Atlanta

In a once-thriving neighborhood in the southeast part of Atlanta, Lakewood Elementary served families who came to work at the General Motors assembly plant, a sprawling 100-acre landmark that became a path toward economic mobility for entry-level workers. At its height in the late 1970s, the plant employed as many as 5,700 people. 

But by the early ‘90s, when Gloria Hawkins-Wynn moved into the community, signs of decline were evident. The last Chevy Caprice rolled off the assembly line in 1990, and a popular antique market at the now-defunct Lakewood Fairgrounds shut down in 2006. The closure of the elementary school two years earlier further contributed to neighborhood blight, turning the abandoned structure into a hotspot for criminal activity.

“We get prostitution. We get drug dealing. We get drive-by shootings,” Hawkins-Wynn told four years ago. A neighborhood representative, she urged city leaders to turn the eyesore over to a developer. 

Former students begged the city to save the school, home to some of their earliest : Dick and Jane books, dances in the auditorium, a principal named Mr. Hinkle. Still visible on the school’s deserted playground is a faded map of the United States.

“Please don’t demolish it,” wrote one woman. Walking to Lakewood with her mother, who died when she was 7, is a cherished memory. 

Now the old school is one of several in Atlanta It’s a transformation that is increasingly taking place across the country as city leaders and developers look to give new life to vacant buildings once bustling with students and teachers.

In 2024, nearly 2,000 apartments were built in former schools across the U.S., a record high and four times the number a year earlier, according to from RentCafe, a property search website. School-to-apartment conversions are now the fastest growing segment of a niche industry devoted to makeovers of historic spaces. 

As student enrollment nationwide and more districts, including Atlanta, make the painful decision to close schools, the Lakewood project offers a glimpse of what’s to come: Seventy-four school conversion projects are already underway across the country, RentCafe’s data shows. With enrollment loss in traditional schools , districts will be left with even more surplus properties. 

Renovating existing structures “offers a way to help those buildings continue on as community assets,” said Patrice Frey, president and CEO of RePurpose Capital, a subsidiary of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

For the first time since the Great Depression, renovation projects, including historic preservation, surpassed new construction in 2022, according to the . Supply chain gridlock and “the rapid escalation of materials costs” likely contributed to the shift, Frey said.

The pandemic also played a part as parents chose charter schools or uprooted to other districts and states to find in-person learning. The rapid expansion of private school choice has also contributed to enrollment declines, school consolidations and closures.

Data from the Brookings Institution showed that between the 2018-19 and 2021-22 school years, 12% of elementary schools and 9% of middle schools lost at least one-fifth of their students. Many districts delayed closures in response to parents and generations of former students who pleaded with leaders to keep the neighborhood institutions open. Some districts, , are still putting it off.

But maintaining underenrolled schools, especially those with just a couple hundred students, can be a financial drain. The , and districts are among those that have recently announced or discussed closures. That means they’ll eventually have to decide what to do with the buildings.

An earlier Atlanta project, completed in 1999, offers a preview of what’s in store for Lakewood and many other former schools. was redeveloped into Bass Lofts, a three-story structure that sits in a bohemian neighborhood known for vintage clothing stores, dive bars and record shops. Mallory Brooks, a photographer, moved into one of the units 10 years ago after relocating from Florida.

“It was the first place I looked at, and I was definitely smitten,” she said. Stepping through the main entrance, “you are transported immediately to being in a school.” 

Old lockers, welded shut, line the ground floor hallways, and a large Depression-era mural of women dancing sits above the stage in the auditorium. While rows of seats remain intact, some tenants also use the space to store their bikes. Brooks appreciates how sunlight pours through the 10-foot-high windows — “I’ve been able to basically create a greenhouse in my apartment,” she said. But regulating the temperature is difficult, and she looks forward to HVAC upgrades. 

‘Legacy residents’

Lakewood Elementary is one of eight sites that the Atlanta Public Schools is now repurposing through an agreement with the Atlanta Urban Development Corp., a nonprofit arm of the city’s housing authority that renovates historic properties into mixed-income residences. The plan, part of to increase affordable housing, includes giving teachers the first choice of apartments. That was important to Cynthia Briscoe Brown, a former Atlanta Board of Education member whose last vote in December was to . 

“Seventy percent of APS employees do not live within the city limits of Atlanta,” she said. “One of the board’s priorities in developing these properties is to make it possible for our employees to not have to drive so far before their work day.” 

A lawyer with experience in real estate, she took an interest in the dilapidated properties when she was first elected in 2013. But she also has personal ties to the site where Peeples Street Elementary, one of the eight former schools, once stood. Her father, Woodson Briscoe, attended the school, which sat just down the street from the boarding house, run by an aunt, where the family lived. 

“This was the Depression. They were a young couple with a family, and they couldn’t afford their own house,” she said. Today, as in the neighborhood climb, with some homes priced well over $500,000, families are facing the same problem. “The West End is gentrifying to a point where a lot of legacy residents are having trouble staying.” 

‘A pall over neighborhoods’ 

Peeples Street closed in 1982. has been gone for 30 years, torn down after a fire left little worth saving.

But some shuttered schools can sit vacant for decades, attracting crime and casting “a pall over neighborhoods,” Alyn Turner, a sociologist with Research for Action, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, told a group of Atlanta leaders in February. 

In a hotel east of downtown, they gathered in a dining room to discuss ways to lessen the negative impacts of the upcoming closures on both students and the neighborhoods where they live.

Turner cited a showing that between 2005 and 2013, 12 urban districts, including Atlanta, Chicago and Pittsburgh, sold, leased or repurposed 267 school properties, but still had more than 300 on the market. 

School closures “tend to concentrate in communities that have already experienced displacement and disinvestment,” she said. “People can experience a closure as yet another signal of neighborhood decline.”

In Gary, Indiana, a rising number of 911 calls near abandoned schools — an almost 600% increase between 2022 and 2024. They found fires, hundreds of requests for extra police patrols and 26 reports of “shots fired.”  In 2015, a was found dead in Emerson High School, a Four years later, three teenagers fatally shot a woman and in an emptied-out elementary school.

Like any abandoned building, a boarded-up old school can “provide cover” for criminals, according to at Arizona State University. Run-down, vacant structures can even escalate criminal behavior, they write, sending a message that no one owns or cares about the property.

Maintaining former school buildings until they’re sold or repurposed can make the neighborhood feel safer, Turner told the Atlanta group. But like Briscoe Brown, some participants said they worry about the opposite effect — gentrification that leaves some lower-income families behind.

“How can you help the people who are still there?” asked Femi Johnson, a senior director at Achieve Atlanta, a nonprofit that focuses on college access. “Can it be a food bank? Can it be a community health center?”

In her hometown of Philadelphia, she saw the former Edward Bok Vocational School, part of a wave of closures in 2013, transformed into an event space with , a destination she felt didn’t serve the community’s needs.

Developers are drawn to former schools because of their historic architectural features, like wide hallways and stairwells. The former Monsignor Coyle High School in Taunton, Massachusetts, now , boasts “soaring ceilings” and original windows. 

Tax credits for historic preservation can offset some of the costs of modernization, but come with restrictions on what developers can change and which “character-defining features,” like a gymnasium, must go untouched, said Pittsburgh developer Rick Belloli.

In 2022, his company, Q Development, Mt. Alvernia, a former Sisters of St. Francis convent and all-girls school north of Pittsburgh. He described the massive, 333-room main building, the Motherhouse, as “a gloriously spectacular historic building” with cast iron stairways and arched ceilings. But he’s still navigating the approval process, and some developers, he said, avoid former schools because of those hurdles. 

‘Choice properties’

Like Coyle and Mt. Alvernia, many of the school-to-apartment conversions are concentrated in the northeast and midwest. Columbus, Ohio, ranked first on of cities with the most school conversion projects. 

Next on the list is Cleveland, where the former Martin Luther King Jr. High School, in the predominantly Black , was among those affected by more recent enrollment loss. In 2020, the district , which had dropped to less than 350 students, and a Maryland-based developer for $880,000.

Exploring one of Cleveland’s abandoned high school’s

Last fall, knowing the building might be demolished, former students gathered to reflect and grab what mementos they could. Some cut strings off the basketball hoops, said Ronald Crosby, who attended in the late 1980s. Others took old library cards and team jerseys. 

Ronald’s sister Johnetta Crosby has fond memories of the school. “We had teachers that took their time to make sure you learned,” she said. “If you didn’t have anything to wear, they made sure you did. If you couldn’t afford to eat lunch, they fed you anyway.”

D’Angelo Dixon, who graduated in 2018, felt more conflicted. “Black stuff” leaked from the ceiling, he remembered, and academically, he felt behind friends who attended other schools. 

“Once I went to college, I felt like I didn’t know anything,” he said. But he credited the school’s career-tech program with inspiring him to work in health care. He’s now a nursing assistant. At the alumni gathering last year, he headed for the art room to grab a ceiling tile he painted with his nickname, Delo — part of a senior class assignment.

Some alumni hoped the developer, Kareem Abdus-Salaam, would save the building but that’s not part of his vision for the new residential community, a mix of apartments, townhomes and retail space.

“I really want to just level the whole site and bring it up, almost like a phoenix rising from the ashes,” he said. He expects to break ground this spring. “There are so many abandoned schools in this country that are sitting on choice properties.”

He does, however, intend to make use of the large stones that still border one corner of the property by crushing them into gravel for a quarter-mile walking trail that will wind through the development. Along that pathway, he plans to erect signposts with historical photos of the school so former students “can have some feeling of yesteryear.” 

In Atlanta, the partnership between the school district and the city gives officials a say in what the developers preserve. They’ll integrate the original Lakewood Elementary building into the overall design. 

With a strip of commercial properties on the corner, including a popular restaurant and coffee shop, Hawkins-Wynn, who still lives a few blocks away, hopes the redevelopment will spur even more investment in the neighborhood.

On a recent afternoon, the transition was obvious, but so were the obstacles in its path. As she walked the perimeter of the property, a construction crew put up plywood on a new home across the street. A few lots down, trash and discarded mattresses piled up on the curb.

“This is why we need redevelopment,” she said, pointing to the debris. “It’s still shady around here, but it’s changing like you won’t believe.” 

A recent college graduate from Kansas, Phipps chose the district, which is about 45 miles east of Denver, because of an unusual job perk: housing for school staff. The district-owned apartments offer monthly rent starting at $200. Phipps, who still lives in the apartments with his wife and infant son, said it’s a main reason he’s remained in the district.

Affordable educator housing has existed for decades, especially in remote school districts like Byers. But teachers are increasingly getting priced out of the communities they work in — causing them to seek employment elsewhere or avoid jobs in high-priced metro areas. To combat this issue, nonprofits and school districts across the nation — in states including Colorado, Arkansas, California, New Mexico and Kansas — are pursuing teacher housing projects to improve educator retention.

For example, rent for a one-bedroom apartment at a for San Francisco Unified staff starts at $1,183 per month, in a district where this year is $79,468 and similar rentals go for around $3,000 or more. First-year Kansas City educators who make a $48,150 can pay $600 to $900 a month to share a duplex with other teachers. Nearby monthly rents start at $1,000. San Francisco tenants are selected through a lottery system, but many other housing projects prioritize new teachers and have waiting lists.

Between 2019 and 2025, housing costs increased by roughly 50% on average, outpacing the average 24% growth in entry-level teacher salaries, according to a .

“Until all teachers can reliably afford basic necessities like housing, the challenges of attracting and retaining a diverse, high-quality teacher workforce will likely persist,” the report said.

‘I don’t have much turnover’

Phipps interviewed with multiple Colorado districts, including one that paid more than what Byers was offering. But he liked the high school social studies job in Byers the most because of the school community and low-cost housing. Rental units are scarce in the district, with monthly payments starting around $1,400 — a high price tag for Phipps’ $50,738 salary. Having a boss who was also his landlord wasn’t an issue, he said.

“The demand and prices of housing — especially rent — is very high out here,” he said. “I don’t know if I would have moved out to Colorado without this teacher housing. I didn’t know what was going to be do-able with my teacher salary straight out of college.”

The Byers school district has owned staff housing since the 1960s. It has 10 apartments and two houses — all occupied, with a waiting list. Superintendent Tom Trudell said the rent pays for occasional renovations or repairs. Housing has always been part of the district’s strategy to attract and retain teachers, he said, and it allows them to save money to eventually buy a house of their own.

“There’s a kind of a bond that builds between [me and my tenants], because if they’re quality employees, they’re typically not going anywhere,” he said. “So I don’t have much turnover.”

In the Vilas School District in southeastern Colorado, Superintendent Abby Pettinger is the landlord for 11 rental homes that house eight single school staff members and one family with children. Two units are vacant. The homes have become outdated because the district lacks money for repairs and remodels.

“It’s really hard to be somebody’s landlord and be their boss,” she said. “We wanted [the units] to be an asset for our staff, but I wish that we could be at a point that it could be self-sustaining. We’re not at that point.”

Some teacher housing complexes are owned and managed by local nonprofits rather than the school district. That’s the case for Harrison School District 2 in Colorado Springs. An organization called We Fortify is raising $6 million for that consist of 325-square-foot tiny homes. Rent will start at $825 per month. 

Construction has already begun, and teachers will begin to move in next summer, said district spokesperson Christine O’Brien. 

“We did poll all of our staff before we 
 started designing the idea for the village,” she said. “We could have filled five villages with just our initial interest.”

District plans don’t always come through

Of the 12 teacher housing developments in California, seven have popped up in just the last three years, according to a from the Center for Cities and School at the University of California-Berkeley.

“Generally, recruitment has become more and more challenging, so districts are motivated to look for other ways to enhance their ability to recruit staff,” said Sara Hinkley, the center’s program manager. “High costs of housing have become pretty entrenched. And then most states are experiencing declining enrollment, which means there are more properties available.”

The Santa Clara Unified School District was the first in the state to complete a teacher housing project, in 2002. This year, three developments for multiple school districts opened in Silicon Valley, in , and . Educators in Mountain View and Palo Alto were offered free rent as an incentive to move in.

Building affordable teacher housing can be a rocky process, especially if schools or nonprofits run into problems with city zoning laws, insufficient funding or a lack of community support. It to build modern, five-story apartment buildings for San Francisco Unified teachers because of housing density concerns and other issues. And once the lottery opened, some teacher applications .

In 2021, California’s Oakland Unified School District for future teacher housing. The apartments have yet to be built. The project hasn’t received enough funding, and union members have to focus first on raising wages.

“We’ve definitely seen districts realize that what they want to do isn’t going to be financially feasible,” Hinkley said. “They may get as far as choosing a parcel of land, coming up with an idea of what they want to build and [find out] that they are going to have to charge rent that’s way too high in order to make the project work.”

Rural schools in New Mexico have access to , but larger districts like Sante Fe Public Schools don’t qualify. In recent years, the in funding for a 40-unit housing complex project, but that was well below the needed $15 million. Now, Santa Fe is trying to fund it through a .

An initiative in Bentonville, Arkansas, stalled last year when a rezoning request to turn school district property into 40 cottages for low-income staff. The Bentonville School District had next to its high school to the Excellerate Foundation, a local nonprofit that was funding the $35 million housing project. 

Superintendent Debbie Jones said she thought it was the end of a project she had worked on since 2021, when Bentonville began to lose newly hired educators who couldn’t afford to live in the district. But then the foundation included the teacher housing plans in a that’s slated to open in 2026. Two-bedroom cottages will cost $1,000 a month.

“It’s actually better than our original plan because they have built in a 3,000-square-foot child care center that we will run and it serves the families in that neighborhood,” she said.

Giving new teachers a boost with education and a home

The housing projects for the Bentonville and Harrison school districts have guidelines to allow low-income young staffers like new teachers or paraprofessionals to qualify. Residents also have a time limit for staying in the housing. For Bentonville, educators have to move out after five years. In the Harrison district, the maximum is three years.

In both, residents are required to participate in financial management classes that are designed to help them prepare to move out. In Bentonville, staffers can pay an extra $500 a month in rent as part of a program that will give tenants $50,000 toward their next house.

Kelly Davis, president of the Bentonville Education Association, said young teachers in the district are getting excited for the development to open because monthly rent costs anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000.

“When I came to the district back in 2003, I couldn’t afford to live here. I still don’t live in Bentonville,” he said. “They are trying very hard to make sure that the lowest-paid people in the district have a place to live, so that they don’t have to leave the community.”

Kansas City has a similar housing project that not only provides financial education, but helps college graduates get their first teaching job.

In 2020, Trinity Davis left her post as assistant superintendent of Kansas City Public Schools and founded to increase the number of local Black educators. A by the University of Missouri-Kansas City reported the metro area had more than 53,000 Black students but fewer than 1,200 Black teachers.

Teachers Like Me recruits recent college graduates by securing them a job in one of eight partner Kansas City school districts while also providing low-cost housing. School districts pay the organization $15,000 for every educator they receive through the process. The nonprofit has three homes and is in the process of building seven more to create a duplex neighborhood. 

“Suburban districts that don’t have any teachers of color are coming to us to say, ‘Hey, can you help us recruit some Black teachers?’” Davis said. “I have an elementary school where the fourth-grade, fifth-grade and sixth-grade teachers are all Teachers Like Me [participants]. They’re like a family and they live together.”

New , released today by nonprofit Advocates for Children of New York revealed around 27,000 more students experienced homelessness than in 2022-23 for a total of 146,000 children. Roughly one in eight children lacked a permanent place to call home.

An influx of and a have likely contributed to the stark increase, experts said, outside of persistent drivers like the city’s . 

The 23% increase after a decade of mostly under 10% increases has alarmed education and housing advocates who called for the city, state and department of education to address shortages, , expand , improve the , and prioritize placing students into housing nearest to their school. 

According to the latest demographic data of students in temporary housing available from the 2022-23 school year, one in three were English language learners and nearly all were Black or Latino. 

This marks the ninth consecutive year student homelessness has exceeded 100,000. The latest tally of students could fill all seats in Yankee Stadium nearly three times over. Each of the city’s 32 school districts saw increases, but students experiencing homelessness were most highly concentrated in the south Bronx, upper Manhattan, and central Brooklyn’s Brownsville and Bushwick, where the city’s largest shelters are.

“The challenges remain stubbornly persistent,” said Jennifer Pringle, director of AFC’s Learners in Temporary Housing Project. “…If we’re [going to] talk about ending family homelessness, we need to make sure that education is front and center. Young adults who don’t have a high school diploma are four to five times more likely to experience homelessness as adults. We have to make sure that our young people right now in shelter are getting the support that they need, so they graduate and flourish beyond high school.”

The numbers, while unsurprising to experts familiar with the growing crisis, are likely still an undercount as to how many children are experiencing homelessness. Data capture only school-aged children, but “the most common age that someone is in shelter is under the age of 5,” said Henry Love, vice president of public policy and strategy with Women in Need, the city and nation’s largest shelter provider. 

“We’re probably talking about a quarter of a million or 200,000 children, at least,” Love said, emphasizing families are the main population in shelters today. “I’m still wrapping my mind around it.”

He added that the situation has been exacerbated by Mayor Eric Adams’ vetoing a package of the City Councils’ housing bills, which would have expanded financial assistance to families at risk of homelessness. After the Council attempted to override the vetoes, a . The decision is now being appealed in court, leaving thousands of families in limbo. 

“The number one thing is if we could keep people in their homes,” he said. “…We have decided by de facto that instead of giving these kids housing that they deserve, we said, you know what, we’ll give you shelter instead.”

Just over half of last year’s students who lived in temporary housing were “doubled-up,” sharing homes with friends or family, and more than 60,000 spent nights in the city’s shelters.

Data obtained from the state’s department of education also revealed alarming education outcomes for students in temporary housing in the 2022-23 school year, the latest available: on state reading and writing tests, proficiency for third through eighth graders was 20 points lower on average; and the high school dropout rate was three times higher than that of their peers. 

Students in shelter experienced the most negative educational impacts, seeing rates of chronic absenteeism closer to 70%, in part due to the city’s common practice of initially , adding strain to already costly and lengthy transportation routes. 

About 18% of students in shelters had to move schools at least once during the school year, four times the rate for permanently housed students. 

“It’s not good for students, it’s not good for the school to have that level of churn among your student population. You think about the connections that kids have to their peers, their teachers and how vital those relationships are and how much they can help a student during a time of housing instability,” AFC’s Pringle said. “Yet for so many families, they’re forced to contend between these ridiculously long commutes or transferring schools.” 

Mayor Adams’ administration also enacted an “inhumane” 60-day stay limit on particular shelters, disproportionately impacting the .

In addition to housing policy reforms, adjusting the state’s per-pupil formula would be critical in boosting kids’ educational outcomes by allowing schools to adequately invest in family outreach, attendance improvement, wrap around services with local community organizations, and academic tutoring. 

In a statement, Department of Education spokesperson Chyann Tull said the system has provided “field support, enrollment support, transportation services for students and parents, access to counseling, immunization assistance, and academic support.” 

The city has a goal of placing 85% of students in the same borough as their school, but “they haven’t gotten anywhere close to that .. more needs to be done there,” Pringle added. “I think it’s recognized by the fact that they set a goal that they are not achieving – they know that they need to do better.”

It took five years for the project to be completed — a timeline that did not go unmentioned by representatives of the organizations involved.  

“Once we know better, we need to do better,” said LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho. “And this time we need to do better and faster. Sun King is evidence that the impossible can be turned into the inevitable.” 

Carvalho called the partnership “a first of its kind, a difficult partnership. We have learned, and that learning should result in more projects delivered in a shorter period of time.”

Sun King Apartments, located in the San Fernando Valley just half a mile from Fernangeles Elementary School, was created through a partnership between LAUSD, and .

Services for homeless families have become more important than ever as LA Unified reported a in student homelessness from the previous school year. As of 2023–2024, there were 15,000 students reported homeless in the district. 

“It was around 2019
when Many Mansions approached us,” said Celina Alvarez, executive director at Housing Works. “There’s so many hoops and hurdles and paperwork and financing and service provision
it takes quite a while.”

Alvarez said the increase in homelessness is due to two things: rent increases and inadequate trauma services. 

“People are getting displaced rapidly and in high numbers,” said Alvarez, “A lot of children are coming from households where parents don’t have the knowledge or resources readily available to understand what their rights are in terms of tenant rights.”

The new apartments were especially good news for Annika, a homeless mother who has been living in unstable conditions for years with her daughter Faith and partner, Angel.

“The years of being homeless moving from couches to park benches to shelters have caused a decline in our emotional, mental, and spiritual health,” said Annika. “Knowing that we will have a permanent home, we were able to start thinking about what the future truly holds for us.”

The housing complex includes gated parking, an outdoor area and kitchen, a laundry room, and a community garden.  The complex will also have direct services for students such as tutoring, school supplies, summer classes and family gatherings.

This is not the first time LAUSD has partnered with developers to provide housing to teachers and students. In 2017, Los Angeles Unified partnered with , using vacant land just north of Gardena High School Campus to build Sage Park Apartments, a 90-unit complex.

Combined with a lack of mental health services for young people living in poverty it is difficult for students to get the help they need. 

“There’s people with a lot of unresolved trauma, untreated mental illness. And sometimes they’re coping with illicit substances because they’re easier to access than mental health treatment, ” said Alvarez.

This article was originally published by , and is republished through our partnership .

An Indianapolis nonprofit called  has launched a program to help Black educators buy their first homes. 

The idea sprung from conversations with educators who said low pay drove them away from teaching, CEO Blake Nathan said. While his organization, which is dedicated to building diversity among teaching staffs, can’t help educators earn higher salaries, it can provide financial support for other living expenses. 

Nathan said the organization’s long-term goal is to grow its support for Black educators in an effort to help build generational wealth within the community. If successful, Nathan said, those results could trickle down to students.

Studies have shown that having greater representation of Black teachers in classrooms can positively affect student performance, suspension frequency and graduation rates, Nathan said. In IPS, for example, Black educators make up 20% of the district’s teaching population while more than 40% of students are Black.

“We have to find ways to retain those Black teachers because we understand the importance of having Black teachers in our school systems,” Nathan said. “This is a true testament of philanthropy to circulate the dollar to get it directly into the hands of the beneficiary who needs it most.”

The program, called , will cover closing costs of up to $5,000 for homes in the Martindale Brightwood area. Educate ME is partnering with the Martindale Brightwood Community Development Corporation to offer educators early access to view the organization’s inventory of new homes before they’re listed on popular real estate websites like Zillow. Nathan said the neighborhood organization has more than a dozen new homes on track to be completed by the end of the year.

Educate ME also will sponsor down payments for existing homes in the neighborhood and is interested in partnering with other Indianapolis-area community development corporations in the future.

The Teacherville program funds Black educators — including teachers, counselors and school support staff — working in any Indianapolis school. To be eligible, educators must meet certain income and credit score requirements.

Educate ME also partners with the Indianapolis Neighborhood Housing Partnership to connect teachers with resources for homebuyer education classes and support for credit building, regardless of their income levels.

“The homebuying process can be very overwhelming to anyone,” Nathan said. “What we want to do is think about, ‘How can we streamline this process? How can we make this process less intimidating for a teacher?’”

Nathan said Teacherville set an initial goal of supporting 25 educators and now has at least 10 others on a waitlist. The program, however, is still adding to its waitlist and Nathan encourages educators to apply through the .

The initiative is supported by a gift from the African American Legacy Fund of Indianapolis and the donor advised fund of the Indianapolis Foundation, which provided $100,000. Educate ME is now seeking community donations to fund down payment assistance for educators on the Teacherville waitlist.

Larry Smith, president and CEO of Indianapolis-based  said the program seeks not only to help recruit and retain teachers, but also to contribute to the resurgence of the Martindale Brightwood area.

He said he and other community leaders were drawn to helping Educate ME because of its plans to scale up support beyond Teacherville’s initial donations.

“We don’t have millions and millions of dollars,” Smith said. “But, in terms of helping to attract, recruit and retain teachers, we felt that we could have a real impact.”

ST. PAUL, Minn. — In the early days of the pandemic, Kentarios Franklin, now 24, who goes by KD, spent his days looking for jobs and new places to stay. He walked into restaurants and stores, asking if he could help stock shelves or do other odd tasks, and bounced around among friends’ homes, sometimes staying for as little as a week or two. 

He continued like this for about three years until one day, a friend gave him a camera. That’s when his life began to change, Franklin says. About six months ago, through a local youth organization that teaches video production, he met former professional soccer player turned philanthropist Tony Sanneh. Sanneh offered him a job as a photographer and videographer for the Sanneh Foundation, which runs free sports camps and other out-of-school opportunities for diverse, low-income, urban and immigrant youth. 

Sanneh Foundation founder Tony Sanneh, left, and youth worker KD Franklin pose for a photo at the foundation’s St. Paul office.

For the first time since the pandemic began, Franklin has a stable job — and stable housing — where he feels like he can grow. He’s one of 14 Sanneh Foundation youth workers currently living in subsidized housing provided by the foundation specifically to support workers like him.

“Stability is everything,” Franklin said. “Ever since I picked up a camera, my life has changed in ways I couldn’t have imagined. I’m already in cahoots with videographers outside of the Sanneh Foundation, and being in this environment is helping me to develop not only as a professional, but as a man as well.”

Low pay and the lack of benefits as well as career development are common among frontline staff in the youth work industry — broadly defined as jobs that serve kids outside of school, from afterschool and tutoring programs to sports to summer camps. Funding sources can often be ad hoc and industry staffing standards are not highly regulated, which opens the door to much-needed workers without formal degrees but can also prevent career advancement.

“Workers in these spaces are undervalued,” said Dale Blyth, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development. Blyth is also part of a group conducting a comprehensive survey of youth workers called the . 

“They’ve been thought of as ‘nice things for kids,’ but not necessary for learning and development. But what we’re increasingly learning is that these opportunities for young people after school, during the summer, on weekends, are actually critical learning and development opportunities. They are often where young people have a chance to explore their interests and take their learning further than they might be able to in a classroom.”

Research shows that out-of-school programs can have a profound impact on kids, including , and . But workers in the field don’t see a big financial payoff. More than  earn $10-$20 an hour, with 9% earning less than $10 an hour, according to a nationally representative 2022 EdWeek Research Center survey. According to a spring , only 21% of workers receive full or partial benefits and paid leave. 

Funding for out-of-school programs operated by school districts often comes from . But many programs are operated by nonprofits, faith-based groups and volunteer-based groups that rely on philanthropy and whose leaders say they aren’t able to simply pay workers more due to grantmakers’ restrictions on how funding can be used. Some youth programs like the Sanneh Foundation, however, are finding more creative ways to support workers. 

About six years ago, the Sanneh Foundation surveyed its staff members at the time about their work, lives and well-being. The survey found that five of the organization’s 50 employees didn’t have permanent places to live.

“We found a lot of young people who wanted to serve their communities and help other youth, but it was just a struggle. It’s a low-pay and low-opportunity field,” Sanneh said. “So we asked ourselves, ‘how can we invest in them while keeping the foundation sustainable?’”

With housing insecurity topping the list of staff concerns, the foundation began offering employees housing vouchers, paying security deposits and co-signing leases when necessary. 

Fourteen Sanneh Foundation youth workers live in subsidized housing provided by the foundation including this shared home.

A few years later, the foundation started purchasing houses to rent to workers. Most workers pay $500 per month for a room plus $100 in utilities, compared to an  in rent for a one-bedroom in the city, and also receive a box of food every week as well as supportive services for mental health and other issues. 

Many of the foundation’s workers who don’t work directly with youth are hired through the AmeriCorps VISTA program and receive salaries between $20,000 and $25,000 a year, with additional stipends of up to $14,400 a year. Staff over 18 who work directly with kids are paid about $16-$20 an hour.

Other organizations are also working to support youth workers outside of raising salaries. Starting in January, the Indiana  will provide thousands of youth workers across the state — including out-of-school workers, child welfare professionals, shelter staff and mental health counselors — with access to telehealth services, mental health counseling and peer learning groups. They also plan to launch a professional development program for emerging leaders of color. 

The project will be operated by the Indiana Youth Institute, a nonprofit focused on training professionals in youth work, and be funded by a $20 million Lilly Endowment Inc. grant. The project grew out of a 2022 survey of the state’s youth workers, said Cassie Wade, vice president of youth worker well-being at the institute.

“Youth workers talked about high levels of vicarious trauma they experienced working in the field,” Wade said. “They talked about high workload, inadequate or lack of access to benefits, lack of clear career advancement — and all while being a youth worker during a global pandemic.” 

California offers a cautionary model for non-school-based youth programs looking to support their workers. Before the pandemic, the state put nearly $800 million toward expanding before- and after-school and summer programs and later expanded the programs with the help of the federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars. Today, $4 billion a year goes toward out-of-school programs, with the number expected to reach $5 billion by 2025.

A  found that the expansion allowed more kids to be served, for more hours in the day, and with a greater diversity of learning experiences. But even as the funding increased, Tiffany Gipson, the program director for equity and quality initiatives at the California AfterSchool Network, said some programs are still on the verge of going out of business and struggling to pay their workers minimum wage.

“It’s not just the transactional piece of ‘oh, give us more money so that we can pay staff more and make staff do more,’” she said. “For me it’s more, how do we help the systems understand the value of this work and that it’s been undervalued?”

In light of the lack of consistent and reliable funding to increase salaries, Sanneh wants to invest in his workers’ career development and help them find more stable, better-paying careers rather than stay at his foundation, unless they want to. For some, that means helping them become teachers or social workers.

For Franklin, that means helping him network with other video and photography professionals and make a financial plan to achieve his goal of owning his own video production business, ideally making documentaries that shine a light on issues like youth homelessness. 

“I didn’t have a choice to go to college,” Franklin said. “That was out the window in the first place. But the fact that I didn’t go and am still here, it’s like seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. I never would have thought I’d be working at this level.”

The Bentonville School District is considering building affordable housing for teachers who are struggling to secure homes amid skyrocketing home prices in Northwest Arkansas.

Superintendent Debbie Jones said district officials first realized the severity of the problem in 2021 when teachers who signed contracts resigned before the start of the academic year because they couldn’t afford housing in the area.

The Rogers School District, another large district in Benton County, has also had employees rescind job offers after realizing they couldn’t afford moving to the area, Communications Multimedia Specialist Jason Ivester said.

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“It is an ongoing concern that we are constantly looking at,” Ivester said.

The affordable housing issue complicates teacher recruitment, which is already challenging because the pipeline is shrinking as fewer people go into education, and a solution is going to take a community effort, Jones said.

To that end, the Bentonville School District has partnered with the Excellerate Foundation, a grant-making organization that has previously worked on housing issues in the region. President and CEO Jeff Webster approached Jones with a possible solution to the district’s affordable housing problem and presented his proposal at the Bentonville School Board’s .

The proposed project would involve construction of a community center, 50 to 60 multi-family rental units and 20 single-family rental homes on land adjacent to Bentonville High School. Developers would also build 20 single-family homes that could be sold for $180,000 to $200,000.

The average sale price of a home in Bentonville was about $475,000 last year, according to a . In July, the median sale price of home in the city was $507,500, according to .

Webster told the board there will be no cost to the district, which can donate the nine acres, six of which are usable because of a floodplain. Webster estimated the project will cost $20 million to $25 million and said the development would be built by Strategic Realty, whose founder and CEO is Sen. Jim Petty, a Republican from Van Buren.

Excellerate will invest millions into the project and act as “the quarterback” by bringing different funding sources to the table, Webster told the Advocate.

“It’s everybody doing their part, and we’re just trying to step up and play our role,” he said.

Jones said she didn’t understand the depth of the affordable housing issue until she received an email from a teacher earlier this year.

“We gave a 6.5% salary increase this year, and she said, ‘I’m a single parent and I can finally breathe
but the housing is a whole different challenge,’ and we know it is,” Jones said.

During the 2022-2023 school year, Bentonville had the third highest starting salary for teachers in the state at $48,755. The LEARNS Act of 2023 raises Arkansas’ minimum teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000.

”ț±đČÔłÙŽÇČÔ±čŸ±±ô±ô±đ’s for a new teacher with a bachelor’s degree and no experience is $51,924 for the 2023-2024 school year.

Webster said he expects the project to be completed within two years, but the district is awaiting a legal opinion from Arkansas’ Attorney General before moving forward. Rep. Mindy McAlindon, R-Bentonville, has submitted questions to the AG’s office to ensure the novel project is legal.

If approved, Webster said the project could become a model for others. No districts have pursued such a project in Arkansas, but organizations in other states have.

For example, a California school district south of San Francisco opened 122 apartments for teachers and staff last year, while the American Federation of Teachers opened a building with apartments and shops for teachers in West Virginia, according to .

Arkansas School Boards Association Policy Services Director Lucas Harder said the housing issue that affects teacher recruitment in the Natural State more often deals with a lack of housing in remote areas.

“It’s one of those things that always comes up every so often, especially in the Delta or some of the more rural areas, where it can be hard to get someone to come and move out there, either because there isn’t housing or there aren’t other things available,” Harder said.

Sen. Linda Chesterfield, a former educator and Democrat from Little Rock, tried to address this issue in 2003 when she was a member of the Arkansas House and lead sponsor of . The law created the Arkansas Teacher Housing Development Foundation to develop affordable housing and provide housing incentives to attract high-performing teachers to high-priority school districts.

The law was repealed in 2016.

A growing problem

If the Bentonville School District moves forward with its affordable housing project, the development will be built just south of Walmart’s Home Office, which is under construction on 350 acres. The world’s largest retailer has spurred a lot of economic development in Northwest Arkansas, which has come with rising home prices in recent years.

The average price of a home in Benton County in the second half of 2022 reached $401,875, nearly 76% higher than five years ago, according to released in March. The average price was $376,018 in Washington County, 71% higher than five years ago.

A variety of organizations and municipalities have taken steps to study and develop plans to address the region’s affordable housing crisis. In March 2021, the Northwest Arkansas Council launched a with the goal of providing housing solutions for the region’s critical workforce.

The center rebranded as Groundwork in July when its executive director announced a in downtown Springdale that will include 30 units permanently reserved for households earning below the region’s area median income.

In late 2021, the Bentonville City Council adopted a resolution to establish a group to study workforce and affordable housing. Webster served as chairman of the Bentonville Housing Affordability Workgroup, which met for a year and released a in January. The group’s work included a recommendation for developer incentives and process improvements called Project ARROW.

In early August, the Excellerate Foundation , a wholly-owned subsidiary, to accelerate the creation of affordable housing in the region.

“The affordable housing crisis has been with us for years, but it continues to intensify in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, historic inflation and a population growth rate that shows no signs of slowing down,” Webster said in a statement. “Excellerate Housing will help those who have been hit the hardest by the lack of affordable housing, especially the region’s ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) population.”

The 25-year-old foundation has worked in the housing space for about six years. Among other things, Excellerate led the creation of the NWA Regional Fund through which local banks invested more than $40 million in equity to support five new affordable housing developments. The fund supported 345 rental units for lower-income families that will run, on average, 49% below current market rate rent.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com. Follow Arkansas Advocate on and .

By the time Chaunceey Chery turned 18, he had moved nearly two dozen times. 

For years, he bounced between apartments and hotel rooms in Vermont and Florida as his mother struggled with substance abuse. His family, he said, spent more hours than he can estimate driving back and forth on I-95, which runs the length of the Eastern Seaboard. 

As a teenager, Chery tried out online school to maintain continuity amid the many moves, but family turmoil and his own mental health challenges prevented him from fully engaging in lessons. For nearly two years, he hardly learned anything, he said.

At 15, he began living with relatives in northeastern Vermont, hoping for more stability. He began regularly attending school in an alternative program meant for students facing adverse circumstances and was able to land a job, but he felt he was “walking on eggshells” living in a space that was not his own. Meanwhile, his housing nightmare continued as one aunt got evicted, another had landlord difficulties and his uncle’s house got foreclosed. 

“I felt like I was quadruple homeless at that point,” he said.

Circumstances like those that Chery endured as a young person trying to survive and stay in school now threaten to become increasingly common in rural areas, as experts warn of a in remote towns and villages.

In St. Johnsbury, Vermont where Chery lives, the school district’s homeless liaison, Kara Lufkin, said her caseload has jumped to nearly two dozen students this school year after hovering just above a dozen for the two years prior. Lori Robinson, the liaison for a nearby school district in the wider Northeast Kingdom region, also said she’s now serving the most students she ever has since starting the role in 2020, when a nationwide eviction moratorium protected families. 

Federal funding for low-cost rural rentals has been slashed in recent decades. A U.S. Department of Agriculture program that once helped finance the construction of new apartments in sparsely populated areas of the country has been — squeezing an option long relied upon by many rural households.

But local factors also play in as Vermont is phasing out its pandemic rental assistance program. Rebecca Lewis, regional director of Northeast Kingdom Community Action, said her organization is bracing for “a lot more” families to lose their housing in the next six months.

Vermont has the second-highest per capita rate of homelessness in the nation, lower only than California’s, according to a December 2022 report from the . At the same time, the Green Mountain state provides temporary shelter to a higher share of its residents without homes than any other state, with 98% safely indoors on a point-in-time count from last year.

While dwarfed in size by places like New York City, where the number of homeless students , rural students without housing face challenges that are distinct from those in metro centers. Emergency shelters, public transportation and cell reception tend to be scarce or nonexistent. Quiet places to work like libraries and coffee shops may be miles away. And in far north regions like St. Johnsbury, one winter night without proper shelter can be lethal.

As a homeless liaison, Lufkin understands it’s her job to mitigate these difficulties as much as possible. She coordinates transportation to and from school when families need it and often provides youth in need of winter gear with jackets, hats and gloves. Robinson, in the district next door, celebrated being able to scrape together the equipment and transportation for a student on her caseload to play football in the fall and basketball this winter. 

Still, much remains beyond their control, Lufkin said, and some conditions can cripple learning for homeless youth regardless of whether they’re happening in a teeming city or the remote reaches of New England. 

“[Students] may not be sleeping as well if they’re sleeping on a couch,” she said. “If you’re hungry, your focus isn’t on reading that textbook or doing that math work.”

These are just a few of the many factors that explain why youth experiencing homelessness have worse education outcomes than any other peer group, with the lowest overall attendance, standardized test scores and high school graduation rates of all students. The limited data that exist suggest roughly the same share of youth in rural areas experience homelessness as in urban areas, but with .

“It’s definitely a survival mindset,” said Chery. 

For the embattled teen, a level of stability finally came when, at 18, he entered a temporary housing program for homeless youth run by Northeast Kingdom Youth Services. He finally had a space to himself without worrying about eviction.

“It felt like I could breathe for a second,” he said.

He began taking courses at the local community college, which conveniently was walking distance from where he was staying. He applied to nearby Northern Vermont University for the spring term and was accepted, attending school there for three months until the COVID school shutdowns of March 2020 derailed his plans.

The disruption underscored the fragility of his situation, he realized. At his new college, he had depended on his dorm room as his only place to stay and often felt a level of “imposter syndrome,” he said, as it seemed that other students were more prepared for the coursework and campus culture. He had a long way to go before fully recovering from the traumas of his teenage years, he thought to himself.

“I got out of those situations that I was in, but now there’s so much more work to do trying to build a life, lay the foundation.”

Homeschooling while homeless

For Elysia Gingras, the spiral into homelessness didn’t come until she was in her 30s with five children, who now range in age from 9 to 13. 

The once financially comfortable seven-member family now stays in two rooms at an inn in St. Johnsbury as a part of Northeast Kingdom Community Action’s supportive housing program. The family burned through roughly $15,000 in savings, the mother said, after their dog attacked their nephew in an incident that was heavily covered in local outlets. While the family followed the injured toddler to hospitals in Boston and Hanover, New Hampshire, a health inspector condemned their apartment of five years, forcing them to crash at a nearby Comfort Inn — a move they thought would last a couple of weeks, tops. 

Now two years and hundreds of unsuccessful rental applications later, Gingras has come to understand just how tough the area’s housing market is. Even with her husband working full time as a roofer making over $20 an hour and her selling Arbonne cosmetics part time, nothing has panned out yet.

“I look [for rentals] every day, and I’m not exaggerating,” Gingras said. 

“Every place that we thought we were gonna get, it was like this constant roller coaster of getting your hopes up and finding out, nope, we didn’t get that one.”

Low-priced housing units in the Northeast Kingdom have been in short supply for years, explained Patrick Shattuck. He works as executive director of Rural Edge, the region’s main affordable housing development organization and its largest landlord. The Kingdom’s population of roughly 65,000 is both shrinking and aging, he said, meaning big houses that used to be occupied by young families now often hold just one or two elderly inhabitants. 

At the same time, the rise of seasonal tourism — with enticing skiers in the winter and the popular drawing mountain bikers in the summer — have led some property owners to convert rental units into more lucrative AirBnBs. Despite the efforts of Shattuck’s organization to maintain and add affordable options to the market, apartment prices have soared. Local institutions like schools and hospitals, he said, have lost would-be hires because the candidates can’t find affordable places to stay.

For the Gingras family, the housing squeeze has translated into some major life adjustments. Elysia Gingras, previously the type to bake homemade bread and meal-plan a month in advance, had to serve cereal and Hot Pockets when they first moved to the inn due to lack of kitchen access. 

She homeschools four out of her five children from their two motel rooms, but they now complete worksheets on clipboards rather than at the kitchen table. By homeschooling, Gingras is able to incorporate the family’s Christian faith into the school day, teaching prayer alongside math lessons, spelling quizzes and visits to the local Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium. She ensures all her children make their beds nicely each morning so their shared area stays orderly and there’s floorspace during the day for group yoga breaks.

But for all the family’s work to maintain normalcy, keeping up morale can be tough at times, the mother told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ just after New Year’s. The last few months were especially difficult. 

“Everybody’s trying to be joyful because it’s the holidays, but how do you really have a merry Christmas when you’re all in a hotel?” she said. “When we see [the other unhoused parents] outside and we’re like, ‘Hey, how are you?’ It doesn’t even matter what you say 
 because we’re here. We’re still here. And it’s like that unspoken acknowledgement of pain.”

Identifying and supporting students

Gingras, with her self-created curricula and Harry Potter read-alouds, exemplifies something Brittnee Dwyer, two months into a job with Northeast Kingdom Community Action, has quickly come to realize.

“It doesn’t mean if someone’s homeless that they’re a bad parent,” the newly hired housing specialist said.

But still, Asia Goldsmith, the Gingras’s neighbor at the inn, sometimes can’t avoid the creeping thought that she’s failing her three children. After spending the summer couch surfing and camping, the four of them have been at the hotel since September. She’s proud of her kids for earning good grades this school year thanks to afterschool tutoring provided by the district, she said. But she asks them to conceal their home life as much as possible.

“They hate that they can’t have friends over, but, I don’t know, I’m embarrassed,” Goldsmith said.

Her family had not yet connected with the school district’s homeless liaison, she said.

“I imagine there are probably families out there who are not on our list but are maybe experiencing homelessness for one reason or another,” Lufkin acknowledged. She said she couldn’t comment on individual families’ cases for privacy reasons.

The district is working to improve its efforts at identifying students experiencing homelessness so they can provide them with the needed services, she said. The liaison runs professional development sessions to help school staff learn the possible signs of housing insecurity. Bus drivers, for instance, can flag if a young person’s pickup location fluctuates, indicating that the family may be in a couch-surfing situation, she said.

The superintendent of the St. Johnsbury School District did not respond to requests for comment.

Over 2,750 Vermonters are experiencing homelessness according to a from early 2022 — more than double the state’s pre-pandemic level. The state’s overall percentage increase in homelessness from 2020 to 2022 was the highest in the nation. 

Much of that rise, advocates say, may be residents who once fell under the radar while doubled-up with relatives but were forced to seek independent shelter because of families’ COVID concerns.

“We started to see more people who had no place to go,” said Shattuck, the Rural Edge director.

In response, state lawmakers have approved major investments to add more affordable housing to the market. Vermont built 800 new low-cost apartments in 2022 and has another 800 currently under construction, Gov. Phil Scott said in his January State of the State . He said the state helped 1,300 families transition out of homelessness last year.

“Housing is having its moment in Vermont,” Shattuck said.

Chery, for his part, is seeking to address the issue from another angle. After relying on the transitional housing offered by Northeast Kingdom Youth Services as an 18-year old, he now serves as a case manager for the program. 

Having lived in the shared apartment building, the 23-year-old understands the challenges the young people he works with are facing — and he knows what it can mean for their schooling.

“There’s this pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality about education,” he said. But for housing insecure youth, “getting to a place where you’re stable enough that you can fully commit to education, that’s another whole journey.”

But if the family wants to move their child to better schools in the nearby Elwood, Union or Manhattan districts they would be hard-pressed to find housing in that price range. 

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These invisible boundaries are what researchers at Bellwether Education Partners call “border barriers” — lines between districts that frequently keep low-income families out of higher-quality schools. The Chicago area, the authors write, has 45 such divisions, where families in low-income housing brush up against districts with more resources and better schools but few, if any, affordable rental units. 

Bellwether explores these differences in “Priced Out of Public Schools,” released last week that adds a new layer to our understanding of how closely housing and education are intertwined. Districts with out-of-reach rental prices spend, on average, at least $4,600 more per student — the result of higher property taxes. While states’ school finance formulas aim to equalize funding across districts, they don’t make up the gap. 

“As we think about what we need to do moving forward, it’s not just an education solution alone,” said Alex Spurrier, co-author of the report and a senior analyst at Bellwether Education Partners, an education think tank. States, he said, should consider multiple policy levers to address “what is a very thorny challenge.”

The report comes as continue to rise and many low-income families , long delays for federal rental assistance funds and landlords who reject . When families relocate to more affordable housing, their children often must leave not only their schools, but their districts as well — especially in states like Texas, California and Illinois, where metro area maps are dotted with dozens of small school districts. The authors label the phenomenon “educational gerrymandering,” the creation of smaller, exclusive districts that cater to higher-income, less racially diverse student populations. While the report recommends multiple approaches to address the disparities, experts note that altering district boundaries is politically risky: People with money are likely to vote against those who meddle too much.

“People who have wealth are willing to use it to get high-quality schools.” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow and the deputy director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “The rules of the game do produce some inequities.” 

Mergers and secessions

Some of those rules date back to nearly a century ago when the nation entered a movement that by 1970 had cut more than 100,000 districts down to less than 20,000. Now there are 13,000.

But district mergers tended to lack high-minded ambitions to create more racial or socioeconomically balanced schools. Rather, they were likely to be unions of districts with similar demographics, explained Tomas Monarrez, a research associate at the Urban Institute who has studied racial and ethnic segregation in schools.

Some of the starkest examples of drawing boundaries to benefit wealthier populations include recent efforts by some communities to break away from larger, often county-level, school districts. the 2017 report from EdBuild, noted 73 secessions since 2000, with another 55 either attempted or in progress.

Several have launched in the Northeast, but the Bellwether report also includes examples in the South. In Memphis, Tennessee, for example, communities within Shelby County split off into smaller districts in 2014 after the majority Black Memphis district dissolved and merged into the county district. In Alabama, there have been 10 successful attempts since 2000, with in the works. 

“At the very least, we should be wary of those secession trends,” Monarrez said. Mergers, however, can minimize disparities in access to quality schools if leaders pursue them with the goal of improving equity, he said.

Some states have created where multiple districts share tax revenue or allow students to transfer into schools across district lines as a way to reduce disparities. The Nebraska legislature created such a plan involving 11 Omaha-area districts. In Massachusetts, the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, encompassing Boston and the surrounding area, is another example.

But Malkus, at the American Enterprise Institute, cautioned that such options only tend to “nibble around the margins.” Daniel Thatcher, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures, noted that open enrollment programs can make school funding disparities worse because the receiving district gets the state funding for those students.

School choice programs are another way to allow students to attend a school outside their neighborhood, the authors suggest. The results of that approach are mixed. that within a district, charters lead to a slight decrease in student diversity. But across a metro area, the presence of charters can create schools that are more racially mixed.

That’s what leaders in School District 49, adjacent to the Colorado Springs, Colorado, district have found. The district is considered “inaccessible” to lower-income families because there’s not enough affordable housing to meet the demand, according to the Bellwether report. But more than a third of the district’s students come from outside the district for traditional, charter and online options, said Peter Hilts, the system’s chief education officer. Half of the Colorado Springs district’s students are nonwhite, compared to 43 percent in District 49.

“There’s no question that open, inclusive choice has made us a more diverse district,” Hilts said. “If you genuinely want educational equity, you must believe in school choice, and if you truly advocate for inclusive choice, you must address other factors like transportation, affordable housing, and childcare options that can inhibit choice.”

Housing affordability not only affects families wishing to move into a district, but also those who want to stay put. In Tacoma, Washington, low-income families are beginning to leave because of a lack of housing options, said Elliott Barnett, a senior planner for the city. Proximity to quality schools is a key element of , a project that recommends building additional types of housing in neighborhoods that were previously reserved for single-family homes.

“We know that where a person lives has a link to their access to opportunities that have a big impact on our lives such as education achievement, income, life expectancy and others.” Barnett said. “Even if kids can travel from elsewhere to a high-performing school outside their neighborhood, that is another burden to overcome.” 

Some states, like and , have recently passed legislation to increase the supply of affordable housing. While such efforts haven’t always taken school locations into account, Monarrez said that’s beginning to change. California governor Gavin Newsom mentioned the need for a wider array of housing options near schools as one goal of his state’s legislation. 

The next step, Monarrez said, is for policymakers to reconsider district boundaries as well.

“We need to find out more about what would happen if we changed these lines,” he said. “A viable solution is drawing better lines.”

Disclosure: Andy Rotherham co-founded Bellwether Education Partners. He sits on ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s board of directors.