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.

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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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Before she got to the math in her lesson on linear equations last fall, Sydney Kealanahele asked her class of eighth graders on Oahu why kalo, or taro root, is so important in Hawaii.* What do you know about kalo, she asked them. Have you ever picked it?

A boy who had never spoken in class, and never seemed even slightly interested in math, raised his hand.

“He said, ‘I pick kalo with my grandma. She has a farm,’” Kealanahele recalled. “He was excited to tell us about that.”

Class discussion got animated. Everybody knew about poi, the creamy staple Hawaiian food made from mashed taro. Others had even noticed that there were fewer taro farms on Oahu.

That’s when Kealanahele guided the conversation to the whiteboard, plotting data on pounds of taro produced over time on a graph, which created a perfect descending line. The class talked about why there is less taro production, which led to a discussion about the shortage of farm labor.

Kealanahele had taught eighth-grade math for six years at a campus of the Kamehameha Schools, but this was the first time she had started a lesson with a conversation about farming. The idea came from professional development she’d just completed, in ethnomathematics, an approach that connects math to culture by embedding math in a story about something relevant to students’ lives.

Ethnomathematics isn’t new, but until recently it was limited to a niche area of educational and anthropological research on how different cultures use math. Over the past couple of decades, it has evolved into one of several efforts to create more engaging and inclusive math classrooms, particularly for Black, Hispanic and Indigenous students, who tend to score lower on federal tests than their Asian and white peers. Ethnomathematics advocates say that persistent achievement gaps are in part a result of overly abstract math instruction that’s disconnected from student experience, and that there’s an urgent need for new approaches that recognize mathematical knowledge as it’s practiced outside of textbooks.

Many Black and Brown students don’t feel comfortable in math classes, said Shelly Jones, professor of math education at Central Connecticut State University. She said those classes tend to be “competitive” and that teachers “hone in on what Black and Brown students don’t know as opposed to honoring what they do know.” She added:  “We are trying to pull in students who have not traditionally felt they belonged in math spaces.”

That said, research on the impact of ethnomathematics is limited, and its practice is largely confined to individual classrooms — like Kealanehele’s — where the teacher has sought out the approach. And teachers who incorporate ethnomathematics without the right support and instructional tools risk stumbling into a cultural minefield, experts say. Most teachers in U.S. classrooms are white. If one of those white teachers decides their Hispanic students should learn base-20 Mayan numbers, and their students ask why, the teacher will have to come up with an answer, said Ron Eglash, a professor in the University of Michigan’s School of Information.

“Telling kids, ‘Because it’s your heritage,’ sounds really awkward from a white teacher,” Eglash said.

But experts say that high-quality ethnomathematics lessons boost student confidence and engagement when used by teachers (of any race) who have been trained and who allow students the time to explore the material on their own and through discussion.

Ethnomathematics falls under the same umbrella as culturally responsive math instruction. Experts say that teaching math this way requires teachers to get to know their students and create a learning environment where students can connect to math concepts. It involves developing lessons that reveal the math in everyday activities, like skateboarding, braiding and weaving. It can also include exploring the math involved in cultural practices, like beading.

“A lot of this work is about removing barriers or perceptions from a marginalized population that math is something the Greeks created and is imposed on me,” said Mark Ellis, a professor of education at California State University, Fullerton. He said that culturally responsive instruction takes other measures into account, besides academic outcomes, when determining impact. These include students’ attitude about math, sense of belonging in math classes and engagement in math discourses.

Related: Eliminating advanced math ‘tracks’ often prompts outrage. Some districts buck the trend

Traditional math instruction, Ellis said, is treated as if math were acultural, even though, as we know it in the U.S., math descended from the computational traditions of many places, including Mesopotamia (360-degree circles), ancient Greece (geometry and trigonometry), India (decimal notation, the concept of zero) and China (negative numbers). If these mathematical traditions are taught, Ellis and others ask, then why not Hawaiian calculations for slope, sub-Saharan fractal geometry and Mayan counting systems?

Eglash argues that ethnomathematics lessons aren’t just for students from the culture that the lessons draw from. It’s important that students explore math concepts from all cultures, including their own, he said.

Ethnomathematics, a term coined in the 1970s by Brazilian mathematician Ubiratan D’Ambrosio, first appeared in the U.S. about 25 years ago. That’s when Eglash and his wife, University of Michigan design professor Audrey Bennett, developed a suite of teaching modules by which students learn the history or context of a practice — braiding hair into cornrows, for example — and then use algebra, geometry and trigonometry to create their own cornrow designs with software.

Eglash and Bennett designed the teaching tools with the idea that students can use a module to create their work, which can mean mixing cultures. A Puerto Rican student used Eglash’s module about Native American beading to create a Puerto Rican flag simulation.

In 2009, Richmond City Public Schools asked Eglash and Bennett to teach a module called Cornrow Curves to a class of Black 10th graders. Eglash asked the class where cornrows came from. Their answer: “Brooklyn!” That led to discussion about the African origins of cornrows — where they indicated marriage status, religious affiliation and other social markers — and on through cornrows’ history during the Middle Passage, Civil Rights, hip-hop and Afrofuturism.

Only then did the students begin doing math, designing their own cornrows, noticing how the plaits get closer together or further apart depending on the values students enter in a simulation. One student created a design for straight-line cornrows by visually estimating how far to space them apart. In her presentation to class, Eglash recalled, she said that “there are 12 spaces between the braids on one side, which covers 90 degrees, so the braids are positioned every 7.5 degrees because 90/12 = 7.5.”

The Cornrow Curves module and other lessons like it have now been adopted by districts in 25 states. The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, began offering a culturally responsive computer science curriculum in 2008 that incorporates ethnomathematics lessons that Eglash and Bennett developed. Some evidence indicates that this course helped boost student participation in computer science: An external evaluation found that enrollment in the classes rose by nearly 800 percent from 2009 to 2014.

In 2012, Chicago Public Schools adopted the same curriculum for an introduction to computer science course and invested in significant professional development for teachers. In 2016, the course became a graduation requirement for all Chicago high school students, and 250 teachers are trained each year on the curriculum.

An outside analysis of the Chicago program showed that students who took the course before taking AP computer science were 3.5 times more likely to pass the AP computer science exam than those who only took the AP course. A separate study in Chicago and Wisconsin showed that where the course was offered racial and gender achievement divides disappeared and that students were more likely to take another computer science class.

Related: Data science under fire: What math do high schoolers really need?

Keily Hernandez, 15, a first-year student at Chicago’s George Westinghouse College Prep High School, was happy to see the computer science course on her schedule this year, because she plans to major in computer science in college. At first, she found the cornrows module challenging — getting the designs to look the way she wanted them to look was difficult — but it was also fun, she said.

The class is collaborative, she said, and students often turn to each other or to the internet for ideas and help. Hernandez said that taking the class has relieved her doubts that she can be a computer scientist.

“The class made me reassured,” she said. “Math isn’t something that you just know, the same way that computer science isn’t something that you just know. You get better at it the more you do it.”

It’s students like Hernandez that Linda Furuto wanted to attract when she took the job as head of the math and science subdivision at the University of Hawaii West Oahu in 2007. At the time, student enrollment was so low that the school offered just two math courses. Furuto, who had grown up on Oahu and received her Ph.D. in math education from the University of California, Los Angeles, recalled thinking, “This isn’t working. We need to implement ethnomathematics here.”

Over the next six years, she began to integrate ethnomathematics into coursework, and student interest grew. By 2013, the university offered more than 20 math classes.

“Students would say things like, ‘I hated math. I felt no connection to it. But now I see that math is my culture and because of that I want to be a secondary math teacher,’” Furuto said. “Just knowing that the life of a student has in some way, shape or form been transformed speaks volumes.”

In 2018,  by then a professor of mathematics education at the University of Hawaii Manoa, Furuto established the world’s first ethnomathematics graduate certificate and master’s degree program.* So far, about 300 teachers have participated in the online program; about half are from Hawaii.

While teachers in Chicago get ongoing professional development in cohorts both before and while they teach the district’s ethnomathematics-based computer science course, educators who complete the University of Hawaii program are highly likely to be the only teacher at their school with this niche training.

Sydney Kealanahele, the teacher on Oahu, said that as inspired as she was by the ethnomathematics program, she doesn’t have time to teach using the method more than twice every three months.

“To create a really good lesson that feels authentic to me, and not just thrown together,” she said, “it takes time to do the research.”

For a teacher who doesn’t have colleagues in their school using the same approach, it can be hard to fit in something new like ethnomathematics, said Janel Marr, a math resource teacher in Oahu’s Windward School District. Marr was one of the first teachers to participate in the ethnomathematics graduate program, as an eighth-grade math teacher. Today she teaches in the graduate program.

“When you go back to the classroom, there are so many other things from all sides, from administration and curriculum to state tests,” she said. “It starts to get overwhelming. It’s not being implemented as much as we in the program would want it to be.”

Related: How one district diversified its advanced math classes — without the controversy

Ideally, said Eglash, ethnomathematics content should be related to real-world situations, even if that involves exploring painful periods of history. Where possible, content should connect with art, history, sports and math to provide multiple ways for students to interact. This is critical, he said, to address power dynamics and “identity barriers” in the classroom, like the race of the teacher. When teachers let students explore content individually and through group discussion, students gain control over their own learning.

“The teacher finds a way to use the tool that is authentic — which is something the kids pick up on and respect, even for white folks,” he said. “It’s when you are trying to be something you are not that teaching becomes awkward.”

Doing ethnomathematics right can also engage teachers, Marr said. She had been teaching eighth-grade math at Kailua Intermediate School for 13 years when she hit a wall. Her students would ask why they had to learn math, she said, and she didn’t have an answer. She was looking for inspiration when she heard about the University of Hawaii ethnomathematics program.

“My students would learn to work with the numbers and everything, but it wasn’t like they were making a connection of why there is slope,” Marr said.

After earning her master’s, Marr had the idea to approach linear equations in a new way. She showed her students a photo of a mountain with a long, bare line down its lush, forested side and asked if anyone knew what they were looking at. Most students didn’t.

She wrote a word on the whiteboard: holua. The path, students learned from research they did in class, was made of gravel pounded into lava rocks, and it ran down the side of the Hualālai Volcano on the east side of Hawaii. Elite members of ancient Hawaiian communities sledded down mountainside paths like this one as part of the extreme sport known as holua.

“We talked about those pictures and talked about, well what would the slope be? How fast might they be going? Because slope is really related to the rate of speed,” she said. “Math isn’t just theoretical. It’s having an experience of being part of the place.”

*Correction: This story has been updated with the correct spelling of Sydney Kealanahele’s name, and to clarify Linda Furuto’s role when she started the ethnomathematics program.

This story about ethnomathematics 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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Robert Fitzer was watching news footage of New York City firefighters rescuing people from a Manhattan apartment building on fire, a fire started by a lithium-ion battery in an electric bike. 

Fitzer, the associate vice president for public safety at Fordham University in New York, looked at the calendar. It was late 2022. With winter holidays — and the year’s biggest gift-giving season — around the corner, it was possible students would return to campus in January with their own battery-powered transit devices in tow. Fearing that the same kind of fire could occur in a campus residence hall, Fitzer crafted a policy to ban the bikes not only from buildings on Fordham’s Bronx campus but even from the university grounds — an option made possible by gates walling off its perimeter.

Since the entire length of the Bronx campus takes a mere 10 minutes to cross on foot, he said, there was little justification for needing an electricity-powered bicycle to traverse it. 

The kind of fire that spurred Fitzer to act has happened hundreds of times across the country, and especially in New York City – including on Feb. 23, in a Harlem apartment building where The Hechinger Report’s data reporter Fazil Khan lived.

It cost Khan his life.

Fordham, some other universities and some cities, including New York and San Francisco, are creating policies to regulateor ban e-bikes and their siblings, e-scooters and hoverboards powered by similar batteries, in the absence of federal or state legislation. 

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

Talk of setting standards for the bikes, or more precisely for the batteries that power them, is the goal of stalled legislation in Congress. Lithium-ion batteries in e-bikes can catch fire if damaged, overcharged or overheated, according to the nonprofit National Fire Protection Association, which provides training and standards on fire safety. The fires the bikes start can produce toxic gases and burn so hot that extinguishing them can be difficult. 

The federal agency that could regulate e-bikes, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, is instead pushing companies to adhere to voluntary standards for e-bikes and their batteries, such as those set by UL Standards & Engagement.  “CPSC staff believes that products designed, manufactured, and third-party-certified to this standard, or other applicable voluntary standards, reduce the risk of fire and shock,” a spokesperson, Thaddeus Harrington, said, adding that the agency had no plans to mandate these standards.

At the University of Connecticut, a rule took effect at the start of the fall term about what it calls motorized personal transportation vehicles – they cannot enter any campus building. 

The risk of a fire from an electric bike or scooter is “a clock that’s constantly ticking,” the university’s deputy fire chief Christopher Renshaw said. 

That risk is acute when the vehicles aren’t maintained correctly, Renshaw said, or the wrong kind of battery is slipped in, or a charging cord is swapped. A plug may not meet the rating needed for the battery to charge. Students, however, “they see an outlet, and they think, always, the two are compatible,” he said. “They might not be.” 

In New York City, where the fire department said the batteries have become the area’s primary cause of fires, a law that took effect last September requires any mobility device sold or rented that uses lithium-ion batteries to be certified as complying with UL standards. The city also got a $25-million grant from the federal Department of Transportation to set up nearly 200 outdoor charging stations for e-bikes and more than 50 e-bike storage sites. 

“Most lithium-ion batteries and chargers are safe, and we need to encourage the use of more sustainable transportation alternatives moving forward,” New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said at a press conference last year about the grant. “But we also need to make sure that these micromobility vehicles are stored and charged safely, so that faulty or improperly manufactured batteries don’t put people in harm’s way.”

Related: Remembering our friend and colleague Fazil Khan

Storage and charging, especially in residences, cause many of the fire hazards. In San Francisco, where 58 fires were started by lithium-ion batteries last year, a new law sets limits on how many scooters and bikes powered by these batteries can be charged in apartments and also requires them to have certified batteries. 

It’s in this landscape that some universities are forging their own paths.

Yale and Boston College restrict the bikes, as well as how and where they are charged. Some items, including e-scooters, are banned altogether. Quinnipiac University in Connecticut bans them from its dorms, Mark DeVilbiss, the director of housing, said.

“We definitely restrict any kind of item that’s got a lithium-ion battery,” DeVilbiss said. With 4,500 students living in university housing, his institution’s safety committee speaks often with its insurance and risk management company, United Educators, about adjustments to what’s allowed, and not allowed, in the dorms. 

When air fryers, for instance, became a popular new appliance, the committee consulted with the company and determined they are only permitted in apartment-style housing with kitchens wired for appliances.

With the e-bike restrictions, students didn’t protest much, DeVilbiss recalled, except one who insisted their e-bike was essential for traveling between the university’s two campuses, which are about a half-mile apart. Since shuttles are available for students to get back and forth, the university declined to make an exception. 

“Sure enough, they had brought it inside, plugged it in and left for spring break,” DeVilbiss said. It was confiscated and returned to the student to take home. 

United Educators, which works exclusively with education institutions, including K-12 schools, colleges and universities, advises some of its 1,600 clients how to lower risks, so that they won’t need to invoke their insurance policies. In 2020, it offered suggestions about issues institutions should consider when setting policies about e-scooters. Back then, the primary concern was accidents. United Educators suggested that schools adopt rules about helmets, parking and operating the vehicles under the influence. 

“Indoor charging was not an issue,” said Christine McHugh, senior risk management counsel for United Educators. 

Accidents remain a worry, but now the batteries and the fires they can cause are the primary concern for some college administrators. 

The liability insurance company doesn’t track college policies on the issue, however. “Every year we’re seeing new things, from drones to maker spaces to tech toys,” McHugh said. “Then schools have to wrestle with ‘What do we do with these on our campuses?’”  

This story about e-bikes on college campuses was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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The April 18 protests at Columbia University over the war in Gaza and Columbia’s investment in weapons manufacturers and companies doing business in Israel led to more than 100 arrests, and sparked widespread unrest not seen on campuses in decades. Barnard College, which is affiliated with Columbia, suspended at least 53 students and evicted them from their dorms, cut off their meal plans and barred them from campus.

We wanted to learn how the suspensions and evictions felt to students on a personal level, and what the experience meant to them. So we interviewed several Barnard students who were suspended. Most have had their suspensions lifted on the condition that they refrain from unauthorized protest, and to allow them to speak freely we are not identifying them.

A Barnard spokesperson said the college does not comment on confidential student conduct proceedings. The administration said in a statement that it was “committed to open inquiry and expression” and that “students rejected multiple opportunities to leave the encampment without consequence.”

The interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

L.S., who is Jewish, attended the protest on April 18 but said she was careful not to get arrested. Barnard suspended and evicted her from her dorm anyway. Because she is an international student, a long-term suspension could have meant the loss of her visa. She would have had to leave the country within 15 days.

How did you find out you lost your housing?

I was not counting on being suspended. I didn’t know that that was even a possibility. I figured that out when I tried to enter my dorm [that night] – they had my face on a poster in my lobby, with the words ‘ban list’ written on it.

You could only imagine what all could happen in a moment like that in the middle of the night. It’s cold. Some people genuinely had nowhere to go. I was scrambling at 2:30 a.m. to find somewhere to sleep. Luckily, there’s a huge community that was kind of immediately mobilized to help the evicted students.

How do you understand the university’s rationale for the arrests, with concern for student safety?

I don’t think anyone buys the safety narrative. There’s nothing safe ever about evicting students. Barnard is treating us worse than an American court would.

Why is this movement important to you personally?

I think this movement invites a lot of other people to see their own struggles and their own principles in the causes of Palestinian liberation. I’m not a politician. I’m just a student who comes from a background of generations of genocide survivors, and that’s why I’m a part of this.

It’s because I see the struggle of the Palestinians and the struggle of my ancestors as very, very clearly connected. I come from the region. The places I’m from have also been destroyed by war and by empire, and by diaspora and by exile. And so, you know, exile is like a universal experience I think a lot of us can identify with.

No matter what people are saying about us, we will continue to hold our Jewish identity close to our organizing and we will be Jewish even as people continue to deny that.

Is there anything you want people to know that you think isn’t getting covered enough by the media?

It’s horrible what we’ve gone through, and eviction and homelessness of students without due process is unacceptable. But at the same time, we are all going to be okay. The students in Gaza are not going to be okay. There are no universities left in Gaza. And every single bit of media attention we eat up with repeating our same story over and over again – that needs to be that same energy for the people in Gaza. Because the reason that we started all this, the reason that people were willing to get suspended and arrested is because they know that there are no universities left in Gaza, and we do not want to be financially or politically complicit in that.

Related: OPINION: I teach Renaissance literature at Columbia, but this week’s lessons are about political protests and administrative decisions

I.L., a Jewish student from New York City, was arrested at the protest and allowed to return to her dorm that night, but was told she had to leave the next morning.

What happened when you found out you had to leave the dorm?

It was honestly one of really the worst parts about this whole experience. I have two friends who have an apartment off campus. They had an air mattress so they offered it to me and I tried to sleep there, but a lot of students who were suspended and evicted have housing accommodations through our Center for Accessibility Resources and Disability Services. And I’m one of those students.

How do you understand the university’s rationale for the arrests, with concern for the student safety?

It’s absolutely not true. I blame [Columbia President Nemat] Shafik for what’s happening on other campuses with all of these arrests. She normalized calling the cops on her own students. She said that we were a threat when we were just sitting on our campus singing songs [on April 18].

Why is this movement important to you personally?

When October 7 happened, I didn’t really know anything. I went to Hebrew school for 10 years. I was pretty critical when anyone would say anything negative about Israel, because I kind of internalized this conflation between antisemitism and criticizing Israel.

But then I started seeing how Israel responded after October 7th. I basically had another Jewish person swipe up on my [Instagram] story that started the conversation with me. I was like, let me do my research, and I spent a lot of time just reading.

Once I learned, I was like, ‘Whoa, how is any of this about being Jewish?’ I felt like Judaism was being weaponized to somehow support what the State of Israel was doing. I felt like it was absolutely my duty as a Jewish person, and also just an American, because I knew that this was my tax dollars and my family’s tax dollars, that directly funds all of the brutality.

October 7 to me was just a major turning point in the whole rest of my life because I see the struggle of the Palestinians as part of the struggle for liberation of all people, and I become more aware of the other struggles throughout the world.

And so I think that now what’s happening with this encampment is such a beautiful combination of really everything that I believe in. It’s about people coming together.

I continue to bear witness because this is the worst thing that I’ve ever seen in my life. I think how I got here is definitely informed by the fact that I was watching Judaism being kind of twisted to somehow support this. So as an American and a human, that’s why I show up now.

My goal in all of this is a phrase that I’ve really come to in the past seven months. It’s that another world is possible.

Is there anything you want people to know that you think isn’t getting covered enough by the media?

I think overwhelmingly the media doesn’t understand what we’re doing. I’ve been really upset to see the way that the media is focusing on specific individuals who say things that are antisemitic, but they never say anything about the Islamophobia that I see happening every day.

I think that if you actually spend time at the encampments, you’d see that there’s something very beautiful going on. This is about divestment, because it’s the one tangible way that as college students we have the power to change what was happening to Palestinians.

This is because the world does not have to be this way and that other worlds are possible. It’s been the greatest honor of my life to be a part of this.

This story about protests at Columbia University was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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Every night before going to bed, Antonio would tuck in his three younger siblings. After school, he’d tinker with toy cars, or help his dad, a mechanic, fix things around the house.

“He’s quiet, but he’s caring in his own way,” said his mother, Yanelie Marquez. The Hechinger Report is using her son’s middle name to protect his privacy.

But four years ago, the then-12-year-old Antonio suddenly lost interest in everything and everyone. It started with school: He complained he couldn’t focus or understand the teacher’s instructions. “I’d open up his notebooks and they were completely empty,” Marquez said.

Then Antonio’s behavior began to change, too: He stopped showering and coming downstairs for dinner. Eventually, he refused to leave his room. And whenever Marquez would ask about his day, he would throw a tantrum.

“He’d say, ‘None of the teachers like me, I hate it,’ and then he’d take that anger out on himself,” she said.

Worried that Antonio was struggling with depression, his mother enrolled him in therapy at Yale Child Study Center in New Haven, Connecticut.

After ruling out stressors in Antonio’s family environment, the Yale team learned more about the challenges he was facing at school, including severe learning difficulties in the classroom and bullies outside of school. And though the clinicians did everything they could do to help address those behavioral health stressors on their own, they realized they needed another team member to help: a lawyer.

This teamwork comes through Yale Child Study Center’s Medical-Legal Partnership — a collaboration in which health and law professionals team up to address patients’ “health-harming legal needs” from food and housing to public benefits and school supports. Their unique partnership functions as a kind of legal prescription. To treat a child’s behavioral health symptoms, clinicians and lawyers target the root cause, which can sometimes be a school environment where the child’s legally enshrined academic and emotional needs aren’t being met. 

Though the concept of medical-legal partnerships has existed since the 1990s, the Yale partnership, launched in November 2020, is the first in the nation focused exclusively on children’s behavioral health. Last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services invested $1.6 million in the first federally funded demonstration program for medical-legal partnerships, including one at Yale, focused in primary health care.

“When families come in, they tell us about struggles that might be adding stress and impacting their functioning, which could result in anxiety or depression,” said Christy Mills, a licensed clinical social worker and an associate clinical director at the Yale center. Especially since COVID, she says those struggles have increasingly included “school climate issues,” like a student’s experience of bullying and classroom challenges, both of which could lead to school avoidance.

RELATED: Low academic expectations and poor support for special education students are ‘hurting their future’

The post-COVID data shows that New Haven is far from alone. One study quoted in a White House report found that the number of chronically absent public school students nearly doubled, from around 15 percent in the 2018-19 school year to around 30 percent in 2021-22.

Another survey focused on students with disabilities experiencing “school refusal” — a behavioral pattern describing problems with attending or staying at school — revealed  57 percent of these students had no symptoms prior to the pandemic. And for students who do attend school, their behavior struggles have increased, too; a national report of public schools in 2021-22 found more than 80 percent agreed that the pandemic negatively affected their students’ socioemotional and behavioral development. A recent study found that depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts in teen girls has reached record highs, and that the number of mental health hospitalizations for children more than doubled between 2016 and 2022.

Meanwhile, as children’s behavioral health struggles grow, the usual supports can’t keep up. The demand for child and adolescent psychiatrists and behavioral health providers continues to outpace supply, especially for young people already facing inequitable access to care. One estimate found that nationally, there was just one school psychologist for every 1,127 students from kindergarten to 12th grade in the 2021-22 year.

And teachers want more support, too. A recent survey of U.S. teachers found that 9 in 10 reported they need more resources to care for their students’ mental health.

“Educators are doing the very best they can, but most of the time, in advocating for our low-income families, the issue cited is due to school district resources,” said Kathryn Meyer, an attorney at the Center for Children’s Advocacy, the legal partner of the Yale center.

That’s where the medical-legal team can help, by letting the school know how a child’s experience is affecting their behavior — and to connect the child’s needs to their legal rights, Meyer said. “Sometimes we’re just trying to get the student an [individualized education program], and then, if we have the IEP, we’re trying to increase the service, or make sure that whatever is on the IEP is actually happening,” she said.

In Antonio’s case, after joining Marquez at school meetings, the medical-legal team pushed for the school to conduct another IEP evaluation, which revealed a key part of his story: Though an earlier evaluation diagnosed Antonio with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, the second evaluation found he had an intellectual disability as well. And once the team made the legal case that the current school couldn’t address the services his IEP mandated, Antonio was placed in a school that could.

“In moving him, our goal was to have his academic needs addressed, emotional support to keep him safe, and a smaller structure so people could really have the time to work with him,” Meyer explained.

Sure enough, that worked. According to his mother, the new school didn’t just help Antonio improve in the classroom; it improved his behavioral health, too. “Being in a place that understood him  for his differences relieved a lot of his pressure and stress,” said Mills, the Yale center associate clinical director.

Antonio now spends his days outside of his room, riding bikes with his new friends, or hanging out with his new girlfriend, whom he just took to prom.

“Finally, it’s like, he’s free,” his mother said. “That was the Antonio I wanted to see all these years.”

As word of the medical-legal partnership model spreads in Connecticut, educators are taking note, too. “As a former Bridgeport public school superintendent, I know just how valuable educational advocates can be for our families,” said Fran Rabinowitz, the executive director of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents. “Despite districts doing our best with the limited resources we have, it’s important that we continue to elevate the voice of families, and advocacy can provide a vehicle for that voice.”

RELATED: Do protocols for school safety infringe on disability rights?

Dr. Barry Zuckerman, who created the first medical-legal partnership in Boston more than 30 years ago, saw the need for family advocacy first hand during his childhood, in the 1950s. He grew up with a younger brother with “significant disabilities.” But 60 years ago, Barry says, there were virtually no laws, resources or community services that could support him. His brother was eventually placed in an institution.

“Imagine a parent sending away their 8-year-old who’s never been on his own,” Zuckerman said. “It was extraordinarily traumatic for all of us.”

By the 1970s, the United States passed laws requiring schools to identify and evaluate students with disabilities, and provide them with “free, appropriate public education” tailored to their needs through individualized education programs. But Zuckerman, by then a pediatrician, realized that vulnerable families also needed support to enforce these protective laws.

In 1993, he discovered that need on the job, at Boston Medical Center, through a group of asthmatic patients. When the patients kept returning to the hospital with no improvement, Dr. Zuckerman learned that all of their homes had mold, which can trigger asthma attacks. The landlords didn’t respond to the families or to Dr. Zuckerman when they asked for mold remediation. But they did remove the mold after a lawyer friend of Dr. Zuckerman’s called.

That case would become the first of many medical-legal partnership success stories, in a model that’s expanded to over 450 health care organizations around the nation. One randomized trial found that families referred to legal support through the partnership had fewer emergency room visits six months later. Another found that patients given legal interventions had less asthma symptom severity and took fewer medications. A more recent study of a hospital in Cincinnati found that the medical-legal partnership reduced all-cause hospitalizations of children by 38 percent over five years.

Most evidence around medical-legal partnerships comes from models in primary health care. But those models have demonstrated behavioral health benefits, too. “When parents have concerns about their children’s mental health, the first place they turn is their pediatrician,” said Josh Greenberg, one of the founding medical-legal partnership lawyers in Boston.

One of Greenberg’s earliest success stories came while shadowing a 7-year-old boy during a well checkup. He learned that the boy had been out of school for six months, suspended after pushing his teacher. “The school just sent the child home and then never followed up, and never offered anything in the way of their legal rights around expulsions,” he said.

RELATED: When your disability gets you sent home from school

By “prescribing” legal support the same way they prescribe other kinds of medicine, health workers can see the benefits in their patients just the same. “When you have a life that’s full of stress, you can only do a few things as a doctor, but the lawyer was helping them achieve something they needed,” Dr. Zuckerman said. It also helps to level the playing field. Before, “if a child wasn’t getting their developmental needs met, many schools would blow them off, and well-to-do people got their own lawyers,” he said.

But even with the new federal funding and nationwide expansion, the number of patients who need legal support far outnumbers the supply of lawyers who can provide it, Greenberg cautioned.

That’s one reason why legal professionals are also spreading their knowledge through training and educational resources, and are reserving formal representation for extreme cases. Through the Yale partnership, for instance, of 120 patient referrals made in the program’s first year, just 20 cases went to full representation.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services invested $1.6 million in 2023 for a medical-legal partnership demonstration program.

Instead, most of the Yale legal team’s work is focused on educating clinicians, psychiatrists, social workers and families about legal options that exist for children, and that they can access on their own. “Sometimes it’s just like, ‘Go to this place,’ or ‘Call this hotline’ — it’s really as simple as that,” Meyer said.

Through those trainings, clinicians can ask the legal professionals questions, too. “Sometimes we need help knowing, is this a fair legal ask? Does a family or child actually have a right to this expectation, or do we need to think about this in a different lens?” said Mills, the Yale associate clinical director.

Outside of the formal medical-legal partnership model, other organizations, like the Council for Parent Attorneys and Advocates — a national nonprofit working to protect the legal and civil rights of students with disabilities — have been similarly addressing families about their options. Selene Almazan, their legal director, said that these kinds of trainings  can help prevent behavioral health struggles before they develop, especially when a student has more than one disability.

“The more information you have, the more that you know how to take care of yourself and advocate for yourself in a school setting,” Almazan said. 

In her organization’s work, training parents and students on their rights has been “transformative” for students’ mental health and self-esteem. And in cases where students would otherwise be punished, Almazan says, the advocacy can completely change the trajectory of a child’s health and life. 

“When kids are traumatized by exclusionary discipline or restraint and seclusion in schools, that can cause them to act out and can exacerbate any kind of mental health issues that they may already have,” she said. “Getting students what they need in school can break a pattern of family trauma and generational trauma and prevent the school-to-prison pipeline.”

This story about medical-legal partnerships was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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WARM SPRINGS, Ore. — Rosanna Jackson, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs here, counts herself as one of the resilient ones. Her childhood in the 1970s and 80s was tough. Home didn’t always feel like a safe place to be.

There’s a stigma that leads to people “not talking about their feelings and not wanting everyone to know that they’re hurt or in pain,” she said of many in her community who have dealt with similar childhood trauma.

But that silence can be lethal, Jackson said. Now an adult who has dedicated her life to helping her tribal members be more resilient, Jackson is leading the effort to create the nation’s first suicide helpline staffed by and designed for Native youth.

“I’m hoping that my youth will come out of their shell and help each other,” Jackson said. “It’s OK to not be OK. It’s OK to talk about what’s on your mind.”

Native youth have one of the highest rates of suicide of any demographic in the country, according to federal data. While American Indian and Alaskan Native teenagers reported feelings of sadness and hopelessness that tracked with national averages, they were more likely than their peers of other races to seriously consider suicide, to make a plan to die by suicide and to attempt suicide. That’s according to the latest youth risk behavior survey for high schoolers by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Native leaders say their young people are facing an acute mental health crisis and could particularly benefit from the kind of support a helpline run by and for Native youth would provide.

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

There are only a small number of suicide crisis lines in the country that are staffed by young people. Youthline, the 21-year-old program in Oregon that is behind Jackson’s effort, is one of them. California and Arizona also have long-standing peer lines for teenagers. And while there’s no single national directory of every suicide crisis call center, most don’t cater to people with a specific identity. The Trevor Project is a large helpline for LGBTQ+ youth, but volunteer counselors must be 18 or older to take calls.

If it’s successful, Jackson’s program would be the first crisis line in the nation designed for Native youth.

While many of the issues affecting Native youth are universal to young people today, including the isolation and loss suffered during the pandemic and the threat of climate change, other reasons for desperation in this group are more specific. They include intergenerational trauma (when harmful stress experienced by adults affects how they parent), an ongoing addiction epidemic, poverty and a lack of rural infrastructure. People living on reservations may not have paved roads or potable water, let alone easy access to mental health services.

Annamarie Caldera, 18, who lives near Jackson on the Warm Springs reservation, is on track to be the first young person to pick up the phone — or, more likely, to respond to texts — at the nascent Youthline Native. She was recruited by Jackson last spring and, nearly a year later, has almost completed the 64 hours of training required to answer calls.

Caldera said she was excited at the prospect of finally taking calls. “I get to help people and pass on my vibes to them,” she said.

Caldera was sitting in the reservation’s new call center, a converted classroom decorated with a giant mural depicting three young Native people in traditional garb on one wall and a mural featuring several Pacific Northwest animals in front of Mt. Jefferson, a volcanic peak that can be seen from the reservation, on another wall. The local tribal artist who designed the murals also added a portrait of a young man the tribes lost to suicide in 2020.

While she’s dedicated to supporting her Indigenous peers who are facing down despair, Caldera said it’s important that people know that Native teenagers are not always — or even often — thinking about suicide.

“I’ve had a few people ask me on my social media if … all we think about is killing ourselves and drinking and smoking,” she said. Most of those who’ve asked, she said, are white. “It’s not accurate — not at all.”

She said she spends far more time thinking about school and ways to help her community, which is why she wants to be a call taker for Youthline Native.

“I think it is really important because you’re also Native and you can understand your peers more than any other,” Caldera said.

Related: The pandemic knocked many Native students off the college track

Starting in the 1950s and gaining speed in the 1970s, suicide crisis lines for all ages have been set up by small nonprofits serving limited geographical regions. This didn’t work well for people without a local line or who called at a time no volunteer was available. Moreover, many people didn’t even know the lines existed. To address those issues, local crisis lines joined together in 2005 under a single number — now 988 — that anyone in the country could call at any time.

Volunteers and staff at more than 200 crisis centers now answer approximately 5 million annual calls and texts to 988. People who call the three-digit number are offered the chance to connect to a service for veterans or for LGBTQ+ youth and young adults, all groups at especially high risk for suicide. There’s also a Spanish-language option and an American Sign Language option for video phone callers.

But there is no national Native suicide prevention helpline.

There’s a line called Native and Strong, based in Washington state that is staffed around the clock by Native counselors, but it’s only available to callers with a Washington area code. And there’s the All Nations Hotline, staffed by counselors from the Ponca, Omaha, Lakota and Winnebago tribes for eight to 16 hours a day, but it’s not part of the 988 network.

Youthline is part of the 988 network and there are adults monitoring the line at all hours, even when young people aren’t available to take calls. Although Youthline Native has not fully launched, Youthline’s existing call takers are prepared to talk to anyone who texts “teen2teen” or “native” to 839863. People can also call 877-968-8491 or start a chat from the Youthline website.

Since it’s usually impossible for crisis lines to ensure that the person answering the phone is a match for the person calling, crisis line organizers agree that counselors must be prepared to respond to all callers no matter their age, race, gender or sexual orientation.

And yet, talking to someone with the same background can be incredibly important and healing, especially for Native people, said Rochelle Hamilton, the head of Washington state’s Native and Strong line.

“If you are an Indigenous person — often if you go to talk to a therapist or counselor who is non-Indigenous, you spend the majority of your time talking about what it is to be Indigenous,” said Hamilton, an enrolled member of the Ehattesaht First Nation and a descendent of the Tulalip tribes.

Not only is that annoying and exhausting, especially for someone in a bad mental space, she said, it prevents the therapist and client from addressing the actual crisis. Anticipating some level of disconnect and accompanying frustration, many Native people in crisis never pick up the phone, Hamilton said.

“Indigenous people often and for good reason don’t have a lot of trust outside of their communities,” she said. “They’re relying more on each other. They want to look to each other when they need something.”

When someone calls Native and Strong, the counselor answers by identifying themselves and their tribal or cultural affiliation. Callers know right away that the counselor is saying “I’m Indigenous and I know where you’re from,” Hamilton said.

Related: A vexing drawback to online tribal college: Social and cultural isolation

A non-Native state representative, Tina Orwall, identified the need for a tribal 988 line and advocated for its funding. An existing crisis call center got the contract from the state. The call center consulted formally with tribal leaders who helped to design the Native and Strong program.

Since Native and Strong started taking calls in late 2022, the nearly 30 folks on staff have answered the phone more than 5,000 times, a number that far exceeds original expectations. The high usage of the line proves it’s needed, Hamilton said.

But even with funding secured, Youthline Native has faced more hurdles. Jackson initially had six teenagers interested in being part of the helpline. But only Caldera is close to completing the training. Three others have just started.

Peer-to-peer crisis lines for young people are always hard to staff. Young people are often required to take calls from a physical call center as a measure of protection for their own mental well-being. That creates geographic limits on where volunteers can be pulled from.

Partly to attract a more diverse group of call takers, Oregon’s Youthline recently added three new call centers. In addition to the original center in Southwest Portland, there are call centers in the more diverse neighborhood of East Portland, in Warm Springs and in Bend, a small city in Central Oregon.

When it’s up and running, the small Warm Springs call center will be a lot like the one in Bend, where Eddie Lopez, 17, is among the young people answering the phones.

On a chilly February night, Lopez sat in the cozy call center with half a dozen other teen call takers and three adult supervisors. Lopez moved to Bend, about an hour south of Warm Springs, when he was 15. The transition was brutal, he said. But the gracious welcome he was offered when he arrived inspired him to give something back.

“Obviously, I won’t understand people from all walks of life,” said Lopez, whose family is Mexican-American. But “mental and emotional support is kind of universal in a way,” he said. “Everyone likes to be validated. Everyone likes to feel like they’re not alone. I’m helping even if I don’t understand them as people.”

Lopez read a message on his computer screen from a person saying they felt unloved.

“I also feel better when I talk about my feelings,” the texter wrote. “I just want to heal from them, but I don’t know how to heal?”

Related: A surprising remedy for teens in mental health crisis

The key when texting people who reach out for help is to make sure they know that they are not alone and that their feelings are valid, Lopez said. The teens are taught to avoid giving specific advice; instead, they ask questions.

“I’m very thankful you shared that with me,” Lopez texted back under his alias. “It takes a lot of bravery to be vulnerable. Have you talked to anyone about what you’ve been going through?”

The goal is for the texter to say how they will take care of themselves for that evening, at least. “Since we’re so short term, we kind of have to, like, motivate them to want to help themselves in a way,” Lopez explained. The teen volunteers may list things other people do to calm down, like take a walk or listen to music.

Counselors on the Native and Strong line follow the same protocol, but they also list culturally specific practices, like smudging (the burning of sacred herbs), talking to an elder or eating a traditional food.

Some callers don’t have an Indigenous mode of self-care they rely on, Hamilton said, so counselors will urge them to find one as a way to reconnect with their heritage.

“The reason we are in the place we are right now is because of loss of connection,” Hamilton said.

Both Hamilton and Jackson said they are determined to prove the need for Native-specific call lines and then expand their models. They want to see a nationally available, Native-run helpline available to every Indigenous person struggling with thoughts of suicide.

There was some encouraging news buried in the most recent CDC data on suicide released last year. The rate of suicide for young people fell 8 percent in 2022 and for Native people it fell 6 percent. Yet experts say a one year drop is hardly a trend.

Back in Bend, a call taker named Sarah Hawkins, 18, was chatting with someone worried about a rumor being spread about them at school. Following protocol as the conversation wrapped up, Hawkins asked the middle schooler what would help them tonight.

“IDK,” the texter replied. “Frankly, just talking about it made me feel so much better.”

If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, you can speak with a trained listener by texting 988, the national Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

This story about Native American suicide prevention was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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Ignorance and apathy are not a winning combination when facing down an existential threat. But that’s exactly what Susie Jaramillo, of Encantos Media, found when her team was conducting focus groups with tweens. They were working on their just-released educational video series on climate change, “This Is Cooler.”

“There’s misconceptions around what is actually causing climate change,” she said. “There are so many false narratives: Kids think it’s litter, pollution or a hole in the ozone layer. Zero knowledge in terms of solutions, and zero awareness in terms of the jobs that are available.”

Only two of sixteen 10- to 12-year-olds interviewed could explain the basic facts of climate change; one had done a fifth-grade research project and the other had visited the Climate Museum, a temporary exhibit in New York City.

On top of not knowing the facts, kids this age expressed some pretty dark feelings. Jaramillo said she heard “a lot of lizard brain negativity; doom and gloom. There’s a lot of cynicism, sarcasm — adults dropped the ball. There’s a fatalist mentality — ‘there’s nothing we can do, so oh, well.’”

Meanwhile, teachers report a confidence gap in teaching about climate change. Many say that they feel ill-equipped to tackle it, even as most agree it’s important to teach, and that their students are bringing up the topic and are concerned about it.

One potential ally that could help: educational media. In a 2021 survey of education professionals by the company Kaltura, 94 percent said that video increases student satisfaction and directly contributes to an improvement in student performance.

But a report I co-authored with Sara Poirer in 2022 for This Is Planet Ed, an initiative at the Aspen Institute (where I’m an adviser), found that children’s media is still largely silent on climate. Zero of the most popular family movies of 2021 referred to climate change or related topics, and even when reviewing educational, nature and wildlife-themed TV shows for kids, we found that only nine of 664 episodes, or 1.4 percent, referred to climate change.

Related: Little kids need outdoor play – but not when it’s 110 degrees

To help break the silence, This Is Planet Ed now has a Planet Media initiative, dedicated to encouraging creators to make more scientifically accurate and entertaining media that engages kids on the causes, solutions and even the opportunities to be found in our changing climate.

Planet Media supported the creation of Encantos Media’s just-released “This is Cooler” video series, which is aimed at tweens. It uses a combination of live action and animation, with snappy editing, plenty of humor and positivity, to get across some basic info in terms kids can understand. For example, it compares heat-trapping greenhouse gases to a too-thick blanket making the planet warmer. The series also looks at green career opportunities, like solar panel installer or sustainable fashion designer.

Jaramillo said she was inspired by successful YouTube influencers who inform while they entertain. “It’s super engaging,” she said. “It’s not your typical climate education video.”

Just like the tweens she talked to, many children’s media creators also hold the misconception that climate change equals doom and gloom. I’m currently running an informal survey of people in the children’s media industry for a chapter in an upcoming book on climate change education. More than four out of five of our respondents agreed that “children’s media should cover climate change, its causes, impacts and solutions, in developmentally appropriate ways.”

But when asked why there isn’t more coverage of the topic to be found already, the top three responses were “creators don’t have the background knowledge,” “too scary” and “too controversial.” One respondent, who works in climate change education, said, “My children (ages 6 and 8) no longer want to watch nature documentaries because they always manage to describe how climate change threatens or is killing wildlife and their ecosystems. It’s too scary and they feel helpless.”

Related: How student school board members are driving climate action

One of the most successful kids’ science media creators out there says that doesn’t have to be the case. “It’s important to meet kids where they are. To care about the planet you first have to love it,” said Mindy Thomas, co-host of “Wow in the World” from Tinkercast. The kids’ science podcast reaches about 600,000 unique listeners a month. And at least one in five episodes touches on the environment.

Thomas and her team participated in Planet Media’s recent “pitch fest,” an open call for more content that puts across the core facts of climate change in an age-appropriate way, as well as depicting solutions. “We wanted to use our platform to help elevate this important initiative,” said Meredith Halpern-Ranzer, co-founder of Tinkercast. “Climate activism is always something we’ve been really passionate about.”

Often, Halpern-Ranzer and her team find their “wow” by focusing on emerging climate solutions, like a plant-based substitute for single-use plastic, or white paint that can cool down a city. Last fall, they launched Tinker Class, a National Science Foundation-funded hub for teachers to use the podcasts in their elementary school classrooms, as the instigators for “podject-based learning” activities (the “Wow in the World” team really likes puns). About 2,000 teachers have participated so far. Similarly, This is Planet Ed has created an “educational guide” to reinforce the key messages that Planet Media content is trying to get across.

Ashlye Allison teaches fifth grade in a Title I elementary school in South Seattle. She crafts her own curriculum on climate change, following the Next Generation Science Standards, which seek to improve science education using a three-dimensional approach.

“I want it to be connected to their daily lives and what’s going on in Seattle, and about, ‘what can we do about this?’” She showed the “This Is Cooler” video to her students, and said they found it more engaging than other videos she’s used in class.

Just as Jaramillo found, Allison said her students especially liked the video’s reference to solutions like solar power and electric school buses. “If it’s just doom and gloom, nothing can happen, and so I don’t care. That’s what my kids took out of it: solutions. That’s what they quoted the most, is how to fix it. And I think they would be interested in more ways people are fixing different problems.”

This column about climate change outreach 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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AURORA, Colo. — Until early this year, Alberto, 11, had never stepped into a classroom.

The closest school was many miles from his village in Venezuela, and Alberto’s father never allowed him or his mom, Yuliver, to stray far, according to mother and son. The school also charged far more than they could afford.

“I want to learn to become somebody in life,” Alberto said through an interpreter. “I’m going to be a lawyer or a doctor. I wanted to go school, but dad wouldn’t let me.”

Yuliver, who has a third-grade education, stepped in as Alberto’s teacher, sharing what she knew about numbers and letters. He loved those lessons, and wanted to know more. (The surnames of Alberto and Yuliver, like those of other migrants in this story, are omitted due to privacy or safety concerns.)

Last summer, Yuliver and her son left their home country, walking through deserts and jungles across two continents before they arrived in Denver, where Yuliver’s sister lives, six months later. Alberto enrolled in suburban Aurora Public Schools as a fourth grader, and has learned enough English that his teachers hide their smirks when he makes a particularly witty, and inappropriate, pun. In math, however, he’s grades behind and even in Spanish struggles to follow his teacher’s instruction.

Alberto is one of approximately 2,800 migrant and refugee children who’ve arrived in Aurora, located just east of Denver, this academic year. The Denver school district — the state’s largest, with a total enrollment of about 88,000 — similarly has enrolled at least 3,700 newcomer students since last summer. In May 2023, Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, started sending immigrant families by the busloads to the Colorado capital, adding it to a destination list of other Democrat-led cities including Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

Aurora and Denver, like many school systems in Colorado, have long welcomed students new to the United States. In recent years, they have designated specific campuses to serve as resource hubs for migrant and refugee families, offering wraparound supports, integration services and dual-language programs. But the ongoing surge of immigrants — local educators hesitate to call it a crisis — have exposed clear signs of strain: Classrooms don’t have enough seats for students. Teachers are fatigued by large class sizes, discipline issues and new students showing up each day. And state and local leaders are increasingly resistant to helping shoulder the costs.

The city council in Aurora, for example, recently passed a resolution restricting migrants from receiving local public services, a move that opponents fear will place undocumented residents at risk if they experience a fire, medical emergency or violent crime. But when it comes to schools, requirements under the U.S. Constitution are clear: States are obligated to allow children living in the U.S. without legal documentation to access a basic education. That’s created a new dilemma for schools in communities like Aurora and Denver: The steady arrival of newcomers has all but reversed years of declining enrollment, staving off budget cuts and layoffs, but the costs associated with addressing the new arrivals’ basic needs are steep.

“It doesn’t matter what your opinion is. You have to serve these kids,” said Julie Sugarman, an associate director for K-12 education research at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “There are civil rights that support these kids, but it does come with real, significant costs.”

Related: How one district handles the trauma undocumented students bring to school

Although migration fell at the start of the pandemic in 2020, it rebounded quickly, with the number of migrants encountered along the U.S.-Mexico border by U.S. Border Patrol more than quadrupling in 2021.

In a typical year, Denver Public Schools enrolls about 500 students who’ve just moved to the country. The district so far this year has been receiving an average of 250 each week, according to Adrienne Endres, the district’s executive director of multilingual education.

“We have some less-than-ideal circumstances,” she said. “We have some very full classrooms. We hear most from teachers, ‘This is kind of overwhelming. There’s a lot more kids and they all need a lot more from me.’”

The majority of migrant families in Denver have chosen to place their kids in schools with existing bilingual programs, Endres added. But many students who have little, or any, formal experience with education find a better fit in one of the district’s newcomer centers. The city opened its first center back in 1999, in an unused gym at Denver South High School, as a magnet program for refugee children who speak neither Spanish nor English.

The district has since expanded the program to six campuses, where students learn literacy skills for one to two semesters before gradually moving into general classes.

On a recent morning at South High’s newcomer center, teacher Karen Vittetoe worked with 14 teenagers from nearly as many countries — including Burundi, El Salvador and Sudan — on how to tell time and describe a daily schedule in English.

“Marta goes to work at 9:50 in the morning. Is that 9:15 or 9:50? Do you hear the difference?” she asked as two teaching assistants walked in the classroom.

The adults together speak six different languages, allowing them to help during small group and one-on-one instruction during the 90-minute period. But that’s not nearly enough in Vittetoe’s larger second period, where 31 students speak 11 different languages.

“Can you imagine?” she said. “I don’t even have enough desks for them all.”

One of her students, 18-year-old Momena, spoke no English when she first enrolled at South High about eight months ago. Her family left Afghanistan, where the Taliban banned girls from attending school beyond the sixth grade. 

“I like everything about this school — except the food,” Momena said. “They have a nice curriculum and also kind teachers.”

Like her older brother, a nurse, Momena hopes to one day work in the medical field.

“This is very important for me,” she said of getting an education in the U.S. “I want to go to college, go into nursing. I try hard every day.”

Unlike Momena, most students in Vittetoe’s classes arrived after October 1 — the date on which Colorado determines its annual funding for K-12 schools based on enrollment. Only 10 other states rely on a single count day to allocate funding to districts. And in Denver, that’s required central administrators to draw from cash reserves and other department budgets to make up for the roughly $17.5 million that the district hasn’t received in per-pupil funding despite enrolling so many migrant and refugee children since last fall.

State lawmakers in February fast-tracked a plan to provide $24 million — to be split among districts across Colorado — to ease the strain on local school budgets. Gov. Jared Polis signed the legislation in early March, but the money has yet to trickle down to local districts.

“Without action in D.C., it’s up to each state if schools get any support at all,” said Jill Koyama, vice dean of educational leadership and innovation at Arizona State University’s teachers college.

Related: Convincing parents to send their children to a San Francisco public school

At Boston P-8 School in Aurora, the first few weeks made for a rough transition for Alberto.

He failed a vision screening test and received a voucher for an eye exam, but passed it. Teachers eventually determined he had such little schooling that he simply couldn’t identify letters to follow along in class. The school nurse also learned about trauma Alberto had experienced back home and on his journey to this country. School staff would have placed him with a therapist on campus, but no one on the mental health support team speaks Spanish. Many newcomers, including Alberto, have been referred to an online therapy service.

The school, however, had recently hired Danielle Pukansky, one of two English language development teachers who, in a tiny and cramped room, lead daily 45-minute classes for multilingual learners like Alberto.

“The trauma showed when he first got here,” Pukansky recalled, noting he had been aggressive toward other students. “How to re-regulate when these big emotions come up in such a little body, that is part of my background — and thank goodness.”

She said many of her students come to school worried about deportation, insecure housing and simply being misunderstood. “I try to help the kids not feel that fear,” Pukansky said.

Boston P-8 is one of six community schools in Aurora that provide intensive support services — such as medical care, food, clothing and adult education and language classes — to help stabilize families so kids can focus on academics in class. It’s similar to the community hub model that Denver Public Schools operates at six campuses. And as of 2022, the state has allowed low-performing schools to convert to the model as part of a school’s turnaround plan.

Late on a Wednesday afternoon, Yuliver sat in Boston P-8’s community room with her head in her hands. A worsening toothache had kept her awake for days, and made it hard to look for work or an immigration lawyer who might help her. After making a couple calls, a staff member booked her a tooth extraction, free of charge, at a nearby dental clinic.

“This is the only place I feel supported,” Yuliver said. “Clothes, Wi-Fi, food, shoes — they help with everything.”

Upstairs, in an afterschool science program, Alberto was learning about the education required to become a dentist.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Schools’ mission shifted during the pandemic with healthcare, shelter and adult ed

In Aurora and Denver, which both faced enrollment declines during the pandemic, the influx of migrant students this year presents an ironic silver lining: By contrast, enrollment statewide has continued to fall for two straight years — with the largest decreases in pre-kindergarten through first grade — prompting school closures, budget cuts and potential layoffs.

In the Denver area, the surge of students from other countries has more than made up the difference.

So far this year, Ellis Elementary in southeast Denver has absorbed 60 more students than initially expected. Several classes are packed with 35 students — the maximum allowed under the district’s contract with teachers. A week before even more students arrived in late February, Principal Jamie Roybal hired two novice educators. They had only a couple days to convert a teachers lounge and music room into their first classrooms.

Roybal said that on hard days many of her staff members contemplate leaving the profession. “We’re swimming in the deep end,” she said, looking into a classroom. “That’s a first-grade teacher with 35 newcomers. That’s a lot. When she goes home, she’s exhausted.”

By winter break, Hamilton Middle School in Denver had already absorbed 100 additional students over its projected enrollment. Priscilla Rahn, a Republican candidate for the Douglas County commission who teaches band and orchestra at Hamilton, said it’s been a joy to welcome so many new musicians who have never had an instrument of their own.

Still, Rahn wondered whether the community’s generosity had been exhausted.

“We’re cutting city services,” she said, referring to the mayor’s budget. “As a teacher, we can’t ask if you’re legal. It doesn’t matter. I teach all kids. But as a city, we’re pretty much at capacity. We cannot take any more families, because we don’t have the money or the space.”

At Centro de los Trabajadores, a local labor rights group, executive director Mayra Juárez-Denis has for months fielded calls from recent migrants trying to secure legal work or file complaints about employers who exploited them. Lately, her phone started ringing with rants from teachers overwhelmed with the current crisis.

The organization has tried to partner with Denver Public Schools, mostly to host a worker center or hiring fair for hourly jobs. Scott Pribble, a spokesman for the district, said it has looked for parents with legal documentation to work in cafeterias or get licensed to drive a bus.

“We want to help the district with labor integration for parents,” Juárez-Denis said. “They need not just immigrant teachers who serve Spanish speakers, but every staff position can use someone who is already part of the immigrant community.”

Related: School support staffers stuck earning poverty level wages

At some campuses, Denver principals have been able to identify and recruit migrant parents who used to teach in their home countries, but for out-of-country teachers, the checklist of requirements they must meet for eligibility to work in the state long. At Ellis Elementary, for example, a classroom aide from Venezuela finally got her teaching license approved in Colorado — three years after she first applied to teach in the U.S.

The latest federal bipartisan immigration reform proposal, which collapsed in Congress in February, would have expedited access to work authorization for asylum seekers, potentially allowing people like Yuliver to begin employment before the current six-month waiting period.

Without a job, Yuliver has struggled to afford an apartment — even one without hot water or central heating — for her and Alberto. She tried to sell household goods to shoppers on the street and would like to work in a beauty shop, doing nails and hair. Already, though, Yuliver has considered making the trek back to Venezuela if she can’t find employment.

“I wish for him to keep studying,” she said of Alberto. “He’s intelligent. He just wants to learn everything.”

Alberto, meanwhile, said he misses his friends and swimming at the beach back home. But here he’s learning to ride a bike — provided by the community school program — and has already made five new friends at Boston P-8.

During a sunny but chilly recess, Alberto drew a heart with wood chips on the ground in his school’s playground. He placed a stray feather in the middle, and said it was for those friends he’d made at his first-ever school.

*Correction: The photo credits in this story have been updated with the correct name for the photographer, Rebecca Slezak.

This story about Denver migrants 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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MINNEAPOLIS — At a late August meeting in a windowless room at Minneapolis College, a handful of students barely a week into classes sat back on couches, took a breath and marveled that they were there at all.

“Gifting myself with an education is a part of my recovery,” said Nomi Badboy, 43, one of three students attending this week’s meeting of the school’s collegiate recovery program. But she admitted to feeling overwhelmed: Her four kids were trying her nerves, her ailing father was requiring more of her time, and a bad-news ex had left her with a destructive puppy and a lingering disbelief that she can pull it all off.

Ray Lombardi, 50, listened thoughtfully. “What I’m hearing is that we have three things in common: It’s hard to be a parent. It’s hard to stay sober. And it’s hard to go back to school as an adult,” he said, adding, “It would be a great tragedy to get sober, get my life in order, and then come here and have college be the cause of going back into using.”

Collegiate recovery programs began appearing at four-year institutions in the late 1970s, offering services like sober-living dorms, life skills classes and recovery coaches. Today, more than 170 programs exist across the U.S. and Canada. But it’s only in the last dozen or so years that programs began popping up at community colleges; Minneapolis College’s program, opened in 2017, was the first in Minnesota and the fifth in the nation.

Today, there are at least 23 recovery programs at community colleges, and their expansion reflects a growing awareness that many survivors of opioid addiction and those who struggled with substance use during the pandemic are now enrolling in pursuit of a fresh start. But despite the need, the programs face significant obstacles, and many are scrambling for dollars and staffing to stay afloat.

Related: More than a third of community colleges have vanished

Substance use disorder affects about 18 percent of American adults, according to national statistics. Among 18- to 25-year-olds, the share is nearly 28 percent. Meanwhile, of the 29 million adults nationwide who said they’ve ever had a problem with substance use, about 72 percent considered themselves to be in recovery or recovered.

Unlike treatment, a necessary but often short-term process, recovery is the long-term work of rebuilding a healthier and typically sober life. Education is an example of what’s called “recovery capital,” something earned that makes long-term recovery more likely.

Community colleges are a natural first step for people in recovery, said Jessica Miller, who oversees four collegiate recovery programs, including two at community colleges, for the Ten16 Recovery Network, a substance use disorder treatment provider in Central Michigan. At two-year institutions, admission is accessible, tuition is affordable, and flexible coursework fits into schedules complicated not only by jobs and families, but counseling, support groups and doctor visits.

“I don’t know why we weren’t trying to do this years ago,” Miller said.

In November, the Association of Recovery in Higher Education, which serves as a hub for the programs, launched a working group tasked in part with editing the guidelines for starting recovery programs to make them more applicable to community colleges. A new networking group for community college program coordinators held its first call in February.

Advocates say the growing number of recovery programs makes sense not just for individuals but for community colleges looking to recoup lost students. Since 2010, enrollment at two-year institutions has declined by nearly 40 percent, as more people have opted to remain in the workforce or head directly to four-year colleges, among other factors.

The downturn has pushed community colleges to broaden their approach to recruitment, resulting in an increase in the number of students requiring more support and services, said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of education policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The schools are pursuing their goals of serving more students, but the additional supports bring higher costs. “The price tag is not the same,” he said.

Schools investing in recovery programs do so without an abundance of research connecting the programs to improved student outcomes. But the data that exists is encouraging, said Noel Vest, an assistant professor of community health sciences at Boston University. A 2014 paper reviewing the impact of recovery programs, mostly at four-year colleges, found lower incidences of relapse for involved students and slightly higher GPAs and graduation rates compared to their peers overall.

Vest plans to complete a study this summer of five recovery programs, including Minneapolis College’s. He expects the findings to illuminate best practices for the programs and provide an evidence-based foundation for starting more of them. “Right now,” he said, “the data that says we must be doing this just isn’t out there.”

In the interim, advocates for the programs are using creative approaches to keep them alive and growing. At Tompkins Cortland Community College near Ithaca, New York, program leaders have forged connections with student groups on campus whose struggles with substance use might fly under the radar, such as student athletes.

In Central Michigan, the Ten16 Recovery Network is helping its clients enroll in colleges with recovery supports by providing pre-enrollment services at its out-patient treatment facilities. A client might meet with the collegiate recovery program coordinator, for example, to receive counseling about which career paths might be a good fit and which ones might present obstacles due to the client’s history with addiction and the legal system.

At Skagit Valley College, a two-year institution north of Seattle, Aaron Kirk runs the recovery program for formerly incarcerated students jointly with the school’s Breaking Free Club. (About 60 percent of people who are incarcerated struggle with substance use disorder, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.) In his role, Kirk has built a relationship with the local drug court, which offers alternative sentences to eligible individuals who commit to treatment for substance use. Typically, the sentences include a work or education component, making Skagit Valley a natural fit.

Related: Training people recovering from substance abuse disorders to be part of treatment teams

Genevieve Ward, 42, enrolled at Skagit Valley in the summer of 2021 after spending time in prison on a drug conviction. While taking coursework in human services, she used money earmarked for students in the recovery program to earn certification as a peer recovery coach. She uses the skills daily as a leader in the recovery housing where she lives near campus.

“In school, the number one struggle is that most of us don’t feel like we’re smart enough. That’s what I see the most, and what I feel the most,” she said. She credits the Breaking Free club with creating the community she and her peers need to beat back their insecurities and succeed in the classroom.

In the years leading up to her incarceration, Ward said she was living each day simply to survive. “But this college, this club, has given me hope for the future — I know that there is one.” After graduating this spring, she plans to transfer to nearby Western Washington University, where talks are underway to expand recovery supports thanks in part to advocacy from students in the Breaking Free club. Ultimately, Ward hopes to land in a career that helps people with struggles like the ones she’s faced.

For many students like Ward, community colleges’ flexible academic offerings make college possible. But the same flexibility creates obstacles to the success of on-campus groups. Options like part-time course loads, online classes, and short certificate programs can stymie consistent attendance and participation. Even for full-time students, the two-year window creates frequent turnover. “A lot of our work is student-led,” said Kirk at Skagit Valley. “It’s challenging to have these awesome leaders who graduate so quickly.”

It’s also hard to engage students in recovery programs when they don’t have the time to linger on campus. “These students are flying home from work, making dinner, getting their kids settled, then racing to get over here on time for class,” said Cheryl Kramer, recovery program advisor at Cape Cod Community College, in Massachusetts.

But the toughest scrambles are often for staff and funding. Jonathan Lofgren, a professor of addiction counseling at Minneapolis College, launched the college’s program in 2017 after a sabbatical year studying recovery on college campuses. School leaders provided a dedicated space for the program and allowed Lofgren a half day per week to manage it, but they stopped short of hiring a dedicated coordinator.

During the pandemic, the program moved online and participation dropped. Welcome news arrived in 2021, though, when the school won a state grant in collaboration with a nearby four-year university, providing funding for two paid interns, a peer recovery coach, and a coordinator, Lisa Schmid.

But amid a nationwide shortage of staff in the treatment and recovery field, the peer coach and one intern position remain vacant. In November, Schmid took extended personal leave, which left her role unfilled as well. While she was out, two student workers ensured the recovery program room stayed open, emails went out and weekly meetings happened. But broader goals, like increasing awareness of recovery support services on campus, lost steam.

When Schmid returned from leave in February, she prioritized spreading word of the program to likely partners, such as the college’s veteran services program and its admissions team. In March, Minneapolis College leaders reached an agreement with the campus health clinic to continue funding her position once the state grant runs out.

“The need is everywhere,” Schmid said. Recovery “has always been such a hush-hush thing. How do we normalize it?”

Related: ‘Waste of time’: Community college transfers derail students

Advocates hope that a percentage of the hundreds of millions of dollars in state opioid settlement funding can be earmarked for collegiate recovery, and that Congress might one day approve additional funding. President Biden’s stalled 2024 budget includes $10.8 billion for SAMHSA, of which 10 percent would be set aside for recovery support services.

In a handful of states, legislation has made for a rosier funding picture. Washington lawmakers passed a bill in 2019 that led to the creation of a state grant fund to support recovery. From that work grew the Washington State Collegiate Recovery Support Initiative, which has provided funding for eight colleges, including four community colleges, to open recovery programs or provide recovery services in pre-existing programs, like Skagit Valley’s Breaking Free club.

Patricia Maarhuis of Washington State University said that, ultimately, collegiate recovery supports are about propelling academic success. “People might say this is just another student group, but no. This is not the frosting; this is the cake. If you want your students to stay in school and do well, you need recovery supports.”

Back in Minneapolis, Badboy has found a new home for the destructive puppy and her kids are settled in good schools and daycares. She’s thriving in her classes and expects to graduate in 2025. The balancing act of family, school and recovery, for now, is stable.

Recovery is painstakingly hard, Badboy said. But her journey — more than 12 years sober after nine bouts of treatment — has created a firm structure in her life that supports college success as much as it supports her well-being. Her peers in the program understand that in a way few others can, she said, and she feels accountable to them.

“It’s made it so that I really want to do this — almost that I must do this, I have to do this,” she said. “Because other people like me, who’ve felt the same way about themselves, need to see that this is possible.”

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

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