Houston ISD voters resoundingly rejected a $4.4 billion school bond package Tuesday, a victory for opponents of the district’s state-appointed leadership and setback for the district’s years-long push to upgrade campuses.

About 58 percent of voters opposed , which promised to rebuild or significantly renovate roughly three dozen schools, improve campus security, upgrade schools’ heating and cooling systems and expand preschool offerings, among other changes. The school bond proposal was the largest in Texas history, and it became the first Texas school bond after the previous 23 passed.

HISD’s last school bond vote, held in 2012, received support from two-thirds of district voters.

The vote came a year and a half after a controversial June 2023 state takeover of HISD, in which the Texas Education Agency installed a new superintendent, Mike Miles, and school board. Since then, Miles has carried out a dramatic overhaul of the district, turning HISD into one of the . 

The bond vote garnered extra attention because it represented community members’ first opportunity to vote on an issue that will meaningfully impact district operations since Miles’ appointment. Many voters saw it as a referendum on Miles’ leadership, with his critics rallying behind the slogan, “No trust, no bond.”

Steve McHenry, 76, who cast his ballot at a polling location in Houston’s Frenchtown neighborhood, said he was voting against the schools package because of issues with the district’s leadership. All his children attended HISD schools but are now grown, he said.

“I don’t like the superintendent and I don’t like the state running (HISD),” McHenry said.

Usually, large Texas districts pass bonds roughly every five years to keep campus facilities up to date, but HISD . In that time, the district has put off roughly $10 billion worth of needed maintenance and repairs, HISD administrators said during several bond-related meetings. The $4.4 billion total represented HISD’s most immediate needs for safe and healthy learning conditions, they said. 

The district will now have to pay for some of those upkeep costs out of its general fund, leaving less cash for other operating expenses, such as staff salaries.

Miles expressed frustration with the bond result in a statement HISD released Tuesday evening, arguing students across the district would bear the brunt of the community’s decision.

“In this instance, the politics of adults beat out the needs of our children,” Miles wrote. “I cannot promise our aging facilities and systems will never be a barrier to student learning. We will do our best to keep long expired heating and cooling systems running, but on very hot or very cold days, we are likely going to have to close campuses to keep students safe.”

Jackie Anderson, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, HISD’s largest employee union, celebrated the early voting results as a sign that a wide coalition of community members oppose HISD’s leadership. She hopes the vote encourages Miles and his team to take the union’s concerns more seriously.

“We hope that this sends a resounding message to them that we’re not going away,” Anderson said. “It would behoove them to sit down and talk to us.”

Two education advocacy nonprofits that have been high-profile bond advocates, Good Reason Houston and Houstonians for Great Public Schools, released statements shortly after early voting results were published that treated the bond result as a defeat. Both groups are backed by some of Houston’s wealthiest philanthropists, who helped raise about $2 million to support the bond through a political action committee.

“We are deeply disappointed that the HISD bond measure did not pass,” Good Reason Houston CEO Cary Wright said in a statement. “This outcome means we must continue to work within the current insufficient infrastructure, even though we know students deserve and need more.”

Because HISD typically has held bond elections during the November of even-numbered years, the district may be at least two years away from another bond vote. If leaders choose to wait until the state returns power to a locally elected school board, the timeline would likely extend until at least the 2028 election.

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From purchasing alarm clocks, donating Uber gift cards, showing up on families’ doorsteps and even attempting to help parents plan their vacations, Clear Creek ISD employees are exhausting their options to get students to show up to school.

In the roughly 40,000-student district southeast of Houston, 17 percent of students were considered “chronically absent” during the 2022-23 school year – meaning they missed at least 18 school days. That’s up nearly double from five years ago.

The issue is not unique to Clear Creek ISD. Mirroring a nationwide, persistent trend, rates of chronically absent Houston-area students exploded after the pandemic. It’s a phenomenon that leaves many wondering why kids aren’t coming to school like they used to – and what it will take to fix that.

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Houston’s other largest districts did not make administrators available for an interview for this story.

School leaders and education experts say high absenteeism has devastating ripple effects on students’ academic performance, school district funding and society’s overall perceived importance of the classroom. Yet there is no clear solution, causing schools to scramble to improve attendance habits.

“There did become the feeling of, ‘Is schooling optional?’” said Holly Hughes, Clear Creek ISD’s assistant superintendent of elementary education. “We know that the habits start in pre-K, in our earliest years, with parents understanding the value and the intention. It’s a lot to get our students to school in the morning.”

When schools returned in-person after the pandemic sent classes online, most large Houston districts saw their chronic absenteeism rates double. Those rates decreased in the 2022-23 school year — the most recently available state data — but still remain much higher than pre-pandemic levels.

‘Do we even need the school?’

The pandemic shattered the routine of going to school each morning, and once students returned, the lingering option of remote learning was largely seen as an acceptable alternative for when students don’t show up in person.

“People became comfortable staying home and not going to school, where they could dial in or not dial in,” said Kevin Brown, executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators. “There wasn’t anybody there to enforce that.”

That’s created an issue larger than anyone knows how to fix, let alone any one district, says Joshua Childs, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education. To him, it signals to him a shift in the culture of American schooling.

“At this moment, we are wrestling, as a country, as a state, in terms of what we value when it comes to educating the kids under the age of 18,” Childs said. “Like, what’s the value of education, and what’s the purpose of the school itself? And do we even need the school?”

School leaders and education experts agree that a student’s attendance has major impacts on their academic achievement. The Texas Education Agency that chronically absent students are more likely to perform poorly on standardized tests, and they’re less likely to attend or complete college.

In a late June State Board of Education meeting, TEA commissioner Mike Morath hypothesized that increased absences could be a reason why studentg across Texas.

“Our broad hypothesis of this is that Covid caused much higher absenteeism from instruction, and as a result, much more mathematics gaps,” Morath said. “The linear nature of mathematics as a discipline is such that if a student misses little chunks of that discipline along the way, that may or may not cause them immediate problems, but it will certainly, at some point in time, prevent them from achieving higher levels of mathematics.”

But the problem lies in getting students and families to understand these stakes.

“One of the things that the pandemic … maybe raised more questions around, is, ‘What’s actually the purpose of schooling? If I can do it through my phone. I can learn through TikTok. I can learn through using technology in different ways, and arriving in a building every single day may not be what’s best for my kids or myself,’” Childs said. “It has big impacts, as far as academic outcomes, employment, post-secondary opportunities, social, mental, physical health outcomes. All of that is impacted based on a child’s attendance.”

Across-the-board issue

Chronic absenteeism affects students across different demographics – campus-level data shows that in some Houston districts, schools in both affluent and underserved communities post similarly high rates of absenteeism.

Students in underserved areas may miss school because they lack necessities like transportation, or because they have a job to support their families. Meanwhile, students from more affluent families may miss class to take regular vacations or visit colleges. Across the board, it’s easier to keep kids at home because parents are increasingly able to work remotely.

With no simple root cause, there’s no crystal-clear solution to keeping kids in the classroom.

Hughes, the Clear Creek administrator, said she found it isn’t as simple as providing more “wraparound” resources such as clothing and transportation. They’ve had to urge families to schedule doctor appointments and college visits on staff professional development days, supply suggested dates for vacations, and try to communicate the overall importance of the in-person school routine.

“It’s important to start those traditions, those expectations and those structures in the home early,” Hughes said. “Going to school on a daily basis and committing to that follow through every day, it takes a lot on a family unit. … I think it became hard for parents.”

A pricey problem

Brown said declining attendance is a circular issue – the more kids miss school, the less money districts have to rectify low attendance.

The Texas government funds schools based on their average daily attendance, meaning total attendance counts for the year are divided by the number of instructional days to produce the number of students a district is funded for.

Proponents of attendance-based funding say it provides incentive for improving attendance, while critics have long argued it more heavily penalizes schools with students dealing with socioeconomic factors that drive absenteeism.

Many school districts across Texas have outlined multimillion-dollar budget deficits this year, and several Houston-area school boards have pointed to declining attendance rates as a factor contributing to their financial woes.

“Schools are working really hard to try to get the kids in but it takes the parents and the kids, as well, to get them into school,” Brown said. “Schools can’t do much on attendance, other than encourage and try to build an environment where kids want to be there.”

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Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles will require roughly two dozen schools to cut 12 percent of their budgets next year, initiating a painful but expected process meant to bring campus-level spending in line with declining enrollments.

The cuts will target schools not participating in Miles’ “New Education System” next year, whose budgets are managed by campus principals. HISD manages the budgets of schools in the NES program and funds them at a significantly higher level than other schools.

On Tuesday, HISD provided half of the district’s principals with preliminary information about their campus budgets for next year and plans to provide information to the other half Wednesday. Most of HISD’s roughly 140 non-NES principals will have to make cuts in their spending, capped at a 12 percent reduction, due to decreases in the number of students attending their schools.

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Roughly 25 schools will have to slash the maximum 12 percent, while about 35 schools will see increases to their budgets, Miles estimated in a Monday interview with the Houston Landing. That leaves dozens more schools to reduce spending between 1 and 12 percent. HISD declined to say which schools will be subject to the steepest cuts.

The tough financial pill stems from a decision by Miles to end HISD’s pandemic-era policy to insulate schools from budget cuts, even when their enrollment and attendance decline. With pandemic relief money set to soon run out and with HISD expected to run a this year, Miles said it is time to bring spending in line with student counts.

“People have known this is coming,” Miles said. “If they’ve lost 100 kids, they are going to have to cut some staff. At some point, we do have to stop paying for kids who actually aren’t there.”

In recent years, HISD has lost about 32,000 students, . Since the policy of not reducing schools’ budgets based on attendance went into effect, more than 150 schools have lost 12 percent or more of their student enrollments, including more than 60 non-NES schools.

In total, the cuts will save about $15 million across the district, Miles said. The savings represent a of Miles has said he plans to make next year. However, they represent the first time Miles has outlined plans likely to result in widespread staffing reductions at the campus level.

Due to a in 2024-25 and a dramatic increase in the number of overhauled schools paying teachers salaries $10,000 to $20,000 above their typical rates, HISD plans to spend an additional $114 million on staff next year, including $74 million at NES schools, according to Chief of Human Resources Jessica Neyman. Miles has said he plans to present a draft budget proposal for next year’s spending to HISD’s board of managers in May.

Schools undergoing Miles’ transformation, which typically have a quarter to a third more employees than other HISD schools, also will be subject to limited staffing cuts if they have lost students, Miles said. He estimated  NES schools could lose one to two non-teaching roles.

Former Love Elementary Principal Sean Tellez, who resigned in early March, said he thinks the cuts fall unfairly on schools not participating in Miles’ overhaul program. The end of the policy insulating campuses from attendance-related budget cuts did not surprise him, because former HISD Superintendent Millard House’s administration had warned it was coming. However, he thought the whole district would be subject to the painful spending decisions, rather than just the half not participating in Miles’ NES program.

As a principal, Tellez had to make budget cuts, including last year reducing the work hours of the Love Elementary nurse and librarian, eliminating a technology role and cutting a front office worker. If he were forced to eliminate 12 percent of his spending, he would have to cut at least one teacher and it would be “virtually impossible” to keep students from feeling the losses, he said.

“The overwhelming vibe, or feeling, amongst the non-NES principals has been, because we’re not NES, we’re going to have to bear the burden of this increased budget for NES schools and we’re going to be on our own,” Tellez said.

Researcher Chad Aldeman, who previously served as policy director at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab and now runs the organization , studies school enrollment and staffing trends nationwide. Across the country, most school districts have seen increasing numbers of staff-per-student ratios since the pandemic, mostly due to student headcounts falling faster than staffing levels, he said, creating looming budgetary difficulties.

However, while making cuts to balance staffing levels may be necessary in many instances, it rarely is straightforward, Aldeman explained.

“Let’s say you lose 20 students across an elementary, they’re not going to be all in one grade. … So, you might lose two students or two-and-a-half students from every grade, and you can’t just reduce your staff by one fourth-grade teacher,” Aldeman said. “None of these things are fun. They’re not good for kids.”

Miles said he empathizes with principals now facing dreaded decisions, but said he had no other choice. HISD is easing the process for principals by covering certain expenses, such as approved curricular materials, he said.

“I’ve been a principal, I’ve been a charter school principal, and I know what it is to have to do a budget and I know what a cut looks like, even a 10 percent cut,” Miles said. “​​If I can protect the classroom from any cut, that’s what we’re going to do. But we do have to live within our means now.”

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Each day after his shift as a machine operator, Eliberto Ortega used to walk through the front door of his east Houston home, take off his steel-toed work boots and call out, “¿Quién es la princesa de Papá?” meaning, “Who’s Papa’s princess?”

His daughter would holler back her own name, bolting into his arms. Ortega would scoop up his little girl and, after the hug, she would ask to carry his lunchbox into the kitchen.

It’s been over two years since Ortega’s daughter, now 8 and a third-grader at Houston ISD’s J.R. Harris Elementary School, has felt her father’s embrace.

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Ortega died of cardiac arrest while sick with the coronavirus in July 2021. Since then, there’s been a father-sized hole in the lives of Ortega’s daughter and her younger brother, who is 7. His daughter still struggles at times to sleep at night, as swirling memories of her dad occupy her thoughts. His son has become more reserved, listening to music about loss and longing.

“We still have an invisible string to him all the way up to heaven,” said Ortega’s daughter, whose name is being withheld by the Houston Landing due to the sensitive nature of discussing her mental health. “He’s with you. It’s connected with you but you cannot see the string.”

In Harris County, thousands of students continue to grapple with the long shadow of grief cast by the deaths of parents and caregivers from COVID-19. Yet today, with federal stimulus funding for schools drawing to an end and state lawmakers dedicating virtually no additional money for public schools during the 2023 legislative session, education leaders are starting to make tough choices about whether to maintain mental health support for children like the Ortegas.

Their decisions will have lifelong effects for students quietly struggling with their anguish. Researchers have found the sudden loss of a parent when it comes to impact on academic performance.

“​​Those kids who don’t want to think about or talk about what happened tend to struggle longer,” said Julie Kaplow, executive director of the Trauma and Grief Center at the Texas-based Hackett Center for Mental Health. Professionals trained in trauma-informed care — including those placed at schools — can help children process their grief in a healthy way, she said.

No government agency has tallied the number of pandemic-bereaved children in the Houston area, but the number might reach about 5,000. An estimated 41,000 Texas children lost a caregiver to the virus, according to a maintained by the Imperial College of London, and about 12 percent of the state’s coronavirus deaths occurred in Harris County, Texas Health and Human Services show.

A 5,000-person estimate could understate the magnitude of the losses because parent deaths due to reasons other than infection, such as drug overdoses and other health issues, also increased nationwide during the pandemic.

A family man

In the Ortega family, before the virus that changed everything, Sundays meant time with Dad.

It was the one free day in Eliberto’s six-day work week, said Laura Ortega, his widow. After going to Mass in the morning, the afternoon would become an adventure of his design. Many weeks, the family would enjoy a bite to eat, then head to a flea market. The four would peruse the multicolored stalls and his daughter would ask to go on rides that her younger brother was still scared of. Eliberto, relishing the chance to spoil his daughter a little, would always say yes, Laura said.

The husband and wife met at a Houston nightclub when Laura was 19, him coaxing her onto the dance floor. After that, the couple dated for several years, at first only meeting up at parks to swing on the swing sets, then later watching Eliberto’s favorite Spanish telenovelas and dancing together to música norteña. Eventually, they married.

Both dreamed of becoming parents, but Laura struggled to get pregnant. Several years later, when her belly started to swell, it felt like a miracle. A second child followed a year afterward. It felt like everything was falling into place.

But one evening in 2021 shattered the future Laura had pictured. Eliberto, who had tested positive for the coronavirus earlier that day, took a rapid turn for the worse. As his children slept in the same room, his breathing became raspy, his lungs closing in on themselves. His eyes rolled back into his head as he slumped in his chair. A trickle of blood slid down from his nose.

Desperately, Laura tried speaking to him. She got no response.

“I literally felt at that moment like he took his last breath in my face,” Laura said. “Because after that, I didn’t feel his heartbeat. I didn’t feel nothing.”

Emergency medical staff arrived at the home to perform CPR and transport Eliberto to the hospital. But hours later, doctors pronounced Eliberto dead.

The next day, the kids arose to an alternate universe. As the news sunk in, the brother and sister spent the following days alternating between bewildered silences and hysterics.

It was late July, just a few weeks before the first day of school. The return to classes would inevitably mean classmates and teachers asking her kids how their summers had gone. Laura decided she had to get them help from a counselor.

Mental health needs mount

Across Texas, schools saw a surge of demand for the sort of services Laura was seeking.

The Texas Education Agency’s School Mental Health Task Force found a “staggering increase” in the rates of students experiencing depression, anxiety and other mental health concerns since the pandemic, according to its 2023 report. About half of roughly 750 school districts surveyed by the task force reported rising rates of “distress related to trauma and grief.”

Sean Ricks, senior manager of HISD’s crisis intervention team, said he saw a surge in student psychological challenges during and after lockdown. The district launched a 24/7 crisis hotline that fielded about 600 calls, according to HISD.

“If I can just use the Richter scale … we were used to tremors of 2.5 or 3,” Ricks said. “At the return of the students to school, I would say it was probably a 5.5 or 6.”

A shortage of psychological support for students has long plagued Texas public schools. For nearly a decade, zero districts in the state had all the recommended ratios of counselors, nurses, psychologists and social workers, a .

But facing never-before-seen levels of psychological distress among students amid the pandemic, and simultaneously flush with cash thanks to the passage of a federal stimulus package that sent billions to Texas campuses, districts began investing in mental health.

As of 2022, Texas schools had spent $64 million in pandemic relief grants on student mental health needs, according to data the TEA provided to the Landing. All told, districts planned to devote over $300 million to the issue, according to a , the most recent available. The vast majority of the spending went to bringing on new staff, the TEA data show.

The investments spurred tangible, though modest, increases in the number of adults that students struggling with their mental health could turn to.

Statewide, schools added about 820 school counselors and 230 social workers from 2019-20 to 2022-23, according to the Landing’s analysis of TEA data. The change nudged the number of students per counselor or social worker statewide from 389 down to 363. Although school counselors in Texas are required to have training in mental health support, their jobs typically also involve helping with scheduling and making plans for after graduation.

In HISD, which lags behind statewide averages in mental health resources per child, the shifts were more extreme. Over the same period, the student-to-counselor-and-social-worker ratio decreased from 793-to-1 to 547-to-1. HISD also brought on more staffers known as “wraparound specialists” meant to address students’ non-academic needs and this year that offer free psychological services.

Families like the Ortegas would finally have better access to the services they were looking for, it seemed.

‘They never call back’

That’s not exactly how the situation played out for Laura.

Before the 2021-22 year began, just weeks after the death of her husband, she spoke with leaders at her children’s elementary school. She explained what her kids had experienced and asked what counseling services might be available. To her astonishment, she learned the school did not have a counselor.

J.R. Harris Elementary, facing a tight budget, had no guidance counselor to start the 2021-22 school year, Principal Jessica Rivero confirmed during an early September community event attended by the Landing.

In the meantime, without options at her children’s campus, Laura looked for psychology practices after she enrolled in Medicaid following Eliberto’s death. Medicaid had suggested several providers, so she went down the list calling every number. It yielded nothing.

“They will just say, ‘Well, you can call this place, and you can call this place, and you can call this place,’” Laura said. “And you call them, but they never call back.”

The lag time without access to counseling meant Laura’s children spent roughly six months going to school every day, attempting to maintain a semblance of normal life, with no outlet to process their loss other than with family members who were also grieving.

That unmet need can be dangerous to children, said Bradley Smith, director of the University of Houston’s school psychology doctorate program. Young people often need therapy catered to dealing with traumatic experiences in order to process them in a healthy way, he said.

“The saying, ‘Time heals all wounds,’ that doesn’t really apply to trauma,” Smith said. “Just the passage of time doesn’t automatically take care of things. And so I think we have a lot of kids walking around that are still experiencing negative effects of the pandemic that haven’t been worked out.”

J.R. Harris Elementary ultimately added a school counselor midway through the 2021-22 school year. While the counselor was not a child psychologist, she agreed to meet regularly with Laura’s children throughout the spring semester. The school later added a second counselor.

Talking about the loss of their dad in one-on-one meetings over the course of months helped Laura’s children begin to heal, she said. Then, in mid-2023, Laura finally found a therapy practice that would accept her insurance. Her kids now attend sessions regularly.

Still, it can be hard for Laura to gauge how her children are processing their grief.

This past summer, she received a troubling report from a staffer at her son’s YMCA camp who said she saw him cutting himself with scissors on two occasions. The second time, the staffer said she asked Laura’s son what he was doing, and he said he wanted to be with his father.

The episode triggered her own memories of childhood trauma for Laura, who cut herself when she was young while struggling to find an outlet to process difficult experiences.

“I want to make sure he doesn’t go through the same thing I went through, that it was hard to get somebody to help, or to listen, to hear me out,” Laura said.

A fiscal cliff

Some of the mental health resources that Texas schools invested into supporting students’ mental health may now be in jeopardy.

The federal stimulus money that helped fund many positions will end in the fall of 2024, meaning districts will soon have to make tough choices about whether to keep or cut any recently added roles.

And state lawmakers, despite a nearly $33 billion surplus, ended their legislative sessions in 2023 without dedicating any new mental health funds to Texas public schools. One promised $100,000 or more per district for students’ psychological needs, but it died early in the legislative process. Barring an unexpected call for a special session, schools will not see significantly more funding until 2025 at the earliest.

That means school leaders likely will have to decide whether to pull money from other sources, such as teacher salaries, to pay for keeping recently added mental health services.  Those decisions will play into student learning, said Brian Woods, deputy executive director of advocacy for the Texas Association of School Administrators.

“A student with mental health needs, just like a student who’s hungry or can’t see well, is going to really struggle academically,” Woods said.

In HISD, district leaders hired seven “intensive mental health specialists” for positions that will not extend beyond the deadline to spend federal funds this year, spokesperson Joseph Sam said.

Nearby Fort Bend and Conroe independent school districts added six and 10 new mental health-related roles, respectively, thanks to stimulus funds. The positions will remain indefinitely, district officials said.

And Katy Independent School District said it has yet to decide the fate of 20 roles funded by the stimulus package, which totaled $4 million and included counselors and social workers.

Districts that decide against retaining pandemic-era mental health support fit into a troubling trend, said Kaplow, the Hackett Center grief specialist. People are eager to forget about COVID-19 and its lasting effects, she said.

“I do think it is in the rear-view mirror of most individuals,” Kaplow said. “I think that the silence around it is making it even more difficult for the children and families who are grieving.”

‘He’s watching them’

Laura does her best to erase the silence and show her children that it’s OK to talk about their father. She frequently sports the cowboy boots her husband bought for her last birthday before he died. She keeps a locket around her neck that, when the light hits it right, reveals an image of the couple stealing a kiss.

She and her kids still sleep in the same room where her husband died because there’s no extra space in the house they share with their cousins. On the wall, she hung a framed picture of her children’s father wearing a white cowboy hat and tan blazer, hands stuffed into pockets, eyes shadowed by the brim, but gaze strong and directly into the camera. A teddy bear named Eric, Eliberto’s nickname, sits on the bed.

Laura’s son said he often brings his father’s voice to mind. If he needs help staying calm, like if someone is annoying him at school, he remembers Eliberto.

“In my head, I don’t forget him,” Laura’s son said. “I know, if I forget him, I’m never going to know him anymore.”

Now, in lieu of the old rituals the family had, they have created new ones. Every Sunday after church, Laura and her children visit Eliberto’s gravesite. Most of the time, the kids race through the headstones in a game of tag or soccer.

Meanwhile, Laura sits by the stone marker, enjoying the fact her children can, once again, play in the presence of their father.

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Some campuses could see those numbers rise further still: In May, a , which kept millions of people from seeking in the United States, is set to expire — a development that comes amid a crippling teacher shortage in parts of the nation. 

Newcomers’ impact on social services, including schools, has long been a talking point for politicians. It’s also been posited as by New York City’s Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, who began upon their request: His administration cited their rising numbers as a key factor in this month’s , including to the . 

The White House has taken note of the educational imperative. President Joe Biden, in his March 9 budget address, proposed devoting in fiscal year 2024 to help these students gain English proficiency — a over the current amount. He’s also pushing for an additional $90 million to build multilingual teacher pipelines through Grow-Your-Own initiatives and $10 million for post-secondary fellowships to further bolster the educator pool.

But it’s unclear if this new round of funding will meet the needs of one of the fastest-growing student groups in the country. English learners made up 10.4% of total U.S. enrollment in 2019, according to the most recent available , up from 8% in 2000.

To gauge how these students are being served, ����Ӱ�� reached out to 13 school districts across the country representing hundreds of thousands of English learners requesting information about their numbers and their teachers’.  

ESL Student to Teacher Ratio

Responses received over the past several months show dramatic differences in student-teacher ratios ranging from roughly 4:1 in San Diego, 9:1 in the Houston Independent School District and 11:1 in both Chicago and Cypress Fairbanks, which also serves Houston. It’s approximately 23:1 in Los Angeles and Las Vegas’s Clark County schools, and 30:1 in Baltimore City, though school officials there say it’s usually closer to 40:1. 

“Most teachers are begging for there to be a cap on classes, but there usually isn’t,” said Pamela Broussard, a long-time educator who serves new arrivals just outside Houston. The magic number for her, she said, is 15, but the U.S. Department of Education does not regulate this figure, a spokesman said: It’s a state and local issue. 

A manageable class size, experts and educators say, depends on students’ age, English proficiency, level of trauma and the instructional model used to help them, among other factors, including the teacher’s own training.

In the classroom 

When queried about their experiences by ����Ӱ�� on a Facebook group for English language instructors, dozens of educators replied, describing a vast array of conditions in the classroom.

Those with caseloads hovering around 20 or 30 generally found their workload manageable while those responsible for 75 or more multilingual learners found it untenable.  

Some say they have supportive administrators, make great use of related technology, employ top-notch curriculum and work alongside highly trained peers in a single building — with the help of paraprofessionals. 

Others say they are the only such teacher in their district, work across several campuses and struggle with scheduling, plus administrative duties and paperwork. Among the most exasperated are those who have little assistance and serve students of varying age, need and ability. 

“No limit for me,” wrote one Oklahoma teacher. “I’m personally responsible for around 80 and do paperwork and supervise over an additional 30 to 40.”

Jody Nolf, a literacy engagement specialist based in Palm Beach County, Florida, said the appropriate class size depends on whether, for example, students missed years of schooling or were unable to read in their home language — all of which can slow their progress.  

“Some teachers do well with 20 to 25,” said Nolf, who works with East Coast school districts. Others, she said, barely manage 10 to 15 when students’ needs are great.   

“Few of us, however, teach in ideal circumstances,” she said. 

If the primary purpose of English language instruction is for children to make gains in reading, writing, speaking and listening, Houston’s Broussard said, students need time to tackle all four tasks. 

“Smaller class sizes give children time to talk,” said the teacher, whose charges, many of whom hail from Cuba and Venezuela, have lived in the United States for less than six months. 

By the numbers 

New York City Public Schools reported roughly 150,000 multilingual learners among some in the 2021-22 school year. The figure excludes charters — and the who’ve enrolled in the past year. 

Some 77,000 of these children were identified as newcomers, meaning they had three or fewer years of English language learner status. Roughly 9,500 of the city’s teachers had either a bilingual and/or English-as-a-Second-Language credential. 

Teachers in bilingual education classes instruct students in two languages while ESL teachers focus on English — as do those labeled . 

Georgia’s Cobb County serves more than 12,000 multilingual learners — more than 1,300 are newcomers — with 274 ESOL teachers. More than 1,800 other educators have some certification in this area, the district said, but it’s not clear how many teach English exclusively to these students.

Baltimore also serves a substantial number of newcomers, defined by that district as those who have been in U.S. schools for less than a year and are at the lowest English proficiency level. More than 1,500 of the district’s nearly 9,000 multilingual learners fit this category.  

Brevard Public Schools in Florida has 723 such students out of 3,181 multilingual learners. It has 27 English to Speakers of Other Languages teachers to serve them. Seven positions remain vacant. The district also has 55 bilingual assistants — 16 spots remain open. 

Students assigned to Clark County’s Global Community High School, designed to serve newcomers, enjoy a 10:1 student-teacher ratio: It has just 165 students and 16 teachers. Another 3,792 newcomers are elsewhere in the Las Vegas school district. 

While many school systems across the country employ specially designated staff to help immigrant students build their initial inroads to learning, other districts, including Brevard, provide none. Houston ISD has 4,125 newcomer students and no specifically assigned staff to serve their unique needs.

Teacher training 

As with class size, there’s little agreement regarding what constitutes teacher preparedness, a fact evidenced by vastly different state standards. Some educators who responded to ����Ӱ��’s Facebook queries said they earned their credentials after passing a single test — many sought additional training afterward — while others had to complete numerous courses and spend many hours in the classroom working with multilingual learners. 

No matter how they win the designation, said Diane Staehr Fenner, founder and president of SupportEd, which aims to provide educators with the skills and resources they need to serve these children, these instructors must understand how language works, use culturally relevant and responsive materials and have expertise in crafting and implementing effective lesson plans. 

They must also collaborate effectively with other teachers, design appropriate classroom assessments and know how to interpret the scores their students earn on the state-wide English language proficiency exams that determine whether they are eligible for services. 

Staehr Fenner credits the Teachers of English for Speakers of Other Languages International Association’s P-12 for the criteria. She said these educators must also protect students’ legal rights; they should “really empower multilingual learners and all of the teachers who work with them.”

Schools are legally obligated to enroll all children who live within their district boundaries, , according to the 1982 Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe. Almost a decade earlier in 1974, the high court ruled in that schools must provide appropriate services to students who do not yet speak English. 

But multilingual learners face ongoing discrimination: Districts across the country have been sued for failing to and these children. 

Boston Public Schools has been under court order since 1994 to direct a more equitable share of its federal funding toward this group, but last month a longtime legal monitor said Boston school leaders recently for the records documenting how it spent the money. 

Learning a new language   

The goal of providing appropriate services is to move newly arrived and non-English speaking students to the place where they are proficient and can learn in English without additional support.

Tim Boals, founder and director of WIDA at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, said studies show it takes either four to seven or five to seven years for a child to exit ESL services. But there are variations: Some children graduate from such programs in three years, he said. For others, it takes longer. 

“Being younger is assumed to be a big advantage, but that’s not always the case,” he said. “If kids don’t come with basic reading skills in their home language, that can slow things down. Arriving in high school can also be hard since kids have only four to five years typically to ‘catch up’ and accrue credits.”

Added time is unlikely in many classrooms as teacher shortages persist: While the English learner population is growing, staff are . 

Officials from Baltimore City Schools, who said they travel all over the country looking for staff and also recruit from overseas, hope to hire at least 25 more teachers in the coming months to serve this student group. 

The need was so drastic last fall that administrators and other leadership staff went back into the classroom to teach, with some staying on for months. 

“Every year has been hard trying to find teachers,” said Lara Ohanian, the district’s outgoing director of differentiated learning. “After the pandemic, with this national teacher shortage, we have seen even more challenges.”

Ohanian said the student teacher ratio varies throughout the year and is more typically 35 or 40:1. 

It can be difficult for schools to plan or predict class size as many children arrive long after the academic year begins, said Ferlazzo, of Sacramento, a city that has become from all over the world.

“Schools didn’t know a Russian invasion of Ukraine would cause an influx of refugees late in the school year,” he said. “Or know the Afghan government was going to collapse.”

Florida’s Duval County Public Schools has 9,597 multilingual learners and 2,747 teachers to support them: 329 held an English to Speakers of Other Languages K-12 certificate, which requires passing an ESOL K-12 Area test, and much of the remainder had an ESOL endorsement, which demands 300 hours of specialized courses. 

The district had 3,199 newcomer students and 77 teachers to support them. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, has 6,786 in grades 9 through 12 alone — and 19 dedicated staffers at three high schools to help them.

The Paradise Valley School District, which serves students in the Phoenix area, has 2,024 multilingual learners this school year and 69 properly endorsed teachers who teach targeted English language development. 

McAllen Independent School District, located on the Texas-Mexico border and long accustomed to serving newcomers, is home to 7,338 English learners and has more than 550 teachers to serve them. 

A trio of reactions to new arrivals 

The resources allotted to these students might depend on their reception by their school district: In some cases, Sacramento’s Ferlazzo said, immigrant students are considered an inconvenience. 

“Their needs are not prioritized,” he said. “That might result in putting (English learners) into classes with English proficient students with no extra support at all.”

Ted Hamann, professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, has long studied children who were educated in both America and Mexico as their families traversed the border. 

He said schools and communities faced with a significant uptick in new arrivals react in three ways: through a spirit of welcome, disquiet or xenophobia. 

In the first instance, people regard the influx as a positive development, a reflection of their town’s attractiveness to newcomers. In the second case, locals note the change with curiosity or uncertainty, but general neutrality. 

The last reaction is hostile, in which newcomers are cast as a threat or contaminant. 

“What is striking,” Hamann said, “is that in most of the communities we work in, we see all three.”

On campus, it’s up to school leaders to determine which reaction is dominant, he said, adding our duty to educate multilingual learners in this country should hinge on a belief that all children deserve investment, no matter where they come from — or where they are headed. 

“We owe in the present to these kids a future that may or may not be geographically local,” Hamann said. “What kind of world do we want to live in — where we have reciprocity to each other, or we don’t? Can we be generous to each other or is it this desperate struggle for survival?”