that forced transfers had to begin with teachers who had the least seniority. That exacerbated teacher turnover at his poorest schools, and the loss of some very good teachers, he said. 

“Despite being relatively new to the profession, many of these teachers were highly skilled,” said Grier. 

Losing promising new talent is painful. Raúl Gastón, the principal of a predominantly Hispanic and low-income middle school in Villa Park, Ill., still regrets not having the discretion to lay off a teacher whose poor performance was under review, and being forced instead to let go of an “excellent” rookie teacher in 2015.

“It was a gut punch,” Gastón said. “She had just received a great rating on her evaluation. I was looking forward to what she could do to bring up our scores and help our students.”

The loss of excellent early career teachers was made stark in Minnesota, where Qorsho Hassan lost her job in the spring of 2020 because of her district’s adherence to LIFO rules. After her layoff, Hassan was named the state’s Teacher of the Year. 

Hassan was also a Black teacher, which highlights another unintended consequence of layoff policies that protect veteran teachers: they disproportionately eliminate Black and Hispanic faculty. That undermines efforts to diversify the teacher workforce, which is 80 percent white, while the U.S. public school student population is less than half white. In recent years, districts have had some success in recruiting more Black and Hispanic teachers, but many of them are still early in their careers. 

The unfairness of LIFO layoffs became evident after the 2008 recession. Since then, 20 states have enacted laws to restrict the use of seniority as the main criteria for who gets laid off. But many states still permit it, including Texas. State laws in California and New York still require that layoffs be carried out by seniority, according to TNTP, a nonprofit focused on improving K-12 education, and Educators for Excellence. 

While there is a consensus among researchers that LIFO layoffs have unintended consequences that harm both students and teachers, there’s debate about what should replace this policy. One approach would be to lay off less effective teachers, regardless of seniority. But teacher effectiveness ratings, based on student test scores, are controversial and unpopular with teachers. Observational ratings can be subjective and, in practice, these evaluations tend to rate most teachers highly, making it hard to use them to distinguish teacher quality.

Others have suggested keeping a seniority system in place but adding additional protections for certain kinds of teachers, such as those who teach in hard-to-staff, high-poverty schools. Oregon keeps LIFO in place, but in 2021 carved out an exception for teachers with “cultural and linguistic expertise.” In 2022, Minneapolis schools decided that “underrepresented” teachers would be skipped during seniority-based layoffs. Still another idea is to make layoffs proportional to school size so that poor schools don’t suffer more than others.

This story about teacher layoffs was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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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.”

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

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.”

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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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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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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — As their teacher pounded his drums, belting the lyrics to the Native folk rock song “NDN Kars,” middle schoolers Eli, Izzy and Manin rehearsed new guitar chords for an upcoming performance.

“I got a sticker that says ‘Indian Power,’” teacher Luke Cordova sang. “I stuck it on my bumper. That’s what holds my car together.”

Inside a neighboring greenhouse, a group of school staff and volunteers prepared to harvest herbs and vegetables for students to use in medicinal teas and recipes during science lessons on local ecology. Meanwhile, in a 19th century schoolhouse next door, eighth graders in a Native literature class debated the consequences of racism on college campuses. “Remember,” teacher Morgan Barraza (Akimel O’odham, Kawaika, Apache, Thai) told them, “power is not all with the decision makers. You as a community have power, too.”

Once the site of an Indian boarding school, where the federal government attempted to strip children of their tribal identity, the Native American Community Academy now offers the opposite: a public education designed to affirm and draw from each student’s traditional culture and language.

The charter school, NACA, opened its doors in 2006. Today, it enrolls roughly 500 students from 60 different tribes in grades K-12, bolstering their Indigenous heritage with land-based lessons and language courses built into a college preparatory model. High schoolers at NACA graduate at much higher rates and tend to outperform their peers in Albuquerque Public Schools — which authorizes the charter — and throughout New Mexico. Over the past decade, NACA’s academic track record and reputation with families and tribal leaders has spurred the creation of a network of schools designed to overhaul education for Native students across the American West.

At 13 campuses in five states, the NACA Inspired Schools Network supports tribal communities that have found little support in traditional K-12 systems and want academic alternatives that reflect their hopes and expectations for the next generation. Each school approaches that mission very differently, and with varying results. Some have struggled to keep their doors open, testing the Albuquerque-based network’s ability to sustain its success beyond the flagship school. Still, network leaders plan to continue expanding and hope to present the NACA model as a way to grant Indigenous families the self-determination and sovereignty that has been denied to them for generations.

“In 150 years, we moved from a foreign, abusive, violent structure to now, where maybe our communities have something to say about where education is going,” said Anpao Duta Flying Earth (Lakota, Dakota, Ojibwe, Akimel O’odham), the network’s executive director. “We’re leading these schools. We’re in the classrooms. It’s not just maintaining status quo. It’s how we’re pushing the edge of what’s possible.”

Related: 3 Native American women head to college in the pandemic. Will they get a sophomore year?

NACA was born out of an urgent need to reimagine education for Indigenous youth: In 2005, 

three quarters of Native American students graduated on time in the Albuquerque school district, compared to 87 percent of all students, according to state data. Only about 1 in 4 students identifying as American Indian tested proficient in math, while proficiency rates in reading and science hovered closer to 40 percent. A string of suicides in the city’s Native communities, especially among youth, shocked educators.

In response, Native administrators within the district started meeting with families, college graduates and tribal leaders to discuss what a better education for Native students might look like. More than 200 people weighed in, often sharing their poor experiences in traditional schools, such as pervasively low expectations and a lack of cultural awareness among teachers. Community members prioritized three things in their dream school for Native youth: secure cultural identities, college preparation and holistic wellness.

Those conversations prompted Albuquerque Public Schools to authorize NACA as its first charter. Today, courses at all grade levels include Indigenous history, numeracy, land-based science and language classes in Keres, Lakota, Navajo, Tiwa, Spanish and Zuni. About two-thirds of the school’s teachers are Native American, with many alumni now leading classrooms. 

NACA requires students to take at least two college-level courses and earn internship credit. Last year, nearly 80 percent of graduates enrolled in college, up from 65 percent for the class of 2022. The school also tracks college completion rates, with 59 percent of the class of 2012 finishing within six years. Since then, the numbers have slipped to the single digits, with just 5 percent of the class of 2016 finishing within six years, according to a data analysis from the charter school network. (School officials said the decline is due to incomplete data.)

Younger students attend the K-8 campus on the former boarding school site, while the high school is located in a gleaming new tower nearby at the Central New Mexico College.

During a lunch break, 11th graders Joshua, a Navajo Nation citizen, and Tyshawn, from the Laguna Pueblo, volleyed a badminton birdie under the tower’s shadow. Both are recent transfers to NACA — Tyshawn from a private Catholic school and Joshua from a traditional public high school.

“There was nothing like this. No language class, nothing,” Joshua said of his previous school. Discussions of tribal culture were limited to a few isolated craft projects during a history unit and inaccurate portrayals of Indians at the “First Thanksgiving,” he recalled.

“Yeah, not at my school,” Tyshawn agreed, chuckling. “You had to learn that experience yourself.”

“I was the ‘only’ a lot,” added Joshua, referring to his Native identity. “We fill an entire school here.”

Related: Schools bar Native students from wearing traditional regalia at graduation

It’s only recently that the U.S. has fully acknowledged its long history of using education as a weapon against tribes. An investigative report released by the U.S. Department of the Interior in May 2022 identified more than 400 Indian boarding schools, across dozens of states and former territories, as part of a system that directly targeted children “in the pursuit of a policy of cultural assimilation.”

The investigation found evidence of at least 53 burial sites for children. Schools renamed students with English names, cut their hair and punished them — through solitary confinement, flogging and withholding food — for speaking Native languages or practicing their traditional religions. Manual labor was a predominant part of school curricula, but often left graduates with few employable skills.

“We continue to see the evidence of this attempt to forcibly assimilate Indigenous people in the disparities that communities face,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, said at the time of the report’s release.

According to a 2019 national survey, close to half of American Indian and Alaska Native students reported knowing “nothing” or only “a little” about their cultural heritage. A majority — between 83 percent and 91 percent — of fourth and eighth graders in the survey said they could not speak or read in their heritage language, or reported knowing a few words or phrases at most. Other studies have found significantly higher child poverty rates, lower graduation rates and lower performance on standardized exams for Native students.

As the state of education for these children continued to languish, the U.S. Department of Education in 2018 pushed for the expansion of high-quality charter schools meant to serve Native communities, among other groups it deemed educationally disadvantaged and underserved by the existing charter sector. It later published, in partnership with the National Indian Education Association, a guide to help founders and supporters of new Native American charter schools.

“The word just hasn’t gotten out about the ability to do this,” said Todd Ziebarth, a senior vice president of state advocacy and support at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

In its tally of about 4,300 charter schools with at least one Native American student, the Alliance counts at least 16 schools specifically dedicated to Native American cultural affirmation. Only a handful offer classes taught in an Indigenous language.

Related: College tuition breaks for Indigenous students spread, but some tribes are left out

In one of those schools, about 90 miles northeast of Albuquerque, a dozen students walked into the front office of Kha’p’o Community School with stacks of books teetering in their hands.

They’d just cleaned the shelves at the Santa Clara Pueblo library, grabbing their favorite titles in Tewa, one of the languages spoken by the Pueblo people in New Mexico. The third graders juggled the books as they traversed a courtyard ringed by adobe houses-turned-classrooms, with teacher Paul Chavarria trailing them.

Back in their classroom, Chavarria, a first-year Tewa language teacher at Kha’p’o, commenced a lesson on the language. It’s a traditionally oral language, and speakers frown on any written form. Chavarria, though, scribbled a rough translation for “stone,” “trees” and “plants” on a whiteboard to help the students learn their heritage language.

For decades, the school (then known as Santa Clara Day School) was run by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education, or BIE, which today operates 183 schools on 64 reservations. But in 2014, after the government-appointed principal barred a Tewa teacher from campus, tribal leaders took control of the school from the federal government, said Porter Swentzell, the school’s executive director and an enrolled member of the Pueblo. That same year, the school officially joined the NACA-inspired network as a K-6 charter school with a dual language immersion model. Today, it enrolls about 90 students. 

“In our hands, language is a sacred obligation. Our job is bigger than math or ELA,” Swentzell said.. “Our story doesn’t begin with us, and it certainly won’t end with us.”

Swentzell, who served on the school board when it shifted to tribal control, recalled a rocky start for Kha’p’o. The BIE withdrew the bulk of its support, he said. Teachers and staff had to reapply for their jobs, which no longer offered salaries at the federal level. In terms of school policies, technology systems, contracts and more, “we were starting from scratch,” Swentzell said.

Then, during the pandemic, Kha’p’o’s principal left, and enrollment plummeted from 120 students to 73, as multigenerational households kept their children at home. Half of the school’s teaching positions were unfilled, largely because of its remote location and lower salaries, according to Swentzell, who took over as head of school in 2022. 

Kha’p’o wasn’t the only school in the network to lose its leader during the pandemic. And each has since struggled to get academics and operations back on track, said Flying Earth, head of the charter network. The network has tried to help: In 2022, it created a fellowship program to nurture new leaders like Swentzell, a former professor at the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. The fellows meet regularly on Zoom and gather in person once a year, along with a lead teacher or executive team member who could potentially become principal one day.

Related: How one Minneapolis university more than doubled its Native student graduation rate

Indeed, as the network has grown, it has confronted the difficulty of recreating the “NACA sauce” — as the flagship’s principal called it — in each new tribal community.

Six Directions Indigenous School opened the same year as Kha’p’o, in the western region of the state near the Navajo Nation and Zuni Reservation. Data from the New Mexico Public Education Department shows that 1 in 5 students at the charter school tested proficient in science. About 1 in 10 students perform on grade level in math, with a slightly better rate in reading, at 14 percent. 

Aside from academic problems, students at Six Directions have protested what they view as the school’s failure to fulfill its charter of serving Native youth. “It’s right there on all the signs: ‘This is an Indigenous school,’” said Caleb, a 14-year-old Hopi freshman. “This is supposed to be an opportunity for us to know our culture. These teachers weren’t doing that.”

At the start of the school year, in August, Caleb and other high schoolers at the K-12 campus staged an impromptu walkout to protest what they described as a revolving door of teachers hired from overseas and ongoing vacancies for language and culture classes. As of late fall, the entire school had just one core teacher, in science.

The walkout happened during Rebecca Niiha’s first week on the job as new head administrator of Six Directions. A former teacher who has worked on the Zuni and Navajo reservations, Niiha, who is Hopi, had admired Six Directions from afar. But she described finding its academic achievement and school climate as “degenerative” on day one.

After the walkout, two more teachers quit. Then the school’s current landlord announced it planned to sell the property, leaving Niiha unsure if she’d have to find a new location. In January, Six Directions received a warning from the state about its poor performance. 

The network’s support of struggling schools, like Six Directions, can only go so far. It does not directly authorize any charter and has limited ability to hold the schools accountable. 

Still, the network dispatches experts on finance, community engagement, student experience, curriculum and professional development. On a weekday last year, a team from the network met with Niiha to discuss options for the school’s location, training for teachers and an upcoming charter reauthorization. The network also recently partnered with AmeriCorps to place Indigenous educators in schools to offer classroom support, tutoring and mentoring, and has worked with individual tribes to certify teachers in heritage languages.

“Once a school’s created, we’re in it for the long haul together,” said Ben Calabaza, Kewa – Santa Domingo Pueblo and a spokesperson for the charter network.

Ultimately, the network wants to avoid being forced to close another of its member schools, as happened last year when Denver Public Schools shuttered the American Indian Academy. That school opened in fall 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and suffered from low enrollment and poor finances, according to the charter’s board of directors.

Flying Earth acknowledged the challenges of running a charter network that spans schools in several states. He said the charter model isn’t, on its own, a solution for poor educational outcomes for Native students. But he added that the NACA-inspired network has done what it promised: offered tribal communities a chance to have agency in building a dream school for their Native youth.

“How do we use the structures of education today, including charter schools, to lift up the genius that’s always been there, since time immemorial?” Flying Earth said, referring to the “genius” of traditional ways of knowing in Native communities. “The namesake school of NACA serves as an example of how one community did it.”

Many students, long after graduation, continue to contribute to that community. Some have returned as teachers and school staff. Emmet Yepa Jr., Jemez Pueblo, commuted two hours each way to attend NACA in downtown Albuquerque when he was in high school. Now, at 30, he sings every year at the school’s annual feast day — a traditional celebration among New Mexico pueblos.

“What attracted me to NACA was just the community,” he said. “They really emphasize your culture and holistic wellbeing.”

Yepa earned a Grammy Award as a child and later graduated from NACA as part of its inaugural class in 2012. From there, he went on to the University of New Mexico and now works for an Albuquerque nonprofit that includes land-based and outdoor education in civic leadership programs for young people.

Based on his positive experience, his siblings enrolled at NACA. His younger sister graduated  last year and now attends UNM, while his younger brother is a sixth grader.

“It’s hard to get into NACA now because there’s a waiting list,” Yepa said. “Thankfully he got a spot.”

This story about NACA 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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Jolene Hunt-Fleming did not hesitate nearly 13 years ago when her daughter asked for help with her newborn baby son. She knew her daughter, a single parent, needed full-time child care to finish school and work.

Hunt-Fleming, who has worked for years as a mortgage funder and is certified in human services, also stepped in when the next three grandchildren – now ages 2, 6, and 9 – came along. My daughter “was very skeptical about other people watching her children,” said Hunt-Fleming, who lives in La Habra, California.

Although the work has been a personal joy, it’s also been a financial sacrifice. The grandmother learned quickly from the Children’s Home Society of California that the state offers subsidies for family caregivers, but the pay might well be below minimum wage. At one point, Hunt-Fleming — who cradled her 2-year-old granddaughter in her lap during most of our interview over Zoom — made only $1.79 an hour for the work. She currently earns about $2,800 each month from the state to watch the 2-year-old full time, and her siblings part-time. “If I wasn’t providing care for the children…I’m sure it would be substantially more that I would be bringing in,” she said.

Family, friend and neighbor caregivers, often referred to as “informal” care, are both underpaid and too often unable to access the money they are entitled to, according to a new policy brief from Early Edge California, which supports quality early learning opportunities for children from birth; the brief was produced in collaboration with several other groups. Between a third and a half of all children under the age of five receive informal care from a family member, friend or neighbor, making it the most common child care arrangement for this age group outside of parental care. Many of these caregivers are grandparents, like Hunt-Fleming.

In many states, informal caregivers are eligible for some form of funded support for their work, the most common being child care subsidies for children from low-income families. There are also state and locally-funded models for support. But nationally, less than 20 percent of the more than 4.5 million informal caregivers receive the subsidies or related payment, according to a 2022 report from the BUILD Initiative, which provides support to state leaders for early childhood programs. In California about one in four of informal caregivers go unpaid, the Early Edge report noted.

The California effort is just one example of growing momentum across the country to provide more resources and support for these caregivers, who have only become more essential after the pandemic contributed to a devastating loss in licensed child care spaces in many communities. In Colorado, a recent law makes it easier for immigrants and undocumented caregivers to access the subsidies, according to the BUILD Initiative report. Meanwhile, Louisiana has simplified the process for informal providers to become registered. And New Mexico took steps to provide them with significantly more public funding.

California is unusual in that informal caregivers can be part of the collective bargaining unit for home-based child care providers in the state, as long as the children in their care are eligible for subsidies. That said, they have historically been less organized and visible in policy debates than licensed home-based providers. “We saw the need to give them a voice,” said Patricia Lozano, executive director of Early Edge.

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

Scores of California caregivers don’t receive the state subsidies they are entitled to for a variety of reasons. “Many times there are language barriers,” Lozano said. And some caregivers “are afraid that their immigration status will impact whether they can get subsidies.”

The policy brief described several of the key barriers, including: mistrust over interacting with the government; fear of losing access to other government benefits; challenges navigating the enrollment system; and a lack of awareness.

The state needs to let more people know that financial support is available, Hunt-Fleming said. “It could start in the doctor’s office or the schools.”

The policy brief also provided recommendations for change and ramped up outreach. Those could include making multilingual posters and brochures available at libraries, parks and recreation services; technical assistance in navigating digital applications; and tax guidance so the caregivers don’t have to worry about jeopardizing other forms of government aid to access the subsidies.

“It’s important to acknowledge them and make them part of the system,” Lozano said. In California there’s a real need to raise the reimbursement rates for all types of child care providers, including informal ones, who currently receive 70 percent of what licensed family child care providers get, she added. “We can raise everybody,” she said. “The bar is so low right now.”

Hunt-Fleming doesn’t think she could make it work financially without a husband who brings in regular income. Besides the low pay, the reimbursement process can be slow. The state never processes subsidies toward the end of the month, when most people have rent and other payments due, she said. “That’s hard because I have bills,” she said.

Hunt-Fleming spends whatever hours she can on advocacy work for her colleagues through a program called California Leading from Home. After more than a decade spending her days changing diapers, taking kids to doctor appointments and helping the older ones with homework, she wants others in her situation — and policy makers, too — to view the work as more than a gesture of love. She wants them to see it as a real job.

This story about informal 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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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Across the country, the story for families is virtually the same: Child care is unaffordable for many, hard to find for those who can pay, and financially precarious for day care operators and their employees.

The Biden administration and Congress tried to alleviate some of these problems when the pandemic crippled the child care industry. But as the record $52.5 billion in relief winds down, many states have stepped in with their own solutions.

States have expanded free preschool and early education and helped more families pay for child care, making it low-cost or even free for many. Recognizing that a federal solution is unlikely to materialize anytime soon, policymakers have come up with novel ways to pay for their plans, creating permanent funding sources that will make new programs sustainable.

New Mexico, for instance, has tapped into its petroleum revenue, Washington state put a new tax on investment profits, and Kentucky is incentivizing parents to become child care workers. 

And while the largest investments in child care have come from Democrats, Republican state lawmakers across the country are embracing plans to support child care — citing the importance to the economy.

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

After she gave birth, Marisshia Sigala put on hold plans to start her real estate career. She and her husband — a personal trainer — lived on one paycheck for about two years and realized the cost of child care would be out of reach even if both were working.

Then, in 2022, New Mexico made child care free for nearly all the state’s families, amending the constitution to fund early childhood initiatives with money from leasing state land to oil and gas companies. 

The change will bring in an estimated $150 million a year for the early education of children like Mateo. Sigala and her husband qualify because they earn less than 400 percent of the federal poverty rate of about $120,000 a year for a family of four. Mateo is one of more than 21,000 children now benefitting from the subsidies. 

Now Sigala, 32, is back at work while Mateo attends Koala Children’s Academy, which specializes in bilingual education. 

“Being entrepreneurs, it’s a lot more challenging, and we have to rely on ourselves. We don’t have a paycheck coming in every week,” Sigala said. “It’s been a blessing for us.”

Related: What convinces voters to raise taxes: child care

Expanding free child care for families is “making a difference for families in such a profound way,” said Elizabeth Groginsky, New Mexico’s early childhood education secretary. And, she said, it’s helping the people who care for and educate young kids, too.

Groginsky and other state leaders are hoping the massive investment will help blunt the effects of poverty.

“It’s just a really incredible opportunity we have here,” she said. 

Washington state is aiming to offer free preschool to all low-income families, and child care vouchers to all low- and moderate-income families by the end of the decade, along with high-quality care for infants and toddlers with developmental concerns.

The state is expanding its programs with help from a new 7 percent tax on profits made from residents’ financial investments — a levy intended to fall on wealthier people.

When Zaneta Billyzone-Jatta’s daughter Zakiah was born prematurely in 2021, her mother hired a nanny to watch the baby three days a week. A clinical manager for a hospital network, Billyzone-Jatta, 42, had to work while keeping an eye on her daughter the other two days. She felt like she couldn’t give her toddler enough attention, much less address the girl’s developmental concerns like a professional could. 

Through a state program for low-income families and kids with challenges like Zakiah, she now sends her daughter to a child care center near her Seattle-area home, free of cost. There, three teachers supervise seven children in Zakiah’s class and diligently document her progress. Occupational and speech therapists see Zakiah at the school and work closely with the teachers.

Related: Schools tackle child care needs to keep staff in classrooms

Billyzone-Jatta said Zakiah has made huge strides at the school. She talks about her days in detail and refers to classmates by name. She has learned to interact with other students, drink from an open cup and share. 

“Being a working mother and being able to know that you’re bringing your child to an environment where they’re loved and cared for gives you so much peace,” she said.

But the program helping infants and toddlers like Zakiah is still small, serving fewer than 200 kids statewide. And in November, Washington voters will have a chance to weigh in on the tax in a referendum that could lead to its repeal, endangering the progress the state has made.

“It would be catastrophic,” said Jon Gould, of Akin, the nonprofit that operates Zakiah’s state-supported child care center.

Rilee Monn, 24, was working at Baptist Health Child Development Center in Lexington when she had her second child, doubling what she paid for her children to attend the same center. 

She thought about quitting and getting a night-shift job so she could stay home and care for her children during the day.

“All of my paycheck was going to child care,” Monn said.

Related: Our child care system gives many moms a draconian choice: Quality child care or a career

Then, in 2023, Kentucky started a program to cover or reduce the cost of day care for parents who work in the child care industry. The program was meant to tackle two challenges at once. Policymakers hoped it would draw more workers into the child care industry, addressing a shortage. And they wanted to provide more low-cost child care for all families.

Now, more than a dozen states are considering or have already adopted policies modeled after the one in Kentucky, according to EdSurge, a publication that focuses on education.

The program has helped the state’s child care industry recruit workers who might otherwise be working in service jobs.

Delaney Griffin, 30, was working in a pizza restaurant last year and pondering her next move with her young family. Her child care costs consumed all but $100 of her biweekly check. 

After learning about the child care benefit, she took a job in December with Baptist Health Child Development Center. She now pays about $5 a week. Her older child is in a preschool program.

“The free child care part was like the biggest reason that I actually got to start in child care,” Griffin said. 

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

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Seventy years ago this month, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, rejecting legal racial segregation of public schools. The decision appeared to pave the way for equal educational opportunities for every child and integrated classrooms where students from all backgrounds could prepare to thrive in their communities, careers and lives.

Yet our progress toward integration stalled and is now backsliding, even as our communities and workforce grow evermore diverse. And we’ve failed to achieve equity on just about every metric of access to educational opportunity.

In the 1954 decision, the justices declared that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” They also called education “the most important function of state and local governments,” the “very foundation of good citizenship” and “a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values [and] in preparing him for later professional training.”

Seven decades later, those words ring truer than ever. The link between education and economic opportunity has only increased. And our democracy is desperately in need of shared knowledge and understanding across cultural, racial, economic and geographic lines.

But the tragic reality is that our schools are still segregated, and separate is still unequal. Educational resources remain correlated to the whiteness of a school or district’s student body. I spent nearly two decades of my career working to change that equation: to shift funding and other crucial resources toward schools that disproportionately serve Black and Latino students, students from lower-income communities and other groups of students who have historically been denied equal opportunity.

Now I’ve come to believe that in a country shaped by centuries of systemic racism and structural inequality, we will never find the political will to achieve true funding equity at scale so long as schools remain highly segregated.

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It’s a hard truth that, in America, green still follows white. So, until our children all sit together, the odds are long that we’ll fairly fund allour schools.

One thing we have seen work at scale? Integration. In the wake of Brown, court-ordered desegregation increased high school graduation rates for Black students by 30 percent and decreased poverty rates by 22 percent. Integration works for Latino students too. Due to desegregation after Mendez v. Westminster, a different lawsuit in California, Mexican American students’ graduation rates rose by over 19 percent.

These were big, life-changing results with intergenerational effects for families.

None of this is to say that the early attempts at integration were perfect; far from it. Too often, the brunt of those efforts was borne by Black communities in the form of long commutes, isolation, discrimination, educator job losses and outright racist intimidation.

The political backlash against desegregation left a lasting impression on a generation of leaders and advocates; that backlash at least partially explains why so many in the education field have turned their backs on integration as an equity strategy.

But while we must not repeat the mistakes of past desegregation efforts, we cannot afford to turn our backs on integration.

Our understanding of what makes for successful and inclusive integration has evolved tremendously since the early days of desegregation. We know now, to take just one example, that a truly integrated school must include both diverse students and diverse educators.

The political landscape is shifting. In a recent nationwide poll, our nonprofit, Brown’s Promise, found that 71 percent of American adults — including strong majorities across racial groups — favor “re-organizing school districts to have more racially and economically diverse student bodies and providing more resources to the school districts that serve students who need the most help.”

Just 12 percent oppose.

The overwhelming and, for some, surprising support reflects a growing realization that diverse classrooms benefit all children by preparing them for the real world and the workplaces they will face as adults.

And it reflects what we are hearing at Brown’s Promise when we revisit this 70-year-old conversation with community-based partners in states across the country: curiosity about the way invisible district lines segregate children and lead to unfair school funding practices and interest in what we can do differently.

As we approach this milestone anniversary, I am feeling inspired by these conversations with families and community leaders.

Our task now is to harness that support and recommit to real action toward realizing Brown’s promise by rethinking school and district lines that have separated children from each other for far too long.

The specifics of that action will vary from community to community based on local context, but some examples include: creating interdistrict transfer programs; investing in magnet schools to attract students of all racial, ethnic, linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds; fostering school pairings, in which two highly segregated neighborhood elementary schools unite to create a single, integrated school; and consolidating small, gerrymandered school districts into larger, more diverse, countywide districts.

Related: PROOF POINTS: 5 takeaways about segregation 70 years after the Brown decision

Any of these actions must be paired with additional measures to fully and fairly fund public schools and to ensure positive student experiences for all students — especially for students of color in primarily white environments.

None of this will be easy; it never has been. But there are clear paths forward that we can forge together. And if we don’t try, we’ll still be sitting here in another 70 years reflecting on the lack of progress since Brown.

Ary Amerikaner is co-founder and executive director of Brown’s Promise, an organization housed at the Southern Education Foundation and dedicated to achieving educational equity. She served as deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education from 2015 to 2017

This story about Brown v. Board of Education and school segregation was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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