Then came her dyslexia diagnosis. 

My husband and I explained to her, “Mi amor, not everyone’s brain is wired the same way, and yours is having a hard time putting letters and sounds together. This isn’t your fault.”

I told this guidance counselor about my frustration. I knew the most important indicator of lifelong success is the ability to read, and reading-related learning challenges are common. Yet schools aren’t set up to support these students. It didn’t make sense.

Individual instruction is the best way for struggling readers to catch up, but affordable options were hard to come by.

“You’re just a mom,” he said, dismissively. “There’s nothing you can do.” 

I wouldn’t just give up and hope my daughter would eventually read well enough to get by. 

Most kids don’t learn to read alone, and no child should be expected to somehow figure it out. My family became a team, navigating this challenge together: switching schools multiple times, finding specialized centers, doing hours of research. I sold my business so I could dedicate myself to Lucy — scheduling intensive instructional intervention while ensuring she could be a kid. I started a book club for her and went to soccer and swimming lessons so she could see her friends. 

Today, Lucy is an honor roll high school student and a strong reader. But getting here was a lonely, humbling road. I heard people talking about my kid having “a problem.” I was doing everything I could, but doing it alone was so difficult. It’s partly why I founded here in Miami in 2020. I know what it’s like to have a struggling child and little guidance. And I now know from experience, it doesn’t have to be like that. 

The Lucy Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit advocating for and providing science-backed reading instruction. A full-time team of five — curriculum specialist, operations director, learning specialist, executive assistant and me — runs the show. We have school partnerships, teacher training programs and one-on-one lessons. Five part-time learning specialists are fully trained by my team. In October, we’ll hire six more. 

Our first chair was also a mom whose child has dyslexia. Currently, half of the board comprises moms in similar situations, bringing firsthand experience and dedication. While I lead as CEO, I’m a parent who spends ample time guiding parents with emotional support and effective resources so the whole family will thrive. Our goal is to create a replicable, scalable model that serves all children.

The Lucy Project has served more than 375 students from 36 Miami-Dade schools and has worked with four Title I schools in underserved communities: Kinlock Park, W.J. Bryan, Goulds and Norwood elementary schools.

The project harnesses the Science of Reading to enhance literacy skills among children, particularly in underserved communities. It’s the backbone of The Lucy Project’s professional learning and student programs, as Science of Reading moves everyone forward. It is crucial for many and essential for some. 

Lessons are fun, interactive and responsive to each student’s changing needs. Learning specialists break down reading and spelling into smaller skills and help students build on them over time. Early intervention is everything. While the majority of second- and third-graders reached grade-level proficiency within one school year, remediation makes the biggest impact in kindergarten. 

Norwood Elementary’s partnership launched the first Literacy Hub, which included summer professional learning for two kindergarten teachers and coaching throughout the year. All students engaged in Structured Literacy lessons in small groups, and those who needed focused support received it one-on-one. At the start of the 2023 school year, 52% of kindergartners were on grade level. By year’s end, that number was .

The Lucy Project also hosts seminars, apprenticeships and professional learning that have empowered more than 100 teachers so they can empower their students. Our team helps Miami-Dade students access daily reading remediation and provides parents with emotional support, guidance through the school system,and referrals to appropriate agencies.

We provide income-based private tutoring on a sliding scale, depending on household income. A mix of corporate and individual donors and grants from foundations fund these programs and make financial assistance possible for families in need. 

To catalyze cutting-edge literacy education, The Lucy Project is hosting a conference, , on July 30. Featuring nationally recognized experts in structured literacy education from leading universities like Stanford and Yale, the event is open to educators and families, who can . The idea is to empower South Florida families and the whole community with practical teaching strategies that provide results.

Having this type of community support network for students and families. It takes a team to ensure every child learns to read and succeed in life. Together, school administrators, educators, literacy specialists, nonprofits, parents and caregivers, and funders who collaborate are a force that can change the world. 

It’s time to start thinking like a team. Because we are.

This is either a bold move or a foolish one, depending on which political side you’re on.

“By picking Karla Hernández as his running mate, Charlie Crist continues to demonstrate his respect for Florida’s educators as the professionals they are,” , president of the National Education Association, in a press statement.

Supporters of incumbent Gov. Ron DeSantis were quick to react. “If it were up to Charlie and Karla, kids would have been locked out of school for 18 months. And parents would be put on an FBI watchlist for raising concerns about indoctrination at school board meetings,” .

As a practical matter, . The office exists mostly to provide an immediate successor should something happen to the governor. Politically, the choice is usually made in order to balance the ticket geographically, or by race or gender.

Crist has an additional reason to name Hernandez-Mats: Money. DeSantis has amassed a huge campaign war chest, estimated at more than $132 million. Crist drained his reserves to win the Democratic primary and had at last report.

Crist’s largest donor so far is the , which contributed $500,000 to his campaign last month. Having a teachers union officer on the ticket should open the purse strings even further. Outside of direct contributions, Crist can also expect significant independent expenditures from affiliates of both NEA and AFT on his behalf.

Florida’s gubernatorial races are traditionally very close, but a Democrat hasn’t held the office since 1998. Crist is a former Florida governor, but he was a Republican at the time.

Whether the presence of Hernandez-Mats on the ticket will sway the result one way or the other is an open question, but her actions and statements as union president are already being debated.

She opposed reopening Miami’s public schools in fall 2020. “Lives are going to be lost,” . But a later revealed, “resumption of in-person education was not associated with a proportionate increase in COVID-19 among school-aged children.” The CDC concluded that its findings “add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that COVID-19 transmission does not appear to be demonstrably more frequent in schools than in noneducational settings.”

A second issue involves Wendell Nibbs, a middle school teacher who pleaded guilty to engaging in sexual activity with a child. Nibbs was a union building steward and active member of United Teachers of Dade.

Questioned by reporters, , and called his actions “horrific, evil and vile.”

We should take Hernandez-Mats at her word when it comes to Nibbs’s crimes, but the Dade union’s executives did benefit from his presence at meetings: Several union stewards told the Miami Herald that union officers used Nibbs to intimidate other stewards who would question the leadership.

“He was their attack dog,” . “Any time someone opposed the leadership, stood up and said something. He was one of the loudest voices who said, ‘Shut up, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ”

Since being selected, Hernandez-Mats has highlighted her achievements as a union official. One of these requires additional context: that she claimed she had cleared United Teachers of Dade of all debt when she was the union’s secretary-treasurer.

It may come as a surprise to many current members that the union ever was in debt, but that story goes back decades, to the tenure of the late Pat Tornillo. Tornillo ran the union as his personal fiefdom and piggy bank for more than 40 years, until . He pleaded guilty to tax evasion and mail fraud in 2003.

Tornillo’s crimes left the Miami union’s finances in a shambles. The AFT established a trusteeship over the local and lent it millions of dollars to keep it operating. This is the debt to which Hernandez-Mats referred, and it is true that the Dade union came out of arrears during her term as secretary-treasurer. But it wasn’t really her doing.

The union’s budget for 2014-15 showed it owed AFT $2.4 million in loan repayments and more than $3.6 million to AFT and the Florida Education Association in back dues.

, the Miami union was able to make good on its repayments only by dumping property it owned. First, the union sold its headquarters building and rented space in it instead. . At AFT’s insistence, it sold an empty lot behind its headquarters.

All these real estate deals helped, but it didn’t vanquish the debt. Despite abnormally high dues (currently $978.40 a year), the union continued to make unrealistic membership projections, making it difficult to meet its repayment obligations. Although Miami-Dade Public Schools have about 17,000 teachers and another 18,000 support employees, fewer than 12,000 are union members.

Ultimately, AFT forgave the last $1,126,426 the Dade union owed.

Hernandez-Mats’s advancement from secretary-treasurer to president led to a hefty personal benefit. In 2016-17, her first full year as president, she earned $143,698. In 2020-21, she made $197,225 — a 37% increase over four years.

She’s clearly not joining Crist’s ticket for the money. Florida’s lieutenant governor makes about $125,000, and the governor a little over $130,000.

Crist is gambling that Hernandez-Mats’s record and the funds she can potentially bring will be a net positive in a race against a governor as polarizing as DeSantis. But teachers unions are polarizing as well. His lieutenant governor pick may have the opposite effect. Either way, it will be an interesting test case for future union candidates for higher office.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

Quality of schools in the region, which encompasses Boise, could be a factor, according to a from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation that identifies the nation’s best and worst metro areas for educational effectiveness. 

“Literally, you see the houses springing up like mushrooms,” said Terry Ryan, CEO of Bluum, a nonprofit supporting charter and district schools in the area. 

The region is among those where schools made above-average academic progress prior to COVID-19, the report shows. With the pandemic now accelerating toward suburbs and smaller metro areas — and often away from high-priced coastal cities — the authors say families and business leaders looking to relocate should factor in school quality when deciding where to settle down.

Michael Petrilli, president of the Institute, cautioned that there’s no guarantee the pandemic hasn’t stalled progress in areas where student performance once trended upward. Some experts, for example, have called recent “staggering.” But he said the message to districts and charter schools that were effective before the pandemic is to stay the course, and those that are ineffective “cannot just go back to normal.”

“I would assume that school districts and charter schools that were doing well by kids before the pandemic are probably largely the same ones doing well by them during the pandemic,” he said.

Using the — a national database of student performance — and graduation data from the U.S. Department of Education, the Fordham-Chamber project focuses on 100 large and mid-sized metro areas. The top locales include Miami, which recently received back-to-back from the state; Memphis, where Black, Hispanic and low-income students have shown above-average academic growth; and the Atlanta region, which ranks fourth in the study.

Atlanta has been ranked among the best places to start a new business, attracting tech leaders like . Collaboration among districts across the metro area is one reason why students were making progress before the pandemic and are “well-positioned to return to growth,” said Kenneth Zeff, executive director of Learn4Life, a nonprofit working to improve education outcomes across the metro Atlanta area. “Substantial inequities still exist, but the gap in several key indicators has been slowly eroding.”

Smaller metro areas, such as Jackson, Mississippi, and Brownsville, Texas, also emerged as places where schools performed better than expected based on demographics.

Those on the lower end of the spectrum include the Salt Lake City area, Las Vegas and Tulsa. Average achievement in math and English language arts has improved over the past six to 10 years in the Las Vegas metro area — essentially the Clark County School District — but schools still perform below average nationally, according to the report. 

Eighty percent of the population

The researchers focused on the nation’s metro areas because that’s where 80 percent of the U.S. population lives and where economic activity and labor market trends tend to have the most impact. Issues such as school choice and racial segregation also affect multiple districts. 

In addition to identifying areas with above- and below-average academic growth, the researchers factored in progress among Black, Hispanic and disadvantaged students, a region’s improvement over the past six to 10 years, and high school graduation rates. They combined these indicators into a measure they call “student learning accelerating metros” — or SLAM. The report includes interactive features so users can isolate results for specific indicators, subject areas or demographic groups.

The authors stressed that while achievement scores might seem to be an obvious indicator of high-quality schools, achievement alone often reflects students’ family backgrounds instead of a school’s effectiveness.

That’s why “Best Places to Live” lists should provide families a more comprehensive view of school quality instead of relying on standardized test scores, the authors wrote.

The SLAM rankings show that a metro area in which students have high achievement scores overall might not perform as well on the other measures. 

In North Carolina, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools, in the state’s Research Triangle region, has among the highest ACT scores in the state, but also large in achievement between Black and white students. 

That hasn’t stopped the region from attracting Google, Apple and Nike, which are in the area.

And the Raleigh area ranks fourth in raw achievement scores, but falls to 48th in the report when the other indicators are considered. On the other hand, the McAllen, Texas, area — which includes the Sharyland, Edinburg and Hidalgo school districts — ranks 41st in raw achievement, but third based on the report’s SLAM measure.

Brenda Berg, president and CEO of BEST NC, a nonprofit organization of business leaders in North Carolina, praised the report for providing relevant data for her state, where countywide districts include both urban centers and higher-performing suburbs. 

She said in an email that she’s “most concerned” about Wake County, which includes Raleigh, and is “most eager” to see where the Guilford and Charlotte-Mecklenburg districts go in the years to come.Those two districts, she said “have some really interesting promising practices emerging” around literacy and teacher recruitment in high-needs schools.

The authors note that while charter growth and district reform efforts have often focused on the cities at the heart of a metro area, the “suburbs are where many of the kids — and much of the action — are at, and they often explain a metro’s grade.”

Looking at broad trends across metro areas, however, can hide “meaningful variation” from one district to the next, said Alex Spurrier, associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners. In October, the think tank released a report showing how a lack of affordable housing in some of the nation’s most sought-after districts limits educational opportunity. 

“Even if families decide to move to a metro area with higher-performing public schools,” Spurrier said, “their access to specific public school systems may be limited based on where they can afford housing,” Spurrier said.

“I was part of those people that sort of had their doubts,” the Miami high school senior told ����Ӱ��.

He was worried that the development of the shot was too quick, and that perhaps the safety checks were incomplete. He opted to hold off on receiving the vaccine.

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But soon after, a classmate changed his mind.

Abigail Felan, communications director for the student-led nonprofit , was presenting information on the vaccine to classes at Coral Gables Senior High School, where she and Montigny are students, as part of her organization’s all-new Teens Get the Vaccine campaign. For Montigny, who over the summer would be traveling to France to spend time with his grandmother and was worried about putting her at risk, Felan’s pitch struck a chord. Hearing her speak about the vaccine’s safety and benefits was enough to convince him to roll up his sleeve before going overseas.

Now, as schools across the country prepare to return students to classrooms after a summer marked by increasing COVID caseloads brought on by the Delta variant, New Voters is re-launching its Teens Get the Vaccine campaign. The group hopes to persuade peers, like Montigny, on the fence over whether or not to get vaccinated.

“This is such a pressing issue right now,” said Felan, whose state has one of the worst outbreaks of the Delta variant in the nation, with there this week.

Youth vaccination rates continue to . As of July 28, some , according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, representing 40 percent of 16- to 17-year-olds and 28 percent of 12- to 15-year-olds. Another 2.2 million teens and adolescents had received a single dose. Meanwhile, against COVID.

Down from a high of 1.6 million youth vaccinations per week in late May, rates fell to 315,000 shots per week in early July, before rebounding slightly, with 450,000 individuals under 18 immunized in the week prior to July 28. The uptick may perhaps reflect growing concern for the highly transmissible Delta variant, which more readily infects young people than previous strains. Youth 12 and up are currently eligible for COVID-19 immunizations, and .

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has launched an all-out blitz to vaccinate eligible students in the country’s largest school district, including a , before the district’s mid-September start.

Felan’s student-led organization, she believes, has special leverage to persuade teens to get vaccinated because they can empathize with their peers’ concerns.

“We have that youth appeal to show that we understand,” Felan, also a rising senior, told ����Ӱ��.

With misinformation about the vaccine constantly being spread online and landing in teenagers’ newsfeeds, Felan and her team try not to shame students for having the facts wrong, she added.

“It’s important to show that we are empathetic.”

From Aug. 6 to Sept. 6, New Voters will double down on its campaign. This spring, Felan reached over 2,000 students by Zooming into classes at her school and speaking about the vaccine. This fall, the group plans to expand its classroom presentation campaign to other locales where the nonprofit has member branches, including California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as well as other parts of Florida outside Miami.

The organization also recorded TikTok videos and Instagram reels that together amassed over 10,000 views and conducted a to answer youth questions on vaccine safety.

This fall, the youth-powered group plans to continue its information campaign and will partner with various civic engagement organizations such as and . On Friday, New Voters will hold an Instagram live session with Katie Grossbard, a founding member of the nonprofit , a nonprofit working to promote democratic participation, says Felan, who is hopeful that the collaborations will help her team’s message reach new audiences.

“On a national level, I really hope we can double our reach — or triple our reach,” said the high schooler.

She knows there will always be people who watch their videos and ignore the information. But then again, she says, there will also be people who learn something new or are inspired to have a conversation about the vaccine. After seeing a TikTok clip, “maybe they talk to their sister or their friend about [the shot],” said Felan.

The group has already had an international impact. Montigny, inspired by the pitch he received from New Voters, was able to talk his French cousins, who he’s staying with this summer, into making vaccine appointments for themselves.

When he returns to Miami, he says, “If I have friends that are not [vaccinated], I know that I can try to convince them.”

In what could be a bellwether for schools across the U.S., young students in the nation’s fourth-largest school district are doing poorly on basic academics, recent data suggest, a key sign that pandemic schooling is taking a bracing toll.

Officials with Florida’s earlier this month reported that 43 percent of students who took January diagnostic tests in grades pre-K-3 tested below grade level in reading. And 54 percent tested below grade level in math.

Students in both at-home and in-person settings took the online tests.

The district educates some 334,000 students, more than nearly every district in the U.S., with the exception of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

An assessment expert said the Miami-Dade findings will likely be repeated nationwide as districts assess students more fully, and may actually underplay the extent of the crisis.

“The national trends are pointing in a direction at least as severe as what’s happening in Miami-Dade, and likely more severe,” said Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, a Massachusetts-based firm whose tests are used in schools in the district and elsewhere nationwide. “These numbers from Miami-Dade are deeply troublesome, but the national picture, I think, is much more troublesome.”

The Miami-Dade findings are the latest to emerge in large districts nationwide since the school year began. Elsewhere, districts and advocacy groups have rung similar alarms. In Los Angeles, the group in late March issued a report that said the city’s children are in “an unprecedented educational crisis.” In Fairfax County, Virginia’s largest school district, officials in November said the percentage of middle- and high-school students earning F’s in at least two classes in the first quarter last fall.

Nationwide, the consulting firm McKinsey that U.S. students by this fall may have lost as much as a year of learning.

Miami-Dade school board member Mari Tere Rojas, who requested the testing data, noted that the problem is worse among older students, the Miami Herald . While just 15 percent of pre-K students tested behind grade level in reading and 13 percent in math, among third-graders the data showed that 27 percent were behind in reading and 40 percent in math.

that among third-graders nationally who took Curriculum Associates’ iReady tests last winter, 41 percent were below grade level in reading and 68 percent in math.

Among these students, another 22 percent were two or more grade levels below where they should be to do grade-level reading work, while 18 percent were two or more grade levels below in math.

About 8 million students take the iReady tests, according to the company’s .

The district is already moving to limit the damage from the past year or more of disruption. Lissette Alves, Miami-Dade’s assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, told the school board on May 12 that students identified as performing below grade level in reading based on a September assessment are already receiving more help, which can amount to an extra 30 minutes of daily reading or, in worse cases, an additional hour of intensive reading instruction.

They’re also planning to scale up an intensive reading and math summer school program for more than 65,000 students, with plans to use federal Covid relief funds to get students tutors and other kinds of extra help.

Miami parent Kimberli Nelson said her son Maddox, a first-grader at George Washington Carver Elementary School in Coral Gables, Fla., is “doing well with school from an academic perspective. But he pretty much just learned to sit quietly and draw pictures all day.”

Nelson said her son, who has been identified as gifted, had more difficulties with the “psychological element” of school disruption. To fight isolation, she said, “We had to just break out” and visit friends.

Nelson, a Black parent who grew up in Chicago, said the pandemic has been doubly hard for poor students, as well as students of color. Many of these students, she said, have parents who are essential workers and can’t supervise their at-home learning. “We’re having two pandemics, based upon race and poverty.”

The new achievement data were first reported by the Herald. Miami-Dade officials have said that one of their biggest concerns revolves around the estimated 10,000 students who for school — as well as 10,300 online-only students identified as at risk of failing.

In January, the district sent letters to at-risk students, urging them to return to in-person school. Of 5,400 contacted, about 3,600 have returned to classrooms.

The district did not respond to a request for comment. In March, Miami-Dade Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told the school board that about 500 students remained missing, the Herald at the time. Most of these, he said, are English-language learners whose parents moved and whose phones were disconnected.

Nelson said she has worked with a community center and neighborhood afterschool program known as to support families and, in some cases, find students who couldn’t otherwise be located.

She credited the center’s longtime director, Sylvia Jordan, with tracking down many neighborhood kids. “If you can’t find them, Miss Sylvia can,” Nelson recalled telling district officials. “Some of our kids were going after school — they just weren’t going to school.”

In the district, the new achievement findings have been greeted with a mixed reception.

Board member Rojas called the data “alarming,” but Carvalho said he and his staff are approaching them with “trepidation” and “doubt,” since students learning from home may have had parental help on the tests — those in school, he said, may not have had the same assistance.

“It is data that we’re not going to take to the bank as we have in the past,” he told board members.

But Curriculum Associates’ Huff said she doesn’t suspect “widespread cheating” from students who took iReady tests at home. Even if students got help from family members, she said, she doubts there was intention to cheat.

“I think it was very innocent helping, because adults, older siblings, or others in the home did not realize that these young students — first, second, third graders — that they were taking a test that needed to happen independently. And if they had known that, they likely would not have helped — just like a parent would never help their child try to pass an eye test.”

So-called “Covid learning loss” has obsessed educators and researchers for the better part of a year, but Huff said the term doesn’t accurately describe what’s happening to students. She prefers the term “.”

“I do think it’s more accurate because a lot of what has happened is just less instructional time,” she said. “Students have not had the opportunity to learn. They didn’t have learning to lose. They were just not finished doing the learning that we would expect, given the circumstances of the past year.”

Roosevelt, who teaches first grade at a high-poverty public school in Portland, Oregon, changed her mind after her school closed and she saw how the crisis was affecting her students. It took three weeks to get devices to students who needed them. The next hurdle was connecting families to the internet.

Then Portland Public Schools announced in early May that it would move to a four-day work week, furloughing teachers and other employees to save money in anticipation of next year’s budget cuts. Three days were added to the end of the school year, but it still means less instructional time for students.

“It’s a big hit for our students,” Roosevelt said.

Across the country, school districts are starting to confront the reality that remote learning — executed rapidly, without much advance planning and during a national emergency — isn’t working well for some of the most vulnerable students, including families with language barriers, young children whose work requires constant supervision, some students with special needs and those experiencing economic hardship. Some school leaders are looking at the summer months as an opportunity to provide extra support and instruction, even though campuses could remain closed into the coming school year.

Many of the country’s biggest school systems — in New York City, Los Angeles, and Houston — have announced plans for summer learning, even if it’s online only. Houston had considered holding some in-person sessions, but opted against it. Miami-Dade County Public Schools hopes to bring some students into classrooms in August, just before the next school year starts.

Summer sessions in high-poverty school districts, such as New York City and Miami-Dade, will likely focus most of their efforts on students who need credit recovery, remediation or grade promotion. Some school districts have said they will try to offer enrichment classes as well. The Northshore School District, a small, affluent school system near Seattle, plans to offer classes in video production and animation alongside credit recovery courses, while Los Angeles Unified has said it could provide music lessons.Wichita Public Schools will offer extra instruction to students recommended for it by their principals as well as virtual learning opportunities for other interested students. Portland Public Schools, where Roosevelt teaches, has announced some virtual options for high school students.

When school buildings closed in Florida, Miami-Dade shifted quickly to remote instruction. They distributed devices and connected students faster than some of the nearby school districts. Attendance in the 346,427-student district has been similar to when school buildings were open, with about 91 to 93 percent of students logging in each day, according to Jackie Calzadilla, the district’s director of media relations. Despite those efforts, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho warned board members during a meeting in May that he expects to see “unprecedented academic regression” in the fall, and not just in Miami-Dade, but nationwide.

“We’ve done our very best with distance learning, but we know for a fact that the most fragile students in our community, in our schools, will experience difficulties keeping up,” he said.

Researchers from the NWEA, a nonprofit research organization based in Portland, Oregon, have predicted a considerable academic slide from the coronavirus pandemic. By the fall, students could return with about 70 percent of the learning gains in reading and less than 50 percent of the gains in math, compared to a typical school year. In some cases, students could be a full year behind in math, according to the released in April.

“The economic impacts and trauma of recent events will also have far reaching effects that will likely exacerbate long-standing opportunity gaps,” researchers Megan Kuhfeld and Beth Tarasawa wrote in their report.

Despite that, many school districts haven’t announced plans for summer school. The Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research center that has been tracking remote learning during the crisis, found that as of May 12, just 26 out of 82 school districts have said they will offer summer school. A “handful” of others hope to or are evaluating options, according to a recent .

In Miami-Dade, Carvalho said he wants to provide extra support to students during the summer and throughout the 2020-21 school year. He proposed “waves” of summer learning, with sessions offered to students with special needs, who typically have an extended school year, students who logged into remote learning but fell off the grid, and high school students who will need to pass end-of-course exams in order to graduate.

If buildings can be opened, students who weren’t able to participate fully in distance learning could be brought onto campus for in-person instruction before the next school year starts on Aug. 24.

“It is best to prepare for any and all eventualities,” he told board members.

In Houston, school leaders are “trying everything” to reach the district’s 209,772 students right now, said Yolanda Rodriguez, the district’s chief academic officer. Their were better prepared for the move to remote learning because students already receive laptops and are expected to carry them between school and home, she said. To connect younger students, who aren’t given laptops as part of their regular instruction, the district has distributed thousands of devices and hotspots, she said. District officials also have made some TV lessons available in English and Spanish, and they mail paper packets to students in pre-kindergarten to eighth grade every two weeks, she said.

Some students haven’t been able to participate in remote learning, but “we’re pleased with the logins that we have,” she said. By the sixth week of school closures, about 42 percent of students had logged onto the district’s main platform, according to the press office. That number doesn’t capture students who are working with their teachers in other ways, however, such as with paper packets or through other learning platforms. So far, 38,211 packets have been distributed, the district said.

District officials had hoped to bring some students back into classrooms, but decided late last week it wasn’t .

Dori Luzzo Gilmour, a mother of three in the Richland School District in Washington State, said she’s worried about her children falling behind during remote learning. All three — in first, fourth and fifth grade — require constant supervision. She thinks her 12-year-old is working diligently on his schoolwork, only to discover that he’s watching random videos on YouTube. There’s no live instruction, only pre-recorded lessons. Zoom meetings, which are largely for fun activities, are “pure chaos.” She’s had to learn how to do math the way her children do it, not the way she was taught.

If the school district offers summer school, she is “100 percent interested.”

“They’re not getting as much out of what they’re doing now,” she said.

In Andover, Kansas, Nikki Call said she doesn’t have any interest in summer school because she doesn’t think her children have lost any learning time. The transition to virtual education was smooth, and teachers kept expectations “very high.” Her children — ages 14, 10 and 7 — had regular meetings with teachers on Zoom. Both she and her husband were able to work from home, making it easier to oversee the children’s schoolwork.

“My kids are doing just as well at home as they would at school,” she said.

Call said the teachers in Andover Public Schools went to great lengths to keep the children engaged. Before school buildings closed, her daughter’s first-grade class had planned to read Charlotte’s Web together. The teacher also had chicken eggs for the children to observe. After the closure, the teacher recorded herself reading each chapter of the book, and she put the chicks in a box on the front porch of her house. She set up a schedule for the children to come visit them.

As an academic intervention, summer school could be easier for some districts to implement simply because it’s already offered in many places, and school officials likely wouldn’t need to negotiate major changes to existing employment contracts. Teachers in Miami-Dade and New York City, for instance, are paid their regular hourly or daily rate for teaching in the summer.

What’s unclear is whether teachers will want to work this summer. Karla Hernandez-Mats, president of the United Teachers of Dade, said in a normal year there are more teachers willing to work than available positions. But teachers are juggling a lot of responsibilities during the shutdown. Some are caring for their own children or sick family members, while also learning how to teach remotely, she said.

“They’re overworked. They’re super stressed, just like parents are super stressed,” she said.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City, the country’s largest district with 1.1 million students, said teachers have been working “crazy hours” to help students and parents amid the crisis. The attitude is: “The buildings are closed. School is in session,” he said.

But teachers still have found it challenging to help families with language barriers. Some families are sharing one device among multiple children. Some high school students are working because their parents have lost income or jobs. The New York City Department of Education has estimated that some 177,700 students will need summer school, compared to about 44,000 students last year.

“It’s going to be a huge effort, an unprecedented effort … the greatest challenge I’d say this school system has ever faced,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said of the summer school endeavor at his .

Some teachers might want to work the summer, however, because some of their families have also been hit hard by the economic crisis, union leaders said.

In Portland, the public school system is offering virtual options for high school students, but hasn’t announced plans for younger students. Three days were added to the end of this school year to limit the instructional time lost from the four-day week. Roosevelt, the first-grade teacher, said she would be eager to work during the summer.

For many of the families at her school, education has taken a backseat to providing basic needs. Families have lost jobs and homes. She has delivered food to families, along with paper packets of school work. With two young children of her own, Roosevelt said she and her husband are juggling a lot, but she wants her students to know she’s available.

“I just think, ‘What can I do to help in any way?’” she said.

Lead Image: Carmella Gilmour, a first-grader in Richland, Washington, works on a reading assignment at home. Her mom is concerned that Carmella and her two siblings are falling behind and would jump at the chance to send them to summer school. (Dori Luzzo Gilmour)