Many states, including Maryland, where I live and work as a literacy coach, are embracing the science of reading, which . However, these efforts are focused at the elementary level, and older students are going through high school without the benefit of these best practices.

My district, Baltimore City Public Schools, is working to address that problem. For the last four years, I have helped all teachers at Reginald F. Lewis High School weave reading and writing into their lessons. This is unusual, because while the district has had literacy coaches in elementary and secondary schools, most work only with English Language Arts teachers. This isn’t enough.

Consider this: During a team meeting, teachers and I reviewed Maryland’s state English test and found it had just one set of questions related to a literature passage. The rest were based on informational texts, such as historical primary source documents, scientific reports and graphs. Subject-matter teachers are best-suited to help students learn to read and analyze these passages.

While all the teachers I work with know that students are coming to them with large literacy gaps, most weren’t accustomed to working with a coach, especially a literacy coach. They were skeptical at first. Overcoming that required taking key steps. 

First, my principal had to make it clear that literacy learning was a schoolwide responsibility and that I was there to help. Then, I had to build strong relationships with teachers. I did that by listening, learning about the challenges they faced, observing instruction and providing feedback, and being a consistent and supportive presence in their classrooms. We studied data and set goals together.

It was especially important to be patient. Change of this kind takes more than a single school year.

Across classrooms, we raised the rigor. Because reading achievement was low, teachers had been using texts designed for elementary or middle schoolers. But what our high schoolers needed was reading material aligned to high school expectations. My job was to give teachers tools that they could use to help students understand what they were reading. These included strategies such as previewing complex vocabulary with students before diving into reading and offering multiple opportunities and ways to access difficult texts, such as through read-alouds or partnered reading. Those approaches improve reading fluency and are particularly appropriate when books or articles are challenging.��

Yet, even as the teachers helped students to access harder books, they had to pull back on doing too much. I found they were reading aloud texts that students were capable of reading on their own, or oversimplifying assignments and taking away opportunities for students to write answers that showed what they really knew.

Today, the teachers know that I’m there to help their students learn in their particular content area and are proud that, after a sharp dip in proficiency directly after the pandemic, our . Overall, our school went from 10% English proficiency in 2023 to 27% in 2024, and we met our literacy progress goals for the first time since the pandemic. Teachers also like the engagement they see in their classrooms when students read aloud to their partners or speak up to answer questions.

More recently, after we realized students were skipping written response questions on state assessments, we started weaving writing instruction into the school day. To tackle this, our school made writing instruction the focus of professional development and coaching. We all read “The Writing Revolution,” by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler, and I provided support to teachers based on the approach in the book and training I received.

Many teachers at first lacked confidence around teaching components of good writing, so I provided explicit modeling and coaching. In a math class, I’d have a teacher demonstrate what good writing looks like in that grade and subject — for example, writing a response to a question — and then we’d discuss ways to help students reach that level of proficiency. 

Today, nearly all teachers in my school are more comfortable providing writing instruction in their content area, and nearly all implement some kind of writing instruction every day. This means that students get multiple chances to practice writing and learn particular skills. I love hearing them saying things like, “All my teachers are talking about segment fragments!” Or, “Now we have to use conjunctions everywhere!” 

In January, teachers had reported that half or more of their students skipped writing tasks on any assignment. Today, nearly every student writes answers to assignments, and basic writing mistakes have dwindled. 

I’ve also been working to help encourage students to read independently. show that a mere 14% of 13-year-olds read for enjoyment daily. It’s a shocking figure but it reflects what I see. I often ask students what they like to read, and unfortunately a common answer is, “I don’t know. I don’t really like reading.”

After one of these exchanges, I asked my 10-year-old, who loves curling up with a book, what he would say to that. “I would say they just haven’t found the right book yet!” he replied. High schoolers have tons of interests and opinions; they just need to find a book based on these interests to ignite a love for reading. Sometimes I ask kids what movies they like, and the answer usually helps make a connection to books. I also encourage families to participate in summer library programs that give kids and adults a free book of their choice each month.

I believe the successes my school has seen on classroom tests in literacy will also show in the state exams our students recently took. More importantly, I’m confident the skills they’ve learned will make a lasting difference in their lives, whatever path they choose.

Community leaders called on Baltimore County school officials Tuesday to ensure that undocumented students are protected, days after reports that an Overlea High School teacher reached out to immigration officials and offered to name names.

That incident has rippled through the immigrant community, leaving students and family members more scared than ever over their safety in school, advocates said during Tuesday night’s board meeting and at a news conference earlier in the day.

“This isn’t just about one teacher,” said Lucas Cunha, an Essex business owner who testified to the board. “He offered to hand over the names students to ICE – young people he was entrusted to protect.”

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Cunha, who was once undocumented, called the alleged actions of the Baltimore County teacher a “betrayal” that “didn’t just endanger immigrants, it shattered the trust of every student.”

Advocates were referring to a series of posts last week that appeared to come from a since-deleted account on X, called @RennerTraining, that tags the account of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and offers to share the names of undocumented students.

���f you want the names to investigate families to find illegals, let me know in dm [direct message]. I’ll give names and school. All in Md,” according to screenshots of the posts.

County school officials did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. The Teachers Association of Baltimore County said in a Facebook post Tuesday that it was “aware of alleged actions by an educator at Overlea High School last week,” without further elaboration on the incident.

���t’s also important to note that all students have privacy rights based on federal FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) protections,” the Facebook statement said. “And while immigration issues may seem complicated, some things are simple: children do not decide where and how their parents choose to move.”

But Crisaly De Los Santos, Central Maryland and Baltimore director for CASA, said during a virtual event Tuesday afternoon that the incident has shattered the sense of security for families in the region.

“Families should feel confident that when their children are in schools, they’re safe and they’re protected and supported by teachers and administrators who they trust to care for their children,” she said. “But in light of recent events, we have seen how this basic expectation has not been met.”

She said that the county school board needs to “adopt a clear and comprehensive policy to ensure that ICE is going to be blocked from accessing school resources and personal information.”

“We need a policy that guarantees that students’ safety and their future is not going to be jeopardized by federal immigration enforcement,” she said. “The current policy is just not enough, and it does not provide the clarity some families need to feel safe in our schools.”

Several members of Baltimore County’s immigrant community said during the virtual event that the social media posts heightened anxiety many were already feeling under President Donald Trump (R). They did not provide their full names for privacy reasons.

A 12th grader named Helen shared that her goals are simple: She wants to become fluent in English and attend college. But she is now constantly worried that her “personal information will be shared with ICE,” which makes focusing on schoolwork difficult.

“Every student deserves to feel safe at school, no matter where they come from,” Helen said.

Another Baltimore County student, who used the pseudonym Rosa, said the United States is the country she “calls home,” but “hearing a county teacher threatened to call ICE made me feel that I did not belong in this country.”

Gricelda, a parent of three Baltimore County public school students, said she worries about sending her children to school each day.

��� have to think every day about the possibilities of family separation — and what this could lead to for many families … Just seeing that a Baltimore County Public School teacher has threatened to share students’ information with ICE, it really worries me,” she said through De Los Santos, who translated. “This is something that does not just affect me, but many other families, and I am constantly worried, thinking about if sending my kids to school is the safe thing to do.”

During open comments at the virtual board meeting, Cunha and others said a sense of security is important for immigrant safety so students can learn.

“Every single opportunity I got … was because of the trust that I built with my teachers over 20 years ago,” Cunha said. “That trust is the foundation of every student’s success. That very trust is what’s at stake here.”

Peter Baum, who was previously taught English as a second language in Baltimore County, said he’s been in “education for over eight years … and in my time I have never heard of such a massively egregious violation of student safety.”

While she did not speak on the case itself, Superintendent Myriam Rogers said during the virtual board meeting that “teachers, all staff, are expected to create safe learning environment for our schools, for our students.”

She also noted that federal and state law “protects student privacy and prohibits the release of student information.”

“When staff members violate those expectations and break policy, there are consequences. We absolutely do follow due process. There is an investigation, and based on the results of those investigations, next steps are determined,” she said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: editor@marylandmatters.org.

A model for math tutoring employing nearly 1,000 college and graduate students has taken root across Maryland, converting some into lifelong educators and providing middle schoolers with diverse mentors.

Now in its first full academic year, the is bringing hundreds of students from Morgan State, Johns Hopkins, Towson, University of Maryland Baltimore County, and Salisbury into the lives of middle schoolers in Wicomico, Baltimore City and County public schools.

“When you have 35 to 40 kids in a class and a lot of them need extra help, you as a teacher, you can’t get to everybody every day,” said Matt Barrow, Baltimore City Schools’ director of differentiated learning. 

Schools across the country are finding ways to offerings to help get kids back on track. For Barrow, the impact has felt immediate and positive.  

“…To see joy on kids’ faces when they’re doing math – they’re middle schoolers!,” he said. ���t makes me reflect back to when I was in the classroom, wishing that the kids I had at the time had that type of opportunity for support consistently, not even just in math.” 

On a fall afternoon at Dickey Hill Elementary and Middle School, one of UMBC’s ten placements, Shradha Gawad introduced her eighth graders to the scientific notation by having them think about how far the earth was from the sun – too big of a number to actually write out. 

���f small words or encouragement from me, if that makes a small change in their life and they are interested in math and able to grow with that, then that’s definitely a yes for me,” said Gawad, a master’s student in information systems. ��� want to keep doing that.”

UMBC tutors began lessons by asking students how they’re feeling that day or to recap their weekends, one way they build relationships with students. If students are notably upset, tired, or not into it for whatever reason, they take small breaks to play math games.

That approach helped Rahul Sodadasi, a first year at UMBC studying cyber security, with a disengaged student. By the end of the first week, the student complimented before leaving the room, “this was really fun.” 

���t’s about knowing that person,” Sodadasi said. ��� know that she is an emotional person and likes to build bonds [before] she can understand … that’s how the math got into it.” 

After an initial orientation, tutors are trained during monthly professional development sessions, on topics such as strategies for English language learners. 

They reinforce positive mistakes that show kids’ understanding of concepts, using phrases like “Not quite, but that’s great thinking and I can see why you got there,” or “what if we tried this, too?” 

Tory, a seventh grader and aspiring doctor or realtor, reflected honestly, “it’s not my favorite thing, but I still do it … [This] makes me want to do it more when I’m at home.” 

The program aims to be permanent, lasting long after pandemic relief funds end by requiring grantees to find funding sources, like local foundations, nonprofits and city governments, to state funds. 

“Through the Maryland Tutoring Corps, we are engineering an educational renaissance,” Governor Wes Moore said of the program as the first grantee districts were announced .

With math scores reaching historic lows, Moore and the Maryland State Department of Education unveiled the $28 million grant program to , just a few months before tutoring was named a top by the Biden administration. The latest NAEP scores, or Nation’s Report Card, had revealed a bleak reality: about 3 in 4 .

Schools, eager to jumpstart tutoring but struggling to keep teaching vacancies filled and attendance up, have been transformed by district-university partnerships. 

Coaches, ranging from undergraduates to PhD and teacher candidates, are now supporting middle schoolers identified for added support by their year-end test scores or iReady diagnostic tests.

Earlier this year, the Department of Education extended federal pandemic relief funds’ spending deadlines of January 2025 through the next two academic years, to enable other districts to double down on this model of support. In nearby Washington, D.C., is bringing high dosage tutoring to about 6,000 more kids.

In practice, Maryland’s corps adheres to research-backed : ensuring small groups of no more than three meet during the school day, for maximum attendance and minimum disruption to transportation or family life; paying tutors; and prioritizing high need student populations. 

High dosage tutoring, when led as theirs is in at least two 45-minute sessions per week, is known to help students develop a positive attitude toward math, feelings of connection to school, and build an academic foundation for higher paying down the line. 

While Maryland doesn’t yet have results from tutoring done this fall, a report looking at randomized control trials from the last few decades showed students gained . It’s widely considered one of the most , including for the most student populations. 

According to a prior UMBC evaluation of one of the grantee programs, 85% of students felt more confident in math. One eighth grader remarked in a survey, ��� could get help, and if I got it wrong, they didn’t put me down.” 

The grant has given UMBC’s pre-existing program new life. 

“Math is something that has not been as supported as say literacy over the past several years. I do think that is shifting. I see it,” said Sara Krauss, director of school partnerships with the university.  

Three years ago, UMBC’s program served 355 students across four schools. At the time, Krauss managed logistics alone, conducting interviews with hundreds of potential coaches until midnight to accommodate schedules and demand. 

, they are serving nearly double across ten sites, utilizing curricula from Saga Education and Rocket Math. Over 1,100 students applied to tutor this year. The grant has also enabled them to rely less on carpools, providing some funds for Lyfts and vans. 

As they’ve grown, they’ve streamlined other logistical puzzle pieces, like bringing fingerprinting and background check services to the university. 

“That’s what this means,” said Sanfoya Ray, Baltimore City Schools’ coordinator of academic tutoring. “Knowing that there is work to do and doing the work to get it done.” 

All images by Marianna McMurdock

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the amount of money Washington, D.C. is investing in high-impact tutoring. 

The school, which serves 400 students pre-kindergarten through second grade in Maryland’s Baltimore City Public Schools, is rethinking the way it operates to boost parental involvement, said first-grade teacher Kaylah Crawford.

Crawford, who is in charge of family engagement at Arundel, said every student will lead their own parent-teacher conference this year, giving their families a glimpse of what they do in the classroom.

“Students will be leading their conferences by saying, ‘This is what I’m doing in school’ and then parents will be able to see (their child’s work) firsthand,” Crawford said. ���t’s more engaging for families to hear from the student about how they’re performing.”

Parent perception of their child’s educational progress is tricky for many schools around the nation. A recently released national study has unveiled there’s a stark gap between parents’ knowledge of their child’s performance in school and their actual achievement in the classroom.

released in November by Gallup and the nonprofit Learning Heroes, surveyed roughly 2,000 parents of K-12 public school students nationwide about their experiences with and perceptions of their child’s educational achievement.

What researchers found was that parents don’t have a complete understanding of their child’s progress, said Bibb Hubbard, founder of , a national parent advocacy organization.

Nearly 9 out of 10 parents surveyed believe their child is performing at grade level in reading (88%) and math (89%) despite standardized tests showing far fewer students are on track. showed that at the beginning of the 2022-23 school year, public schools reported on average half of their students were below grade level.

“We just can’t afford to leave parents on the sidelines right now. We absolutely don’t have 9 out of 10 students performing at or above grade level, unfortunately,” Hubbard told ����Ӱ��. “We need to give parents more information.”

The study also found that nearly two-thirds of parents (64%) said report cards — often considered the “holy grail” of measurements, Hubbard said — were important in determining whether their child is at grade level. And for 79% of parents surveyed, those report cards showed their children getting mostly B grades or better.

Hubbard said oftentimes, good grades equal “on grade level” for parents.

“That’s because they’ve not been told otherwise,” she said. “Grades don’t necessarily reflect grade-level mastery. You can also have your fourth grader getting an A or B in reading and that’s because they are reading at a second-grade level and they are getting B’s on their quizzes at a second-grade level.”

Crawford said her building principal strives to be transparent with parents about grades, but recently it has become more evident that some students complete homework without understanding all of the content.

“(Turning in finished homework) doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re able to read or even always able to complete work independently,” Crawford said. “So one of the things that we’ve done to target some of those discrepancies is starting different family programming.”

Arundel Elementary School launched a program called Family University in December, Crawford said. Parents can communicate with school staff to learn more about what’s happening in the classroom. They will also get feedback about what their child needs to work on academically.

“We learned through every program that we have within the building that the goal is to teach the parents something that would better prepare them to have a scholar within the school system,” Crawford said.

When parents are more informed about their child’s academic progress, they are more likely to take action and discuss concerns with their child’s teacher, Hubbard said.

The study found that 97% of parents who know their child is below grade level in math are worried about their child’s math skills. Only 22% of the parents who knew their child was at or above grade level in math were concerned about their child’s math skills.

Parents were also asked about what worries they have about their children.

“For the parents who perceive their child to be at or above grade level, their top worries are social media and emotional well-being … reading and math fall to the very bottom of their worries,” Hubbard said. “For those parents who have information that their child is not performing at grade level, their number one worry is math or reading.”

Researchers also unearthed racial differences in parents’ perceptions of how well their child was doing in school. The study introduced a hypothetical scenario to participants where their child receives a B in math but has two below-grade-level math test scores. While more than half of parents (56%) said they would be very or extremely concerned, Black parents were more likely to say they would be concerned (72%) compared with Hispanic (56%) and white parents (52%). 

Black and Hispanic parents were also more aware of their child’s academic performance in the study, Hubbard said.

Black (42%) and Hispanic (40%) parents were found less likely than white parents (54%) to say their child was performing above grade level in reading, with a similar finding in math. 

Contradicting that Black parents don’t care about their child’s education, Hubbard said, “Black parents in particular are taking more action, thinking and more deeply worrying. The Black parent in this dataset really emerges as the super active parent that’s really focused on academics.”

Lakisha Young, co-founder of Oakland REACH, a parent empowerment group that recently launched a large-scale parent-led tutoring program, said Black parents in Oakland have been more aware that something isn’t right with their child’s achievement, but they don’t know what to do about it.

“They’re definitely plugged in around something not being right,” Young said. “We asked our parents what was keeping them up at night and they just said, ‘I know my child’s not reading on the level they should be. But I’m not really getting a lot of help from the school to figure out the best thing for me to do to move forward.’ ”

The parent perception problem in education is solvable, Hubbard said — parents need to look beyond their child’s grades and engage with teachers to get to the bottom of their achievement.

“Teachers say that the number one way to know how your child is achieving is to ask them,” Hubbard writes in the study. “Asking teachers to unpack those factors and focus on grade-level learning is how to know where to lean in and help.”

Young said when her own son is struggling in his eighth-grade classes, he’s not the one to inform her — his teachers are. 

��� think things that continue to be helpful for families is to be able to feel like they can engage with the school and I think it really starts with building a relationship early,” Young said. “Kind of (letting) the school know, ‘I’m here, I’m accessible. I care. I want to understand these things about what’s going on with my kid.’ ”

Learning Heroes has been working to boost parent engagement across the nation, most recently with its campaign. The campaign partners with local nonprofits to connect parents with teachers and helps them understand achievement scores, among other resources. 

In addition to the national project, Go Beyond Grades has local campaigns, most recently launched in St. Louis, Missouri, but is also in New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Houston, Boston and Sacramento.

“Grades are important, but we need to unpack that a little bit and get some additional information about how your child is doing,” Hubbard said. “The call to action is pretty simple.”

Disclosure: The Carnegie Corporation of New York provides financial support to Learning Heroes and ����Ӱ��.

By searching for district communications and media coverage in each state from fall 2022 through summer 2023, CRPE identified districts publicly responding to AI last school year. We conducted more thorough research on these districts and .

Most of the reactions have revolved around ChatGPT, the large language learning model-based chatbot . 

Many large districts were initially wary of the new technology, with , and issuing , largely because of concerns over cheating. 

But many are adapting. New York City Public Schools , with Chancellor David Banks acknowledging a and a determination to “embrace its potential.” 

in Washington State reported that while it blocked ChatGPT to “get out ahead of it,” the district doesn’t plan to stop it long-term. In April, the district established a committee of teachers learning how to use ChatGPT to work on related policies.

In California’s , Superintendent Don Austin embraced ChatGPT’s potential to enhance learning and improve efficiency. Likening AI pushback to early resistance to calculators and the internet, the superintendent this spring to start using the technology. 

Supporting learning and emotional well-being

While most districts CRPE reviewed have not released precise plans for using AI, some are exploring opportunities. 

The introduced a tool called that functions like a literacy tutor that listens to students read and corrects mistakes in real time. The district piloted the tool at four schools last spring and had a small group of teachers experimenting with a tool to help create unit and lesson plans.

is piloting , an AI-powered “tutorbot” created by Khan Academy to give students individualized support across core subjects. The program , offering personalized prompts, diagnosing errors and helping students develop deeper reasoning skills, and gives teachers .

in Arizona and in Texas are piloting AI-enabled “early warning” programs that track student performance and send alerts if kids are off track. Mesa’s program collects academic, social and emotional data from teachers and students to predict up to three months in advance whether a student will pass or fail coursework. 

Creating new AI courses and standards

Other districts are designing curriculum to build students’ AI literacy. Most are in states creating conditions to help steward the advancement of AI curriculum. 

Baltimore County Public Schools an AI program at three high schools this year that will feature . The program is a byproduct of a 2020 state innovation grant, which funded district staff to develop curriculum and lead an advisory council.

In Georgia, the district is opening up a K-12, AI-themed that will provide progressively more sophisticated study of AI . This will in core subjects, and Gwinnett hopes that piloted lessons will spread across the entire district. The Georgia Department of Education worked with Gwinnett to write new academic standards so all schools in the state can launch their own AI courses.

A dozen districts in Florida, including those in the , are rolling out AI and data science programs this year in partnership with the , part of the university’s broader goal to infuse AI into K-12 curriculum across the state. The state is also providing funding to train teachers. 

Supporting teacher development

A small number of districts reviewed are using AI to strengthen teacher practice or generally orient educators to the technology as a teaching tool. 

This year, Spokane Public Schools in Washington, St. Vrain Valley School District in Colorado and Keller Independent School District in Texas an instructional coaching platform called that films classroom instruction and uses AI to offer teachers feedback and in developing an “action plan” to implement suggestions.

in Maryland launched training sessions this summer to help teachers learn how to incorporate AI into their lessons as part of a three-year agreement with nonprofit training partner aiEDU, which provides curricula and learning resources. 

Improving communications and operational efficiency

Districts are using AI to provide individualized guidance to students and parents. In April, the announced a chatbot to answer parents’ and guardians’ questions online and track whether issues were resolved. In August, unveiled a chatbot “student adviser” that provides parents real-time access to grades, test results, and attendance and assists its “” program. is one of many Arizona districts using , a chatbot digital assistant that helps students navigate the federal student financial aid — FAFSA — application. 

Districts are also using AI-powered technology to support safety and operational efficiency. in Florida uses AI to . uses AI-powered, self-driving floor cleaners, and in North Carolina uses AI to detect student illnesses as part of their pandemic response. 

Districts face essential questions about AI in 2023-24

A year ago, few districts or stakeholders were paying much attention to AI. Now, it’s clear that this technology will evolve faster than districts can develop formal training and guidance for staff. Leaders need to respond by thinking through how they train their workforce to responsibly use AI, and prepare for fundamental shifts in teachers’ roles and students’ opportunities in the coming years.

We suggest that districts:

• engage early adopter educators to discuss strategies and guidelines;
  
• communicate regularly and transparently with parents;
  
• train teachers on responsibly using AI; and
  
• partner with organizations, industry and higher education institutions who have AI expertise and can weigh in on best practices. 

We also urge state departments of education and regional associations to provide guidance and tools to help districts navigate AI. Students, parents, teachers and employers are looking to districts to do this well and to provide a learning environment that is both safe and reflective of the 21st century and beyond.

A long-standing effort to provide low-income schools with federal grants to improve building infrastructure and internet connectivity has been reintroduced in Congress by Democratic U.S. lawmakers with support from Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D), and others.

According to a Monday press release, the “Rebuild America’s Schools Act” would establish a $100 billion federal grant program and a $30 billion tax credit bond program for high-poverty schools to fund physical and digital infrastructure improvements.

Van Hollen has been a supporter and cosponsor of the initiative when the bill was first introduced in 2019, and then again in 2021. But neither of those previous efforts were successful.

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“We must ensure that our students and educators have modern school buildings and facilities that support their success rather than rundown infrastructure that hinders progress,” Van Hollen said in a written statement.

“This legislation will help bring our schools and classrooms into the 21st century, ensuring that they don’t stand in the way of our children’s opportunity to receive a quality education,” he added.

This year, U.S. Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) are again leading the legislative effort, and Van Hollen joins more than a dozen other co-sponsors for a third try to get the bill over the finish line.

According to a , the average age of a school in the state is 31 years, with Baltimore City Public Schools having the highest number of aging school buildings.

The effects of aging facilities can impact a student’s ability to learn, according to the press release, as students can miss hours of instruction time due to power outages or bad pipes.

According to the press release, the federal grants would not only go to schools in greatest need for infrastructure repairs, but would also encourage green construction practices and improve access to high-speed broadband internet connection.

The Rebuild America’s Schools Act would also encourage projects to use American-made iron, steel and other manufactured products.

“Chronic neglect of America’s public schools has forced students and teachers across the country to learn and work in outdated and hazardous school buildings. Moreover, dilapidated and poorly ventilated school facilities that make it harder for teachers to teach and students to learn,” Scott, the House bill sponsor, said in a written statement.

The story was originally published at .

Flush with federal dollars, new and robust offerings have been open to a wide swath of students starting in the summer of 2021 and will continue in many districts this year. But the trend could stop as that pandemic relief money runs out.

Some districts, including , have summer programs, inviting only those students identified as struggling, while others can’t even reach all the children on that list — at least not during the summer. 

Baltimore City Public Schools saw some of the most staggering losses in mathematics at the fourth-grade level — on the 2022 NAEP exams compared to those in 2019 — tying it with Cleveland for worst-in-the-nation.

Baltimore’s and Cleveland’s decline in fourth-grade math scores was nearly double the average eight-point drop among the 26 big city districts that took the tests and dwarfed the average five-point drop of fourth graders nationally. 

Eighth graders in both cities also saw their math test scores plummet: They dropped nine points in Baltimore and eight points in Cleveland. These losses are on par with the rest of the nation: The major cities’ average and the national average for eighth grade math both declined by eight points. 

The 76,000-student Baltimore district has been working for years to remediate those who have fallen behind. It offers extensive summer programming for children at every grade level — more than 22,000 seats from pre-K through 12th grade for summer 2023 programming, up by 2,000 from the year before, district administrators said. But only 15,000 children participated last year, meaning thousands of seats were left open. 

And even with the additional slots, the number might not match the need as it relates to this subject: Just on recent state exams. At 23 Baltimore schools, not a single student tested proficient in math.

Administrators said their district’s summer program was developed, in part, in response to recent NAEP scores. But they know some children who might have benefited from the program will be left out because of budgetary restrictions. 

“Of course, we would love to be able to offer every student an opportunity to engage in learning during the summer,” said Laurie-Lynn Sutton-Platt, director of summer and extended learning.

The upcoming program can’t be a catch-all, but it can help, district administrators said. 

���t’s a start,” said Kerry Steinbrenner, Baltimore’s director of mathematics. “Summer is an ideal opportunity for students to continue to develop their math skills and we don’t want to miss that … We want to try to impact as many kids as we can during that time.” 

Cleveland Metropolitan School District, which serves , is also working to undo damage done by the pandemic. Some 4,200 students are enrolled in its five-week summer learning program with more added to the list every day. The district hopes the figure will reach the height it did last year at 6,500. 

But it can’t guarantee participation. 

“We are working to reach all of the students we can during the summer, but it is dependent upon students and families electing to enroll,” said chief communications officer Roseann Canfora. “We cannot require them to do so.”

Although driven by poor reading, not math scores, some third graders in Tennessee are summer programming this year if they performed poorly on that portion of the state exam and are at risk of being held back.

In the long term, average for fourth and eighth graders on the NAEP between the early 1970s and 2012. Between 2012 and 2020, just before the pandemic struck, they largely flattened while achievement gaps between high and low scorers — a persistent equity issue with NAEP — widened. And then the unprecedented drop in the 2022 scores brought COVID’s impact into full relief. 

How long it will take children to recover from that — or what it will take for more students to reach grade-level proficiency in math — are big questions, but recent research has shown the sharp decline in math proficiency could have lifelong negative consequences. 

Talia Milgrom-Elcott, executive director and founder of Beyond100K, a national network focused on preparing and retaining 150,000 excellent STEM teachers in 10 years, believes wealthier children have long made up what was lost. 

But others will never reach that goal, she said. 

“What’s different isn’t the kids: It’s their experience during the pandemic and the support they’ve received since,” she said. “We could have corralled all our resources to accelerate the mental, emotional and academic recovery of all kids — and if we would have, we’d likely have created the next great generation — but we haven’t. At least not yet.”

The federal government gave schools $190 billion in COVID aid with $3 billion available for summer learning. Experts say the type and quality of the summer programming counts, while some researchers assert that even that unprecedented overall sum is not enough to reverse the level of learning loss. 

Melodie Baker, national policy director at , an organization that promotes math policies that support equity in college readiness and success, said students need engaging and meaningful content that helps them make sense of the material and retain what they’ve learned. This is true whether it’s delivered during the school year or the summer, she said. 

���t’s also important to recognize the role of teacher diversity as a long-term strategy for improving student engagement and learning outcomes,” Baker said. “A diverse teaching staff can provide students with a range of perspectives and experiences that can enhance their understanding of the material and make it more relevant to their lives.”

Some 110,000 of New York City’s roughly 1 million students will participate in summer learning this year, a spokeswoman told ����Ӱ��. NYC students slid nine points on the fourth-grade NAEP mathematics tests and four points on the eighth-grade exams. 

One program, , will focus on grade-level instructional priorities for grades K-8, helping students build math foundations, fluency and conceptual understanding to support learning recovery, acceleration and enrichment, she said. It includes assessments meant to identify weaknesses and help teachers narrow learning gaps ahead of the upcoming school year. Other programs include project-based learning and financial literacy.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, where fourth graders saw their math scores drop 13 points and eighth graders 11 on the 2022 NAEP exams, plans to grow its summertime math offerings for middle schoolers heading into ninth grade.

Mark Bosco, the district’s senior administrator for expanded learning and partnerships, said the four week-long program is expected to swell from 400 to 1,000 participants this summer. 

“This is designed for students who find math abstract,” Bosco said. 

Pre- and post-assessments reveal improvement: Children who stayed for the 16-day duration who could not answer a single pre-algebra question correctly at the start of the program could successfully answer five or six questions out of 20 at the end, Bosco said. 

He described the summer program as hands-on and project-based. In one instance, he said, reflecting on last year’s program, students were made to go through the steps of finding and financing a car, learning about credit applications, compounding interest and loans. 

���t really got them thinking about how math can be so important in everyday life,” he said. “The kids are applying concepts in pretty advanced ways.”

Chicago Public Schools is encouraging schools to implement math camps this summer for rising third and fourth graders in addition to programs for students in middle and high school, a spokesman said. Fourth graders in the district saw a 10-point decrease on math NAEP scores. The loss was worse for eighth graders, who suffered a 12-point decline. 

More than 73,000 of Chicago Public Schools’ engaged in at least one summer program last year. Math enrichment at the district includes the Summer of Algebra and Math Camp programs. A group of elementary schools also will host a Computer Science/Engineering Camp for students in kindergarten through fifth grade. 

Despite the success of some programs, funding remains a concern: Canfora, of the Cleveland schools, said federal COVID relief funds likely will not be available for summer 2024. Her district is building next summer into this fiscal year’s general fund budget, which will be submitted to the school board this month. 

Aaron Philip Dworkin, chief executive officer of the , said districts should always work to establish and strengthen relationships with outside partners to build better programs and to secure funding so they are not as reliant on federal dollars. 

“What do you do when the money runs out?” he asked. “We will figure it out. Everyone will contribute what they can and we will make it work.” 

On a quiet side street tucked back in an industrial section of West Baltimore, Damon Ray Harrison revs the engine of his red dirt bike. He sits askew, unable to reach the ground with both feet. The street is empty except for a few other dirt bikes and riders. Harrison lowers the visor on his helmet and takes off down the street lined with industrial buildings that are set back from the road. Then he pops a wheelie. With the front wheel still in the air, he jumps off the back of the bike, runs a few steps, then jumps back on, continuing his ride down the stretch of empty road.

The teen has been a dirt bike guy since well before his uncle bought him his first bike. “My mother says I loved bikes, immediately.”

But in Baltimore, as in most major cities in the U.S., owning and riding a dirt bike is illegal and can mean jail time and fines for those caught. Government officials from Atlanta to Oakland point to crashes and deaths involving dirt bikes as the reason for the non-violent offense laws established in their cities. In 2016, Baltimore  a Dirt Bike Police Task Force to handle the “noise and nuisance” problem; last year, it was .

Still, dirt bikes remain a hobby for enthusiasts in Charm City. “Dirt bikes are as much a part of Baltimore as the [Inner] Harbor, as SnoCones. And when I think about being Black in the city, [dirt bikes are] part of my blackness,” says Brittany Young. An engineer who worked with both NASA and McCormick Spice Co., she has been working for seven years to change how the city perceives riding and riders.

In 2017, Young returned to her roots in West Baltimore and launched a nonprofit called . The name itself calls on people to “be the revolution” – that is, a 360-degree angle. Through a partnership with police, youth can legally ride dirt bikes as part of B-360’s educational programming. And through hands-on training and workforce development, they can develop their skills and find their way into careers in science, technology, engineering and math. Already, they’ve worked with over 8,500 young Baltimoreans.

���t’s not just about dirt bikes; it’s about Black freedom,” says Young, 33, of her mission. “So, literally, be part of a change, be part of a revolution, be part of systemic change beyond dirt bikes, for Black people across the country.”

Young, who grew up watching riders at Druid Hill Park, says legislators get it wrong when they ban a sport that’s part of Black and Brown culture instead of using it to improve lives through education and open doors to opportunity. Those are two of the key problems that Young says B-360 aims to fix: “The opportunity divide for Black and Brown people, and the need for programmatic solutions instead of incarceration for Black and Brown people.”

B-360 is using dirt bikes to teach STEM to kids of color and hosts events that show off a style of riding that she says has, so far, been ignored by the $42 billion motocross industry. It’s an attitude that confounds Young: Motocross, she argues, could be a $100 billion dollar industry if it didn’t neglect the talent and drive of Black and Brown riders.

According to a  on the history of the city’s dirt biking community, back in the 1970s dirt bikes were not ridden on city streets but on state park trails and dirt roads, which is what their lighter bodies and treaded tires were designed for; but, within a decade, laws against the use of dirt bikes outside of the city had passed. “That’s when — local dirt bike riders say — they moved to the city streets,” the Sun reports. Soon after, dirt bikes became illegal to use on streets in Maryland’s cities, too.

By criminalizing dirt bikes, Young says, the city has spent decades ignoring rather than tapping into unrecognized potential. “A dirt bike police task force is not a strategy or a game plan,” says Young. “Programmatic solutions that unlock potential is a much better approach.” As a “solutionist,” she says, her approach has been using dirt bike culture to help end the cycle of poverty, disrupt the prison pipeline and build bridges in communities.

This month, the mayor’s office  its second round of the American Rescue Plan Act to nine nonprofit grant recipients. B-360 was awarded $1.25 million in funding to support its STEM education programming and workforce development.

It’s all about perspective, Young says. The Black men and women who ride dirt bikes are seen as the problem, but for her, it’s exactly the opposite. Riders can be the solution, and B-360 is showing how.

Some of the teachers B-360 hires are riders paid to teach students everything from mechanics to stunts, “acknowledging their assets,” Young says. According to the group’s own assessment, B-360 has employed 57 former dirt bike riders, decreased dirt bike arrests by 81% and saved the city $1.2 million in taxpayer dollars by employing locals at risk of incarceration.

Other teachers, like 23-year-old Shavone Mayers Dixon, heard about the program and wanted to get involved. Born and raised in Baltimore, Mayers Dixon graduated from Arizona State with a degree in biomedical engineering. Now, she works full time as a software engineer and part time at B-360’s summer camp.

“We definitely need more young Black people in science, and this is a bridge to do that,” says Mayers Dixon. ���t’s doing something that’s fun for them – dirt bikes – to get them engaged and incorporating the education aspect to help them go into careers…That’s all up my alley, just helping out kids, science. It was perfect and I thought, ‘sign me up.’”

When Young was in first grade and “Bill Nye the Science Guy” was her favorite show on TV, her teacher told her that she would never grow up to be an engineer. Despite being fascinated by science, despite her math and reading levels being beyond her classmates, and despite the lab she’d built for herself in the basement of her West Baltimore home, Young recalls that her white teacher told her that she couldn’t be an engineer. Why? Because she is Black, female and her parents didn’t go to college.

As Young describes it, she was ready for the world of science, but the world wasn’t ready for her. In corporate America, she was usually the only Black female in a room of engineers, mistaken for a secretary more times than she can count. “The problem is the receiving side,” says Young. “We can be equipped, prepared, intelligent, but if the work isn’t done to better the reception, it’s always going to be the same issue.”

Her adult experiences were a culmination of the uphill battle she’d fought since childhood. The advanced public middle school into which she’d tested meant a five-hour round-trip commute on up to five buses to the other side of Baltimore, starting at the age of 10. The commute continued when she was accepted into The Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, a top STEM-oriented high school.

Educating Baltimore’s Black and Brown youth and providing better experiences than she had to endure are huge drivers for B-360. Though she was working at Key Technology, Inc. doing prototyping for medical devices and, at the same time, working at  in asset management for the construction and engineering firm, Young decided it was time to leave corporate life to become a catalyst for change to her city and beyond.

Baltimore at that moment was still reeling from the death of Freddy Gray at the hands of police. ��� knew there were a lot of people going through challenges like me, being from this city and not being heard and not being acknowledged,” she says. “Sometimes when it comes to Black societies and Black voices the easiest thing to do is silence us, or police us, or to make the things that we like to do criminal.”

“Everyone in Baltimore that rides dirt bikes has dealt with the task force in some capacity,” says Young. Too many people in the city see dirt bike riders as criminals because that’s the policy, she says.

Michael Chesser, a B-360 teacher who has been with the program since its founding, has had run-ins with the law. ��� just think that they don’t understand where we’re coming from – why we ride, what’s our cause,” says Chesser, 24, who started riding when he was five.

��� just think they see us as individuals who…want to do harm,” he says. But for Chesser and others learning or teaching at B-360, dirt bikes are “my outlet. I feel free. I feel like all my problems go away…It clears my mind.”

While Chesser has taught more than 1,000 students through B-360, the program has also been a fork in the road for him and he wants to stay with Young’s foundation. ��� want to help build B-360 everywhere, so everyone can understand the opportunities that it has. It can actually change a kid’s life.”

Wheelie-popping Harrison didn’t realize that he was learning science and math while riding until he joined B-360 four years ago. ��� want to be a mechanical engineer when I get older,” he says.

Harrison is one of 8,500 youth with whom B-360 has worked since 2017. Young says if the money from dirt bike task forces around the country were channeled into initiatives like hers, it could affect positive change for hundreds of thousands of youth who are being criminalized for enjoying a hobby. Young wants to take her program and expand to other cities where there is an urban dirt bike culture, including D.C., Cleveland, Oakland and Detroit.

���t really needs to get started in cities before it’s too late, before we have more hashtags,” says Young of her programmatic approach. “And so I think cities have hopefully learned some hard lessons. You don’t want to put officers in positions to enforce policies that can cause turmoil. But you also have to maintain public safety,” says Young. “We have to hit the reset button.”

“B-360 exists at the unlikely intersection of three lanes; unrecognized potential, dirt bike culture and STEM education,” says Young. And to that intersection, Young has brought together government officials and riders. “We literally created a table for them to talk,” says Young of the figurative space she’s carved out in Baltimore. Her goal is “to build safe spaces, create better practices, and make sure [officials] are thinking about dirt bikes solutions holistically.”

Safety starts with a helmet and riding off main roads, as well as learning how to maintain a safe bike. But it extends beyond the bike itself.

For Young and those she mentors, it means embracing one of the mantras of dirt bike riders: “Bikes up, guns down.” It’s about feeling safe within one’s own city, within one’s own community. It’s about having access to a safe outlet and not falling victim to street life, she says.

Young knew that for her educational programming to work with Baltimore’s youth, she needed to make STEM more relevant. So she teaches science through dirt bikes — basically, applied learning. Popping a wheelie becomes a physics equation, tuning an engine is a class in engineering, finding the gas-to-oil ratio to make sure your engine doesn’t explode is a chemistry experiment.

“A rider has to think about how much time it will take to pop a wheelie, get down a street at whatever speed they are going and make sure they don’t crash,” explains Young. That can be solved through D = V x T, or distance equals velocity times time. “That’s the type of math they can do in their head, and that is the type of math they just know naturally.”

Since her STEM programs require skilled teachers, B-360’s workforce programs also give riders a formal home for teaching — everything from dirt bike mechanics to stunts.

Beyond the classroom, B-306’s advocacy is paving new strategic avenues for dirt bike riders, both literally and physically. As the Baltimore Police Dirt Task Force disbanded in spring of 2021, Young teamed up with the Baltimore City’s State’s Attorney’s office to create a diversion program for those arrested for riding dirt bikes on the street. As part of the program, which kicked into gear in March 2021, when someone is arrested for a dirt bike offense they have the opportunity to complete 20 hours of programming at B-360. Once their hours are fulfilled, their case is dismissed. According to Young, many of the individuals who enter B-360 through the new diversion program stay on, voluntarily, to learn even more about STEM and entrepreneurship.

“We literally are making sure people don’t go to jail. We are changing people’s lives,” says Young. “One, we want to make sure these young men, 17, 18, 19 year olds, have career and job opportunities, transferable skills, like fixing and repairing bikes and cognitive reasoning. Two, that all charges get dropped which will change their trajectory. And then three, making sure that they know that the skills they possess will give them a new outlook on life.”

One young man in the diversion program is a 19-year-old who had faced a slew of charges ranging from dirt bike possession to traffic violations. After taking part in B-360’s program, he graduated high school and recently found his first job in manufacturing, based on the skills he learned with B-360. Another young man who faced criminal charges is still with B-360. After completing the program, the 20-year-old chose to stay on board. Now he’s working as an instructor at the group’s summer camp every day, teaching the city’s youth on everything from rider safety to bike repair.

“What Brittany’s program does is completely counter to what the criminal justice system does with an individual. We’ll lock somebody up for 120 days and that can ruin your life,” says Michael Collins, Strategic Policy and Planning Director for the Baltimore City’s State’s Attorney. “As a country we deal with nuisance problems and ‘quality-of-life offenses’ almost exclusively through a criminal justice lens. But we recognize that most of the people riding dirt bikes and being arrested are people of color. They’re riding for fun. It’s not malicious, per se.”

Collins says that what B-360 was offering was a solution outside the criminal justice system – “a safe middle ground where we are getting individuals off the street and putting them on the right track,” as he puts it, particularly for individuals with no other offense except the possession of a dirt bike.

While this new diversion program is just over a year old, Collins said there is much to be done to support groups like B-360. The city of Philadelphia, which has long struggled to deal with its dirt bike subculture, has already reached out to him to learn more about Baltimore’s model.

“At the end of the day we’ve tried the approach of incarceration and that didn’t work,” says Collins. “We are in a moment in the country where we are trying to reimagine policing…We are trying to limit people going into the criminal justice system unless they are a discernible safety threat.”

There has been talk of building a dirt bike park in Baltimore for years — a place to ride safely and legally. There’s been similar chatter . Neither city has been able to get their ideas off the ground. The irony of these failed efforts is not lost on Young, who points out how White hobbies are incorporated into cityscapes. When skateboarders become nuisances on city sidewalks, communities build skateparks; when cyclists are endangered, cities build bike lanes and teach motorists to ‘share the road,’ and when motorized scooters become the go-to transport of choice for thousands, rideshare companies launch money-making ventures. “None of these activities are criminalized,” says Young.

Rather than waiting for stagnating efforts to bring a dirt bike park to Baltimore, Young is moving forward, fostering relationships with city businesses. Last year, the B&O Railroad Museum gifted B-360 the use of 2.5 acres of the museum’s land in Southwest Baltimore for safe riding. Along with the gated, empty parking lot, B-360 used the site trailers for classroom space.

“She can literally be saving lives,” the B&O Railroad Museum’s Executive Director Kris Hoellen says of Young and her program. “Putting kids in ‘the system’ that are trying to overcome so many challenges that they face already, is not going to be helpful…But if you can spark a kid with a passion and use that passion for learning, then you’ve got them.”

This year, B-360 is housed at an unused recreational center in Southwest Baltimore. Surrounded by 10 acres of land, it serves as an example of how vacant buildings can be given new life. Young’s goal is to raise $10 million by 2024 and secure about 20 acres of land and a permanent campus, which would be the first of its kind anywhere in the country. Her aim is to create an auto body shop, an educational space for STEM programming, and an indoor and outdoor dirt bike riding course.

���nitiatives like B-360 absolutely save the public money and frees up resources which we can use to invest in our young people and to catalyze their future,” says Fagan Harris, CEO of Baltimore Corps, which works to recruit and retain social impact leaders to Baltimore. Harris, who is the chairman of B-360’s advisory board, says Young’s “ideas and solutions, for our communities, are big.” Young was one of Baltimore Corps’ inaugural Elevation Awardees.

Last year B-360 was awarded a $300,000 grant through Microsoft’s , which promotes  in the U.S. It was one of 50 Black-led nonprofits selected nationally.

“We need your funding, but we want people to trust us with our own ideas,” says Young. ���’m a person changing from being in survival mode my entire life…a fight-or-flight mentality, to the person that can now think about sustainability.”

This originally appeared at and is published here in partnership with the .

The course is “Cloudy With a Chance of Science,” and James Ramirez places his hand-fashioned tin foil boat into a bin of water, squealing with excitement as he discovers it floats. The first grader and his classmates are learning about density by testing how many pebbles each students’ contraption will hold before it sinks.

Ramirez tosses in every stone from his first handful — quickly surpassing the class record of five pebbles — and rushes back for more as his boat remains above water. The child, who is reserved and hasn’t spoken yet this period, keeps adding weight, laughing and wriggling his shoulders with each successful placement.

“…27, 28, 29…” 

He has the attention of the class now and his peers count with him.

“…42, 43, 44…”

With each pebble, Ramirez is doing more than proving he crafted a sturdy ship. He is accomplishing something educators across the country are anxiously hoping he and millions of students like him can do: accelerate their learning to get back on track after COVID.

The first grader is one of 481 youngsters enrolled in Baltimore’s Emerging Scholars program this summer and one of over 15,000 students participating in no-cost summer learning opportunities through Baltimore City Schools. Thanks to COVID relief funds, the 77,800-student district is serving more than twice as many young people as its pre-pandemic max of 9,000, said Ronda Welsh, the district’s extended learning coordinator. 

Among the offerings are typical summer school options like credit recovery and career exploration, but also more specialized programs like debate, farm and forest camp, robotics and “Freedom Schools” focused on Black history. The Emerging Scholars program stands out as a camp providing accelerated academic instruction, but with none of the cost or admission requirements typical of gifted programming.

“Our goal was to provide as many opportunities as we could for students in Baltimore,” Welsh told ����Ӱ��. “We wanted students to not only make progress academically, focusing on math and [English], but also the social-emotional aspect as well as enrichment.”

Young people in and nationwide continue to score far below pre-pandemic levels in reading and math tests, with more severe deficits for high-poverty schools. Experts estimate it may take a half-decade to fully recover. Meanwhile, many officials pin their hopes on summer learning efforts like those in Baltimore to make up lost ground.

“Especially because of COVID, the kids are a little behind,” said Claudia Wiseman, a second-grade summer science instructor with Baltimore Emerging Scholars. During the school year, she’s an elementary special educator and said months of Zoom school have meant many young learners still lack basic skills like how to hold a pencil. The students she’s teaching now will be “a little better prepared for second grade,” she hopes.

It’s afternoon pickup time at the Emerging Scholars’ John Ruhrah Elementary School campus, and Ramirez’s mother Christy Miranda arrives. Staff tell her about her son’s latest feat: 63 pebbles.

Miranda beams. The program is helping the family recognize their son’s potential, unlocking academic capacities she didn’t realize he possessed.

“He’s learning a lot,” she told ����Ӱ��. ��� didn’t know he had the ability to do so.”

During the year, her son has few opportunities for rigorous coursework, she said, explaining that his school is “very defunded.”

But this summer is different. Baltimore Emerging Scholars is a six-week gifted and talented program. In collaboration with , a global leader in gifted education, the camp provides high-level content in science, math and literacy to rising 1st  through 6th graders. 

“During the regular year, [school] is just teachers rambling on about stuff I already know about … but this is new material,” said rising fifth grader Basil Coleman. ���’m just having a great time here.”

Unlike most other gifted programs, the camp doesn’t rely solely on test scores for eligibility but rather welcomes virtually any student who is up for the challenge. As a result, the cohort of students is more diverse than the group of students identified for gifted lessons during the academic year. Some 68% of summer students are Black, 14% are Hispanic, 9% are white and 3% are Asian — figures that closely resemble district-wide demographic averages.

Rae Lymer, who manages the program and reviews every student application, explained that anytime a student has a recorded assessment at or above grade level, it automatically qualifies the youngster for the program. If such a metric does not exist, the administrator calls families directly, looking for an alternative qualification such as if the applicant likes to ask lots of questions or thinks outside the box.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time, what I hear is, ‘My kid is completely under-challenged and they’re not motivated by school and so that’s why you’re not seeing scores,’” Lymer told ����Ӱ��, explaining that the program almost never turns away motivated students. 

Youth who choose to participate usually rise to the occasion, the data suggest. While the summer program does not yet have numbers on its academic impact, Emerging Scholars also runs afterschool offerings during the fall and spring. In 2020-21, the most recent data available, the share of participants testing at or above grade level increased 18 percentage points in reading and 39 percentage points in math over the course of the year.

“We’re learning advanced stuff and we’re able to get ahead,” said 11-year-old Ama Amoateng, between stints on the playground during recess. ���t makes me feel smarter.”

After engaging in the summer program, “many of these kids will become identified [as gifted],” anticipates Stacey Johnson, spokesperson for Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. ���t’s reaching kids we wouldn’t otherwise reach.”

Indeed, parent Torrey Parker said his daughter Skylar got “bumped up” in reading and science last school year, which he believes was “absolutely” because of the work she did in the program.

The rapid growth attests to what education scholars have long posited: That academic talent is equally distributed across all students without regard to race, class or gender — but that access to advanced learning opportunities are not. 

“We firmly believe that if opportunities are provided, students will flourish,” said Lymer.

In one reading course focused on mystery novels, rising fifth graders are already 12 chapters into their third book in as many weeks and engaging in what their instructor called “detective work” to predict the ending. In another classroom, second graders concoct oobleck, a water and cornstarch mixture that has both solid and liquid properties, to learn about states of matter and “non-Newtonian fluids.” Down the hall in “Toyology,” first graders study inertia and momentum by unleashing metal and plastic slinkies down a set of stairs.

A classroom of fifth graders peer down the lenses of microscopes at magazine cutouts of the letter “e,” diagramming what they see at various magnification levels. It’s several students’ first time using a microscope and they’re surprised to find what one describes as “static on a TV.”

“They were playing, but they were also learning,” said Toyology instructor Tamika Robinson.

Even the students admit it’s a good time.

“Because it’s called summer school, most of us thought it would be like school … but instead it’s a lot of activities and really engaging,” said Brooke Bennett, 12.

Propelled, perhaps, by rave reviews, the camp has grown nearly three-fold since its 2019 launch and added about 35% new seats this year while transitioning back to in-person programming for the first time since COVID. Staffing challenges, which have of numerous summer programs across the country, haven’t posed a barrier for Emerging Scholars. In fact, two teachers rather than one work in each classroom under its co-teaching model.

“Many of our teachers come back from year to year because they really respect and value their time with our program,” said Lymer.

As the day winds down, a dozen rising first graders arrive at their last class, Social-Emotional Learning. Shoulders slouch and one student’s head is on his desk. They’ve just watched a on how to keep a growth mindset and their instructor Brother Modlin wakes them up with some call-and-response. 

���t’s not ‘I can’t do it,’ is it class?” He asks the question by trailing off. ���t’s ‘I can’t do it…’”

“YET,” they exclaim, picking up their heads and once again regaining attention.

Modlin works as a school counselor during the year, but was previously a therapist at a juvenile detention center in the city. 

“My whole thing as a counselor is about growth mindset,” he told ����Ӱ��. “We’re going to have bad situations, especially in Baltimore. … If I give them a growth mindset, they can rise out of any situation without depending on anyone but themselves.”

The lessons are having an impact for 10-year-old Akorede Adekola.

��� feel really confident and relief [after SEL class],” he said. ��� get to show my feelings and get it all out.”

The program’s approach, coupling rigorous academic work with emotional supports, could be a promising model, believes fourth-grade instructor Michelle Brown-Christian. She scoffs at the idea that the curricula, fashioned for gifted children, should be reserved for only a select few.

“This could work for any child that wants to learn,” she said.

On March 13, 2020, Kyair Butts and his sixth-graders were deep into a particularly engaging forensic anthropology lesson, trying to answer this question: Why did Virginia’s Jamestown settlement collapse?

At the time, Butts — universally known as “Mr. K” to his students and colleagues and simply “K” to his friends — was a language arts teacher at Waverly Elementary/Middle School in Northeast Baltimore. When COVID-19 hit, he and his students were mere weeks from the end of the school year.

That evening, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan ordered schools statewide to close immediately. The city system, along with Maryland’s other 23 school districts, would , with a plan to reopen in early April.

Butts was worried. ���f I waited two weeks, I’m just convinced that I would have lost some students — and lost some families,” he said. “And we just don’t have time for that.”

So he contacted all of his families and told them he’d be on Zoom first thing Monday morning, no matter what — greeting students, hearing about their weekends, commiserating, sharing fears, and teaching a lesson. 

While virtually every other school in the city took a break, his students logged on, attended abbreviated classes and quickly learned about Zoom waiting and breakout rooms.

That sent a message.  

“Families just really appreciated that,” he said. “So, in turn, they showed up. That’s all I can ask.” To be exact, 25 of his 60 students showed up. As the week progressed, that number grew, to 35, then 40, then 45.

Two years later he’s teaching at his third Baltimore school, Henderson-Hopkins, a that partners with Johns Hopkins University, located just blocks away. With the pandemic entering its third year, this Iowa transplant has become not just a go-to expert for advice about how to reach students remotely. He has established himself as a constant, supportive presence in his students’ lives, both inside and outside school, and an unlikely role model for young people growing up in a very different time and place than he did.

Honored in 2019 as Baltimore’s — district CEO Sonja Sontelises cited his “passionate commitment to student achievement and equity” — Mr. K. sees teaching as more than just a job.

One weekend a month, he brings students to get free books at the Maryland Book Bank. Then he takes them out to brunch and, on occasion, to attractions like Baltimore’s National Aquarium. The outings further cement his bond with families, said Henderson-Hopkins Assistant Principal J.D. Merrill. “That relationship piece is something that you can’t really quantify, but it translates into academic gains because the kids will work for him. They know he’s there for them, that he loves them.”

The ‘super magical’ promise of Zoom

When school shutdowns forced him to begin teaching almost entirely from his bedroom, he was sharing a Baltimore townhouse with two other teachers. One was a special education teacher at a local high school who taught from the adjoining bedroom, and another was a tutor for the startup Amplify, who conducted 20-minute lessons from the dining room. 

Butts learned that in other Baltimore schools, teachers at the same grade level were logging onto a single Zoom link and taking turns working as lead teachers. He and his colleagues tried it, adding a dedicated special education teacher to the mix and teaching one lesson apiece each day, as opposed to the typical model, in which each teacher delivers the same lesson to several classes throughout the day. 

While one teacher taught, the others provided support, answering students’ questions via Zoom chat, monitoring student work, and moving students into breakout rooms for individualized or small-group instruction. That kept students focused on the lessons and, in the bargain, standardized teachers’ expectations across the team, helping students figure out how to succeed day by day.

“My colleagues were also able to see me teach for an hour every day — and I was able to see my colleagues teach for an hour every day. We’d give each other really good feedback and great debrief sessions,” he said. “We kind of tweaked our practice so that there was a unity among what students were hearing, by way of expectations — it was actually super, super magical.” 

It also simplified the school day for families, who only needed to log on to one Zoom address each day instead of four or more. In all, students received about three-and-a-half to four hours of instruction each day. 

While attendance was rarely perfect, he said, 55 to 58 of 70 students would show up most days — a respectable 79 to 83 percent attendance rate, during a school year in which Maryland school systems collectively lost an estimated , according to one analysis. 

Two years later, Butts has retained his sense of urgency. “Zoom and remote learning has so much potential,” he said. “The problem, though, is that potential is still at rest until something gives a push to become kinetic and something kind of magical and brilliant.”

Love & straight talk

The magic that Butts offers is a dose of honesty about life and the world that is often missing in the daily press to teach content to students. The honesty lets him and his students talk about things that matter and be vulnerable with each other. 

Each year, he shares with his students a 2015 , based on the ground-breaking research of Harvard economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, detailing the risks of growing up poor in Baltimore. The researchers found, for instance, that every year a poor boy spends growing up in Baltimore means a 1.5 percent drop in his earnings as an adult; if a young man spends his entire childhood in the city, by 26 he’d earn about 28 percent less than if he’d grown up nearly anywhere else. 

Butts translates data about Black Baltimore students’ achievement into a picture of what awaits them as young adults. If they’re not reading on grade level, for instance, their risks of not graduating high school rise, as do their chances of being incarcerated. Assistant Principal Merrill said, “He just makes these connections between what’s happening, but then he doesn’t make the kids feel bad about it. He has a plan: ‘This is what we’re going to do to get you caught up.’”

Because of recent interruptions in their schooling, that straight talk has never been more important, Butts said. ���’ve been very clear with students this year: ‘I’m going to be very transparent with you. I want to be open with you, I want to be vulnerable with you. But because I love you, I’m also going to tell you things that you need to hear versus things that you want to hear.’”  

Butts’ life story offers up a different kind of narrative of growing up Black. 

By his own admission, Butts led a “pretty middle-class” life: a child of divorce raised on the south side of Des Moines, he was liked by teachers, with a loyal group of mostly white friends. He liked school and thrived, especially in high school, where debate and mock trials fired his imagination. 

Being Black in “majority white spaces” gave him an awareness of a kind of implicit spotlight that shone on him. He fit in at school and knew that his friends and their parents respected him.

Actually, his classmates went a step further, electing him “Man of the Year” in his junior year. That shocked him. Butts knew he was well-liked, but never thought of himself as popular. ��� could kind of blend in with various different friend groups or different kids, but I just didn’t think I was in the ‘In’ or the ‘It’ crowd.” To win Man of the Year proved to him “that I belonged.”

Decades later, that quiet confidence shines through — as does a decidedly Midwestern sensibility and set of tastes that he can trace to his youth: He likes Marvel superhero movies, progressive rock, and Ultimate Frisbee. In that way, colleague Christina Bradford said, his students get to see “a different representation of Blackness.” 

Butts, who sports thick black eyeglasses, laughed when asked during a midmorning recess period about his tastes in movies, music, and sports. “A little never hurt anybody,” he joked. “So we’re going to listen to it. I just choose me, and I hope that some kids are like, ‘You know what? I think I can choose me too.’”

‘He believes that Black students deserve the best’

Butts actually showed up at Henderson-Hopkins nearly three years ago to lead a teacher training, recalled Merrill. But as he and Principal Peter Kannam looked on, they were instantly impressed with his ability to both deliver the material and connect with teachers. Merrill pulled out his phone and texted his boss: Are you thinking what I’m thinking? 

Merrill ran back to his office, typed up an offer letter, dug in a closet for a Henderson-Hopkins backpack, hat, and folder, and ran back to the training room. Kannam signed the letter and they handed the odd parcel to Butts, even though they had no open positions. 

Eventually Bradford, the math teacher, accepted a job there — with the requirement that she and Butts could teach as partners. They both began teaching there last fall.

“You can tell that he treats each student as if they were his own kids,” she said. “And he is very clear about his expectations for them and truly believes and acts in a way that he believes that Black students deserve the best and are the best, which is really refreshing to experience and work alongside.”

Principal Kannam said walking the line between friend and teacher is harder than it looks. “Everyone says, ‘Relationship build,’ but it’s not to be students’ friends,” he said. “You’ve got to get them to work for you.”

Camyra Williams, 18, vividly remembers Butts’ class at Calverton Elementary-Middle School, where he taught her for fourth and fifth grades. Even now, she said, they talk regularly about school, and about life.

Williams remembers that he helped her come out of her shell, especially during preparations for debates, which taught her to both embrace the ideas she cared about and think about them logically.

��� put up a pretty good fight now, I’m not going to lie,” she said with a laugh. “Anything that I feel strongly in, nobody can beat me.”

At the end of her fifth-grade year, she was so grateful that she arranged a party in his honor, which she dubbed “Appreciation Day for Mr. K.”

She still relies on an exhortation he used to share with students: “Mind over matter.”

���t didn’t click with me at the time,” she said. But as she got older, it began making more sense: Everybody has hardships and bad days, she recalled him saying. You’ve got to accept that and keep going in life, no matter the obstacles. ���t’s being able to control it, not letting it control you.” 

A senior who’s due to graduate next month from Baltimore’s Western High School, Williams still keeps a hand-written letter Butts wrote to her (and every other student) for fifth-grade graduation. It sits in a mirror frame, next to her graduation photo. In the letter, he tells her, ���n you, I see someone who will change the world.”

“He didn’t have to do what he did, kind of like the typical teacher, the typical person,” Williams said. “But he wasn’t. And I will forever cherish him for that.”

‘This generation is in no way lost’

On a recent morning, a cool jazz ballad played softly on the classroom stereo as Butts led 24 sixth-graders through a reading lesson. He urged them to sound out large, unfamiliar words such as “humanitarian” syllable by syllable, in their heads, much as they once sounded out simpler words like “cat” when they were younger.

He clapped out “hu-man-i-tar-i-an” saying, ��� know it sounds silly, it sounds a little elementary. But your brain is going to thank you.”

With a passage from a reading about the Black photographer Gordon Parks on a projector screen, he led students through an “echo read” of the passage, reciting short phrases that they repeated, en masse, like a congregation following the lead of a minister.

The technique is a standard one, but he brought it into the classroom, he later said, because he’s thinking more and more, post-pandemic, about the importance of reading fluency. ��� haven’t spent this much time ever truly focusing on fluency,” he said. “There’s a precision to this.”

Being able to read is one thing, he said, but being able to demonstrate it is another. “Working on fluency has to stay going forward,” he said.

As schools look past the pandemic in 2022 and beyond, Butts said he’s hoping the public will rethink its idea of how students like his have fared. The dominant narrative is that remote learning was a disaster and that millions suffered possibly irretrievable “learning loss.” One July 2021 study from the consulting firm found that students, on average, were four months behind in reading and five months behind in math by the end of the last school year. 

In Baltimore, the most recent show that just 19 percent of city middle-schoolers read proficiently, compared to 37 percent in nearby Baltimore County and 53 percent in suburban Howard County. 

Butts said he saw a different reality with his students.

“They really attacked school,” he said. “Yeah, there were some students for sure who are in sixth grade that need some decoding practice, but I’ve also seen that before there was ever a pandemic. And the students that I had the virtual year, they were engaged — they asked questions. They found ways to just get it done.” 

He also roundly dismisses any talk that his students risk becoming a “,” as several critics have warned.

���f anything, I would like to think that it’s a ‘generation of opportunity,’” he said. “The coolest part about being a teacher, I like to think, is that every day you get to do something that allows others to present their best selves to you. And if that to me is a measure of success, aside from academics, this generation is in no way lost.”

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to both the Weave Project and ����Ӱ��.

One day in June, the employees of the Enoch Pratt Free Library gathered online to learn something new: how to de-escalate conflict, mediate grief, and help people feel better about themselves.��

They got instruction from Lawrence Brown, a professor at Morgan State University who trains organizations on racial equity, then broke out into smaller private sessions where they had tough, but open, conversations about healing their own and their city’s trauma. 

“There was conversation about understanding history and the impact on neighborhoods in current Baltimore,” said Heidi Daniel, CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library system. “We are focused on questioning how the library can play a role in healing inequities and examining our internal policies and practices to do better work.” 

That session was part of an experimental effort by Baltimore leaders, who hope to enlist city agencies, starting with the library, to answer a big question: How does a city that has suffered trauma for decades, including over 190 homicides just this year, begin to heal? Baltimore is teaching its city staff how to spot and assist people dealing with that trauma, and turning city facilities into places where they can learn to cope and, in turn, assist their neighbors in processing their own pain and suffering. 

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, social services like shelters had become strained in the city, as across the country; librarians and their colleagues had stepped up to aid in this kind of frontline work. In 2021 the city, recognizing the reach of the public library branch system, wondered how library staff might go a step further, helping to address the root causes of violence. 

���f all agencies have a deeper understanding of the impact of trauma and a focus on not retraumatizing people, that can be a game changer for Baltimore,” Daniel said. 

The strategy is among the first of its kind nationally, and it poses a challenge for the public health approach to violence reduction: Whether official policy and programming can directly soothe the pain and stress residents experience amid the frequent violence, despite the entrenched poverty and racism built into the city’s infrastructure.

City Councilperson Zeke Cohen, who sponsored the Elijah Cummings Healing City Act sparked this approach, hoped to “understand how we became a city where a child in Roland Park” — among the wealthiest and whitest areas of Baltimore — “is expected to live 20 years longer than a child born in Sandtown-Winchester” — one of the poorest, and majority Black. 

Learning History — to Change the Future

Drive through Baltimore and the physical signs of trauma are obvious: Vacant homes, wooden boards covering their windows and doors, pockmark city blocks of row houses; an open-air opioid trade flourishes in plain view; unhoused people sleep below highway overpasses; and, throughout the city, people build memorials to the victims of an unprecedented . Those physical signifiers display Baltimore’s legacy as an innovator in systemic racism. Redlining, the practice of marking where families can and can’t live or receive services, often based on race,  in 1910 after a Black Yale Law graduate bought a home in an all-white neighborhood. The city responded by adopting a racial segregation ordinance that outlined exactly which blocks in which Black people were allowed to live. Though redlining as an official practice was outlawed decades ago, the city remains deeply segregated by race; by extension, the distribution of resources and opportunity are unequally divided as well.

“Trauma can inflict people at a population level, whenever you have a dominant group oppressing a vulnerable group,” said Brown, who led the June session with librarians. ��� contend that Baltimore apartheid is the root cause of group trauma and individual trauma in Baltimore.” 

That session was the first training for city employees; elected officials, including the City Council and the mayor’s cabinet, trained earlier in the spring. Brown’s presentation relied heavily on his book, The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America, which details Baltimore’s deep segregation and how racism permeates policy. 

“Budgets [determine the city’s] policies, practices and systems and allow them to flourish,” Brown said during the training. So the city that creates those budgets, and its staff, need to see their role in maintaining inequality. 

Brown flipped through slides of newspaper clips going back more than 100 years that documented the first efforts to segregate Baltimore. Despite federal court intervention, City Hall and local politicians bowed to the demands of the city’s then-majority-white electorate, and the racial divisions of Baltimore’s streets endured.

“Librarians… you are the people who can bring and marshal the information to help increase the citywide knowledge, the citywide political will, to make sure we heal Baltimore in a comprehensive and authentic way,” Brown said.   

Cohen agrees, and says that’s why he saw Baltimore’s library branches as a logical starting point: Many of those with the highest needs — the city’s unhoused people, those experiencing addiction and behavioral health issues, and children — routinely use the library, which is a city facility. “The ultimate goal,” Cohen said, “is for people to feel safe in the institutions the city controls.”

Creating Safe City Spaces

An incident inside a city building set this plan in motion. In 2019, a man entered Frederick Douglass High School and shot and injured a teaching assistant. Even for Baltimore, where violence is routine, the shooting rocked the city. Political leaders considered whether to arm school resource officers and install metal detectors in schools. The students had a different strategy in mind, and called for the city to heal from its profound trauma through group sessions like the ones the libraries held in June, and training in mediation and conflict resolution that is still to come. 

City lawmakers took the students’ advice. In early 2020, the city passed the Elijah Cummings Healing City Act, named after the late congressman and sponsored by Cohen. The law created a Trauma-Informed Task Force to study its impact on individual residents and the city as a whole. The task force used funding from the Open Society Foundations, which funds justice, education, media, and public health initiatives around the globe, along with some money from the city to develop strategies for healing. 

“Trauma, as I have experienced since childhood, is embedded into our very livelihoods, in the food that we eat, to the shows that we watch, to the relationships we take part in,” said Destini Philpot, a youth leader on the city’s Trauma Informed Care Task Force. “We begin to change and heal our community by addressing trauma and creating trauma-informed spaces, especially for youth.”

The city also sought input from the community as a whole. Officials held listening sessions in barbershops, laundromats, beauty salons and, of course, libraries. From those sessions came the outline of the trauma-informed city programming that kicked off in earnest this summer. 

The work is in its earliest stages. Library staff has been trained, and the plan is to roll out similar sessions to the public through libraries. Each branch will specialize in a different type of training, delivered by one of Baltimore’s social aid organizations. If a person wants to learn about dealing with grief, they can head to a library branch that is working with Roberta’s House, a family grief center. If someone wants to learn about restorative justice, there will be a branch focused on that skill. The city expects to make an announcement about a bigger rollout of this plan in the coming weeks.

The city’s program could serve as a model for other cities and for the state of Maryland. In May, the state passed the ​​Healing Maryland’s Trauma Act, which is modeled after Baltimore’s Cummings Act. Baltimore officials will report their results from the city’s trauma training to the state to help develop a similar program across Maryland.

The program’s very existence at the national level has grown increasingly politically polarized in recent years, with many progressives pushing for its dismantling and conservatives arguing for its preservation: In the nation’s largest school system, which serves nearly 1 million students, politicians, not educators, are fighting over its future.��

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What will happen to New York City’s program is uncertain: outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio of 4-year-olds and instead offering accelerated learning to all of the city’s 65,000 kindergarteners next fall compared to 2,500 such children today. Eric Adams, de Blasio’s all-but-certain successor, has said he wants to keep the gifted and talented program, but create his own version whose eligibility requirements and delivery methods he hasn’t specified.

To better understand what other school systems are doing to identify and serve gifted children, ����Ӱ�� asked more than 20 large and diverse districts across the nation about their screening processes, delivery methods and racial breakdown of participants. Ten replied, including Los Angeles Unified School District, Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, Florida’s Orange County Public Schools and Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District in Texas.����

We also queried experts who have spent years assessing gifted programs’ efficacy. And while there are strong differences of opinion as to the programs’ merit, many in the field agree that the nation’s approach is scattershot and delivery is too often ineffective.��

If gifted and talented education in younger grades is to survive, it will have to change.

“There is a lot of rethinking of these more traditional models and some recognition that they don’t work so well for the kids that are in them,” said Jason A. Grissom, professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University.

Grissom found, after nearly 13,000 kindergarten children across the country for six years starting in 2011, that students showed only modest gains in reading and math in the years of their participation in gifted and talented programs. They showed no change in the frequency with which they report to work hard, pay attention and listen in class, among other factors.

And the results were worse for Black and low-income students: They did not appear to benefit academically, on average, possibly because their schools’ offerings were less robust than those of their wealthier peers.

Yet these programs have many supporters. Dina Brulles, who serves on the board of directors for the National Association for Gifted Children, said her organization was “devastated” to learn New York City might no longer have a gifted and talented program, a move that who believe it’s their child’s only path to a quality education.

“We know these kids need something different,” Brulles said. “These students cannot be challenged in a regular classroom with someone who does not have the training or resources.”

The problem is solvable, she said. But schools must let go of outdated approaches.

“A lot of districts have the same programs for 10, 20 or even 30 years and look for a kid to fit in it,” said Brulles, who is also the director of gifted education in the Paradise Valley Unified School District in Arizona. ��� take the opposite approach. I look for the potential, group these students together and find out what they need.”

Sandra Kaplan, professor of clinical education at the University of Southern California, bristles at the notion of dismantling gifted education in younger grades, saying some children are simply more capable than others and should have their interests recognized. An expert in the field who has worked as a consultant for school districts and state departments of education around the country, she said teachers should be on the look-out for more-abled students as soon as they enroll.

��� want to start at preschool,” Kaplan said, adding that classrooms should be rich with materials meant to spark kids’ interest, much like a museum. ���t is a teacher’s responsibility to provide an environment where kids can demonstrate what they know.”

Much of the model she suggests relies on teachers’ observation of students. She balked at the idea that such a method seems inexact and might exclude some children.��

“There is a subjective element in all evaluation,” she said.��

Nearly all of the school districts that responded to our survey have opted for universal screening, testing all students in younger grades for possibly entry to their gifted and talented programs in effort to sidestep the selection bias of teachers, which has of Black, Latino and Native students and those from low-income families.��

But even this has not guaranteed equal access.

Fairfax County Public Schools conducts universal screening in first and second grade, but there is another pathway — it consists of parent referrals, appeals, requests for re-testing and procurement of outside exams — “for those who know about it,” according to a .��

That second, alternative route, “inserts a form of assessment bias, similar to traditional uses of teacher or parent nominations,” meaning that only some parents are aware of and take advantage of this work-around.

Los Angeles Unified was under scrutiny from the Office for Civil Rights for years because of the lack of Black and Latino students in its gifted programs: the case was closed in November 2019 after the country’s second-biggest district enacted several measures to include them.

Some 3.3 million children participated in gifted and talented education nation-wide in the 2017-18 school year according to The Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education. Records from that time, which reflect the most recent data, show 58.4 percent were white, 18.3 percent were Hispanic or Latino, 9.9 percent were Asian and 8.2 percent were Black.��

Students with disabilities made up 2.8 percent of the total and English language learners comprised 2.4 percent.��

Grissom found, in a , that children in the top 20 percent of the socio-economic status distribution were seven times more likely to receive gifted services than those in the bottom 20 percent.��

The inequity remained even for those at the same achievement level: A child at the top income bracket was two to three times more likely to participate in gifted programing than a child at the bottom, even when their academic performance was the same.

And the tools used to determine students’ eligibility for gifted services — plus their expected performance on those measures — vary from one district to the next. The 10 districts that responded to our survey listed five different assessment exams among myriad other qualifications for students.

Third-, fourth- and fifth-graders at Clark County School District in Las Vegas, Nevada, must score at or above the 98th percentile on two commonly used entrance exams, the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test Third Edition or Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test Second Edition. They can also qualify if they earn at least 15 points on a combination of other factors, including testing.

Conversely, Baltimore City Schools changed its gifted and talented admissions requirements eight years ago in order to include a far greater swath of children: Any student who scores in the 73rd percentile on that same Naglieri test administered to kindergarteners is automatically enrolled and also must be provided with an Individualized Learning Plan — a sort of gifted version of the Individualized Education Program required for special education students, which might include advanced coursework or guidelines for an independent study program.

Prior to the switch, only 1,675 of the district’s students — it does not have data specific to elementary schools — or 1.97 percent qualified for gifted services in math and English language arts. By the end of the 2020-21 school year, 5,238 students, or 7.4 percent, had been identified, all while overall district enrollment shrank during the prior eight years.

Dennis Jutras, coordinator of gifted and advanced learning in the school system, said he’s proud of his district for holding onto the program. Baltimore schools serve nearly 78,000 children. More than 75 percent are Black, 14 percent are Hispanic and 58 percent hail from families with low income.����

“We have codified universal screening, mandated individualized learning plans … and stated unequivocally that these students exist in all our schools and must be deliberately supported,” he said. “Gifted learners are atypical learners. To force them to adapt to a one-size-fits-all model of learning is inequitable — and doubly so when we’re talking about students of color and/or under-resourced communities. We would never treat other atypical learners in this fashion.”

Other school systems have taken an even broader approach: Some of third- through 11th-grade students in Charlottesville, Virginia have been identified as gifted after a policy change that resulted in relaxed screening standards.

Paradise Valley Unified School District in Arizona uses universal screening to assess young children at all of its Title 1 schools. But it identifies gifted students by comparing them only to those children within their building rather than to the district at large, a tactic that could pit them against far more affluent kids.

Paradise Valley offers 14 different means to serve advanced learners, dividing participants into numerous groups based on their needs. Its “uniquely gifted” program serves children who need special education services and also have high intellectual abilities: Many have autism.��

It has also made strides in including another historically overlooked group: English language learners. While the talents of students with special needs might be revealed during IQ and other tests of their ability, teachers often underestimate the intellectual abilities of children who do not yet speak English. Nearly a third of Paradise Valley’s students are Hispanic and 6 percent are English language learners.��

���f we don’t take those measures, we are going to miss them,” Brulles said. “Those are the kids who worry me the most, the kids who have high potential but are being underserved.”

In addition to differences in screening and grouping students, there is also tremendous variation in how services are delivered, even within the same district. Children in Orange County Public Schools in Florida receive gifted services in one of four ways: Some study core subjects alongside only their gifted peers while others attend gifted class for a specific subject area.��

Many districts are turning away from the traditional model of pulling children out of the classroom for enrichment and instead call for them to learn alongside their peers with their teachers providing more advanced materials, lessons and guidance for the selected few.

While this technique, called differentiated instruction, might be preferred, it’s often poorly executed by teachers already struggling to meet the needs of an intellectually diverse student body. A push in this direction might mean a slow death for this controversial program.

Differentiated instruction is what Mayor de Blasio, with just months left in office, proposed in place of funneling a small sliver of kindergarteners into advanced programs. But to train thousands of city’s teachers to serve gifted learners in every classroom is an effort that would require .

“We don’t do differentiated learning properly,” Grissom said. “Teachers are able to do it to some degree, but not the degree needed to meet kids three grade levels ahead of the standard.”

And the qualifications for those teaching these children varies from one state to another.

Gifted students in Texas’s Cypress Fairbanks Independent School District receive differentiated instruction from teachers who’ve completed a minimum of 30 hours of required training in gifted education.

Paradise Valley requires a minimum of two college courses on the topic or 90 hours of professional development in the form of workshops and conferences, but encourages most of its teachers to take five college classes or complete 180 hours of training.

Beyond each district’s own staff requirements and various program machinations are children like 8-year-old Nonso Anaedozie of Baltimore who loves math so much she practices multiplication on the weekend just for fun.��

The third-grader spends most of her school day learning alongside other advanced students: Their coursework is, on average, six months to a year ahead of their typical peers, one of her teachers said.��

Nonso, whose father hails from Nigeria, is also pulled out of the classroom for advanced work in mathematics and English language arts.

Teachers describe the little girl as highly verbal, creative and confident — she won’t just write a song but sing it in front of the class, they say.

Nonso hopes to one day become a dancer and artist — she was particularly happy with her sculpture of donuts and coffee in addition to her rendering of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night — but is also considering a career in “peacemaking,” a skill she’s been honing since she was a young child.

���n kindergarten, I helped kids who were sad,” Nonso said. “And now, I help people become friends, which solves their problems.”

The child was identified as advanced just before she started kindergarten based on her performance on a gifted education admissions test. She said the advanced coursework makes her appreciate all of her special gifts and that she enjoys the challenge of her tougher curriculum.

���t helps me think about my talents and makes me think about being myself — different from others — which I really like,” she said.

Donning child-sized toques — the tall, white, pleated hats worn by chefs — Winter, 9, DeVonte, 8, and Stormy, 7, took charge of the kitchen, perfecting their knife skills by slicing bell peppers and stirring the roux until it reached a golden brown.

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By the end of the course, they’d made traditional Southern greens, black-eyed peas, smothered chicken and other dishes that trace back to African culture. “They’re already talking about making the cornbread for Thanksgiving,” said Foster.

The culinary-themed Black history lesson, called Soul Food Summer Camp, was a local twist on one of the popular courses available from Reconstruction — an online enrichment platform celebrating Black Americans’ contributions and heritage.

In a year when classroom discussions about race and discrimination have bitterly divided school boards and statehouses, topics such as the essential role of corn in the diet of Black slaves may seem conspicuously noncontroversial. But fostering Black children’s “positive identity development” in the way Hebrew and Chinese schools do for children in other communities is exactly what Kaya Henderson had in mind when she launched Reconstruction a year ago. As former chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools, she wants to counter a narrative that Black families don’t value education.

Roughly 15,000 students are expected to sign up this fall for Reconstruction, a for-profit company that delivers live enrichment classes on Black history and culture over Zoom to students across the country. Black parents browsing its offerings find courses “unapologetically” designed for them and their children. “Shorties” (4- to 11-year-olds), “Youngins” (12- to 14-year-olds) and “Gen Z” youth cover Black entrepreneurship and cultural knowledge. Students can design apps for nonprofits working to support the Black community or study speeches and sermons of famous Black orators. Parents began asking for their own courses, so there’s a Read and Rap Book Club for “grown folks.”

Henderson’s decision to market directly to families and nonprofit organizations has allowed Reconstruction to bypass school district politics.

��� didn’t want to be at the whim of state legislators,” said Henderson, who credits the program’s more celebratory approach to Black history for keeping it under the radar. “We’re not out here talking about white people being awful. We’re giving young people positive examples, and that keeps us a little bit out of the fray.”

But that doesn’t mean the curriculum ignores America’s painful racial history. For example, several courses include lessons on the once-thriving commercial district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as Black Wall Street, and the 1921 massacre in which a white mob attacked residents, homes and businesses there.

‘A place of belonging’

The mission to give students a more comprehensive story begins with the program’s name: Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War when Confederate states rejoined the Union and former slaves got their first taste of freedom. It’s “a lesser known part of American history when African Americans were thriving politically, economically, educationally,” Henderson said. “We wanted to challenge folks who don’t know that part of our history to explore it. And we wanted to remind our students that they come from a rich tradition of Black excellence in America that they have a responsibility to uphold.”

A former Teach for America executive director in D.C., Henderson served under former Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who was for closing low-performing schools and instituting a tough teacher evaluation system. With mayoral control of schools, Henderson continued those reforms during her some critics argued her strategies didn’t do enough to close racial achievement gaps. after she resigned, the city’s Board of Ethics and Government Accountability her for granting the requests of colleagues to place their children in preferred schools rather than submitting them to the district’s competitive lottery system.

When it came to designing Reconstruction, her experience helming the 51,000 student district was instructional. It helped fuel a desire to sidestep a K-12 bureaucracy that hasn’t always done right by African-Americans.

Black students, she said, often have negative experiences in school, and Henderson wanted Reconstruction to be “a place of belonging, joy and love.” She also didn’t want to conform to 50 different sets of state standards — particularly in light of on lessons or materials that could make students feel uncomfortable or guilty because of their race or gender. Reconstruction launched about five months before states began considering legislation to outlaw so-called critical race theory — a loose umbrella of topics from Black history to culturally responsive teaching.

Reconstruction courses have no more than 10 students, and there aren’t any end-of-course tests. That doesn’t mean the lessons go easy on academics, Henderson said. The reading and math courses can add up to a full year’s curriculum.

“To me, the rigor is paramount, but I’m not trying to replace school,” said Henderson.

Reconstruction’s business model also gives Henderson control over who she hires as “reconstructors”— the team of young educators who teach the courses.

“There have been enough hot mic episodes over the years to show that everyone who’s teaching children doesn’t always believe in Black children,” Henderson said.

In March, for instance, a resigned after making comments on a Zoom call about Black parents teaching their children to make excuses for their behavior. A mother recorded the teacher, who was apparently unaware the call was ongoing.

Henderson and co-founder Roland Fryer, a Harvard economics professor, initially discussed whether Reconstruction should be a school curriculum or offered outside the traditional system. Fryer, Henderson said, leaned toward integrating the concept into schools.

��� don’t want [children] to be taught that there’s slavery, Jim Crow and then you. I want for the history to be full and for them to be empowered,” Fryer said during a recent two-part interview on the Ian Rowe, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Those episodes aired the same week that Fryer at Harvard after completing a two-year probation and training on “appropriate boundaries.” In 2019, the university placed him on administrative leave after an investigation showed he had violated sexual harassment policies and engaged in “unwelcome” conduct, such as talking about sex and telling sexual jokes in the Education Innovation Lab he ran. He denied accusations of harassment and retaliation, but later apologized in into whether Fryer retaliated against an accuser closed when a female employee withdrew her complaint.

The university shut down the lab, where Fryer — who, at 30, became the youngest Black professor to earn tenure at Harvard — led notable research on the effectiveness of charter schools and racial disparities in education and policing.

As he faced disciplinary action at Harvard, Fryer co-founded Equal Opportunity Ventures in 2019 to support Reconstruction and other startups that focus on closing racial disparities and expanding economic opportunity. He serves as chair of Reconstruction’s board of directors, but Henderson said he is not involved in daily operations. She added that she’s never received any questions or concerns from parents or organizations about his involvement.

In an email to ����Ӱ��, Fryer declined to comment on the probation or his work developing Reconstruction during that time. But he said, ��� am delighted to be back teaching at Harvard, and currently have a class of nearly 200 students eager to learn about how companies like Reconstruction can both change the world around us and be a sustainable business.”

‘Culturally relevant perspectives’

That business model is primarily aimed at parents, who pay $100 for each 10-session course. But nonprofits, such as the Grable Foundation in Pittsburgh, are making the program available to students for free.

The traditional education system has also taken notice.

In the Baltimore City Public Schools last year, 140 students from 17 schools took an afterschool program featuring Reconstruction’s course on the movement of Africans into the Americas and the Caribbean during the slave trade.

David Anderson, a junior in an advanced STEM program at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, said he learned about Manhattan’s Seneca Village, a pre-Civil War African American settlement that got pushed out to develop Central Park. The life of abolitionist Sojourner Truth also stuck with him.

“She was more under the radar than Harriet Tubman, but her job was just as important,” Anderson said.

David’s mother, Annette Campbell Anderson, an educator and professor at Johns Hopkins University, was initially skeptical about the program, having been underwhelmed by the district’s previous afterschool offerings. But she was impressed by her son’s commitment to the course.

��� found myself needing to change our family dinner schedule on Tuesdays when he had class because he refused to leave the sessions early,” she said. “And if I served dinner early, he raced upstairs to be on time — for a Zoom session.”

Reconstruction has won praise from those on opposite sides of the debate over critical race theory.

Sharif El-Mekki, CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development, said it’s important for Black children to have a space designed for them, even if it’s virtual.

“Out-of-school-time has always been one of the most-effective and least invested-in levers for achievement for Black children,” said El-Mekki, whose daughters, Zaynab and Zakiyyah, participated in Reconstruction’s pilot and then took the cooking class.

The program provides Black children with a “holistic, centering and respectful curriculum,” he said, adding that students who participate in the program could become “powerful advocates” for more culturally responsive teaching in their own schools.

Like other Black educators, El-Mekki has said the debates over critical race theory misrepresent what schools actually teach students but also ignore the persistent educational inequalities affecting Black and Hispanic students.

At a time when some states, such as California, Connecticut and , are expanding ethnic studies in the curriculum, he thinks Reconstruction is one way to re-engage Black students and others “that have been perpetually let down by the educational ecosystem.”

‘All kids of all races’

At the National Charter School Conference in June, El-Mekki and Rowe, from the American Enterprise Institute, strongly disagreed about the furor over critical race theory, but joined in their praise for Henderson’s program.

In a “shout-out” for Reconstruction, Rowe said: ��� think it’s good that we’re having more discussions about what should be the complete [story] — warts and all, oppression and resilience — that we’re teaching all kids of all races about what has transpired with African Americans in the United States.”

The process isn’t always easy. White parents are among Reconstruction’s customers, Henderson said, but some have requested that their child not be the only non-Black student in a class. Others have even asked for all-white classes, a request that would have raised the spectre of segregation in the public school world she left behind.

Those requests don’t bother her.

Though there hasn’t yet been enough demand for an all-white class, Henderson said she’d “absolutely consider it.” Some parents tell her their kids don’t have a lot of experience interacting with Black children and worry they might say the wrong thing. The goal, she said, is to get the message out to as wide an audience as possible.

“This stuff is hard and we’re all going to make mistakes,” she said. “We are designed for and by African Americans, but we need everyone to learn this history.”

Lead Image: Winter Herbert (L-R), Stormy Foster and DeVonte Foster prepare a meal as part of Soul Food Summer Camp, a week-long virtual cooking course for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, students participating in Reconstruction. (Catapult Greater Pittsburgh)

Whether schools can roll tests out effectively — and get cooperation from those who screen positive for the virus — remains to be seen.

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The promise of quicker, more accurate results could bring a welcome reprieve for school districts across the country that are sending large groups of students home with suspected COVID exposure. Last month, six days into the school year in Florida’s Palm Beach County, one in 50 students was . In California, state guidelines call for unvaccinated students who are “close contacts” of a person with a positive COVID test to , forcing thousands of students too young to get a vaccine to miss critical days of in-person instruction.

While the tests’ use in schools has only recently begun to rise, the technology has been in development, in many cases, for more than a year. One of the new tests, developed by , is available through a network of nationwide and counts the National Basketball Association among its users. Another test, developed at , has been championed by New Jersey , who last year called it a potential “game-changer.”

In the K-12 world, the saliva test with arguably the most traction is one developed by the University of Illinois — it is in use by about 45 percent of the state’s 3,859 K-12 schools, covering more than 877,000 students, the university . School health officials elsewhere, including and Washington, D.C., are also piloting it, with more districts likely to follow.

The field will likely get a huge boost after President Biden last week nearly $2 billion for schools, community health centers, and food banks to buy about 300 million rapid tests. Biden said he’d use the Defense Production Act to increase the manufacturing of rapid tests, including those that families can use at home.

‘A very promising platform’

Researchers developed the Illinois test in June 2020, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted for the so-called covidSHIELD test in February. One reason researchers say saliva tests is that virus found in the saliva is more likely to have passed into patients’ lungs, where it can do serious damage. Viral load in saliva, they say, is also significantly higher in patients with known COVID-19 risk factors, such as obesity or diabetes.

Because the new saliva tests are polymerase chain reaction or PCR tests, they can detect both the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, as well as fragments of the virus after a test subject is no longer infected.

Dr. Rebecca Lee Smith, a University of Illinois infectious disease epidemiologist, developed the studies that earned their test its emergency authorization. She said PCR tests are not only reliable, but very sensitive. And they’re better early-warning indicators of infection.

“Our data show that saliva is one of the best ways to find people early because the virus replicates in saliva before it moves to the nasal tissues,” she said.

But saliva tests aren’t without controversy. In one case earlier this year, the FDA warned that a saliva swab test developed by the California startup ​​Curative some later-stage infections. It said Curative’s tests should only be used on people who showed COVID symptoms within the prior two weeks.

In January, health agencies in Colorado, citing concerns over false negatives, said they the Curative tests. Other purveyors have tried to distance themselves from these results.

Dr. Tim Lahey, an infectious diseases physician and head of ethics at the University of Vermont Medical Center, said he’d research with a small sample of patients on the Yale test, as well as a for other saliva tests. Research on the Yale test, he said, found that saliva in the samples was as accurate as nasal swabs. And the meta-analysis, he said, “showed basically the same thing for various saliva testing approaches including the one developed at Yale.”

But he cautioned that he hadn’t seen detailed analyses of “how well the saliva technology performs in people with mild symptoms, or no symptoms at all.”

And the Yale sample was small — just nine patients. How well the test performs in larger groups “is still an open question.” But he said it’s “a very promising platform” and he’s looking forward to seeing more data.

Lower cost, faster turnaround

Pinpointing exactly how many K-12 schools regularly test students for COVID-19 is difficult, but a few indicators suggest that testing isn’t widespread. A recent found that the largest group of schools implementing testing last fall were using rapid tests mostly for symptomatic students and staff, “since they often lacked enough tests to conduct screening testing.” Private schools were more likely to be conducting routine screenings, they found. One survey noted that about 20 percent of private K-12 schools conducted regular screenings at school.

The Illinois test costs just $20 to $30 per dose, a fraction of the typical $100 cost for a standard nasal swab test, according to SHIELD Illinois, the nonprofit that manages testing in the state. The organization is making it available for free to districts across the state, mostly thanks to in federal COVID test funding for schools.

Beth Heller, a spokesperson for , said the organization operates seven labs statewide, which cuts test turnaround time from as much as three days to less than one, on average.

A shorter turnaround time matters, especially now: With the earlier COVID-19 variants, Smith said, about 30 percent of infections happened before subjects showed symptoms. “With Delta, it’s more like 75 percent.”

In Baltimore, where school health officials have been using the Illinois-developed test since March, weekly saliva testing has “made parents feel comfortable sending their children back” to school, said James Dendinger, interim director of COVID testing.

In most of the district’s middle and high schools, students now submit to weekly saliva tests. In most elementary schools, health officials test classroom groups with nasal swabs. If any group of swabs delivers a positive result, they test each student again. Only those who test positive or who had close contact with those who test positive must quarantine.

These protocols kept Baltimore’s positivity rate extremely low last spring: from March 1 to June 15, it was 0.6 percent in middle schools and high schools, and less than 0.3 percent in pre-K-8 schools.

The new tests also bring a certain comfort factor, Illinois’ Smith said. ���t’s a lot easier to than to have a swab stuck up your nose, especially if you’re going to be testing regularly.”

Laura Wand, an advisor for SHIELD T3, the for-profit that administers the tests outside of Illinois, said that ease allows users to make testing part of their routine. “The key to containing the virus is to be able to test often, isolate, and track,” she said. “And the gold standard for testing often is everybody, twice a week. Now, people are not going to do a nasal swab twice a week.”

For the SHIELD test, subjects let saliva pool in their mouth and simply raise a small funnel to their lips, then “let the saliva fall out, push it out with your tongue,” Smith said. “Once people get the hang of it, most people can complete the process in one to two minutes.”

One drawback: Test subjects can’t have anything in their mouth for at least an hour before the test, “which requires planning and logistics,” especially in K-12 schools. Students can’t eat or drink, chew gum, use mouthwash, or brush their teeth for at least an hour prior to the test. For adults, that means no smoking or chewing tobacco either.

Smith said the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the system’s flagship campus, relied on the test for the entire academic year, at least for the more than 35,000 students attending class in person. “We did have some outbreaks, but they came in back under control,” she said.

The biggest one came early, between Aug. 15 and Sept. 15, 2020, as students returned to campus. In early September, the university even imposed a brief lockdown, The New York Times , after an unexpectedly high number of students with positive results continued to socialize and attend parties. One official called the phenomenon “willful noncompliance by a small group of people,” and top officials circulated a , saying the irresponsible students “have created the very real possibility of ending an in-person semester for all of us.”

The letter concluded, “We stay together. Or we go home.”

Behind the scenes, though, the university was testing so often, Smith said, that “we didn’t have to have a long-term lockdown” like .

Willful noncompliance notwithstanding, the university’s seven-day average positivity rate never rose above 1.21 percent, according to data on its .

Once the twice-weekly testing got underway, Smith said, this “just brought everything back under control. We saw outbreaks within dorms or within apartment buildings, and we would increase the frequency of testing to every other day. And within a week we would bring the case numbers in that location down to zero.”

SHIELD Illinois’ Heller said the testing regimen has allowed Champaign County, where the flagship campus is located, to keep its COVID positivity rate under 1 percent since September 2020. Elsewhere in Illinois, she said, positivity rates jumped as high as 12 percent last fall. Nationwide, positivity rates climbed to about .

The state health department in August said it would for free to any school district outside of Chicago that wanted it (The city receives a separate federal funding stream that other districts don’t.) The department also said schools could use it to take advantage of a so-called “Test-to-Stay” protocol, rather than quarantine.

Under the protocol, students and teachers who have close contact with someone who tests positive can stay in school if they agree to be tested four times: one, three, five, and seven days after exposure. If their tests remain negative, they don’t have to quarantine.

Quick results bring ‘an extra layer of comfort’

One of the first public school systems to take up the SHIELD tests was the tiny Hillside District 93, a pre-K-through-8 district in Cook County, about 20 minutes west of Chicago.

Superintendent Kevin Suchinski said the quick test “allowed us to make sure that we kept our doors open” and avoid shutting down, even as other districts took to control outbreaks.

And as in many areas, COVID cases there are rising — last week, the average daily new case count per 100,000 people, but the county’s infection rate remains among the lowest statewide.

The ease of testing students’ saliva, he said, meant “we were testing early-childhood kids all the way up to 8th grade,” ages 3 to 13. The quick results, even with asymptomatic students, “gave us an extra layer of comfort to say, ‘Is it spreading within our community? Is it spreading within our school?’ And we could then react.”

Suchinski made the tests voluntary for students and staff, but the ease of testing and the district’s 0.5 percent positivity rate encouraged more people, including students’ family members, to submit to it. In August, the district was testing 55 to 60 percent of families.

“Nothing’s 100 percent,” he said. “We cannot guarantee that we’re going to stop [COVID]. We’re not going to stop cases. What we’re going to do is prevent the spread.”

Nearly next school year, according to a recent tally from Burbio, a website that tracks school calendars and reopenings.

Of the 200 largest U.S. school systems, 128 will hold virtual programs this fall, while 60 — such as those in , and — will offer no fully remote options, save for medical exceptions for immunocompromised students. Another 12 have yet to announce their plans.

The update comes as the highly transmissible Delta variant now accounts for the , casting uncertainty on an upcoming school year that, just weeks ago, many observers had hoped would mark a — and spurring many parents to revise their expectations for the fall.

“Everyone is assuming that all kids are going back into buildings in September,” Annette Anderson, who is a mother of three children in Baltimore City Public Schools, told ����Ӱ��. “And I’m not really clear with the Delta variant what’s going to happen.”

Her kids — rising 8th-, 9th- and 11th-graders — had already endured a year and a half of remote classes, and were itching to see their friends, she said.

But when COVID case counts once again began to rise in late June, her family’s calculus suddenly became much more complicated. Kids under 12 do not yet have access to vaccinations, Anderson points out, and with many schools following a recent update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that said vaccinated students and staff could forgo face coverings, she worries that schools could become vectors of spread this fall.

A possible precursor of dangers still to come, the U.S. has experienced a in states such as Texas, Illinois, Florida, Missouri and Kansas in June and July.

“There is still a lot of outstanding questioning on my part about whether or not we are ready to let our kids go back into buildings full time,” said the Baltimore mother, who is also an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education.

At first, ��� was comfortable with [my kids] going back to school,” she said, “[but now] the question of children carrying the Delta variant is still very open ended.”

Halfway across the country, just outside of San Antonio, Texas, Deneatra Terry feels similarly. Her state has banned virtual-only school options this fall, and now the mother of two is shopping around for a charter school that would allow her youngest to stay online or keep class sizes low for social distancing.

���f there is something out there … worse than the [previous strains of] COVID, you shouldn’t be in such a rush to open that damn [schoolhouse] door,” she told ����Ӱ��. ���f you keep knocking on the door, the devil does answer, eventually.”

The mothers are not alone in their concern. Worry for the highly infectious mutation could impact the schooling choices that many parents make for their kids this fall, says Robin Lake, director of the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education.

��� think the Delta variant has quite a few families spooked,” she told ����Ӱ�� via email. “A lot of families may decide to hedge their bets and enroll in alternative programs.”

Because the new strain is even than the Alpha variant before it, which originated in the United Kingdom, the coming months may mark the “most dangerous” time in the pandemic for unvaccinated individuals and young people, University of Missouri infectious disease expert Taylor Nelson told ����Ӱ�� in late June.

But while acknowledging that the Delta variant is “incredibly concerning,” Philip Chan, medical director for the Rhode Island Department of Health, says that schools do not have to be risky places for children.

Last year, “we really did see minimal transmission in the K-12 setting, which is reassuring,” he told ����Ӱ��. In Chan’s home state, the vast majority of student and staff coronavirus cases came from out-of-school exposures, he explained.

Last spring, hundreds of academic studies pointed to mitigation measures such as masking and ventilation that schools could use to reopen safely. New CDC guidelines now emphasize flexibility for schools and districts to implement “layered mitigation strategies” to keep kids safe, which proponents say will allow schools more freedom to problem-solve and take local levels of infection into account. Critics meanwhile worry the new guidance will allow decision makers to sidestep key safety measures.

Above all else, however, the Rhode Island doctor emphasizes immunization as the single most effective way to limit spread, including for the new variant.

“We know that the vaccines, certainly the ones we’re using here in the U.S., are effective against the Delta variant,” said Chan. “As long as people in the community … are vaccinated, hopefully the risk of transmission within the K-12 setting will be minimal.”

According to a recent announcement from Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company will seek to expand its existing emergency authorization for shots to . Their pediatric vaccine trials are currently underway. Even with expanded authorization, it’s unclear whether parents will immunize young children in large numbers and there remain swaths of the country, especially in the South, .

In the meantime, Lake, of the University of Washington, underscores the well-documented benefits of face-to-face learning for most students versus attending virtual school.

“Most of the studies comparing learning outcomes in remote learning compared to in-person show students do better both academically and emotionally when they have in-person instruction,” she said.

Ahead of the July 13 Global Education Meeting, UNICEF and UNESCO extolled the benefits of in-person learning, urging decision makers around the world to to “avoid a generational catastrophe.”

Still, there were students and families that thrived in remote learning, the Center for Reinventing Public Education director points out. The key takeaway for district leaders, she says, is that “quality options are the right solution.”

School systems, however, do not yet appear to be altering their plans.

“We’re not seeing any districts walk back plans [for in-person school] yet,” Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche told ����Ӱ��. Most districts’ strategies for the fall were formulated this past spring and were announced early in the summer, he said.

If spread of the new COVID strain does spur changes to reopening plans, those revisions would likely come “in about a three-week window in advance of school,” according to Roche, because districts take time to alter course.

In the meantime, parents will mull how to balance the academic, social-emotional and physical health needs of their children in yet another uncertain back-to-school season.

“We wanted COVID to go away with a vaccine and it has largely dissipated, but it has not disappeared,” said Anderson, in Baltimore. “So that’s what I’m wrestling with.”

Carl attends Sharp-Leadenhall Elementary School, a specialized school for students with severe emotional and behavioral disabilities (EBD) in the Baltimore City School District. Sharp-Leadenhall has the capacity to serve 50 students (current enrollment is 32) with 25 instructional staff.

Sharp-Leadenhall’s principal, Dr. Lillian Cockrell, emailed me after reading an I published arguing that the pressure to keep students with emotional and behavioral disabilities in traditional schools can do more harm than good, and invited me to visit her school “to see how a good EBD program is organized.”

“Special education departments today are all about ‘full inclusion,’” she explained. “And I get that, up to a point. But the other side of saying, ‘We’re doing full inclusion’ is, ‘We don’t have special programs for special education students who need them.’”

The morning of my visit, Cockrell and seven staffers stood in the hallway, greeting every student coming off the buses. Some kids came with hugs for everyone. Others looked dazed or angry.

After 10 minutes, a call came over the radio and I accompanied Cockrell to see what was happening. By the time I reached the classroom, the situation had been defused and the student was walking with a social worker to the Behavior Intervention Office (BIO). He was guided to a cubby where students are asked to remain until they become responsive to verbal direction. He refused to say what happened.

“Are you sure,” coaxed the social worker, “you don’t want to talk about it?”

The student stuck up his middle finger.

���’ll take that as a no,” the social worker replied, nonplussed.

Later, the social worker explained the situation: “He started tearing up his math work. Throwing it and threatening his teacher. He’s oppositional, but he’s not impulsive. He just wanted to get out of the work and wanted everyone’s attention. But he knows that he’ll have to do the work before he can go back to class.”

When I left the office a few minutes later, the student was beatboxing angrily, refusing to respond to the three men staffing the room. Forty-five minutes later, he calmed down, finished his work and returned to class.

Throughout his “crisis,” the staff remained impassive and unflappable.

“We provide students what they need therapeutically,” explained Cockrell, who began her career as a psychotherapist. Her philosophy is that staff must never be reactive; reacting to students’ behavior puts them in charge. By presenting a calm face and using consistent language in response to behaviors, staffers give students a greater sense of order, and they can think better beyond immediate crises to broader patterns in a student’s behavior.

“You have to have very tough skin,” explained Patrick Autry, who teaches a life skills class to students who are several years behind grade level. ���’ve been called everything. I’ve been threatened. But it’s never personal. It’s not you. It’s something that’s going on with them.”

Michelle Hiegel, Sharp-Leadenhall’s lead math teacher, said new students are “so cute because they get here and do something very disruptive and we just kind of give them a look like, ‘That’s all you got?’ And they’re kind of like, ‘OK, I guess these people can handle me.’”

One mother, Amber Maczka, told me that enrolling her son in Sharp-Leadenhall was an “unexplainable relief.” Teachers at his old school would tell her, “These are his behaviors. He’s not getting an education. This isn’t the right placement for him.” But she found it extremely difficult to convince the school district to transfer him out.

��� had to hire people to advocate for him,” she said. “He was not getting an education.” His behavior was not merely disruptive; it was frequently violent. Teachers told Maczka they were scared of her son because “he would attack them every single day.” Yet despite his daily attacks, it took many, many months of a mother’s fierce advocacy before the school finally agreed that “full inclusion” was not in her son’s best interest.

��� didn’t believe it would be any different” at Sharp-Leadenhall, Maczka said. ��� came to them with a ‘don’t mess with my child’ mentality, and they just completely blew my mind with their capabilities.”

Her son’s behavior has improved immensely. He still has serious outbursts on occasion and sometimes needs to be physically restrained. But Maczka trusts the staff to do so responsibly. “Dr. Cockrell always calls me and says, ‘This is what happened, this is why, this is what we’re working on to help improve things.’”

“Of course, it’s scary as a mom for anyone to touch your child,” she said. “But there are times when it needs to happen. When he needs to be removed quick, in a hurry, so that everyone else is safe. As long as it’s done in a proper way, I have no problem.”

Nor does her son. “The last time I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up,” she said, “he named someone in the BIO room and said, ‘I want to be him. I want to be a person in a BIO room who helps kids like me.’”

Maczka believes that getting her son transferred to Sharp-Leadenhall shouldn’t have been so difficult. When asked why she thought it was, she replied, ��� don’t know. Maybe it’s the money?”

The school is very expensive. Its budget is $1.973 million, which at current enrollment comes out to $68,000 per pupil. So it’s hardly surprising that a school district looking to contain costs would not default to transferring students with emotional and behavioral disabilities to specialized schools like Sharp-Leadenhall.

But money is only part of the reason. The other part lies in the ethos of “full inclusion,” the reigning presumption in special education that keeping students in traditional settings is inherently good and placing them in separate settings is inherently bad. Taken together, these two forces encourage district bureaucrats to cloak the shortchanging of students with disabilities with social justice rhetoric.

“We went to a more ‘inclusive’ model,” Cockrell reflected, “because special education students were being ostracized, pushed to the margins. But since [the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act], districts have focused on being fully inclusive, and the pendulum has gone too far for some of our students, who are struggling in that inclusive environment.”

She pointed to the rise of “” elsewhere as an unintended but inevitable by-product. “Teachers are having to remove the rest of the classroom and leave the student there in crisis. … I’ve seen a school in another district where a student purposely trashes the classroom and goes to the principal’s office and gets to play with an iPad. What cause-and-effect life lesson is that message sending? … That’s not reality.” Baltimore City, she said, is the best district she has ever worked with when it comes to properly placing and supporting students with emotional and behavioral disabilities.

Schools in other districts, though, resort to perpetually suspending these students. When Luevana Cooper’s son attended a public school in Arizona, “they just thought, ‘He’s a troubled kid; we’re just going to suspend him for any issue.’ He’d throw chairs, yell at teachers, actually physically assaulted a teacher, scratched her up bad and tried to bite her. They just kept suspending and suspending and suspending.”

Now enrolled at Sharp-Leadenhall, he no longer behaves like that. “Sometimes he’ll get into moods,” Cooper explained, “and you have to guess. But they’ve done a great job guessing and I’m just, like, ‘Dude! You get him!’ … You can tell the difference between a school that doesn’t care and a school that does.”

���t’s like chess,” said Lauren Steinmueller, who teaches third- and fourth-grade math, “because you have to think three to four steps ahead and predict what will happen based on what they do and how you could react. At the end of the day, your mind can be fried because you’re making so many small decisions. I’ve worked in inclusion classes. You can’t do this there.”

Once staff can successfully minimize negative behaviors, student learning can skyrocket. Cooper told me her fourth-grade son entered Sharp-Leadenhall reading at the first-grade level, “and now I think he’s almost on grade level.”

Carl told me, “At my old school, there was so many kids and they would be super rowdy and it took us three days to do one lesson. Here, we could finish two lessons in 30 minutes. I did two lessons in 30 minutes without the teacher. … It’s just so many good people here that it’s hard not to do good. I think more people should come to this school.”

Many disability rights advocates disagree. A by the National Council on Disability declared, “Government enforcement of … inclusion and integration … is essential to breaking the school-to-prison pipeline. The overall inclusion of students with disabilities in the general education classroom has increased over the past decade, but current statistics show that enforcement activities have not adequately targeted students with disabilities at risk of entering the school-to-prison pipeline.”

Patrick Autry has heard that argument plenty of times, and he says that it’s “one of the most wrong opinions that I could ever imagine.” He explained how the “school-to-prison pipeline” is really formed:

“You have kids who are incapable of managing their emotions sitting in classrooms with a bunch of kids who are way ahead of them. If I’m in a class with kids who are three grade levels above me and you call on me in class, I’m going to act out. What’s going to happen is that you get frustrated — ‘Why should I even come in?’ So you stop coming. Then you’re on the streets. You’re doing crime. You’re in jail. This school isn’t part of the pipeline. This is how we stop that pipeline. … People have to get over this stigma of thinking these schools can’t help. If they’re run correctly and properly, they can do amazing things.”

Cockrell said that her goal is to “interrupt that pipeline” by bringing students closer to grade level and equipping them with an emotional “suit of armor” to re-enter a traditional school, navigate it successfully and graduate prepared for a productive life.

That armor is forged partly through the school’s Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS) program. Students can receive up to 50 points a day for behavior and redeem those points during Fun Fridays and on monthly field trips. Carl told me this incentive structure has “helped me realize what I’m doing before I do it, and that helps me be good and better.”

The small student-to-staff ratio allows teachers to create tailored social and moral ecosystems for students.

���t’s about making choices,” Autry explained. “You have to teach them that choices have consequences. Like, ‘Hey, if I push a kid out of a chair, this will happen.’”

With only four students, ��� high-five everybody. You got to make them feel special. … But if this is the consequence, then this is the consequence. There has to be accountability.”

After all, he tells his students, “People want to help children. But no one wants to help a grown man. When you turn 18, this all goes out the window.”

At the end of the school day, most students filed onto the buses with a smile. One did a little dance to celebrate getting a perfect score for behavior. A few left looking sullen.

One didn’t leave. He was in crisis and couldn’t stop screaming. The bus driver offered to wait 10 minutes to see if he would respond to verbal direction, but Cockrell looked at the student and said, “He is not going to be ready in 10 minutes.”

She was right. First surrounded by eight teachers, then only by two when staff suspected the student felt unnerved by the attention, he went from half-hugging, half-hitting a teacher to leaning against her as she tried calming him by walking with him up and down the hallway.

“Some of our kids have a hard time leaving,” Cockrell explained.

The bus driver left. Five minutes later, I left too. He was still screaming. Ultimately, a family member had to come pick him up. G-d willing, after a few more years of being attended to closely by highly skilled teachers, he will be able to forge a suit of armor to navigate a traditional public school and, eventually, find gainful employment.

If he were kept at a traditional school, he would almost certainly have been lost. How many students out there are like him but whose screams are quieter?

“This is my mission. This is my ministry,” Cockrell said. “Something has to be done. If we don’t shift that pendulum back from full inclusion, we are amplifying that pipeline. It is expensive, but what’s the alternative?”

Although it costs almost $70,000 per pupil, that expense must be weighed against the costs produced by systems that hold “full inclusion” to be the highest value: systems that keep an untold number of students like Maczka’s son in traditional public schools, even when their persistent disturbing or violent behavior disrupts learning and makes students and teachers feel unsafe.

��� want other parents to know that there are other options out there. Good options. Safe options,” Maczka said. But, sadly, although this was true for Maczka in Baltimore City, it is not always so; in many districts, the ethos of “full inclusion” holds sway, telling educators that keeping students like Maczka’s son in traditional schools counts as success, and sending him to a more appropriate setting where he can grow behaviorally and academically counts as failure.

Cockrell is confident that the pendulum will soon start to swing back and that properly serving students with emotional and behavioral disabilities by providing them an appropriate education in specialized settings will become a civil rights cause.

For that to happen, however, policymakers would need to lift their eyes above their spreadsheets and look directly at these students and the schools that serve them.

Sharp-Leadenhall would be an excellent place for them to start.

­Max Eden is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, specializing in education policy.

Leonard Ferguson is having the last laugh. A senior at Baltimore County Public Schools’ Western School of Technology and Environmental Science, he’s on track to graduate this spring with both a good job and his continuing education paid for.

Ferguson makes $29 an hour working as a plumber’s apprentice for the mechanical contracting firm G.E. Tignall & Co. The first year of his apprenticeship is complete, and he will go on to trade school with the financial support of ABC Greater Baltimore, also known as the Associated Builders and Contractors. If all goes according to plan, he will earn journeyman status by 21 and become a master plumber at 23, on track to open his own business.

Plumbing is not a popular field — none of the other members of his graduating class chose that particular track. But as far as Ferguson is concerned, the joke’s on them. ���’m happy to go into it,” he said, “because that’s where the money is.”

Located in an old vocational training center in Catonsville, 9 miles west of downtown Baltimore, Western Tech is one of three magnet high schools operated by the district (other district schools offer some CTE classes). Demand is great: The school is at maximum capacity, enrolling some 900 students from all over the county, according to Principal Murray Parker III.

Western Tech’s 11 career pathways include health sciences, automotive service technology, environmental technology and sports science. In several tracks, students graduate with both a high school diploma and an industry-recognized career certificate. Students complete an interest assessment at the start of high school and then apply for up to three tracks.

In addition, there is a Communication Learning Support Program that serves 13 students with autism who are receiving special education transition services, programming designed to prepare them for as much independence and workplace preparation as possible.

Western Tech recruits in middle schools throughout the district. Students apply for admission, which requires a GPA of 2.5 on a five-point scale in seventh grade and the first quarter of eighth, as well as good attendance and proficiency in eighth-grade math and reading. The district provides transportation, as it does for all of Baltimore County’s 114,000 students.

In the 2017-18 school year, 63 percent of Western Tech students were African-American, 17 percent Asian and 4 percent Latino. Thirteen percent were white, and the balance two or more races.

Economically disadvantaged students receiving subsidized meals made up 30 percent of the student body last year, down around 5 points from recent years and below the district rate of 44 percent.

Attendance and four-year graduation rates are high, with an average daily attendance rate of 95 percent last year and more than 98 percent of the 2018 class graduating on time. In 2014, Western Tech was one of 48 high schools recognized as National Blue Ribbon Schools by the U.S. Department of Education. Last year, the Washington Post recognized it as one of “.”

Last year’s reauthorization of the federal Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act garnered bipartisan support in Congress, which appropriated $1.27 billion in funding for fiscal year 2019 for career and technical education and requires states to set goals and demonstrate progress toward meeting them.

Coupled with a growing concern that a four-year college degree is no longer an affordable path to the middle class for some students, the Perkins Act has focused renewed attention on the need to create high-quality alternatives. Education and workforce development officials throughout the country are determined that, unlike vocational-technical programming offered to previous generations, today’s CTE programs equip participants with the academic knowledge needed to compete in a rapidly changing labor market.

Western Tech has had a career and technical education focus for decades. But when Parker took over eight years ago, he began pushing students to take the most challenging academic classes alongside their career-preparation courses.

���t’s not a lower track, it’s a career track, and we had to make sure the academics matched it,” he said. “We needed a goal, an academic goal.”

Parker and his team settled on student participation and achievement in Advanced Placement classes as an internal target. The school’s own “equity and excellence” rating measures how many members of each senior class take and pass AP exams. Students can take more than one test, but only one counts for purposes of determining the rating.

Last year, for example, Western Tech staff determined that the school earned a 58.5 percent rating on the equity and excellence scale. Broken down, that means 649 AP exams were given to 319 students, with a pass rate of 82.6 percent. The rating has ticked up and down over the past five years, with a low of 49 percent in 2017 and a high of 60 percent in 2014.

To put that in context, almost 38 percent of U.S. high school students . That’s up from 24 percent in 2007.

“We wanted to have a goal that meant something,” Parker said. “We wanted our students to compete with kids across the country.”

The need for academic skills is readily apparent in Western Tech’s CTE classrooms — most of them large spaces filled with cutting-edge equipment and staffed by hard-to-find master craftsmen who are willing to take what’s likely a pay cut to teach.

In the mechanical construction and plumbing space, for instance, a group of 10th-graders recently was tasked with completing a project involving drains, waste and vents. Students had to prepare both a flat sketch of the pipes they would be fitting and an isometric view — a drawing done at a 30-degree angle. The surface they were to assemble their pipes and fixtures on had a quarter-inch slope, meaning they would need a precise calculation to make things fit, including an air intake to prevent sewer gas buildup.

The school owns three yellow buses, and a half-dozen staffers have the commercial licenses required to drive them. This allows Western Tech to transport students to local community colleges with career programs that match the school’s pathways and to get students off campus for hands-on experiences.

Environmental sciences students, for example, every year engage in a project that looks at the water quality in Chesapeake Bay. In addition to using geolocation technology to map surfaces that affect the runoff and streams that feed into the bay, students grow wetland grasses to plant along the shore and raise bluegill and rockfish to release.

Angela Beverly is a junior in Western Tech’s Academy of Health Professions. Like Ferguson, she has a carefully thought-out plan for her future. Beverly started on the health care track thinking she wanted to be a physician, but seven five-week rotations at the University of Maryland R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center, a freestanding hospital in downtown Baltimore, changed her mind.

“When I saw more, I decided I wanted to go into nursing because it’s more hands-on,” she said.

Her plan is to graduate from college with a bachelor’s in nursing and a minor in business management, work for a couple of years and then continue on to become a nurse practitioner. Nurse practitioners earn more, she explained, and can practice in different settings.

In eighth grade, Beverly applied to three Baltimore County magnet schools. She didn’t get into the two nearest her home on the east side, so she crosses the county every day to get to Western Tech. The trip, she said, is well worth the time.

��� would not have had the experiences I’ve had here anywhere else,” she said. “The internship opportunity is one of a kind — and amazing.”