But Southeast Lauderdale High School, near Meridian, Mississippi, is not like most schools. Its teachers and staff have made connection and belonging a top priority, with the goal of matching every student with at least one extracurricular activity. Their reasoning? When students are involved in something outside of their core classes, they are more likely to show up at school, build relationships with their peers and staff and succeed academically.

So the school’s student success team — staffers charged with knowing and supporting every student — got together to find a tailored solution for Jamyreon.

He is now the high school’s basketball manager. Jamyreon travels with the team, dresses up on game days, films the games and reviews footage. His teachers have seen improvement in his schoolwork and participation in class. As for the basketball coach and team, they find Jamyreon essential — he’s not only the manager, but very much part of the team.

Southeast Lauderdalel’s approach to strengthening connections can be a model for other schools, particularly amid heightened concerns about student mental health, absenteeism and disengagement. 

The U.S. surgeon general recently issued an calling loneliness an epidemic for the population at large, while noting that the rate among young adults has increased every year between 1976 and 2019. By all accounts, the pandemic’s disruptions only .

Rural communities, like the one served by Southeast Lauderdale High School, face particular challenges. For example, rural residents generally experience more obstacles in accessing mental health care, a challenge known as of availability, accessibility, affordability and acceptability. A recent poll from the data estimates there are just under 400 students for every school counselor in the highest-priority states. 

Rural schools cannot solve the youth mental health and loneliness epidemic alone, but they do have a critical role to play in connecting students to those around them. Research from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that when students feel that adults and peers in school know and care about them, they are less likely to poor mental health and persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness.

Several factors have been key to Southeast Lauderdale’s success in strengthening student connection: 

First, the school leans on the research-driven framework, which encourages schools to designate a group of adults focused on monitoring and improving engagement and connection. Dubbed the student success team, these teachers, coaches, counselors and administrators meet regularly to develop strategies for getting more students involved in activities. As one of 20 members of the Rural Schools Collaborative’s, Southeast Lauderdale receives coaching and technical assistance for its student success team from.

Second, the team has adopted an expansive definition of student data beyond grades and test scores. Southeast Lauderdale also measures student connection to school — in this case, involvement in extracurricular activities.

Its method is one that any school could replicate: a shared Google spreadsheet. The team listed all the students on the spreadsheet and sent it around to school staff so they could input information on which students were connected to which activities — football, cheer, career and technical education clubs and more. The team found that 40% of students were not involved in any activities beyond required courses.

Focusing on those unconnected students, the team sought to find a place for each of them,  matching activities with their interests. For example, a student survey showed that several were interested in a color guard team. A teacher stepped forward to coach the team, and it now includes 10 students, all of whom had not been not connected to any activity before.

Since last year, the percentage of uninvolved students at Southeast Lauderdale has fallen from 40% to just 12%. And after one-on-one meetings with those who remain unconnected, each student has agreed to try something new in the fall.

A healthy American future must include a thriving rural landscape, and schools will be at the forefront of this effort. To address the growing epidemic of isolation and loneliness, schools in rural areas should prioritize relationships and connectedness. Southeast Lauderdale High School in Mississippi is showing how.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to the and ����Ӱ��.

Confronted with that startling reality, the from the University of Chicago’s Education Lab has identified a cost-effective, school-based model that can support young girls: group counseling and mentorship. 

Attending weekly in-school counseling for just four months through the program decreased PTSD symptoms brought on by witnessing or experiencing violent attacks or or losing a loved one by 22%, depression by 14% and anxiety by about 10%, according to the randomized control trial, considered the gold standard of research.

The program is currently offered to groups of 10 teen girls in about 30 Chicago Public Schools and more in Dallas, Kansas City and Boston.

“[Because of] the violence we see, and there’s violence everywhere, not just in Chicago… they are experiencing a lot of loss,” said Christine Diaz Luna, a senior counselor at Hancock College Prep which serves mostly Latino students on the city’s southwest side. “I’ve seen in my experience that loss, that grief, that longing for connection.”&�Բ�����;

The high prevalence of PTSD shocked lead researcher Monica Bhatt, whose team studied over 3,700 9th- through 11th-grade girls across 10 high schools from 2017-19. 

“These are girls who, despite the very, very high levels of trauma that they were experiencing, are coming to school. We see a B average … We don’t see a lot of externalizing behaviors,” Bhatt said.��

“It really adds evidence to this notion … of having a set of latent mental health challenges that do surface later in life, but aren’t apparent early on.” Research has shown that leaving depression and PTSD unchecked can affect girls’ future ability to succeed in their careers and family. 

Earlier this year, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report shed some light into just how pervasive traumatic experiences are for young girls: 1 in 5 nationwide experienced sexual violence in 2021.

The Chicago research is the first large-scale study to look at effective mental health interventions specifically for Black and Latino girls — who are more likely than their peers to experience traumatic childhood experiences and have higher rates of depression and anxiety. 

“Usually, we sort of study program effectiveness on a large sample, and then we try to understand, does this vary for particular student groups?” Bhatt added. “This is a program that was designed particularly with Black and Latino girls in mind … We’re starting to develop a body of evidence where there wasn’t a lot prior.”

Students who are actively suicidal, have learning disabilities or are absent more than 75% of the year were excluded from the Chicago sample. More research is needed to understand how a program like WOW might impact those student groups. 

Researchers believe results would be even greater for girls attending for the designed length, two school years. According to , the local nonprofit that launched the model in 2011, girls who start within clinical range for PTSD and depression have even more success: decreasing symptoms by 62% and 71%, respectively.��

WOW in Action

After her freshman year, whenever TK Nowlin was overwhelmed by family, school and friend stress, she’d get frustrated, and get into arguments, or stop communicating.��

Now a junior at Fenger Academy High School in her second year of WOW programming, she feels more calm and sure of herself. 

“[WOW] helped me work on my healthy relationships … It’s very important to listen to understand instead of listening to respond, and I know that played a big factor in my life, because it was like I always had a rebuttal to something,” Nowlin said.��

Fellow junior Yazmin Hunter told ����Ӱ�� she now has a system when she’s reaching the point of frustration: take a break, sit down, breathe, listen to music, take a walk. 

Once a week, TK, Yazmin and peers across Chicago leave their elective or physical education classes to head to their WOW room. They start with a check-in, sharing a rose, bud, thorn from their week or comparing their mood to songs and colors. 

Her counselor facilitates either full group discussions or individual journaling. Surrounded by colorful walls, affirmations and mirrors, they sometimes pull cards from a container: Who is the most important person in your life? What does success or a support system look like to you? What are your views on parenting? 

Informed by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Narrative Therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, the sessions get girls to reframe or question negative thoughts, reflect on how their day-day actions align with their personal values and listen openly to each others’ stories.��

“Our thoughts are powerful. And sometimes we think thoughts that aren’t necessarily true. As an example, you look in the mirror, ‘Oh my God, I’m ugly,’” Diaz Luna explained. “Let’s take that thought and break it down. What’s going on there? Where’s that coming from? Have you been told this before by someone else?”

Having the group offered during the school day is critical to reach students who work or have family commitments after school that would prevent them from attending otherwise. Students are never pulled out of core classes or lunch, only electives or physical education. 

Students can volunteer for the program, pending a parent’s permission. School staff can also refer students to the program if they notice someone struggling. 

Cost and space are typically the biggest barriers for potential school partners, Youth Guidance’s chief program officer Nacole Milbrook told ����Ӱ��. 

At about $115,000 per school for one counselor, who works with four to five groups of students, WOW is still about $40,000 cheaper to run than the accepted threshold for similar services.

Currently being studied in a randomized trial at five high schools in and around Oklahoma City and bringing individualized help to 183 students since 2021, the rolled out at a critical moment.

Roughly according to the latest NAEP results, or the Nation’s Report Card — the . Oklahoma’s students scored 10 points below average, outperformed by 43 states. The state has also to fill vacancies.

Researchers high dosage tutoring as a powerful intervention for struggling learners. Beyond academic growth, it has the potential to boost feelings of belonging. A in particular can help students graduate high school, persist through college and earn more later in life. 

Yet many K-12 schools struggle to establish quality in-house tutoring, given the strain on finances and staff. High quality programs are costly, between ongoing training, reasonable compensation and research.

Now in its second year, the program at the University of Oklahoma has honed in on a local solution, looking to expand partnerships between universities and their surrounding K-12 schools.

“It’s going to be an everyday thing until we can catch up as many kids as we can and eliminate the issue altogether in the state,” said program director and veteran educator Cristina Moershel. 

Each tutor is paired with two students for a full 50-minute period, three days a week. They’re compensated $10,000 each year, split between scholarships and stipends.

Marcus Ake, a second year tutor studying meteorology, math and German, starts some periods off the page. He asks students, look around the room, what math do you see? From right angles on white boards to parabolas in desk chairs, “I just want to show everyone else that math is all around.”

Of the 9th grade students served by OU tutors, 42% more than doubled the average expected growth on the NWEA Map math test in just one semester. On average, students gained 3.41 points, over a point beyond the average 2.24. Scores for students at one school grew 8 points, about four times the average.

The jump is a big deal. Students are those most likely to not show huge gains, closing out 8th grade scoring in the 15-25th percentile. But if they continue at this rate, they will reach the 50th by the end of 9th grade. 

“They’re basically beating projections for students who are at the 50th percentile by a full point,” said Daniel Hamlin, professor and lead researcher for the project at the University of Oklahoma. “It’s actually really substantial.”&�Բ�����;

Getting creative

Contrary to tutoring programs that support with homework help or replicate a lead teachers’ lessons, OU tutors fill foundational gaps in math that vary student to student. There’s no script: Tutors stop and start wherever students need, pulling a page from mastery instruction.

For many, the starting place is multiplying and dividing fractions, exponents and cubed roots. Others need a refresher on integers and adding like terms before they add variables to the mix. 

Tutors make games and songs for algorithms like the Pythagorean theorem, cut and color code paper to bring life back into what used to feel like confusing, irrational rules like the switch-flip method for dividing fractions.

It’s the individualized attention many wealthy families pay for. But for the hundreds of students now involved, many of whom are first generation or low-income Americans, the support wouldn’t be possible without it being free and during the school day. 

The Stephenson family, who , wanted to target instruction to the kids who most needed support and would not be able to afford it otherwise. Their interest piqued after reading research out of the University of Chicago and Saga Education, which shaped the foundations for OU’s program. 

Recruiting college students to tutor and mentor may also give students faster access to adults that look like them or relate to their life experiences. In the last two years, OU tutors represented 17 countries. This fall semester, 7% identified as Native American or American Indian, 15% as Asian, 15% as Black and 17% as Latino. 

And exposure to college students means exposure to college pathways. Most of the 158 tutors are working toward STEM, economics, or healthcare-related degrees, often able to share with students how they continue to use math everyday, or answer questions about what college actually looks like. 

For first semester tutor and computer engineering student Anurag Rajkumar Doré, the reality check includes breaking down the stigma or shame many kids feel about math. 

“I remember the first couple sessions. They wouldn’t even talk because they were afraid of getting the wrong answer. But I told them, ‘I don’t care if you have the wrong answer as long as you have the right reason,’” Doré said. 

“At the end of the day, math is more about understanding what’s happening than just memorizing steps…when you apply math to the real world, you’re not going to have a list of answers.”

First-time OU tutors go through a three day bootcamp at the start of the semester, learning a mix of pedagogical strategies while refreshing key math concepts. They attend weekly training for one to two hours, planning lessons and getting feedback from each other and veteran educators.  

Those involved say the high-quality training is a key ingredient for the model’s success. 

Doré sometimes messes up on purpose, so his two students see it as normal and practice explaining a different approach. He knows they hesitate with fractions, so naturally he gives bigger and bigger ones. Most recently, 180 over 360 times 35 over 35. The examples drive home the importance of simplifying first — math and many of life’s problems. 

The Initiative is one of three jobs he balances, but he never thinks about giving it up. Some days he feels he’s taught them more about confidence than math.

“I’m able to pay rent because of this program,” Dore said. “I can do all this and I can still help the community.”

Growing pains 

What started at two high schools has now grown to five — two rural, two midsize urban, and one large urban, all with their share of logistical hurdles and lessons learned. 

While the university picks up much of the financial and staffing hurdles, the model leans on high schools to get everyone on the same page so there’s no stigma or misinformation spread. Some parents were apprehensive, for instance, when their child qualified for tutoring.

“It may be that their child in eighth grade had an A in eighth grade math, but then they’re testing in the 20th percentile. Parents may say, ‘Well, my child is doing just fine,’ ” explained lead researcher Hamlin. “There’s a lot of communication that needs to be done with parents and schools and it has to be on an ongoing basis.”

The excitement tutors like Marcus Ake feel on day one is not always shared by students, either. One in particular was chronically absent, sometimes walking the halls. 

“The very first thing they said to me was ‘look, I know I’m bad at math. I don’t need you to tell me that,’ ” he said. 

Ake stressed the truth: “I’m not here for that… I’m literally here to hang out and do some math at the same time. This is low stress.” By the end of the semester, the student showed up every day, and asked if Ake would be there next semester.

Oklahoma has established an , but administrators told ����Ӱ�� a main draw of this partnership was the fact that it supports students within the school day. 

“You’re going to be really challenged to get kids to skip football practice, or not have their part time job or go home to take a nap,” said Chris Brewster, Superintendent for Santa Fe South schools.

Their high school, he said, was lucky — already offering a foundational math class for students who needed another dose. Accordingly, they didn’t have to hire an outside teacher of record or do any scheduling gymnastics to get kids enrolled.

Some school sites approached for the partnership declined, citing those very barriers. They couldn’t spare a teacher to supervise the period or didn’t want to take away student electives.

“These are very costly interventions. I can’t imagine at this point, if I had to bear that cost,” Brewster added. 

OU is gearing up for the long haul, to establish a center that will serve as a hub for high-dosage tutoring in the state. Talks with other universities have begun, including a March symposium to share training and funding resources, like local foundations, banks and national organizations.

On the research end, the University will look into how the program has affected discipline, attendance, tardiness rates and student GPAs, to publish early findings later this spring. Next year, they’ll study how effective a 3:1 student to tutor pairing can be.

Students say the tutoring is, “giving them confidence in math that they didn’t have before and that the relationship with their tutors is meaningful… something that makes them happy about being at school,” Hamlin added.

Other tutoring offerings often pair students with many instructors, and if virtual, can make it difficult for students to build trust and comfort. 

For Ake, who supports two students with completely opposite learning styles, the common denominator is a human one. They talk school drama, weekend plans, birthdays, track meets or whatever students bring up offhand during the period.  

“Showing an interest in their lives has gone a long way,” he said. “I can show them that I’m not just some stranger but I am someone who cares about them as well.”

It’s 9:05 a.m. at Hendley Elementary School in southeast Washington, D.C. when Isabel Chae meets her first tutee of the day. The American University student pulls the first grader, who she describes as “so bubbly, so bright,” out of his classroom and the youngster asks to get a drink of water.��

He sprints backward down the hallway to the fountain. “Please walk,” Chae calls from behind, unfazed by the boy’s surplus energy.

“I’m like, ‘OK, great. You seem like you’re in a frame of mind where you just want to be extra engaged with the lesson.’ ”&�Բ�����;

The college sophomore then appoints the student “Mr. Page-Turner” and makes sure to pause regularly during her read-aloud to let him decode words. During the writing portion of their lesson, she challenges him to print each word in a different color.

She’s honed these strategies over two semesters and a summer of work as a participant in American University’s program, a partnership between the college and DC Public Schools that seeks to boost below-grade-level readers. The 59 tutees who currently work with her and her peers progress about 25% faster in reading than the national average, according to pre- and post-tests administered by the university.

It’s a model experts say has the potential to help millions of K-12 students recoup learning lost during COVID. Researchers point to tutoring, either one-on-one or in small groups, as among the methods for academic recovery. But school leaders looking to roll out such programs have often been by educator shortages and pandemic fatigue.

Recruiting university students who, like Chae, are considering careers in education could “unlock” a huge new pool of human capital for the efforts, said Kevin Huffman, CEO of , a nonprofit organization working to scale tutoring nationwide.

“There are more than half a million people at any given time who are studying to become a teacher in this country and very few of them tutor,” he said. At the same time, “you’ve got districts that need people and it just feels like a match that needs to be made.”

A win-win

Accelerate has distributed $10 million in grants to 31 tutoring initiatives across the country this school year, including $750,000 to a nonprofit working to bring teacher candidates into high-needs schools as tutors. American University’s Future Teacher Tutors initiative is one of the 22 programs in the group’s network, which altogether account for 900 tutors serving approximately 2,500 students across 13 states.

The model is simultaneously a way to “meet the very real needs of students and families [and] an opportunity to strengthen the way we prepare future teachers,” said Patrick Steck, policy advisor at Deans for Impact.

David Murray, program manager for the tutoring initiative at American, agrees that bringing pre-service teachers into local classrooms has yielded a “synergy” that has “been super beneficial, both for the tutors and the students.”&�Բ�����;

Normally, students in the school’s college of education would not gain classroom experience until their junior or senior year. But after a recent change, a course typically taken by underclassmen now requires tutoring as a service learning requirement. The majority of students in the Future Teacher Tutors program, which employed 21 undergrads this fall, come from that course, said Ocheze Joseph, director of education undergraduate programs.

“We decided that at American we wanted to … begin to engage our students in hands-on experiences working with students as early as their freshman and sophomore years,” the administrator explained. “The earlier that they are working with children, getting acclimated to the classroom environment, the stronger their confidence grows.”

To Chae, the idea of working as a lead teacher fresh out of college without the in-depth experiences she’s gained as a tutor seems “terrifying.” Now, having spent so much time working with students, she has realistic expectations. It will still be “somewhat terrifying,” she said, “but I know what I’m in for.”

All tutors earn over $20 per hour for their work and the program gives a stipend for transportation via Uber or Lyft, helping undergrads access K-12 campuses that are on the opposite side of the city. American University foots the bill thanks to literacy grants it received from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education via the agency’s partnership and from the Benedict Silverman Foundation, who also provides the used by the tutors.

Most tutors work about four hours per week, but Chae works as many as 12, spending all day at Hendley Elementary on Tuesdays and Fridays. All told, the college sophomore feels she’s “paid very well” and is “given a lot of support.” She and her peers engage in regular training sessions to hone their tutoring skills and meet weekly with a program coordinator. 

Scale and sustainability

Still, the program at American University only reaches a tiny fraction of the D.C. students in need of tutoring, a difficulty that’s plagued similar initiatives in other districts and states as well.

Youth nationwide saw historic backslides in reading and math during the pandemic, with some of the most severe losses for students living in poverty. Researchers say academic recovery efforts have not yet matched the scale of missed learning.

“The puzzle is how you take [tutoring interventions] to a large scale,” Huffman said.

He thinks that’s where Deans for Impact can step in, figuring out how to replicate initiatives like the one at American. The 22 tutoring initiatives already in the organization’s network exist within a universe of roughly 2,100 educator preparation programs nationwide. It’s the “most obvious, glaring hole in the human capital pipeline for tutors,” said the Accelerate CEO.

“People who already want to become teachers, they should all be tutoring students as part of that work. … It would reach millions of kids,” he said.

It’s a vision that Steck, at Deans for Impact, sees as especially urgent on the heels of the pandemic, but also necessary for the long term. Though many districts are now funding learning recovery efforts with federal stimulus dollars, his organization is seeking to lift up financially sustainable models that can operate even after relief funds dry up in 2024.

A central question is: “How do we make high-quality tutoring something that doesn’t just exist in the context of COVID relief efforts … but something that is a standard part of how we support students and communities?” he said.

At Hendley Elementary, Chae sees the benefits in real time for her six tutees.

One of the first graders she works with began the year not knowing all the letters of the alphabet. She would tune out of her literacy lessons because she was frustrated. Now, the girl “lights up” when it’s time for tutoring and persists even when she has difficulty sounding out the words — a trait Chae knows can spell gains far into the future.

“She will sit there and plug away at it. … And I’m like, ‘You’re super close.’ And she consistently gives that little extra bit of effort just to get the word, which is fantastic to see.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to Deans for Impact, Accelerate and ����Ӱ��. The Overdeck Family Foundation provides financial support to Accelerate and ����Ӱ��. The Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and the Joyce Foundation provide financial support to Deans for Impact and ����Ӱ��.

Mesa, Arizona — A teacher in training darted among students, tallying how many needed his help with a history unit on Islam. A veteran math teacher hovered near a cluster of desks, coaching some 50 freshmen on a geometry assignment. A science teacher checked students’ homework, while an English teacher spoke loudly into a microphone at the front of the classroom, giving instruction, to keep students on track.

One hundred thirty-five students, four teachers, one giant classroom: This is what ninth grade looks like at Westwood High School, in Mesa, Arizona’s largest school system. There, an innovative teaching model has taken hold, and is spreading to other schools in the district and beyond.

Five years ago, faced with high teacher turnover and declining student enrollment, Westwood’s leaders decided to try something different. Working with professors at Arizona State University’s teachers college, they piloted a classroom model known as team teaching. It allows teachers to voluntarily dissolve the walls that separate their classes across physical or grade divides.

The teachers share large groups of students — sometimes 100 or more — and rotate between big group instruction, one-on-one interventions, small study groups or whatever the teachers as a team agree is a priority that day. What looks at times like chaos is in fact part of a carefully orchestrated plan: Each morning, the Westwood teams meet for two hours to hash out a personalized program for every student on their shared roster, dictating the lessons, skills and assignments the team will focus on that day.

By giving teachers more opportunity to collaborate and greater control over how and what they teach, Mesa’s administrators hoped to fill staffing gaps and boost teacher morale and retention. Initial research suggests the gamble could pay off. This year, the district expanded the concept to a third of its 82 schools. (Westwood uses the model for all freshmen classes and is expanding it to the upper grades soon.) The team-teaching strategy is also drawing interest from school leaders across the U.S., who are eager for new approaches at a time when the effects of the pandemic have dampened teacher morale and worsened staff shortages.

“The pandemic taught us two things: One is people want flexibility, and the other is people don’t want to be isolated,” said Carole Basile, dean of ASU’s teachers college, who helped design the teaching model. “The education profession is both of those. It is inflexible, and it is isolating.”

Team teaching, she said, turns these ideas on their head.

ASU and surrounding school districts started investigating team teaching about six years ago. Enrollment at teacher preparation programs around the country was plummeting, as more young people sought out careers that offered better pay, more flexibility and less stress.

Team teaching, a concept first introduced in schools in the 1960s, appealed to the ASU researchers because they felt its unusual staffing structure could help revitalize teachers. And it resonated with school district leaders, who’d come to believe the model of one teacher lecturing at the front of a classroom to many kids wasn’t working.

“Teachers are doing fantastic things, but it’s very rare a teacher walks into another room to see what’s happening,” said Andi Fourlis, superintendent of Mesa Public Schools, one of 10 Arizona districts that have adopted the model. “Our profession is so slow to advance because we are working in isolation.”

Fourlis and others also see team teaching as a way to set their schools apart as a new universal voucher program in Arizona goes into effect, potentially drawing more families and teachers away to private schools. And proponents of the classroom model say it empowers educators at a time when Republicans in Arizona and other states are targeting schools in a growing culture war, passing legislation to restrict what teachers can say about topics such as gender identity and race. 

Peggy Beesley, a math teacher now in her fifth year with Westwood’s team, recalled feeling that parents and politicians gave little consideration to her health and safety as they debated school closures. “It’s almost like we have to give up our humanity to become a teacher,” she said. The team, however, made it easier to tune out what was happening outside classroom walls. And her teammates offer built-in, daily training on new ways to teach.

“I’m, what, 16 or 17 years in and I’m still struggling,” Beesley said. “Without my team, I would have quit — long ago. My teammates make me better.”

Of course, revamping teaching approaches can’t fix some of the biggest frustrations many teachers have about their profession, such as low pay. But early results from Mesa show team teaching may be helping to reverse low morale. In a survey of hundreds of the district’s teachers last year, researchers from Johns Hopkins University found that those who worked on teams reported greater satisfaction with their job, more frequent collaborations with colleagues and more positive interactions with students. Data on the impact on teacher vacancies, however, remains limited.

School districts that have adopted the model are meanwhile beginning to collect data on its impact on students. A district in southeastern Arizona randomly assigned children to classrooms with the team-teaching model, to test whether it improves student performance. Early data from Westwood show on-time course completion — a strong predictor of whether freshmen will graduate — improved after the high school started using the team approach for all ninth graders. ASU has found that students in team-based classrooms have better attendance, earn more credits toward graduation and post higher GPAs.

The model is not for everyone. Beesley has tried to recruit other math teachers to volunteer for a team, but many tell her they prefer to work alone. Team teaching can also be a scheduling nightmare, especially at schools like Westwood where only some staff work in teams, and principals have to balance their time and needs with those of other teachers. School leaders in Mesa stress they would never force teachers to participate on a team; the district only plans to expand the model to half of its schools.

On a recent morning at Westwood High, the four teachers and 135 freshmen on the team settled into a boisterous routine.

They ignored the Halloween music that blared from the school speakers, marking a new period for older students at the school. As their peers in the higher grades shuffled to another 50-minute class, the freshmen continued into a second hour of their work. Most students busied themselves with the day’s assignments, alone or in pairs, while others waited for a specific teacher’s help.

The team regularly welcomes other educators into the classroom, for bilingual or special education services and other one-on-one support. But substitute teachers are rare, since teachers can plan their schedules to accommodate their teammates’ absences.

Another benefit of teams, teachers say, is that they can help each other improve their instruction. During the planning session earlier that morning, English teacher Jeff Hall shared a critique with science teacher Kelsey Meeks: Her recent lecture, on something she called “the central dogma of biology,” had befuddled him and their other teammates.

“If the science is too confusing for me, can you imagine the frustration you feel as kids?” Hall said. “She would never know that on her own.”

Hall, who moonlights as an improv comic, had quit teaching right before COVID. He worked odd jobs during his time out of the classroom and realized what those jobs offered that teaching didn’t: a chance to work alongside other adults and collaborate. The need for a steadier paycheck convinced Hall to return to the classroom last year, but he only applied for positions to teach on a team.

“Why don’t we do this for every teacher?” Hall said. “Why was I — a student teacher with zero experience teaching English — handed the keys to an entire class of kids on day one? All alone? That doesn’t work for anyone.”

At nearby Whittier Elementary School, the team teaching model looks somewhat different.

In some cases, teams span grade levels. A group of more than 100 fourth and fifth graders, led by a team of seven educators, was spread out across two classrooms one recent weekday. Teacher Karly LaOrange sat in a circle with three English learners who were struggling with phonics, while a student teacher paged through the same workbook as LaOrange with a larger group of readers, already on grade level. A third instructor nudged another set of kids toward the proper pronunciation of difficult words in another book, “All about Manatees.” Across the hall, another group of students worked with a second set of teachers.

Principal Andrea Lang Sims said she likes the model because she doesn’t have to worry much about new teachers; they can learn from the mentors on their teams. The team approach also allows teachers to pool their skills and work more effectively with students and their parents, she said. A quarter of the school’s families don’t speak English as their primary language, so Lang Sims tries to place a bilingual educator on each team.

“Not every teacher’s good with parents on day one, or ever,” said Lang Sims. “Not every teacher can speak Spanish or Mandarin or Vietnamese. Not every teacher can do everything every day.”

Proponents of the ASU model acknowledge it doesn’t work perfectly in a system built around the assumption that every classroom has one teacher. The model presents thorny questions, for example, about how to evaluate four teachers on the performance of 135 students. And teachers on the Westwood team argue they receive too little training on the model.

Students, however, have noticed a difference.

Quinton Rawls attended a middle school with no teams and not enough teachers. Two weeks into eighth grade, his science teacher quit — and was replaced by a series of subs. “I got away with everything,” recalled the 14-year-old.

That’s not the case in ninth grade, said Rawls. He said he appreciates the extra attention that comes with being in a class with so many teachers at once.

“There’s four of them watching me all the time,” he said. “I think that’s a good thing. I’m not really wasting time.”

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

In April of his senior year at Timberline High School, after years of conflict at home, Mikel Jake “MJ” Dizon became homeless.

He was a few months from graduation, but considered dropping out of school to focus on his job as a Starbucks barista to make money for rent. This decision could redirect the course of Dizon’s life.

Only 59% of homeless students in Washington state graduate in four years compared to 83% of all students. A similar disparity exists nationally as well. 

This has a snowball effect. Not having a high school degree is the greatest single risk factor for experiencing homelessness after school, according to the Chapin Hall research institute at the University of Chicago.

The longer a person remains homeless, the more difficult obtaining stable housing becomes. If a homeless student becomes a chronically homeless adult, they more often require not only housing but also services for mental health, physical health, and substance abuse treatment.

But at North Thurston Public Schools, the 661 students like Dizon, who are sleeping on friends’ couches, in vehicles, in shelters or in tents — with or without their families — are graduating at nearly the same rates as their peers. The district has shown that this feat just requires dedicated and consistent support.

The Seattle Times’ Project Homeless is collaborating with the Center for Public Integrity to examine how homeless students are faring in Washington and across the U.S. This series will also include a look at school discipline rates for Washington’s 40,000 homeless students, as well as federal funding disparities among states.

Beginning six years ago, North Thurston hired staff, called “student navigators,” whose sole function is to attend to each homeless student’s needs, whether that’s housing or food, feeling like they belong at school, or planning for the future beyond graduation.

It has worked. 

North Thurston’s graduation rates for homeless students rose from 65% in 2017 to 84% in 2020 and 81% in 2021 — within 7 percentage points of the district’s overall graduation rate.

State education officials say that North Thurston has provided a blueprint to limiting the impact that homelessness has on the rest of a student’s life. Now, they just need the money to scale it up.

Our mantra is “remove all barriers”

Since Dizon’s family immigrated to the United States from the Philippines in 2015, he said he’s been forced to leave his home three times due to conflicts with his parents, at times because he didn’t feel safe there.

“I came out of the closet to my parents, and my father wasn’t so accepting,” Dizon said. “They didn’t want to be my parents anymore. And I wasn’t their son.”

Forty percent of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ, 68% of whom cite family rejection as a major reason they become homeless, according to the Raikes Foundation.

Dizon wasn’t able to sleep at night his senior year when he realized he would become homeless. He had trouble waking up in time to attend drama, his favorite class. Soon, he was failing a class and drowning in all the tasks he needed to complete.

His boyfriend’s mom, a teacher at the district, told him a student navigator could help him.

Dizon connected with Gina Goddard, the student navigator at Timberline High School, who invited him into her office and spent hours on the phone with him to sign up for food stamps, and helped connect him with a foundation that provided him money for rent. 

“If you are worried about whether or not you’re going to be able to eat or where you’re going to sleep, it is very, very hard to concentrate on your Spanish test,” said Leslie Van Leishout, who helped create North Thurston’s student navigator program in an effort to “remove all barriers” for homeless students.

That support pulled Dizon above water.

How North Thurston’s student navigator program began

The amount of time student navigators have to spend with their homeless students is what sets North Thurston apart from many other districts.

Before North Thurston had a student navigator in each high school, the district had a single homeless student liaison who was in charge of supporting about 900 homeless students and a similar number of foster care children.

Every school district in the nation is mandated to have a liaison under the McKinney-Vento Act, a federal law passed in 1987 to ensure that students experiencing homelessness “have access to the same free, appropriate public education” as other children.

But the law and the accompanying federal funding don’t provide the level of support homeless students need, education officials and advocates say. 

Much of the North Thurston liaison’s time, Van Leishout said, was spent on paperwork and meetings rather than one-on-one support for homeless students.

Many have duties beyond even that. Sometimes, the McKinney-Vento liaison is also a principal or the district’s superintendent. Nearly 60% of McKinney-Vento liaisons statewide said they have less than four hours a week to serve homeless students, according to a 2022 report by the state’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Washington state passed several laws in the last decade to strengthen the McKinney-Vento Act, one requiring every individual school in the state to designate a staff member as a point of contact for homeless students. But that had the same problem of adding duties onto already burdened staff, usually counselors.

Van Leishout wanted to try something new in North Thurston. Formerly a teacher in the district for almost 20 years, and director of student support for seven years, she had the superintendent’s trust to try new ideas, and she could write the grant applications to support them.  

She repurposed federal McKinney-Vento Act funding the district was using primarily for tutoring homeless students to pay for one student navigator. 

It worked instantly. In the first full year of the program, the district’s graduation rates for homeless students rose 7 percentage points.

The next year, Van Leishout applied for a Washington-state specific grant to help homeless students, which paid for another student navigator. Then, with the pandemic, came funding from the federal government that enabled Van Leishout to add two more student navigators. 

For three straight years since the program began, the graduation rate rose.

Could any district do it?

North Thurston’s student navigator program is “what the McKinney-Vento Act at its heart was designed to do but with the resources to actually do it,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of Schoolhouse Connection, a national advocacy nonprofit for homeless students.

But the funding is precarious and limited.

Two student navigator positions may expire soon as money from the American Rescue Plan runs out.

“That’s a little bit challenging to know what’s going to happen next,” Van Leishout said.

And not every district in the state could marshal as much ongoing funding as North Thurston.

Both federal and state funding for homeless student programs are competitive — not every district applies and not every district that applies wins. 

Washington received in 2019 about $1.5 million of McKinney-Vento grant funding to distribute to districts, and the state’s Homeless Student Stability education Program provides $876,000 per year.

Less than 15% of school districts in the state receive federal McKinney-Vento grant funding and less than 6% of districts receive the state Homeless Student Stability education Program grant.

“That by no means is going to come even close to meeting the need that we have given the number of students that are experiencing homelessness,” said Vivian Rogers-Decker, the state’s Homeless Student Stability education Program supervisor.

Washington does better than most states at identifying and tracking its homeless students, but an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity shows that the lack of funding is likely causing many to fall through the cracks with more than 300,000 homeless students nationally, and at least 2,000 statewide, who  by law.

Rogers-Decker says North Thurston’s model of providing one-on-one support to homeless students is a best practice that should be emulated in districts around the state, but more funding is needed.

Seattle Public Schools, the largest district in the state, with more than twice the number of homeless students as North Thurston, gets the same amount of McKinney-Vento grant funding and none from the state’s Homeless Student Stability education Program. 

Whereas each student navigator in North Thurston provides individualized support for about 65 high school students, in Seattle, each full-time staff member dedicated to supporting homeless students serves more than 200 across the district.

“Do I think there’s enough resources? Absolutely not,” said Jeanea Proctor-Mills, Seattle Public Schools’ McKinney-Vento liaison. 

Like most districts in the state and nation, Seattle’s 64% graduation rate for its homeless students lags behind its overall graduation rate of 87%.

Personalized attention leads to graduation

Lorin Griffitts, one of North Thurston’s student navigators and a former homelessness services provider, said she does what she hopes “a really good mom would do.”&�Բ�����;

She scrutinizes her students’ attendance and grades and notices when they start falling off. She meets with students regularly, some every day, in her office in the high school. She provides them whatever they need. Sometimes that’s a sleeping bag, other times it’s just a listening ear. 

Student navigators say they need to support students’ participation in sports and extracurriculars if they expect them to maintain an interest in school amid what is often turmoil outside of it.

For Dizon, that was theater. He looks the part with long black hair, wearing plaid pants, a pearl necklace and wire-rim glasses. He produced, wrote and directed his first play his senior year and knew he wanted to keep at it.

“I’m really passionate about writing,” Dizon said. 

So when Dizon couldn’t afford a school trip to a Shakespeare festival after he became homeless, his navigator, Goddard found funds to pay for it. 

Students also need to see a path for themselves after school, one worth graduating for, navigators say.

Dizon had little time to think about that last spring. His priority at the time was finding a place to live, so when Dizon received his acceptance letter to college, he was overwhelmed by the amount of paperwork he needed to complete.

Goddard spent hours with him filling out forms for financial aid and submitting enrollment papers, in addition to making sure he had a roof over his head until school started. 

Oftentimes, Goddard is her students’ only support.

“A lot of the things that the kids deal with are super overwhelming. And so I think that knowing somebody cares about them is huge,” Goddard said. “And I do really care about my students.”

Dizon is now a freshman at Western Washington University, hoping to graduate with a degree in theater.

“I call her Miss. G. Like, you know, my aunt,” Dizon said. “I wouldn’t have been so comfortable sitting here in my dorm room if it wasn’t for her help.”&�Բ�����;

School district or homelessness system?

In many ways, North Thurston has created a homelessness response system within its school district where student navigators act like case managers. 

The district even repurposed an unused building into a space where homeless and low-income students and families can do their laundry and pick up food, household items, clothes and school supplies. Community organizations meet families there to offer housing, health services and help obtaining public benefits.

That’s possible largely due to the community’s generosity. All the food, clothes, and supplies are donated by individuals or local businesses. The district also received more than $150,000 last year in cash donations for homeless students. 

That generosity has also been cultivated by student navigators who have built relationships with the community. For example, the North Thurston Education Foundation, which provided Dizon rent money when he became homeless, has increased its giving to the district more than threefold since the student navigator program began. 

Last year, the district built on its success by adding a bilingual student navigator, Jessica Llamas, who is able to reach Spanish-speaking families by allowing them to “kind of put their guard down.”&�Բ�����;

North Thurston is hoping to add a student navigator in its middle schools, and eventually its elementary schools.

That is, if it can find the money.

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

The first rule of Play Club is you can’t hurt anyone.

That’s actually the only rule.

On a Thursday afternoon after the last school bell rings, several dozen third, fourth and fifth graders from Central Academy of the Arts in Pickens County, South Carolina, stream out of the school and scatter round the yard. How to spend the next two hours is entirely up to them.

Quickly there are shrieks from a basketball court where several have started a game of chase. At a picnic table, two girls pull out a notebook to continue writing their novel. Children sit in a row in the shade of the school building talking and eating snacks. Three boys stand in boxes — they are actually train cars, one declares — going chugga chugga down the sidewalk.

Kevin Stinehart just watches. Stinehart, one of two adults supervising, likens himself to a lifeguard. If someone is in danger, he will intervene. Otherwise, the students are in charge.

“It’s good for our souls just to watch them play and be kids,” Stinehart said.

The amount of time children have for unstructured free play has been declining for decades, replaced by activities managed by well-intentioned adults. Today’s children spend about half as much time playing outside each week as their parents did, . COVID-19 caused more disruptions. Play dates and recess were curtailed for safety concerns. Even as those worries have subsided, efforts to remediate learning losses before, during or after school are replacing play in many places.

When Stinehart started Central Academy’s Play Club years ago, the fourth grade teacher just thought children needed more time to play like he did as a child, free from the adult gaze. Only after the club started did he begin to fully realize how seriously play matters for developing children.

There was one child at his school who teachers had never seen smile before the boy joined Play Club. He started making friends and almost instantly his behavioral issues — one week three different teachers had sent him to the principal’s office — disappeared. Teachers saw similar behavior improvements schoolwide. 

Then there were the academic benefits: A researcher who studied Central Academy’s club found that participating students did better on reading and math tests.

Play would be important even without those benefits, Stinehart and others stress. Today’s children have high rates of anxiety and depression and overall feelings of isolation, and helping them socially and emotionally was the school’s ultimate goal.

But for parents and educators alike who have worried over the learning disruptions caused by the pandemic, the academic benefits are noteworthy perks.  

“We didn’t start Play Club to raise test scores,” he said. “All of that was just icing on the cake.”

Teaching play

Central Academy is in the cradle of play.

The Pickens County superintendent is a longtime play advocate. Danny Merck traveled to Finland in 2018 and after seeing how Scandinavian schools take 15-minute breaks every 45 minutes, Merck came home and encouraged his principals to add a second recess. Once you see that kind of joy, you try to emulate it as best you can, he said.

Pickens is also home to Clemson University, where a national coalition that promotes the importance of lifelong play is headquartered. It was at the group’s annual conference one year where Stinehart met Lenore Skenazy and got the idea for Play Club.

Skenazy made headlines over a decade ago after she let her 9-year-old ride the New York City subway unchaperoned. She wrote a blog, and later a book, called Free-Range Kids and is one the most outspoken advocates for free play and children’s independence. Her nonprofit, Let Grow,  and helps schools around the country create their own.

“We’d like to make sure that childhood isn’t so cultivated and so bubble-wrapped,” she said.

Skenazy knew many parents are nervous about the idea of free play. Many of those with grade-school-aged children are young enough to have grown up without experiencing it much themselves. Her group decided to anchor the Play Clubs at schools because children are there already and it’s generally a place that parents trust. Play Clubs have rules that truly unstructured free play doesn’t, but Skenazy’s group saw the clubs as a way to introduce the idea.

Stinehart loved the club concept and it was an easy sell to his principal, Tish Goode. The two had talked frequently about how their students just didn’t seem to know how to play. Many had underdeveloped social skills, well before the pandemic exacerbated those concerns.

Goode, who went to the conference with Stinehart, said she started to realize children at her school were struggling to play simply because they were not given many opportunities to learn how. When adults solve every single conflict, children don’t learn how to do so themselves.

Central Academy’s club operates like most. Stinehart opens enrollment twice a year, filling a fall and spring cohort. There’s always a waiting list — 81 students signed up for 40 spots in the current cohort — so this year he added a third section. Other teachers help supervise on a rotating basis. The club meets weekly on Thursdays after school ends.

Parents and students alike sign a contract agreeing to the rules. No, you can’t hurt anyone. But they also agree children will work out problems themselves. It’s not the adults’ job to mediate interpersonal conflicts. It’s not their job to entertain or ensure children are having fun, either.

This makes Play Club different from recess. At recess, Stinehart will intervene if he sees a child say, cutting the line to go on the slide out of turn. During Play Club, he’ll say nothing.

But what happens is students start to police themselves. A few years ago, Stinehart watched as a group of students decided to make a big pile of leaves. Another child strolled over and sat in the middle of the pile, clearly trying to instigate something. At first, the others complained and begged the boy to move. He doubled down. The adults were wary, nervous they might need to intervene. Then the group decided the leaf pile was big enough for them all. When his behavior stopped getting a rise out of the others, the boy got bored and went to play somewhere else.

Students won’t always solve problems so easily, Skenazy said, but they get better with practice.

“You’re constantly figuring out how to make things happen in the best way,” she said. “That means trying out new ways that might not work, but it doesn’t matter because it’s just play.”

Goode, the principal, was regularly dealing with 200 or more disciplinary incidents a year. Nearly all were from playground fights. Last year, less than 50 crossed her desk. She credits that to Play Club’s influence. She sees students at recess talking out problems instead of fighting.

A head taller

A lot of lessons are imparted during what can look like a carefree activity.

Free play builds a child’s sense of independence. Children learn critical thinking skills and how to interact with others in the world. They grow confidence in their own ability to solve problems.

Peter Gray has been studying play since the 1980s, a decade that marked the biggest decline in the amount of time children spend each week playing. Gray helped develop the Play Club model based on his research showing the value not just of play, but of mixed-age interactions.

Play was at its height in the 1950s. Baby Boomers were young and children of all ages would play until the streetlights came on. The time children spent playing each week started to fall in the mid-1960s but two cultural changes in the 80s prompted a more drastic decline.

First, academic expectations rose. The average time students spent at school and on homework increased by 12 hours a week, a product of a nation worried about falling behind academically. Second, several high-profile kidnappings led to a rise in stranger danger. It became bad parenting to not know where your child was at all times. Working parents started to enroll their children in after-school activities that promised to keep them both entertained and safe but which substituted child-led play for play that’s supervised and managed by adults.

Gray’s son was a child in the 1980s and went to an unorthodox school that bucked the trends happening nationwide. His son’s school incorporated significant time for free play and independent exploration, and the experience made Gray want to understand how exactly children learn from play.

The real magic happens when children of different ages play together, Gray has come to believe. There’s a perception that older children will bully younger ones, or dumb down their play. His research and others’ has found the opposite happens.

Older children are empathetic and kinder to younger children than they are to their peers. They like explaining how games work, a skill that flexes their own language abilities. And younger children love playing with the big kids. The saying among people who study this is that children become a head taller when they play. A group of 5- and 6-year-olds who can’t read couldn’t play a game that requires that. With older children’s help, they can usually figure it out.

Translate to the classroom

The study at Central Academy is the first to look into play’s academic benefits.

Educators at the school were eager to collaborate with Melyssa Mandelbaum, a doctoral candidate at Long Island University. Mandelbaum loved the concepts of independence and resilience that Play Clubs try to foster.

Mandelbaum studied the fall 2019 cohort, comparing students who participated with those who were waitlisted. She looked at attendance, tardiness and reading and math test scores.

There ended up not being a difference in the two groups when it came to attendance or tardiness, something that could be because Play Club only meets once a week. But when it came to academics, she found the Play Club students did significantly better in both subjects.

Mandelbaum’s study doesn’t explain why Play Club students did better academically. Her sample was small and she says more research needs to be done. But it speaks to the skills that researchers have observed in free play for years, she said. A student explaining how a game works is using expressing language skills. One keeping track of scores is using math.

“If you’re building those skills, that might actually really translate to the classroom,” Mandelbaum said.

It’s promising to see how even small amounts of free play can boost student achievement, she said. Central Academy’s Play Club just meets weekly for a couple of hours. Mandelbaum said she’s curious if more frequent play would have an even larger effect. 

Gray and Skenazy said they weren’t surprised by what Mandelbaum found.

When children are playing, they’re forced to keep trying to find solutions to problems. That’s the same type of critical thinking required in the classroom.

Skenazy hopes educators take note and get some relief from the findings, particularly as she sees schools compensate for COVID learning loss by scaling down recess. 

“So many schools have been under the gun in terms of standardized testing that they cut back on free time and free play to give kids more time to quote unquote ‘prepare for the tests,’” she said. “What great news that preparing for the test turns out to be play.”

The Pickens educators were a little bit more surprised by the results. When Stinehart started Play Club, test scores were the last thing on his mind.

Stinehart identifies with Scandinavian educators the superintendent learned about on his visit in 2018. They were surprised the country’s test scores were some of the highest in the world since scores were never their primary focus. It speaks to how critical a child’s emotional and social well-being is to their academic success. You can’t have one without the other.

Just visiting

Out on the playground Stinehart could hardly contain his excitement.

Rainstorms had threatened to push the second play club of the school year inside, but instead the clouds broke and the sun was bearing down. Everyone was hot and sweaty.

“Look at this,” he said, pointing.

Perched on the playground equipment were two girls carefully taking a small parachute and arranging it over top. After putting up their makeshift umbrella, the girls just sat in the shade talking.

Stinehart had never seen students play with the parachute that way or realize it could be used like that. But this is the type of creativity and problem-solving he sees happening in Play Club regularly. Instead of complaining about the heat, the girls just worked together to mitigate it.

The girls’ canopy quickly drew others’ attention and their chat ended abruptly. The playground set had instantly, imaginatively, transformed into a castle under siege.

“I’m infiltrating,” fourth grader Jackson Buier screamed.

“Get out!,” third grader Evelyn Diaz-Cabera told him.

Buier changed his tactic.

“OK, I’m only visiting now. I’m just visiting, not infiltrating,” he said, grinning.

Buier and a few others climbed the slide. The siege ended quickly, everyone’s attention turning elsewhere. Some tossed a beanbag around. A few played on a seesaw. A boy sat by himself on a bench with a box over his head, watching the whole scene through the peephole he’d carved out using Stinehart’s keys. Another child scaled the playground equipment, climbing to the tippy-top of the monkey bars. A single look at the distance to the ground revealed her regret, and she started to climb back down.

“This is too dangerous, I’m not doing this,” third grader Riley Cain said.

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

What’s for lunch?

For millions of school students, the answer may be fresh lettuce and tomatoes, apples and carrots grown by nearby farmers, or, in a few states, fresh lamb or haddock, raised or caught locally.

Local foods, once rare on school lunch trays, are gradually becoming more available in school cafeterias as states promote fresh produce, legumes, meats and fish.

Farm-to-school programs aim to improve the quality of school lunches and educate students about nutrition and where their food comes from. Programs also provide new markets for growers, which can strengthen local economies. Nearly all states have a farm-to-school program, but at least 10 states enacted laws this year or last boosting theirs, though some measures faced opposition over increased food costs.

When restaurants closed during the pandemic, small farmers, ranchers and fishermen found farm-to-school programs a lifeline.

“COVID hit us pretty hard. It was a major setback,” said Phil Raymond, a first-generation farmer who grows artisan lettuces, microgreens and herbs in Okemos, Michigan, near East Lansing. His regular customers, including restaurants, country clubs and caterers, cut back or stopped ordering altogether.

Raymond, who with three friends founded Blue Mitten Hydroponic Farms in 2016 and is general manager and sales manager, had never thought of selling to schools.

“We didn’t know that was an option. We figured they went with the big distributors,” he said in an interview.

Then he connected with 10 Cents a Meal for Michigan’s Kids and Farms, a state farm-to-school program that matches funding for what schools spend on Michigan-grown fruits, vegetables and legumes with grants up to 10 cents a meal.

Now Raymond delivers weekly four-variety, mixed-case lettuce to four or five school districts in his county.

“It’s quite a lot of lettuce — more than we expected,” he said.

In addition to Michigan, states that passed legislation this year or in 2021 to expand farm-to-school programs include California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Nebraska, Vermont, Virginia and Wyoming, according to the National Farm to School Network. The nonprofit advocates for local food and nutrition education for children and for strengthening family farms and communities.

Hawaii’s new law requires public schools and other state institutions to spend at least 10% of their food dollars locally by 2025, with increases up to at least 50% by 2050. In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Buy American Food Act earlier this week, which requires certain schools to buy American foods unless they are at least 25% higher in price than imports.

In California and around the country, farm-to-school programs face several hurdles, including potentially higher food costs, shortages of staff to prepare the local foods and sometimes a lack of available farmers. California state education groups opposed the legislation, saying it would lead to price gouging and unaffordable, increased costs for school districts.

“Well-intentioned but harmful” is how the coalition of education groups described the bill.

Michigan’s 10 Cents a Meal program started as a pilot project in eight counties in the 2016-2017 school year with a $250,000 budget. The Michigan legislature has continued to grow the program, doubling state funding last year and again this year, to $9.3 million for 2022-2023. It now serves 585,000 students in 57 of 83 counties.

“The 10 Cents a Meal program feeds our kids and supports family farmers and growers,” said Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, when she signed the bill in July. “As we continue our economic jumpstart, we have to make sure everyone has the resources and support they need to succeed.”

Nearly every U.S. state and territory has a farm-to-school program and, while programs vary, each includes at least one of these elements: local food procurement, food education or school gardens, according to the National Farm to School Network.

Some states buy only fresh produce, while others include dairy, meat and grains. Coastal states, such as Maine and Massachusetts, include fish.

While studies have not conclusively shown improved academic achievement or increased fruit and vegetable consumption, research has shown students are more likely to try new foods in a farm-to-school setting.

An added benefit of farm-to-school programs for school food services is reliability.

“We’ve really seen great strides with the program. Especially with supply chain issues, schools that have a relationship with local growers are having an easier time getting their groceries,” Wendy Crowley, the Farm to School Program consultant for the Michigan Department of Education and lead contact for grantees, said in an interview.

Farm-to-school began with a few schools in different states in the late 1990s, then started rolling with the federal Farm to School grant program in 2013. The federal government has delivered nearly $75 million in grants, reaching more than 25 million students in nearly 60,000 schools.

The nation’s schools bought more than $1.2 billion in local foods in the 2018-2019 school year, about 20% of their food budget, and milk accounted for more than half of what they ordered locally. That’s according to the 2019 Farm to School Census, the most recent survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service.

Challenges to using local foods include cost — local is more expensive — as well as the staff and space needed to prepare the foods and the difficulty finding local suppliers, the survey found.

Maine schools rarely serve fresh fish, even though Maine is a coastal state, because of the cost, said Robin Kerber, coordinator of the state’s Farm and Sea to School program. The high cost also means many children may not see fresh fish on their dinner plates and don’t know whether they like it.

“There are a lot of communities where the parents are fishermen or lobstermen, but the family can’t afford to eat it,” she said in an interview.

After restaurants closed due to the pandemic in 2020, Maine used COVID-19 relief money to help fishermen sell fish. The state created a Local Foods Fund (formerly the Local Produce Fund) to match school districts $1 for every $3 up to $7,500 spent on produce, value-added dairy, protein or minimally processed foods.

The Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association donates excess fresh haddock, hake, monkfish and pollock from their catches to a location in Portland where schools pick up what they need.

The Maine Farm and Sea to School program also promotes local produce, supplies recipes and holds cooking classes and a cook-off.

Trent Emery, a first-generation produce farmer in Wayne, Maine, 17 miles west of Augusta, is a former teacher who started farming exclusively in 2009, first selling as a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) provider and to farmers markets.

To operate his 15-acre Emery Farm and greenhouses year-round, he developed relationships with schools and other institutions and now makes daily deliveries.

Through the Farm and Sea to School program, he delivers seasonal produce — beets to watermelons — to four school districts, for about 10% or 15% of his total business.

“I’d like for more schools to buy from our farm and from farmers in general,” he said.

This year, Vermont increased the budget for the state Farm to School and Early Childhood program to $500,000, and the legislature passed a universal school meals law, so that every child in Vermont is entitled to free school meals.

Nebraska established a farm-to-school program in 2021 and added early childhood education to the program this year.

Last year, Wyoming established the Protein Enhancement Project. A pilot project since 2017, the program has a budget of $25,000 to provide grants to schools to match their cost of processing donated beef, bison, lamb, pork and poultry starting in 2023.

California and Hawaii this year moved to require schools and other state agencies to buy local. Hawaii’s Farm to School law now requires the departments of education, health, public safety, defense and the University of Hawaii system to spend at least 10% of their food dollars on local fresh or local value-added, processed, agricultural food by 2025, with increases every five years, until 50% of food purchases by the departments are local by 2050.

In California, the agricultural community has complained for years that schools buy cheap imports of peaches and other fruit for school lunches, even though Buy American is a federal requirement of the National School Lunch Program, and the state has a Buy California law on the books.

California state Sen. Anna Caballero, a Democrat, sponsored the Buy American Food Act bill that will require state schools, community colleges and state universities, other than the University of California, to buy American foods unless they cost 25% more than imports.

“We have an agricultural industry to protect,” she said in an interview. “We saw what happened during the pandemic when shortages occur. This is a national security issue.”

The law will strengthen federal Buy American policy at the state level while protecting farm workers and the agricultural industry, she said.

The measure had bipartisan legislative support, but the education community pushed back. The California School Boards Association, on behalf of the California County Superintendents Educational Services Association and local school districts, had urged Newsom to veto the bill, saying in a news release the 25% was an “unreasonable standard” that would lead to price gouging as schools implement the new universal free school lunch service.

Vernon Billy, CEO and executive director of the California School Boards Association, declined repeated requests for an interview.

In his statement, Newsom said requests for additional resources will need to be included in the annual budget process.

Caballero said there’s money in the budget to cover the extra cost, though the money is not earmarked, and opponents say it could be used for other school meal costs.  

The law says buying American foods is a requirement, but it includes no penalties.

“This is not a gotcha,” Caballero said. “We’re not looking to make life difficult for the school districts.”

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

In 2000, the Gannett media company purchased the local newspaper in Muncie, Indiana, The Star Press. Much of what happened next will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the long, accelerating decline of independent local news sources.

As this magazine’s editor in chief, Paul Glastris, has , first the chains began economizing on independent local coverage. Then the chains themselves succumbed to takeovers by even more ruthlessly profit-minded “vulture capital” firms, of which the most notorious are Alden and GateHouse Media. Three years ago, GateHouse took over the Gannett chain (and rebranded itself with Gannett’s name). This has left The Star Press and countless other once-independent and -profitable local papers with smaller newsrooms, shrinking audiences, and fewer possibilities to do the kind of detailed coverage that connects citizens with the progress and challenges of their towns.

That’s the familiar part of the story. Here is the surprise: the way another local institution rose to fill part of the civic information gap. That institution is The Ball State Daily News, the student newspaper at Ball State University in Muncie. Its performance in the past four years, in response to a historic change in the city’s public schools, is an important illustration of how colleges can innovate to address community challenges.

The background to the story is a decades-long cycle of decline in the city’s public school system, Muncie Community Schools (MCS). Enrollments shrank, performance fell, and budgetary pressures rose until, in 2018, the state of Indiana officially placed the Muncie school system under state receivership (along with schools in Gary). Soon afterward, the new president of Ball State, Geoffrey Mearns, surprised the legislature with a proposal that the university assume operating responsibility for the city’s schools. (See James Fallows, ““).

This was a revolutionary step in U.S. educational history. We’ve found no previous case of a publicly run university managing a whole city’s K–12 schools. (The closest counterpart was in the 1980s, when Boston University, a private institution, assumed control of the Chelsea schools, near Boston.) But the legislature agreed; a new school board with new powers took office, and MCS began the slow process of recovery. 

But how would community members be kept informed on what was working and what wasn’t? The normal news outlets had strained to keep up with routine events. This is where The Ball State Daily News came in.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of The Ball State Daily News. In March 1922, the paper debuted as The Easterner, named for the Indiana State Normal School, Eastern Division, the institution that eventually became Ball State University. 

The front page of the very first edition, now viewable in digital archives, is formally laid out like today’s New York Times. It announced itself as “A Live Paper From a Live School,” the “adequate expression of the school life and spirit.” The college was then four years old, and its spirit was growing. The first day’s stories include growing enrollments, a geology class trip to the Pacific coast, the baseball schedule, an announcement of the Spanish Club banquet, and the addition of a trial faculty position for a “physical director” for women—name and gender unmentioned. 

Today, the Daily News publishes a daily digital edition, a Thursday print edition, and special editions throughout the year. It is housed within a big media footprint at BSU, the eight-year-old Unified Media Lab, a hub designed to encourage multimedia collaborations among the paper, two magazines, a media metrics training center, a weather broadcast station, a TV newscast, a sports media and production center, and WCRD radio. 

The paper maintains a professional culture. The director of the Unified Media Lab, Lisa Renze-Rhodes, identifies her role at the editorially independent Daily News as an adviser who is available to help students “make the best decisions they can.” But “at the end of the day, they have authority to move forward or not,” she told me. “We need seasoned reporters, who understand quality and repercussions.” The paper is financed through university support, advertising revenue, and donor dollars.

As the turnover of the Muncie schools was beginning, the Daily News leadership and Renze-Rhodes met and agreed that this was a chance to move beyond the paper’s traditional legacy of standard nuts-and-bolts reporting about the city.

The students thought hard about telling deeper stories about the community, and about the schools. They were aware that Muncie residents were used to hearing bad reports about the local schools—the collapsed budget, the dropping enrollment, the poor graduation rates. The student journalists felt they could serve the community better by going inside the classrooms to see what was happening and telling the stories of the people working to make change. Journalism exists to cover the exceptional—an emergency, a surprising event. But much of its value lies in covering the routine—what happens day to day in classrooms and communities, what is working and what is not. A student newspaper cannot pretend to be a major investigative journalism institution. But the Daily News has given Muncie’s citizens a more nuanced picture of their schools than they would otherwise have.

Brooke Kemp was the editor in chief of the Daily News when the partnership between the university and the schools was under way. In a “Letter From the Editor” in April 2019, she wrote, “We hope to provide a full picture of the commitment to progress within the district. While we know MCS faces obstacles, we want readers to see what is being done.” Kemp told me in a conversation this summer that it had been exciting to lead the paper at this historic moment: “A reporter’s dream—being young and being able to cover this felt like a big deal.”&�Բ�����;

Taylor Smith, this year’s outgoing Daily News editor in chief and a first-year reporter in 2018–19, echoes Kemp’s sentiment. Smith says the students were motivated to tell the stories that no one else was telling and were delighted to work like “real journalists.” One of her favorites is on a history teacher telling his students about Muncie itself, and “what it means for us to be Middletown and having inspired Americans that way.” (Nearly a century ago, Muncie was the setting for Middletown, a famed book of sociology.) 

Covering the story of the university-MCS partnership was a win for student journalists. Renze-Rhodes said this chance helped the students improve their craft, and “now more than ever, there is a need for strong, smart journalism.”&�Բ�����;

Over the past four years, the Daily News has published several dozen articles about different aspects of the collaboration between Ball State and MCS. The series is dubbed The Partnership Project and branded “One district. One university. One shared future.”

In April 2021, Natasha Leland reported from inside a first-grade Spanish-English bilingual classroom at West View Elementary. She talked with students, teachers, parents, and BSU faculty whose university students were helping at the school as part of their Spanish studies. She wrote about the history, goals, and everyday challenges of the dual-language program, and the context of bilingualism in the U.S. 

In May 2021, Dorian Ducre wrote about Indiana’s new bill, inspired by the 2020 national election, requiring middle school students to take a one-semester civics course. The article included commentary from a state legislator, a Muncie middle school principal, and BSU political science professors about the various implications of the new requirement.

Having student reporters dig into stories was a new experience for the town as well as the young reporters. “Creating the relationships, building the trust, took time,” said Kemp, describing the initial reticence among those in the schools who had grown wary of negative stories. The staff was intent on building a solid foundation to pass along, aware that the reporters’ longest tenure would be a short four years. 

Kemp told me that once they started writing, the situation “became real.” It was a big step, she said, “accepting the fact that we are a local paper and a local source of news.” Kemp grew up in Muncie, but through the Daily News reporting, she saw a new side of her hometown. “These are people who are moving our community forward,” she said. “I never knew about it before. I was being a better citizen, too.”

For the city of Muncie itself, this kind of local reporting has a number of advantages: helping it see its own story unfold, letting townspeople speak for themselves, imparting to students a rich sense of where they live, and building shared knowledge of a community and its values. 

Lee Ann Kwiatkowski is CEO and director of public education of Muncie Community Schools. Like Taylor Smith, she told me the students cover stories not done by the mainstream press in Muncie. “They do a nice job tailoring stories and going deeper,” she said. “Word about the schools is getting around. More people learn about work we’re doing because of the university paper.” Andy Klotz, MCS’s chief communications officer, told me that while it is difficult to quantify the impact of the stories on enrollment, graduation rates, and so forth with hard numbers, there is a clear soft measure. “A big factor [is] turning the tide on old perceptions of an old system that existed before the partnership,” he said.

Smith described to me the creative audience development strategy that her team carried out, building readership through savvy social media that connects with students via Instagram, alumni via Facebook, and colleagues via Twitter. The students also applied an old-fashioned shoe-leather approach to building awareness, providing copies to local businesses and showing up at community events in Muncie to distribute papers when stories relevant to the event-goers appeared. When Muncie’s branch of Habitat for Humanity held a fund-raiser, copies of the Daily News were available for the roughly 300 attendees to take home.

On June 23, 2022, nearly four years into its new reporting style, the Daily News ran a sports story that jumped off the virtual page in contrast to the 1922 announcement of a trial position for a “physical director” for women. The headline is “50 Years of Title IX.” Just as women’s sports have moved from the sidelines to the big arenas, so has the Daily News moved from being a college newspaper to must-read local journalism.

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

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.

“It’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. “It’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. “I 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. “I 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.

“I 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. “I 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. “I 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.

“It 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 �ɱ�’v�� 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.

“Initiatives 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. “I’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 little girl was 6 years old, and life hadn’t been kind to her. 

When Catherine Meek walked into a homeless shelter for their tutoring session, she found the child hiding under a desk. 

No questions asked, the volunteer joined her on the floor and began reading to her. For an hour a week, the session would allow the girl to be just a kid, getting the assistance she needed, and for at least a moment forgetting about the circumstances that put the girl educationally behind by about a grade. 

The space remained their meeting spot for six sessions until, one day, Ms. Meek walked in to find the girl sitting at the desk waiting for her. 

“I had, I remember, the biggest smile on my face, and she did too,” Ms. Meek says. “I think even at that young, vulnerable age she understood that something had changed, that there was a set level of trust, that she could trust me.”

Ms. Meek lights up recalling that moment – one of her greatest success stories as a volunteer tutor for School on Wheels, a nonprofit addressing educational needs of children K-12 who are experiencing homelessness. She and the girl worked together for about two years until the child moved out of state and they lost touch. 

Recently, Ms. Meek – now executive adviser to the organization – attended that no-longer-little-girl’s wedding after they reconnected through social media.��

A brainchild of the late Agnes Stevens, a retired schoolteacher, School on Wheels began in 1993 when she started tutoring kids living in shelters on Skid Row, an area of Los Angeles known for its large homeless population. In the next few years, she formalized her efforts, recruited more volunteers, and grew the organization with the help of Ms. Meek, who joined in 1999. 

“She was the inspiration and teacher and had the education background, and I had the business and financial background,” says Ms. Meek. “The need was there in 1993, and it’s just grown astronomically since then. One in 30 kids in California in a classroom is homeless.”

The organization grew steadily, partnering with shelters, school districts, motels, libraries, anywhere homeless families could be – even reaching those living in cars, in foster homes, and on the streets. With year-round operations in six counties, prior to the pandemic, the organization reached more than 3,000 homeless children a year, and it recruited and trained more than 2,000 tutors annually. During the pandemic, the number served dropped to about 2,000, and tutors were down to 1,300. Annual funding reached $3.5 million in 2020.

“Students experiencing homelessness move on average about three to four times a year, and with each move, it’s estimated that they fall behind four months academically,” says Charles Evans, the organization’s executive director. “Our whole goal as an organization is to really try to fill in those academic gaps.”&�Բ�����;  

School on Wheels doesn’t get into the students’ backgrounds but focuses solely on assessing the kids’ educational needs – like a fourth grader who is two grades behind in reading or a 10th grader who’s struggling with pre-algebra and biology – and matching them with tutors. 

“We’re really here to just support the child, and I think a lot of our families like and appreciate us and what we do for them,” says Mr. Evans. “We don’t pry and try to figure out why a family became homeless.”

The children are assessed every few weeks to make sure they’re improving. Ms. Meek says that in 2021, K-4 students improved their literacy skills by 21%; in the past six months, fifth through eighth grade students increased math skills by almost one grade level, and self-efficacy surveys showed a 40% increase in confidence in ninth through 12th graders. 

Leavening the community

Before the pandemic, tutors would meet students wherever they were – motels, shelters, libraries. But tutoring sessions have been remote – via donated Chromebooks and laptops – in the past couple of years. The drastic change had benefits and drawbacks. On one hand, students could stay in touch with tutors even on the move. On the other, School on Wheels had to pivot from handing out backpacks and school supplies to figuring out how to get digital equipment into kids’ hands and making sure they had Wi-Fi access. 

The digital transition was already in progress when COVID-19 hit, says Mr. Evans. Now, the organization is returning to in-person sessions, particularly for younger kids. But it will keep the hybrid model.   

The School on Wheels’ Skid Row Learning Center, which closed and was completely made over during the pandemic, is getting ready to welcome kids again. Many clients of the center come from one of the biggest shelters in California, the Union Rescue Mission just down the street. 

Mr. Evans, who runs the learning center, describes its leavening place in the community: Staff used to pick up about 25 children at the Union Rescue Mission as they got off the school bus and walk them to the learning center for after-school programs. They’d sing along sidewalks where people sitting on the ground would put away drug paraphernalia or anything inappropriate for young eyes. Later, the organization worked with the school district to have students dropped directly at the learning center’s front door and is likely to return to that system in the coming school year. 

Erasing stigma

Outside of tutoring, School on Wheels is out to erase the stigma of homelessness. Many of the families the organization works with found themselves homeless through no negligence of their own – victims of domestic violence or economic hardship, doing their best to get back on their feet.

For example, one single mother in her 20s, who for security reasons asked not to be named, left an abusive relationship, and ended up in a shelter with her four young kids. When she noticed her children falling behind in school, she connected with School on Wheels.

“It’s been the best thing ever, because my kids love their tutors,” says the young woman, who works and goes to school. She now gets reports from school that her kids are doing much better: “The teacher did see a lot of improvement in [my daughter’s] math and her spelling.” That motivates her to do better herself, says the mother.

Angela Sanchez gets it. The School on Wheels board member experienced homelessness during her last two years of high school, after her father lost his job and couldn’t afford rent. 

“Once we went homeless, I wasn’t sure what my options would be or if I would even be able to go to college,” she says, adding that she hid her circumstances to avoid the stigma. School on Wheels changed her outlook: Ms. Sanchez’s math tutor was a grad student in astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology who didn’t see her as a homeless kid, but understood her dreams and aspirations. 

“I literally had a rocket scientist helping me with my math homework,” she says. 

He gave her a tour of Caltech, the first college she ever visited. The experience opened her eyes to possibilities and got her thinking about career options. She says it also gave her the confidence she needed to get her undergraduate history degree and master’s in education. Now in her 30s, she’s an equity consultant, a published author, and homeowner. 

Aside from a literacy program for the youngest kids and tutoring specific subjects for older students, School on Wheels helps high schoolers plan their futures – getting into college, getting a house, and becoming independent. 

“Homelessness keeps you locked in a mentality of day-to-day survival. But that shouldn’t stop anyone from thinking about what it means for life afterward, and I think we forget a lot about that,” Ms. Sanchez says.

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

Toyin Anderson is a mom looking for solutions to what she sees as a crisis of youth crying out for help with their mental health. 

“Our kids are still struggling. From the pandemic, the lack of being able to socialize, from losses of family members due to COVID or to violence in the community, that stuff has not been addressed,” says Ms. Anderson, who advocates for hiring more mental health professionals in her Rochester, New York, school district.

People across the country are searching for ways to support many of America’s children and young adults, who say they’re facing stress, anxiety, and depression. Remote school, shuttered activities, and family job losses during the pandemic often changed their lives – and their sense of well-being. 

Even before the pandemic began, more than 1 in 3 high school students persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. Now, despite nearly all K-12 schools and colleges being open for in-person learning in the most recent school year, many students are still struggling: 

• 70% of public schools reported that since the start of the pandemic, the percentage of students who sought mental health services increased, according to an April from the Institute of Education Sciences. 
• The U.S. Surgeon General issued an warning of a youth mental health crisis in December 2021, following a earlier that fall of a “national emergency in child and adolescent mental health” by a coalition of pediatric groups.
• 88% of college students polled in a January 2022  by TimelyMD, a higher ed telehealth provider, said there’s a mental health crisis at colleges and universities in the United States.  

There are also increased efforts to find solutions. In partnership with the Solutions Journalism Network, seven newsrooms across the U.S. set out to examine efforts that are working for addressing students’ mental health needs, such as peer counseling, college re-enrollment programs, and district mental health services coordinators. The initiatives might not be effective in all ways, or for all students, but there are encouraging signs of success that others could replicate. The approaches also add to the conversation happening around the country. 

Third grader Alexis Kelliher points to her feelings while visiting a sensory room at Williams elementary school, Nov. 3, 2021, in Topeka, Kansas. The rooms are designed to relieve stresses faced by students as they return to classrooms amid the ongoing pandemic.

People “from middle America to the coasts” are talking more about care for adults and children, and are seeking help from faith communities, schools, neighbors, and professionals, says Sharon Hoover, co-director of the National Center for School Mental Health and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “That wouldn’t have happened 20, 30 years ago in the same kind of way – even five years ago – so that gives me hope.”&�Բ�����;

The , a coalition of mental health advocates, including Dr. Hoover, published the first national school mental health report card in February. The report card grades states on eight policies identified by the campaign as to the crisis. It finds that most states are far off recommended ratios of school counselors and psychologists to students in K-12 schools. 

Solutions identified by the Hopeful Futures Campaign include hiring more school mental health professionals, training teachers and staff in mental health and suicide prevention, and establishing regular well-being checks – also known as universal screeners – to identify students and staff who may need support. 

Those types of solutions are attracting attention from lawmakers. “We’re seeing more state legislatures and executive branches trying to figure out what more can we do,” says Hemi Tewarson, president and executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP), a nonpartisan policy organization. 

Between March 2020 and December 2021, 92 state laws were enacted to help youth mental health through efforts in schools, according to a NASHP analysis. Those efforts ranged from North Carolina establishing a for schools to hire psychologists to Texas to include crisis line and suicide prevention lifeline contact information on identification cards for secondary students. Connecticut, meanwhile, permits K-12 students to take per year. 

Even as new ideas rollout, challenges remain. Not all stakeholders are on board with expanding support in schools, which some say could burden educators and encroach on parent rights. When the superintendent in a small Connecticut town recently proposed opening a mental health clinic at a high school, for example, the school board the plan. 

Schools themselves are also pondering how effective they can be in the current environment, given shortages of mental health professionals and funding. In the 2020-2021 school year, 56% of public schools “moderately or strongly agreed that they could effectively provide mental health services to all students in need,”&�Բ�����; the National Center for Education Statistics.  

The reporting from the collaboration newsrooms suggests that educators are trying to reconcile the roadblocks and the solutions by addressing questions like: How do we reach more young people, even in the midst of limited resources? How do we make sure what we are doing for students is actually meeting their needs and includes their input? 

Back in Rochester, Ms. Anderson – who holds leadership roles with the local group Children’s Agenda and with United Parent Leaders Parent Action Network – is also forging a path forward. She has led a community march and attended school board meetings to urge the district, where her son will remain in the fall, to better implement its current wellness plans and use pandemic relief money to expand mental health support. She plans to move her daughter to a private Catholic school, in part because it offers more mental health resources.

“The country needs to be proactive, not only in my community,” she says. “This is everyone’s business to make sure the kids in this country are well.”

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

The healthiest meal students typically receive during the day isn’t at their dining room table — it’s in their school cafeteria.

That is just one reason child nutrition experts have urged Congress to pass legislation that would enable schools nationwide to provide free meals for all students. Pandemic-era waivers that made universal free school lunch a reality the past two years have expired, and this fall, students will once again have to based on need.

That prospect is raising concerns among child nutrition experts who predict that once the school year begins more kids will go hungry amid an .

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“There are going to be many struggling families next fall who don’t apply for meal programs or who don’t qualify for benefits,” said Lori Adkins, president of the School Nutrition Association, a nonprofit representing 50,000 school nutrition professionals nationwide. “The ones that do qualify for benefits, our programs will continue to provide that safety net, but for those that are on the cusp, I’m worried about them. Sometimes it is that single-parent household with children, and they have limited resources, and sometimes they can fall through that safety net.”

Starting in 2020, Congress gave schools waivers that allowed them to provide free meals to every student, regardless of income. But Republicans opposed extending these provisions, arguing they’re no longer needed now that pandemic-related school closures have ended.

Single-parent households are particularly prone to food insecurity, or lacking consistent access to the nutrition needed to maintain one’s health. Nearly in 2019 compared to 15.4 percent of households headed by single fathers, according to the Food Research and Action Center, which advocates for people experiencing poverty-related hunger.

Universal meal waivers can help. A report from the Food Research and Action Center analyzed how these provisions benefited . Ninety-five percent of the districts said meal waivers decreased hunger among their students, 89 percent said the waivers made it easier for parents and guardians, and 85 percent said they erased the stigma associated with free school meals.

“Hungry children shouldn’t have to worry about meal applications or whether they have money in their account so they can eat,” said Adkins, who is also a child nutrition consultant for Oakland Schools in Michigan. “It shouldn’t be a privilege; it should be available as part of the school day for all students along with textbooks and the ride to school on the bus and everything else.”

The federally funded National School Lunch Program (NSLP) operates in almost , helping them serve well-balanced and cost-efficient breakfasts and lunches. School meal prices vary across the country but have cost up to about in recent years, though pandemic-related inflation has caused food costs to spike. Participating schools are reimbursed for providing meals to students by the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service, which administers the program. In fiscal year 2020, the each school day, and more than three-quarters of these lunches were offered for no or reduced cost. The meals have been linked to higher academic achievement, improved behavior and better health for students. They have also been found to reduce food insecurity, with youth from households lacking consistent access to nutritious foods meeting most of their dietary needs at school.

“School breakfast and school lunch are meeting the nutritional needs of millions of kids across the country who rely on them,” said Crystal FitzSimons, director of school and out-of-school programs for the Food Research and Action Center.

In June, President Joe Biden signed the a bipartisan bill that gives child nutrition programs at schools and similar environments more funding to cover food costs and additional support and flexibility as they feed students during disruptions to the food supply chain.But the legislation does not continue universal free school meals.

Low-income families, especially those enrolling their children in school for the first time, may not realize that they need to apply for free meals. Other eligible families, due to stigma, fear or language barriers, don’t apply, only to struggle to cover the cost of lunch. Parents with household incomes that qualify their children for reduced-price meals but not free ones often find it hard to keep up with lunch fees as well.

Despite the benefits of school meals, some low-income families may not apply for their children to receive free or reduced-priced meals due to the perception that doing so amounts to taking a government handout, said Jennifer Gaddis, author of “The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools” and an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Human Ecology.  Ending universal free school meals may increase this notion, she said.

“I think it’s definitely going to be a change that pushes some people out who just can’t get over that feeling of, like, ‘Oh, I’m taking something,’ or ‘I’m being dependent on the government,’” Gaddis said.

During the upcoming school year, a , while a family of the same size earning $51,338 would qualify for reduced-price meals. Eligibility is based on the federal poverty line. The children of some families, such as those enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, will be registered for free breakfast and lunch automatically.

But some school district officials have objected to the idea of children from economically disadvantaged families getting universal free lunch. School board members in Waukesha, Wisconsin, initially turned down the opportunity to provide free school meals during the pandemic for fear that doing so would . After public outcry, the and opted into the federal program.

“There’s been a lot of work to try to educate people on how, as long as this is a program that’s not universal, there are a lot of kids and families who might feel stigmatized by their participation in the program,” Gaddis said. “… One of the big barriers is that a lot of decision makers don’t really think of school meals as education, and we’re really having to kind of push against this to say this is actually a really necessary thing for the well-being of all students.”

Universal free meals don’t just benefit students, according to the School Nutrition Association. As school nutrition departments face , free meals relieve them of the responsibility of determining which students qualify for free, reduced or full-priced meals.

Plus, free meals for all students mean that schools don’t have to work to collect lunch debt from families who have not provided their children with enough money to cover meal costs.

“It is a lot of pressure on the school districts, because they have to absorb those fees if they don’t get paid,” FitzSimons explained. “So it’s not an ideal situation for anybody involved, and being able to offer meals to all kids is critical.”

When meal debt begins to accumulate at a school, the money used to cover it comes out of the school’s general fund for classroom expenses. So schools aim to keep meal debt low. In recent years, some schools have drawn criticism for using aggressive or humiliating tactics to recover lunch debt from families, including stamping students’ hands, not letting them attend school events, providing them with meals noticeably different from what their peers are served or sending bill collectors after their families. Lunch shaming, as these practices are known, garnered so much attention that in 2017 the to schools about how they can resolve lunch debt in a way that doesn’t demean youth. In 2019, related to unpaid meals.

As federal action on providing universal free lunch has stalled, some school districts and states are taking matters into their own hands, helping children in a way that enjoys .

Through the federal community eligibility provision, school districts with large numbers of low-income youth can offer free meals to all students without requiring families to submit paperwork. In addition, California, Maine and Vermont are among the states that have passed legislation to provide free lunch to all students. Massachusetts legislation to do so awaits a signature from its governor.

“A growing number of states have really understood the value of being able to offer free meals to all the kids in the state and are kind of lifting that up,” FitzSimons said. “Some of the state campaigns take a little bit longer than you would hope. But there does seem to be a lot of …interest and momentum at the state level.”

FitzSimons added that the House passed a budget reconciliation last fall that would allow more school districts to provide free school meals through the community eligibility provision and make it easier for states to do the same. Those provisions are also included in the that Rep. Bobby Scott, chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, introduced last month. The House is expected to soon review this Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill through which Congress updates the NSLP and other child nutrition programs.

“I’d love to see some more long-term, sustainable solutions towards making meals available for all kids each day,” Adkins said. “We’re just hoping that perhaps with the Childhood Nutrition Reauthorization, that bill could include something about meals for all or there could be a new bill asking President Biden and the Congress to extend meals to all students into the future. We’re definitely going to continue to lobby for and work towards meals for all students at no cost.”

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

President Joe Biden announced last month the government will forgive $10,000 in debt for college loan borrowers earning under $125,000, with Pell grant recipients eligible to have $20,000 forgiven. And while Americans are at loggerheads over that, they are in almost full agreement about fixing the root cause: the high cost of a college education.

Asked to choose between the government forgiving student debt or making college more affordable for current and future students, an astounding 82% of respondents in opt for the latter. Even among those with outstanding loans, long-term affordability wins out.   

Getting there is not easy. But at Purdue University, an ambitious price freeze with tuition has held for a decade, offering innovative — if not always flawless or popular — cost-cutting models for holding the line on student bills.

Students taking a break in the cool, wood-paneled spaces of Purdue Memorial Union on a recent scorching summer day will pay no more than Boilermakers did 10 years ago — and many will likely get their bachelor’s debt-free, as some 60% did in May.

“If an institution prioritizes affordability, you’d be surprised — �ɱ�’v�� been surprised — by how much progress can be made,”&�Բ�����;says Mitch Daniels, the former Indiana governor who announced the tuition freeze in the spring of 2013, just months after he became Purdue’s president.   

The freeze meant forfeiting some $40 million from a regular increase in price. When the university managed to absorb it just by tightening its belt, the board greenlighted a second year, then a third. As applications soared, enrollment grew, and proud alumni opened their wallets, the “freeze” itself became a large source of income. 

It started as a “gesture”

Sitting in his office by the campus bell tower, Mr. Daniels — with a résumé that includes big-business CEO and director of the Office of Management and Budget for President George W. Bush — traces the freeze idea back to his state governorship. A persistent question he heard then, he says, was, “Isn’t there someplace to get a quality education that won’t put us deeply in debt?”&�Բ�����; 

What has a split Congress accomplished? A surprising amount.

He initially proposed the freeze “as a gesture, a one-time acknowledgment that we understood.” The average cost in real dollars of a bachelor’s degree in the United States had jumped by 41% between 2000 and 2012. Even Purdue, a public, land-grant institution, had consistently raised its price for more than 30 years.

When Andy Pavlopoulos enrolled in the aviation department in 1986, in-state tuition for the year at the flagship West Lafayette campus was $1,870. With fees, room and board, books, and the like, his total bill “was like $8,000,” says the father of three who, in his second career, owns and runs a family restaurant in Saint Joseph, Michigan.

By the time Mr. Pavlopoulos’ eldest child was scrolling through college websites as a high school junior in 2013, prices had soared. In-state tuition reached $9,992, and the full cost of attending — commonly referred to as the sticker price — was $22,782. For out-of-state students like his son, this meant $28,794 in tuition for a total annual bill of $41,614. 

Something to remember about sticker prices is that only a minority of students nationwide actually pay them. As each of his three children enrolled at Purdue, Mr. Pavlopoulos expected them to do what he’d done: get grants and scholarships that knock down the total they owe.  

“The sticker price is damaging misinformation,” says Phillip Levine, a Wellesley College economics scholar with a specialty in higher education. It can cause “people to make decisions that are not appropriate for them.” As a result, many who would thrive in a four-year college decide it isn’t for them. 

“People have no idea what colleges cost,” he says. “They tend to cost a lot less than people think.”

Like an effective meme, Purdue holding “tuition under $10,000” broadcasts affordability. 

“There’s a nice message off of a low tuition,” Mr. Levine says. “Particularly for lower-income families, we know based on research that the ability to simplify the problem increases their likelihood of attending.”

Another way Purdue does this is by applying the freeze to the full cost of attendance. Institutions that have similarly suspended tuition hikes often increase other charges. At Purdue, on the other hand, the sticker price, too, doesn’t budge.

As the freeze entered its second year, the number of applications to the undergraduate program jumped by 28%. That has since climbed steadily by more modest percentages. By 2021, the admissions office was processing almost twice as many applications as it had in 2012.

Aditi Barla’s was among them. A resident of Illinois, she only analyzed her choices once acceptances were in. 

“Purdue is a great school for CS,” she reasoned, referring to her computer science major. “It’s a great STEM school. And, oh, it also has a tuition freeze.” Other contenders included the University of Michigan and the University of Washington in Seattle, but their sticker prices were in the $60,000-to-$70,000 range with no offers of scholarships or grants. With a younger brother in the wings and plans to go to graduate school, the choice was clear.

Today, she is a rising sophomore with no debt.

More students means more revenue 

Even after enrollments nationwide began to decline, Purdue’s on average by about 500 a year. Last fall, matriculations hit a new and unexpected high, with more than 10,000 freshmen arriving on campus. 

The number of postgraduate students has also grown, helping to raise the university’s total enrollment from 39,256 in 2012 to 49,639 in 2021. With more than half paying out-of-state or international prices, tuition revenue increased by a third during the freeze, from $629 million in 2012 to $832 million in 2021. 

But the surge in students has also posed problems. The university has had to add dorms and temporarily house students in cubicle-like lodgings created in dorm basements and study lounges.

Ms. Barla knew guys who started the year in cramped, windowless quarters: “Yeah,” she says, “not ideal, especially when you’re coming into college for the first time.” By fall break, everyone was in permanent housing, and in the spring, the university was purchasing an on-campus housing complex.

“We’re pressing up against limits,” admits Mr. Daniels. To mitigate this, the university has introduced some hybrid classes and has helped students who are so inclined to graduate in three years. 

But an important feature of Purdue’s success is that it has ensured its foundation remained solid. “We don’t run a deficit. We don’t borrow any money. We don’t raid the cookie jar,” Mr. Daniels says, referring to having reduced the spending distribution of the nearly $2.5 billion endowment from 5% to 4%. “We don’t ever let it affect quality.”&�Բ�����;

Department of Education statistics indicate that, from 2012 through 2020 (the last year for which this data is available), Purdue kept up its spending on instruction at the same pace as peer institutions. Even as enrollment galloped, its student ratio is a very respectable 14-to-1. And it enhanced its campus. Among other improvements, it opened the $79 million, 164,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art Wilmeth Active Learning Center and, last year, renovated its iconic Memorial Union.   

As a research university, it has increasingly leveraged grants and contracts to bring students in on groundbreaking innovations and technologies at little to no cost to the university’s bottom line. This has helped it attract students without resorting to a widely used tactic. It’s not uncommon that at institutions that charge up to $60,000, says Mr. Levine, “virtually every single student’s getting a $20,000 or more merit scholarship to bring the number back to $30 or $40,000 — which, not coincidentally, happens to be in the range of what public institutions charge.”&�Բ�����;

As for the “dos” of keeping prices down, Mr. Daniels is “bashful about ever prescribing anything �ɱ�’v�� done here,” he says. “The decisions, we believe, fit this place.”&�Բ�����;

However, not a month goes by, says Chris Ruhl, the chief financial officer, without a counterpart from another school getting in touch wanting to know what worked and how the campus reacted. 

Successful but not without challenges 

Not every cost-cutting measure has proved universally popular. Some faculty, for instance, voiced discontent when the university changed employees’ benefits. In line with a prevailing trend in higher ed, it adopted health savings accounts with high deductibles. It also changed over to defined contribution retirement plans, favored mostly by private colleges. When it contracted out its food service, Purdue Student Government formally condemned its choice of corporate giant Aramark, on the grounds that the company had incurred food and safety violations at another Indiana campus. 

And when Purdue pioneered its own income share agreement — in which students pledge to share a portion of future income — as an alternative to traditional student loans, some accused the university of breaking the law. Purdue has since suspended future contracts in the program, which is similar to a federal income-based repayment loan that also ran into trouble in its implementation. *

Other steps seem not to have caused waves. Mr. Ruhl points to such things as dismantling Purdue’s transportation system and contracting with the city to extend transit routes onto campus; outsourcing printing and photocopying services; and consolidating the university’s data centers, information technology departments, and maintenance and custodial staffs. 

“As the student body has grown,” he says, “�ɱ�’v�� been able to maintain staffing levels” without hiring more people.

Making affordability an institution-wide mission, he says, has been crucial not just in cutting costs but in improving the quality of the institution.

Statistics on retention and graduation rates, rankings, and fundraising support Mr. Ruhl’s claim that “all sorts of key metrics have improved substantially during this period of time.” Likewise, the percentage of undergraduates earning their bachelor’s without incurring debt marched upward. In 2012, the proportion leaving campus with the bachelor’s diploma and no loan was 49.5%. Fifty-four percent did by 2016, and 60% did in 2021.

But Purdue’s performance in one metric proves cautionary in terms of students being able to afford, as Mr. Levine puts it, “the place where they belong.” In a conversation over Zoom, he crunches some numbers on the university’s net price calculator, a feature that institutions that receive money from the federal government are required to post on their website. 

He invents a young Indiana resident with a 3.5 GPA, solid SAT scores, and a family income well below $50,000. Asked how much the family can contribute, he types in $0. Within seconds, the calculator estimates that even with a $6,459 Pell Grant, various scholarships, and $5,500 in federal student loans, the family would have to “come up with $5,087 a year that they have no ability to pay for in cash,”&�Բ�����;Mr. Levine reports. The student can earn $3,000 of that through a work-study program or campus job. 

The exercise, he says, shows that for a family “that has nothing,” borrowing even $2,000 to $5,000 a year “is not affordable.”&�Բ�����;

“Despite the fact that college costs a lot less than people think, it’s still too expensive,” he says. But not if the Pell Grant were doubled. “That would eliminate the gap completely,” in which case, Mr. Levine says he’d “be on board with low tuitions.” As it is, though, he believes freezes benefit wealthier students to the detriment of those of lower-income backgrounds. If the former paid the full sticker price, the university would have extra income to channel into financial aid.

The amount Purdue has spent on merit and need-based scholarships, fellowships, and awards has fluctuated over the course of the tuition freeze. In 2017-18, it gave 21% more aid than it had in 2012, but in 2018-19 the amount it disbursed fell below the 2012 levels. 

“We do have limited dollars,” says Heidi Carl, Purdue’s executive director of financial aid, whose office prioritizes helping Indiana families with $70,000 or less in adjusted gross income. For some with $50,000 or less, it succeeds in meeting their full need. 

“We see this pattern of public institutions increasing tuitions and then also increasing aid,” says economics professor Emily Cook of Tulane University, referring to a recent study on college pricing she co-wrote. The theory is that they are channeling the extra revenue into scholarships and grants that benefit both low-income students and middle-income families who often bear the burden of student debt. 

“Our study,” says Mrs. Cook, “is overall encouraging in that we are heading in the direction of making college affordable.”&�Բ�����;

As Mr. Daniels packs up his office, it is anybody’s guess whether the tuition freeze will extend beyond 2023 or what that would mean for students.

But whatever happens next, freezing the sticker price has done more than hit the reset button for one institution: Its leaps as well as its stumbles offer a decade’s worth of lessons on affordability.

Editor’s note: This story has been changed to clarify that only new contracts in Purdue’s income share agreement program have been suspended. 

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

When education students from Kentucky’s Morehead State University entered a virtual classroom with guest lecturer Chea Parton to discuss rural literature, many felt ashamed of the rural communities where they grew up—and where many of them would return to teach after graduation. 

By the end of Parton’s guest lecture, some of those opinions had started to change. 

“Even though she only spoke to my students for an hour, she already blew their minds,” said Alison Hruby, Ph.D., an associate professor of English education at MSU. 

The stories that the students read and heard as children told them that rural folk were backward and ignorant. That the land they were raised on was just flyover country. And that to find success, they must leave their hometowns and move to larger cities.

Parton, Ph.D., spoke to the students about her project, , which promotes expanding literature curriculums to include works that speak directly to young rural students in middle school and high school classrooms.  

By teaching stories like Wilson Rawls’s Where the Red Fern Grows, about a boy and his two hunting dogs in rural Oklahoma, or Julie Murphy’s �ٳܳ��������’, about a self-proclaimed “fat girl” conquering her small town Texas beauty pageant, students are able to see themselves represented in their school work.

Parton’s lesson seemed to stick, Hruby said. The future school teachers viewed their hometowns more favorably, reflected critically on how literature can affect students’ views of where they are from, and began to think about how to incorporate Parton’s work in their own future English lessons.

“[The students] really wish they had read more literature that represented their home towns in a more positive light,” Hruby said.

Literacy In Place is an online repository of rural literature resources. Parton, a rural language and literacy scholar, to provide book lists, lessons, and activities to students, English teachers, education professors, and anyone else interested in discovering how place (specifically rural place) affects the way stories are told.

Parton said that she based Literacy in Place on three principles: 

1. Rural stories are worth telling.
2. Rural stories are worth reading and worthy of study.
3. And rural cultures (imperfect as they may be) are worth sustaining.

“I realized that rural culture is a culture and that it’s different,” Parton said. “I started thinking about me as a teacher and how my rurality affects the way I teach. Nobody was doing that work. That’s when I started Literacy in Place.”

Parton said many middle and high school classrooms use culturally sustaining pedagogies, or teaching practices, that integrate community history and culture into lessons and activities. That approach teaches students core academic skills through their own unique identities. 

She realized that while this practice successfully uplifts many urban and suburban stories, rural schools there are many important rural narratives left untold. And that the absence of these stories allows negative rural stereotypes to persist.

“In teacher education programs, when we teach what culturally sustaining pedagogy is,” Parton said. “We teach from an urban perspective because that’s where it came from. So no one’s really learning how to sustain rural cultures in their teaching—even teachers who come from rural places.”

Parton—who traded soybean fields in rural Indiana for city streets in Austin, Texas—sees herself as a prime example of what happens when rural life is not celebrated or sustained.

“Growing up, I ingested all of the negative things that people say about rural people and I believed those things,” Parton said. “I believed them about myself.”

Parton’s relationship with rural life and her passion for literature have affected her teaching methods. She believes that most people don’t recognize the value or complexities of rural people and small town life. 

The key, she said, is that it’s not just city folks who make this mistake, but rural folks as well. And people make these discoveries about themselves and others through literature, she said.

“I think that literature is so powerful in helping people understand their own identities and understanding identities different from theirs,” Parton said. “Because story is identity and identity is story.”

Stephanie Reid, Ph.D., an assistant professor of literacy education in the Phyllis J. Washington College of Education at the University of Montana, incorporated Parton’s program into her spring 2022 young adult literacy and literature class.

Reid and her students found that Parton’s work also highlights the complexity that exists within rural identity.

“My students paid especially close attention to their own assumptions and definitions regarding rural life and living and to how those assumptions were shaped by where they are from and the communities in which they have spent time,” Reid said. “I believe it also heightened their appreciation of the importance of place and the diversity of rural identities and experiences that exist across rural contexts and communities.”

When Reid’s students begin teaching in their own classrooms, she hopes the future educators “know and value their students and that they take the time to learn the people and communities that comprise the teaching context.”

The influence of Parton’s program on students encourages Hruby and Reid.

“I’m really excited that she’s doing what she’s doing,” Hruby said. “Because it seems like such a small thing, but it’s really going to have a huge impact.”

They also hope Parton’s work marks a shift in the education field—one that amplifies important rural perspectives and voices from their current spot at the back of the line. 

“Rural educators and students have constructed incredible knowledge, and university personnel should seek to create spaces for these folks to share their knowledge and expertise,” Reid said. “Those from non-rural backgrounds will benefit from listening, reading, and learning.”

For Parton, the work continues. She hopes to re-write and correct the meaning of “rural” in the hearts and minds of young folks across the country.

“This is what culturally-sustaining teaching in a rural capacity would look like,” Parton said. “Being critical of rural places and not looking at them through rose-colored glasses, but at the same time helping the things that are really special and unique and important about rural places flourish.”

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

Wednesdays were usually Justin Alamo’s favorite day of the week. 

As a third-grader at Conte West Hills Magnet School in New Haven, Connecticut, Alamo always looked forward to swimming classes on Wednesdays. Except for one week that sticks out in Alamo’s memory.

“I remember being so angry that day because they canceled swimming,” Alamo, now a student at the University of Connecticut, said. “Our teacher told us we had to go to the auditorium and listen to people talk about a program called New Haven Promise.”&�Բ�����; 

Alamo remembers receiving a packet during the assembly outlining how to qualify for the college promise program scholarship that covered up to 100 percent of tuition to colleges and universities in Connecticut. 

He also remembers thinking he still had plenty of time before seriously considering college and figuring out how to pay for it. When he got home, still upset about missing swim class, he handed the packet over to his mother and didn’t think about it again until he got to middle school.

By the time he was in seventh grade, Alamo, who is Puerto Rican, said he felt comfortable in his mostly Hispanic neighborhood of Fair Haven but began noticing the lack of opportunities in his low-income community. His parent’s home had also gone into foreclosure, and Alamo’s family was struggling financially. They weren’t alone—the city of New Haven averages one of the highest unemployment rates in the state, and more than of residents live in poverty. 

“School was always interesting and easy for me, so there was no question that I was going to college,” Alamo said, “but that’s when I realized, ‘oh, I may not have another opportunity to go to college if I don’t have the money.’”&�Բ�����;

A model from Michigan

College promise programs offer scholarships to high school graduates that cover tuition and fees to higher education institutions in the graduate’s home state. There are more than 400 programs in thirty-three states and Washington, D.C. 

According to a , these programs aim to reduce poverty and crime, increase employment, and improve a region’s overall economic development. 

However, despite the positive reaction to promise programs, there is little research showing if promise programs actually reduce poverty, and  rates vary because outcomes depend on how programs are implemented. However, recent studies show that promise programs offering coaching and other methods of financial support have the  on low-income students’ graduation rates.

Each promise scholarship has different eligibility requirements, including a residency requirement in a specific school district and a minimum grade-point average. Promise scholarships usually follow one of three payout structures: Students receive ‘first-dollar promise scholarships’ before other types of financial aid, ‘middle-dollar scholarships’ are applied after other grants or scholarships are awarded, and ‘last-dollar scholarships’ fill tuition gaps after all other forms of financial aid are applied.

Kalamazoo, Michigan, implemented . was funded by a group of anonymous donors and launched by Kalamazoo’s former school superintendent. The scholarship was open to all graduates of Kalamazoo Public Schools residing and enrolled in their school district for a minimum of four years. 

Kalamazoo, like , has been . The Kalamazoo Promise model aimed to invigorate the city by incentivizing residents to stay in their school district and possibly inspire others to move in. 

In Kalamazoo,  of students who used the scholarship were of free or reduced lunch status from 2006 to 2021. During that same time period, 82 percent of eligible Asian students, 66 percent of Latino students, and 63 percent of Black students used their promise scholarship within . 

, politicians, and even  . The first kindergarten class to benefit from the Kalamazoo Promise graduated from high school in 2019. By that time,  had benefited from a promise scholarship. Since 2006, about  of graduating high school students have qualified for a promise scholarship which could help finance attendance to 58 Michigan colleges and universities, and 80 percent actually used the scholarship. 

Soon after the early successes in Kalamazoo, other promise programs, often with similar missions to increase school completion rates and improve regions, launched in , Pennsylvania, Denver, Colorado, and throughout New England, Connecticut hosts , including the New Haven promise program, and like other similar programs across the nation, each has additional eligibility requirements and varying funding structures from public and private sources. Recently, state-funded promise programs in states like  and  have seen budget cuts, making scholarships contingent on available funds.

Response to rising college costs

While the popularity of promise programs has increased, so has the cost of attending higher education institutions. , the average tuition to private and public universities has nearly doubled, and in-state tuition has almost tripled.

The rising costs have led students to finance their education through loans. However, recent studies have shown that student loan debt disproportionately impacts students of color, . 

In 2021, President Biden, recognizing the inequitable access to degree-granting institutions, added nationwide  to his spending bill. However, the proposal was , making financial aid programs like promise scholarships more attractive for high school students, like many living in New England, where colleges and universities are located.

No two programs are the same, and that lack of uniformity can often be confusing for students and families and impact participation from the students most in need. Rachael Conway, a researcher for the , decided to investigate New England’s promise programs after working as a college access coach in Oregon, helping students learn how to finance their college education.

“Oregon Promise was instituted in 2015 as a free community college scholarship, and I was seeing many of my students being really excited about it, and really drawn in by it,” Conway said. 

She said her students who opted to enroll in community colleges often did so to take advantage of the promise scholarships, regardless of whether the school was a good fit or offered as a desirable field of study.

“Many of my students already had the Pell Grant and the Oregon Opportunity Grant, which is Oregon’s need-based scholarship, that pretty much covers tuition and fees at community colleges in the state,” Conway said, “so what they were actually getting from the Oregon Promise at the time was maybe minimal.”

Examining results in New Haven

Conway admits she was skeptical about seeing if New England promise scholarships offered different results, but after surveying all nine promise programs in New England, she said she was impressed to see that the scholarship programs, like , were striving to be much more than a scholarship.

“New Haven Promise has been around since 2010, so they’re just deeply rooted in the community at this point,” Conway said. “Some of their practices go beyond just making college more affordable.”

According to , New Haven Promise, the oldest promise program in the region, is also one of the most equitable and proved to have a more holistic approach by providing additional services like tutoring, mentoring and alumni networking sessions, and internship placement opportunities for students. 

Yale University funds the New Haven Promise scholarship and other initiatives, such as tutoring and mentoring, are funded by donations. New Haven Promise is the only program in Connecticut that uses a ‘middle-dollar’ format, allowing students to use the scholarships after receiving financial aid, such as a Pell Grant, to fill in any financial gaps or pay for non-tuition related expenses. 

New Haven Promise scholars are 90 percent students of color, and 70 percent are first-generation to attend college. The program has , including a cumulative 3.0-grade point average, a 90 percent attendance rate throughout high school and 40 hours of community service. The requirements alone narrow the pool of qualified students, but according to data collected by New Haven Promise, the results justify the requirements. 

A 2022 donor briefing states that in the first five years of implementing the scholarship, New Haven Public School graduation rates increased from 58% to 80% and college enrollment for the district went from 56% to 64%. Since its inception, New Haven Promise has handed out scholarships to 2,300 students and distributed $25 million. As of 2021, more than 600 students have earned a bachelor’s degree from colleges including UConn, Quinnipiac University, and Yale.  

“One of the things that make New Haven Promise successful is our commitment to seeing our scholars to, through, and back,” New Haven Promise President Patricia Melton said. 

It’s a refrain that Melton regularly uses, emphasizing the program’s mission to ensure that students attend local colleges or universities and galvanize them to return to their communities after graduating from college. 

As a high school student, Melton left her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, after earning a scholarship to attend a boarding school in New England. Through the years, Melton said, she has thought a lot about leaving behind all the connections she had in her community at a young age just to get a better education.

“People say ‘you made it out,’ but that’s the wrong way to think about it. The beauty of promise programs is that you don’t have to leave,” Melton said. “Colleges are supposed to be partners, but oftentimes they drain the talent out of the community.”

Melton said that New Haven Promise tries to inspire its students to stay in their communities by offering mentoring programs, community service opportunities and internship placement at local businesses.

“By helping them create a network in their own community, we make it so they don’t need to make that choice to leave. There doesn’t have to be a trade-off,” Melton said.

Jorgieliz Casanova, the K-12 program manager for New Haven Promise, said she didn’t need to make that trade-off. It’s one of the reasons why she decided to join New Haven Promise once she graduated from Albertus Magnus College as a New Haven Promise scholar. Casanova said she also wanted to offer students the same level of support she had as a scholar.

“I have the very unique experience of being a recipient, and now I’m able to help with the development of the program,” Casanova said. “New Haven Promise has been one of the most solid and consistent things that I’ve ever had.”

Justin Alamo can relate. He also credits New Haven Promise with inspiring him to become a high school teacher after graduating from UConn, completely debt-free next year.

“I’ll be honest, I probably would be on a different career path if I had to pay off student loans because I would be so stressed out about making money,” Alamo said. “But New Haven Promise gave me a chance to pursue education, as a Puerto Rican male, in a world where educational equity isn’t always the thing.”

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

Christina Cody has a tireless, we-can-make-it-work attitude.

No matter the problem, she’s the kind of person who will offer up ideas one after another until she finds one that works.

Cody is a health and wellness specialist for Cherokee County Schools, a small, rural school district in the northwestern part of South Carolina. Over the past few years, she has been confronted with the growing youth mental health crisis at every turn. The reports from her colleagues filled her with worry. They would despair week after week as more students threatened to hurt themselves or others.

Some students were stabbing themselves with pencils or scissors. Others tore apart pencil sharpeners to get the blades and cut themselves. When the last school year started, there were seven mental health therapist positions to serve the district’s 8,000 students. None were filled. Without them, educators did the best they could to help in a job they weren’t trained to do.

Students’ mental health needs were increasing well before the COVID-19 pandemic began. The needs have only grown since. More than a third of high school students nationally experienced poor mental health during the pandemic, with half feeling persistently sad or hopeless, according to a Centers for Disease Control Disease Control and Prevention study. In South Carolina, children’s emergency room visits for mental health needs are up nearly a third since March 2020, state officials have said. Suicide attempts also increased, particularly among teenage girls.

“That’s just a lot of pressure,” Cody said. “You can’t lose a kid. You can’t. It’s not an option.”

Cody, ever the problem solver, started thinking of ways to fill the vacant positions.

South Carolina schools were some of the first in the nation to put mental health therapists in schools. More than two decades later, they’re seen as critical positions — but less than half of all schools in the state have one. The jobs start at $36,000 and require a master’s degree. The persistently low pay makes these positions hard to fill in both urban and rural areas like Cherokee.

The struggles in South Carolina mirror a national problem: Over half of schools surveyed by the U.S. Department of Education report having inadequate access to licensed mental health providers.

Over the next few years, state officials want to dramatically increase the number of school therapists. Paying more is part of the plan — starting salaries could nearly double. But one of their suggestions is to do exactly what Cody ended up pushing for: Turn to private providers.

In the right place

Cody has spent almost her whole life in this rural area. As a teenager, she couldn’t wait to get out. She went to college three hours away in Charleston and might have stayed there for good except her high school sweetheart got a job back home. Cody followed and took a job teaching in the district.

She feels like she ended up in the right place. She finds her work both fulfilling and varied, ranging recently from driving meals to students during the pandemic to serving as a friendly ear.

She is most animated when she’s in front of a classroom or talking with students. Her face lights up when they get excited, and she grins and nods in agreement. She talks with them, not to them.

For nearly a decade she taught biology at Gaffney High, where she tried to make her lessons relevant to students. She paid close attention to topics that excited them. One day she found herself in the middle of an animated discussion between students about health outcomes. On every measure, there were broad disparities. She recalled one student asking, “So you mean to tell me that because I’m Black, I can’t be as healthy as a White person?”

“Everybody felt the weight of that comment,” she said.

They talked about how the problems were systemic and her students kept saying they needed to do something to fix that. The conversation stuck with her. She felt a gnawing sense of urgency to do more to address the physical and mental health issues she saw her students and their families struggling with daily. Cody left the classroom in 2014, but stayed with the district and moved into the job she has now focused on student health and wellness.

Her work looks a little different from school to school because she has made a point to listen to and elevate students’ ideas and solutions. At one school, they told her they needed more equipment for recess. At another, students asked for healthier snacks. Cody works to find grants to do each of the projects.

She focused more on physical health at the start. But mental health has become a bigger priority over the years. The only positive she sees is that people have become more comfortable talking about mental health. Before the pandemic hit, there was a lot of stigma attached to it.

That’s changing. When she brought together a group of 10 middle and high school students during the 2020-21 school year to talk about the problems facing teens, mental health was the top issue they flagged.

Students had lost classmates to suicide but still felt like many adults were scared to talk about it. Cortez Dawkins, a senior at Gaffney High, said it makes a lot of students feel like they have to deal with their mental health problems alone. Ellyson Tate, a freshman at the school, said students often feel like they have no one to turn to. Tate and a lot of her classmates often fly under the radar because they aren’t in immediate crisis.

Tate feels pressure to put on a happy face even when she doesn’t feel that way because she doesn’t want to disappoint people. She said adults “don’t ask how you are until you look depressed or sad.” But even when asked, she doesn’t always want to open up for fear of worrying someone. All that pretending takes a toll.

“It’s like I don’t know what’s the real me,” she said.

The group held a panel discussion to raise awareness that was broadcast live at each of the district’s middle and high schools in spring 2021. Afterwards, teachers and parents told Cody it was the first time they realized the depth of what students were experiencing. They knew things were hard before the pandemic and they saw how life had gotten harder, but they hadn’t grasped exactly how bad the situation was. They hadn’t realized how many students were teetering on the edge, not in crisis, but not doing well, either.

As concerned as the adults were, many believed the needs would lessen once students returned to a more normal schedule. They didn’t anticipate the delta and omicron COVID variants would disrupt schools once again.

They also didn’t predict that all seven mental health therapist jobs in the district would be vacant last August.

They were in for a rude awakening.

‘They are in pain’

Before the pandemic, the entire district might have one student make a threat to harm themselves or others each week.

Last school year, staff were assessing multiple threats daily, said Bessie Westmoreland, Cherokee’s director of student services. One middle school principal said his school saw 10 years’ worth of cases in one year.

Far more Cherokee students were diagnosed with depression or anxiety during the last school year than usual, Westmoreland said. They also saw it diagnosed more in younger students.

But at the same time, schools saw greater needs, they faced their greatest struggle filling positions to help students. Cherokee County has historically worked with the state Department of Mental Health, which fills the majority of school therapist positions around South Carolina. Low pay has led to many vacancies.

That’s the case now in Cherokee. Before the pandemic, they had seven school therapists staffed by the mental health agency. None were filled last August, and only two were eventually filled by the agency over the course of the school year. Cherokee is in the same boat as a lot of schools nationwide, 56 percent of which reported in April that they didn’t have adequate access to licensed mental health providers.

School-based mental health therapists are seen as a particularly effective way of getting help to students who need professional support. Since children are already at school, parents don’t have to take off work to get them to appointments. They miss less class because the commute to a therapist’s office is only a walk down the hall.

In-school therapists can also help overcome the stigma of going to a mental health clinic, said Regan Stewart, the director of the Medical University of South Carolina’s telehealth mental health care program. Their school is a familiar place where students are comfortable.

Those benefits, however, rely on filling school-based counselor positions.

When she saw the usual positions were unfilled, Cody began exploring the idea of using private counselors. A friend of a friend introduced her to a woman who owns Innovation Counseling Services, a private counseling practice out of Spartanburg. With that introduction, the district started seriously exploring the idea of using an outside agency to staff its schools.

Westmoreland initially didn’t want outside vendors. She worried about using people she didn’t manage, but she became convinced they had no other option.

The first outside counselor was placed at Copeland Academy, the district’s alternative middle and high school. She is there four days a week. At the end of the school year, they added a counselor at Ewing Middle School once a week. That brought the total therapists in Cherokee up to four — still less than the district wanted or had before the pandemic, but better than zero.

Gavin Fisher, Ewing’s principal, was elated when he heard his school would be getting a therapist.

“If you can find 100, we’ll take ’em,” he said, only half joking.

This was his first year at Ewing, but Fisher is a veteran educator and principal. Fisher has never seen a school year like this one. Middle school is a notoriously hard time for tweens and teens going through puberty, even absent a pandemic. He believes all 600 students at his school would benefit from seeing a therapist. Mental health needs have trumped every other need in the building. Focusing on academics has been impossible.

“None of that stuff matters to our kids when they’re hurting themselves,” he said. “They are in pain.”

Westmoreland has noticed a difference between the schools with a therapist and those without. It’s anecdotal, but the mood in those buildings is better, she said. She is hopeful behavioral and disciplinary incidents will start tracking down once the therapists are more established.

Having a dedicated mental health provider in the building has freed up other employees, like nurses and guidance counselors, to focus on the jobs they were trained to do. It’s given everyone reassurance that there’s someone in the building who can help students in need.

Cody sees the private counselors as one piece of the puzzle. The district will keep trying to fill the positions it has always had. If they fill them, the contractors will be additional support. If positions remain vacant, the contractors can help fill in those gaps.

At Ewing, Fisher feels optimistic about the next school year. He is under no illusion that one counselor one day a week will fix everything. But they had to start somewhere, and one at a time is better than nothing.

These are some of the incentives and supports aimed at preventing an exodus of principals and school administrators taking on pandemic stressors and the nation’s divisive climate. 

Focused on problem solving, self-care and leadership skills, a handful of nonprofits run by experienced educators have launched support and training programs to aid principals, particularly leaders of color who are underrepresented in the field and experiencing more than their peers. 

Organizations are also recognizing a window of opportunity: recruiting and retaining principals of color to better match and support an increasingly diverse student population. Roughly of U.S. public school students are Indigenous, Black, Hispanic/Latino, Asian or multiracial, while about . 

“‘How could this be done differently? How can we support you?’ We’re not hearing that conversation. It is ‘yes you did this, now do this on top of what you’re doing.’ And I think that is driving a lot of people out because you don’t feel like you can be human,” said TaraShaun Cain, executive director of the Black Principals Network. 

The group is one of several support networks that launched during the pandemic, as many leaders — faced with hostility from parents, death within their family, health concerns and working alongside mental health challenges — have said they may .

One new training is taking aim at the underlying cause of stress educators witness in tapped-out peers: The current role of principal has become unsustainable. And if reimagining school structures isn’t a part of training for the next generation of principals, school systems will likely continue to fail and overtax leaders.

Recognizing the emotional toll of leading schools in the current climate, the partnered with BetterHelp, an online mental health service platform, to provide leaders free phone, text or video counseling.��

Several are extending support beyond seated principals. Recruiting the next generation of school leaders is becoming more urgent, as one New York teacher leader noticed. 

“There’s a lot more hesitancy,” said Margarita Lopez, a teacher and instructional coach for other educators at Urban Assembly Maker, a career and technical school in New York City. 

Lopez, who does not know anyone else currently interested in leadership, is pursuing the shift to leadership out of frustration, eager to change current systems that have left teachers unsupported, without meaningful feedback or professional development. 

“I saw it as a call to action for myself…I’ve seen a lot of people that I’ve taught with leave education altogether,” Lopez said. “I’m seeing more of that, than people wanting to stay in education and become a school leader.”

To make the role more attractive, at least one program is baking in opportunities to reshape school design while bearing the cost of training to make the career accessible and enticing to a more diverse pool of applicants.

Launched by Springpoint, a nonprofit dedicated to reimagining high school, and Boston-based philanthropy The Barr Foundation, the Transformative Leaders Massachusetts program is recruiting to better reflect the state’s diverse student population. 

For example, they may look to recruit multilingual leaders to support the state’s immigrant families, particularly from Brazil, Cape Verde the Azores and mainland Portugal. Massachusetts has the in the country.

The tuition-free leadership program will include coaching on how to encourage staff and student identity development, competency-based learning, and managing teams — thinking through the system and volume of direct reports that principals manage daily, for example.

About 10 teachers will begin the pilot two-year development program this summer — each participant will earn $20,000 stipends on top of their existing school salaries.

“There has been an addition of work without compensation. And for us, this is really a statement of valuing their time… this should not be something that educators go into debt for. This should be something that is a pathway that feels clear and open,” said Lauren Bassi, director of leadership and school design at Springpoint and former English teacher.

Breaking down the financial barrier for leaders to enter the profession while creating support has also been a priority for the , child of the popular leadership training program New Leaders, Clark Atlanta University and Morehouse College. 

New principal fellows can complete a certificate-only program for $10,000, or earn a Master’s simultaneously for $20,000, and receive support to apply for grant funding. Fellows can pursue licensed positions in 37 states and Washington, D.C., thanks to recent state approvals, and will ultimately join a New Leaders alumni network of over 8,000. 

“When we talk about fundamentally changing what is happening in education in our country, this is what we mean: transforming the system so that every school is led by an equity-focused principal with the highest expectations for every child,” J. Fidel Turner, Dean of the Clark Atlanta School of Education, said in a press release.

New Leaders’s latest fellowship will focus on building the pipeline of principals of color to better reflect and serve student populations. Principals of color create better academic outcomes for students of color — who make up the nationally — and are more effective than their peers at recruiting and retaining teachers of color, according to .

The next few years could present an opportunity to better diversify the field and encourage better outcomes for students of color, , said New Leaders CEO Jean Desravines.

“We are not saying that we should transition out existing white principals. What we’re saying is there’s a recognition that there will be significant turnover in the field, a mass exodus because of mental health issues, because of COVID, because of the political environment,” Desravines told ����Ӱ��. “It will be a missed opportunity if we are not being intentional and strategic about how we build the pipeline in a way that ensures there’s far greater representation than there’s been in the past.”&�Բ�����;

Desravines added that principals, particularly those without supportive district leadership, have been feeling “incredibly lonely.” There are about 11 and 9% of Black and Latino principals nationally, respectively. Some may be the only leader of color in their district or county — experiencing a mix of racist hostility or taking on more emotional labor to support marginalized students than their peers. 

Black Principal Network’s Executive Director Cain, for instance, built her career in her hometown of Chicago alongside many Black educators and leaders. But she knows that some, in places like Madison, Wisconsin, are the only ones in their district or county fiercely advocating for the “babies that look like me.”&�Բ�����;

It’s become necessary to share strategies across state lines, so that leaders who would previously have never crossed paths, can share lessons learned like how to advance an equity initiative or deal with a combative school board. 

“There’s [professional] development needed, but what I learned is there are some internal obstacles that our guys face, too,” said Keith Brooks, founder of the National Fellowship for Black and Latino Male Educators, the group offering free access to BetterHelp therapy. “Imposter syndrome — just understanding their worth or value, or internalized racism, and being able to show up as their authentic self… that was one of the biggest things that was getting in our guys’ ways.”&�Բ�����;

The Black Principal’s Network recognized a similar need near the beginning of the pandemic and widespread protests against racism and police violence. What began as a Facebook group has morphed into an online community of over 350; principals participate in self-care, sustainability, and self-discovery programming. 

While the Fellowship and Network specifically advocate for principals of color, the strategies and support offer a roadmap for the broader population of leaders. 

“Sometimes you feel like being vulnerable or taking time means that you are abandoning, or it is a sign of weakness…we have to change that narrative,” Cain said. “We have to create a space where our leaders can actually get refilled and be recharged beyond what we have right now.”

The bell rang a little after a gloomy dawn. As a trickle of A.P. Spanish students settled into their wooden desks, teacher Zachary Daniels powered up his smartboard. Behind him, the classroom wall was covered with translated verbs – Explico (explain), Escribe (write) – written on a large, white scroll. 

For this morning’s lesson, Daniels asked the students to use a different kind of language, to look within and name a feeling. Did they walk through the doors feeling humiliated? Guilty? Peaceful? Were their outlooks tainted by hopelessness or brightened by hope?

It was late March and the world outside Paw Paw High School, located in a rural stretch of western Michigan, seemed increasingly threatening. The war raging in Ukraine was dominating airwaves and news feeds. A school shooting in Oxford, Michigan, had left four students dead. And Covid continued its inexorable march.

As Daniels spoke, he passed out a worksheet filled with 29 colorful, cartoon images of children’s faces, each expressing a unique mood. The worksheet guided the students to rate the intensity of their feelings on a scale of 1 to 10, and they jotted down their answers quietly. 

“The way we think and feel and act affects the next situation that comes up,” Daniels told the class. “And that creates a cycle that can really impact the way that our days go.”

The mindfulness check has become a weekly ritual for the 650 or so students at Paw Paw High. Daniels wants his students to interpret their thoughts and feelings in a non-judgmental way. Mastering this skill will take consistent practice.

A mental health crisis intensifies

Teachers have been trained in the subjects they teach, but not in ways of helping students control their emotions or rewrite the stories they tell themselves. But since the mid-1990s, multiple have shown the benefits of (SEL), a strategy that trains educators to nurture student wellness by helping them feel connected, engaged and supported while cultivating skills in self-management, social awareness and responsible decision-making. 

As the Covid-19 pandemic brought shutdowns and quarantines, making students’ lives less stable and connected, it and left schools searching for answers. Making matters worse was a longstanding shortage of counselors and social workers. As the pandemic began, Michigan had the , with , more than double the recommended caseload. 

To address the problem, many Michigan schools adopted a homegrown social-emotional learning curriculum created by TRAILS – – a program that borrows techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy and was developed at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2013. In the aftershock of the pandemic, its popularity has grown and is now being taught in over 600 schools statewide. 

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has included funding of to expand the TRAILS program in her proposed budget for the 2022-2023 fiscal year. The legislature is now debating the budget and typically tries to pass the education portion by July 1, when the fiscal year begins for school districts.

The program includes a three-tiered approach. , geared toward K-12 students and rooted in the techniques of mindfulness, focus attention on thoughts and feelings to help a child choose to act with care. Elements of help students disrupt the cycles of negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors they go through when confronting a difficult situation.

The is focused on small group, skill-building sessions led by school mental health professionals, and the offers suicide risk-management training to school staff members.  

Decades of scientific research has shown an emotionally healthy learner is a better learner. But school leaders, well before the pandemic, lacked the tools and capacity to tackle a student mental health crisis head on. “They did not feel they were equipped to manage the sort of severity and volume of mental illness that was coming through the doors of counselors, social workers and school psychologists,” said , a former school psychologist and adjunct faculty member at the University of Michigan Medical School who founded the program. 

The goal of TRAILS, said Koschmann, who serves as its executive director, is not for teachers to dole out unwanted therapy to students. Nor is to replace counselors and social workers. Rather, it’s a way to help foster wellness inside schools and coordinate care for students who need extra help or treatment. 

TRAILS’ lessons about feelings and self-management are supportive and often fun. But across the nation, a campaign against social-emotional learning has fomented anger among a vocal sector of parents, state lawmakers and conservative groups with ties to dark money, as . 

These groups have labeled SEL a masquerade for critical race theory (CRT), another culture war flashpoint, . The opposition led a to end its SEL initiatives earlier this year. Florida’s top education officials over 50 math textbooks because their pages made references to SEL and what they describe as CRT.  And a Minnesota group lambasted the district’s SEL lessons as a “”&�Բ�����;

In Michigan, some parents have spoken out at school board meetings against the teachings of SEL skills, and is fighting the pushback. 

“It’s a complicated moment in American education,” said Koschmann. “There’s a larger debate about how are we educating young people about questions like race and racism, and privilege and power in the country, at the same time, that schools are saying, ‘We also need to take care of students’ mental health.’”&�Բ�����;

Despite the backlash, educators and parents overwhelmingly support the teaching of SEL skills, . 

In the past few months, however, a growing number of Paw Paw parents expressed fears over the teaching of social-emotional learning. Some worried the curriculum pushed critical race theory. In response, the district has hosted in-person and virtual community forums to clarify the curriculum’s purpose. Last month’s in-person forum attracted over a dozen parents. District leaders are not planning to abandon TRAILS and are being proactive as fears arise, said Corey Harbaugh, director of curriculum for the Paw Paw Public School District. 

“There is a high level of concern from people who tie social-emotional learning to certain political agendas, even though we know that politics is not our business. Our business is taking care of the needs of students,” Harbaugh said. “Our parents and our community have to be at ease and support what we’re doing; otherwise, we’re fighting about it rather than working together.” He wants parents to understand, he said, that SEL “isn’t tied to any political agenda beyond giving kids what they need to feel connected, engaged, cared for.”

TRAILS training in the Upper Peninsula

Kristy Alimenti, a mental health services coordinator with the Delta-Schoolcraft Intermediate School District in the Upper Peninsula, said her district has facilitated training for over 60 teachers in TRAILS since last year. The limited preparation time required, ease of applying SEL skills to academic lessons and strong research base of the curriculum made it appealing to administrators.

In a rural area where access to mental health services is low and rates of anxiety and depression among students are rising, Alimenti said TRAILS gave staff more tools to tackle challenges before they escalate and may require deeper intervention. 

“It allows us to also de-stigmatize the conversation around mental health and provide lessons that address a lot of what the students may be facing or experience in a more proactive and preventative way,” she said. 

Visits to two districts, Paw Paw Public School District in rural western Michigan, and Ypsilanti Community Schools, an urban district, offer a sense of what these programs look like in practice.  

Learning from Simon Says 

It was a quiet, rainy morning at Erickson Elementary School in Ypsilanti, a diverse, low-income city near the Huron River that has shed thousands of manufacturing jobs. In room 127, the fifth-graders were getting a lesson on thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Halfway through, they stood up as teacher Nikki Krings laid out the rules of a reverse game of Simon Says. 

“Simon Says, move forward!” Krings directed. 

The students shuffled a few steps backward. 

“Simon Says, thumbs up!”&�Բ�����;

The students flashed their thumbs down. 

“Simon Says, make a really happy face!”

Some students grimaced, while one couldn’t help but give a goofy grin. 

Krings and other Ypsilanti teachers were trained in TRAILS at the onset of the pandemic in 2020, at a time when they were fretting over whether they could preserve close connections with their students over computer screens from home. 

Krings said the tools she learned helped her deescalate some students’ mental health problems, instead of relying on a social worker in the building. It also helped build a culture of empathy and understanding in her classroom, giving kids space to navigate their feelings.

As Covid risks eased and students flocked back to classrooms this year, Krings and other teachers at Erickson saw their students’ fears of the unknown grow. 

In a city where people , many of the students were already in survival mode. The students at Erickson are predominantly Black, and most are . Some don’t always have food at home. Others bounce from home to home because their families can’t afford to stay where they are. 

Black children disproportionately endure the pains of poverty and illness, and the mental health impacts that result. More than a third of high school students said in that they’ve been treated poorly or unfairly because of their race or ethnicity. Even before the pandemic, the mental health crisis plagued Black youth. Over the past decade, among Black, Latino, and Asian teenagers.

Krings has made room 127 a place where students can try to escape their troubles and be themselves. In addition to TRAILS, she teaches students about race and encourages discussion and acceptance of diverse gender identities. “It’s important for me, for them, to feel safe,” she said. 

Alayah, a girl with tight cornrows and dangly braids, and Alex, wearing green and black glasses, gleefully followed each step of the reverse Simon Says amid a sputtering of giggles. (MindSite News is identifying them by their middle names to protect their confidentiality).

The two are good friends. Alayah likes Alex because he’s fun. Both want to get good jobs when they grow up. Alayah said her mom believes in her dream of starting a business. One day, Alayah said, she hopes to buy her mom a house and a car.  

“People say they don’t want to go to school,” Alayah said later. “But I’m like, ‘You need school, so you can get a better education and a better job. So you can get somewhere in life.’”

After a few more commands, Alayah, Alex and the rest of the class sat down at their desks and listened closely. 

“I want to challenge you,” Krings said. “When you’re feeling a really big emotion, something really bad, really frustrating, really scared, really embarrassed, I want you to think, ‘I’m going to pause real quick, and…recognize my feelings…I’m going to take it back and say, let me see (if)  I can do the opposite.’”

Learning to avoid ‘thinking traps’

In a classroom off of Paw Paw High School’s long main hallway, English teacher Allan Blank was delivering a rapidfire lesson on the perils of “thinking traps” – the moments when our minds jump to the wrong conclusions or ignore the good. On a wall, posters with memes of the teacher’s likeness include a headshot superimposed on the body of a surfer. The teacher relishes the light-hearted, Gen Z humor.  

Blank asked the students to work in groups and come up with everyday dilemmas that foster thinking traps. 

“Your friend stops texting you back,” one student said, then sketched out the negative thoughts that coursed through his mind: “They don’t want to be my friend. They didn’t text me back. They don’t like me.”

Blank gave each group two minutes to identify the feelings they outlined in their scenarios, and how those feelings inspire less loving actions. For example, thinking someone doesn’t like you can trigger feelings of sadness or tiredness.

“We don’t want to be stuck in the traps,” he told them. “We want to be able to reframe stuff positively, so we’re getting to a better place. And maybe our behaviors are changing as well.”&�Բ�����;

Then he gave them 30 seconds to reframe these hypothetical situations in an affirmative light. 

Perched on a winding street, Paw Paw High School is located in a small town of mostly white, middle-class families. Lakes and small farms dot the countryside outside of town, and a historic winery stands in Paw Paw’s center square.

Despite the bucolic scenery, the district has been accused of fostering a culture of racial hostility. , a group of local Native American activists called for the renaming of “Redskin,” the school mascot. Some in the community reacted angrily, even as about a history of racist incidents in the schools emerged. In 2019, the ACLU against the district. , the district dropped the controversial mascot name, eventually changing it to “Red Wolves.”&�Բ�����;

In the aftermath, the tensions over the mascot renaming created some rifts within the school community. 

“During the divided times of the mascot change, one of the things we learned was that we don’t always know how to talk to one another, across divisions,” said curriculum director Harbaugh. He said social-emotional learning can also strengthen communication and relationships between the district and families.

Paw Paw public schools implemented TRAILS district-wide for the first time in the school year that ends this week. The lessons go beyond mindfulness to teach empathy and understanding of each student’s unique identity and background. 

As curriculum director, Harbaugh has overseen the implementation of TRAILS and hopes it can transform Paw Paw schools. He encourages staff members, including janitors, secretaries and cafeteria workers, to buy into the concept, and the district pays stipends to those who get additional training. He believes the approach demands a team effort and must be consistent in order to be effective. 

“Every adult (that) any child comes into contact with has been trained and has been asked to prioritize students’ social-emotional learning and health,” he said.

The need is real. Last year, Tammy Southworth, Paw Paw High’s principal, talked with her staff about social-emotional learning after reviewing data that revealed an alarming truth: Students were more anxious and overwhelmed than ever, stuck in a realm of discomfort reinforced by social media. 

“The way they were relating to each other, as well as to us, was different,” Southworth said. “When I was a teacher, I would say, ‘Whatever’s going on outside, whatever is happening at home, this is your safe space. Come to school, leave those things at the door.’” But now, she said, “they can’t get away from texts, alerts on their phones, reminders of what’s happening. So I think that just puts a whole different pressure on kids.”

So far, the rollout of TRAILS has meant working through some important challenges.

For some teachers, the lessons went beyond the scope of their jobs and the curriculum felt jarring. A few told Southworth they weren’t comfortable with TRAILS and didn’t want to take classroom time away from academics. Others were afraid.

“Honestly, there’s a fear, even for adults, to feel like you have to share your feelings with  a group of kids,” Southworth said. “There was definitely a fear that kids were going to start opening up and sharing too much personal information, and the teacher was going to be like ‘I don’t know what to do.’”&�Բ�����;

Southworth told teachers they don’t have to encourage students to vent all of their emotions but could share their personal rating on a scale of one to 10. 

Getting teachers to help students navigate their troubles and manage their emotions represents a vital shift, said Paw Paw Superintendent Rick Reo. 

“It’s just a different way to think about things,” he said. “We assume kids are on board and ready to go, or at least, ‘they can put their mind to it.’ You know, it’s not necessarily true. We need to do some things to make sure we’re giving them the best opportunity to succeed.”

The district is figuring out how to track the lessons’ impact on academic outcomes. Southworth hopes TRAILS will help improve student attendance. Harbaugh said the lessons have already helped bolster students’ self-efficacy. In a recent district survey, more students said they “believed in their ability to tackle difficult school work.”

Blank, the English teacher, said the focus on mental health has helped him connect with students more intimately. Recently, he noticed a student being quiet and disengaged. After class, he asked the student if they needed any help. 

“This is just another way to let kids know that you’re here. You care for them,” he said. “And when you can build those foundational relationships, and let them know that ‘I got your back’ sort of thing, they’re gonna be more willing to work with you, open up with you about things that may be happening in their lives.”&�Բ�����;

Learning to stop when you’re mad

Back in Ypsilanti, Alayah, Alex, and their teacher, Nikki Krings, left room 127 and walked to the school’s library, where colorful books line the shelves and windows offer a view of the playground. The three sat at a brown table to talk more about what they learned. 

The exercise in reframing taught Alayah and Alex to rethink things, they said. “It’s helped me quite a bit,” Alex said. “Like when I’m mad, sometimes I just feel like I want to hit something or someone.” Now, he is able to stop himself. 

Alayah said she better recognizes her frustrations and powers through. The other day, she started doing her math homework and got stumped on a problem. She didn’t know what to do. 

“I came to school and asked for help instead of saying, “I’m not going to do it,” Alayah said. Before this year, she probably would’ve stayed quiet and answered the questions randomly. 

Alayah and Alex are new to the school and to social-emotional learning. Alex said he has been moving and changing schools for as long as he remembers, each time starting over. 

“It’s just hard for me to socialize,” he said. It’s also hard for him to keep friends “because I know I’m probably never going to see that person again.” He compares the experience to characters dying and coming back to life in a video game.  

Attendance turbulence often leads to more behavioral challenges, which can affect . 

For both Alayah and Alex, the weight of grief has already taken hold, even before they’ve reached their teen years. “A lot of stuff happens in my family,” Alex said. “Like, I’ve lost two people.” His beloved dog also passed away. 

“It’s just hard for me because I can’t think about the present,” he said. “I think about the future and I know the people I love will be gone.”&�Բ�����;

Alayah lost her father when she was 9. Last year, just before the school year started, her older brother passed away.

“It was hard for me to do, like, anything,” she said. Recently, she wanted to celebrate another brother’s birthday, to be there for him, bright-eyed and enthusiastic. She didn’t want to cry, remembering the other men in her life who were gone. 

“I did cry on his birthday because it was so hard,” she said. “I’m pretty sure my brother and my dad didn’t want me to still be crying. They want me to go on.”&�Բ�����;  

As they talked about these losses, their soft voices broke and tears streamed down their cheeks. School is a place where Alayah and Alex feel safe. When he’s there, Alex said, he tries to forget about home and be nice to everyone. For Alayah, it’s hard to open up, but she’s still trying to make friends. 

The two fifth-graders grab some tissues to wipe their tears, and then walk with their teacher to the social worker’s office. On that quiet, rainy morning, naming feelings may have surfaced memories of trauma. But as they work through those memories, they know their teacher will be there for them.

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

As it did in workplaces worldwide, the killing of George Floyd — just a few miles from its offices in Minneapolis — led to deep introspection about diversity and fairness at the Solve advertising agency.

The company was more than 80 percent white, and part of an industry in which Black and Hispanic employees are drastically underrepresented compared to their proportions of the population.

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“It obviously pushed the entire industry to reflect, ‘Are we doing enough?’ ” said Andrew Pautz, a partner in the firm and its director of business development. “And the answer was really no.”

To respond, Solve looked 1,100 miles away, to Baltimore. That’s where it found a historically Black university, or HBCU — Morgan State University — that was willing to team up to create an entry-level course to introduce its students to careers in advertising.

“Advertising isn’t on the radar of diverse candidates when it really counts, when they’re trying to find a career to engage in,” Pautz said. So he and his colleagues asked: “Where is there a high concentration of diverse students? And that’s what brought us to HBCUs.”

It’s not only Solve that has come to this conclusion. So have some of the nation’s largest employers, who are descending on HBCUs to recruit the workers they need to meet diversity promises or expanding collaborations that already existed — often underwriting courses and programs and the technology needed to provide them.

These employers include Google, IBM, Northrop Grumman, Novartis, NBCUniversal, the airlines United, Delta and Southwest, and even the NFL, which teamed up last month with four historically Black medical schools to boost the number of Black team physicians and medical professionals.

“At many HBCUs, the phones have been ringing off the hook,” said David Marshall, professor and chair of the Department of Strategic Communication at Morgan State. “Given that these institutions are producing some of the highest numbers in terms of Black and brown students in some professions, it’s a natural development to come to where the students are.”

About one in 11 Black college students are enrolled in the nation’s 101 HBCUs, which produce more than a quarter of Black graduates with degrees in math, biology and the physical sciences, the National Science Foundation reports, and 50 percent of Black lawyers, 40 percent of Black engineers and 12.5 percent of Black CEOs, according to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund.

“People who have attended HBCUs, we know the value,” said Cheyenne Boyce, a graduate of historically Black Spelman College and senior manager in the Education Partner Program at the software developer and marketing company HubSpot, which also teams up with HBCUs to find interns and employees. “We’ve always known that. But it does help to have additional external validation.”

No one tracks how many companies are teaming up with HBCUs to find workers. But many such affiliations have been announced over the last two years. There’s been “a significant uptick,” said Marshall, at Morgan State. “It’s been deeper over the last couple of years,” said Lydia Logan, vice president for global education and workforce development and corporate social responsibility at IBM. Added Yeneneh Ketema, university relations diversity program lead at Northrop Grumman: “From what �ɱ�’v�� heard from our campus contacts, yes, there are a lot more companies coming there.”

This expanding pipeline to jobs with top employers could attract more students to HBCUs, whose enrollment overall declined by 15 percent in the 10 years ending 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Education — although about a third of the schools have seen a rebound in response to racist incidents at predominantly white institutions, the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions reports.

“Having companies really be willing to make investments, it benefits the students. It’s great for the parents. It’s great for the universities,” Boyce said.

For HBCU students who are lower-income or the first in their families to go to college, closer relationships with corporate recruiters and mentors also could help offset the advantage long enjoyed by wealthier counterparts who can network their way to jobs.

“I as a rich white kid might have, not just the relationships to get into the door, but also the perspective to know that working at a bank doesn’t just mean being a teller,” said Jeffrey Moss, founder and CEO of Parker Dewey, which helps employers and colleges arrange short-term internships. “Or maybe if my mom or dad works at [the management consulting firm] McKinsey, I could get a job there.

“What’s exciting to see coming out of the HBCUs right now are these opportunities to build real relationships,” Moss said.

That’s because many employers are investing more than an occasional campus recruiting visit. They’re showering HBCUs with technology and other support, mentors and money to help develop talent.

“The old model is, you bring a fancy table to the career fair and you give out brochures,” Marshall said. “The second tier is that there have always been occasional internships. The shift now is looking for more meaningful relationships.”

IBM in May announced that it would underwrite new cybersecurity centers at six HBCUs: Morgan State, Xavier, North Carolina A&T State, South Carolina State, Clark Atlanta and Louisiana’s Southern University System.

HBCUs produce more than a quarter of the Black graduates with degrees in math, biology and the physical sciences and 50 percent of Black lawyers, 40 percent of Black engineers and 12.5 percent of Black CEOs.

In addition to supplying academic content, the company will furnish experts to conduct guest lectures and even simulated hacking events.

“This is our next new big thing with HBCUs,” said Logan, at IBM, which already had a program to recruit students from historically Black schools.

“We’ve had a long commitment to diversity. For other companies it’s newer. For everyone, it’s gotten deeper over the last couple of years,” Logan said.

There’s not only now a social imperative for these companies, but an economic one: a huge demand for workers — not just in cybersecurity, but in other fields that require education in science, technology, engineering and math.

“We have a talent shortage,” Logan said. And “if you’re looking for diverse talent in STEM, it’s a natural fit to recruit from HBCUs.”

Consumers and activists are also pressuring employers to live up to promises that they will diversify their workforces.

“Especially for those companies that are consumer brands, their customers are saying that they want to see something happen,” Marshall said.

In some industries, such expectations can have an immediate and tangible effect on the bottom line. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say their perception of a brand’s diversity through its advertising affects whether they will patronize it, for example, according to a survey by the marketing analytics firm Marketing Charts. More than half of Black respondents said they won’t do business with a company that doesn’t represent Black people in its ads.

“Whether it’s about race or religion or gender, perspective is everything in advertising,” said Pautz, of Solve, whose clients include True Value, American Standard and Rust-oleum. Having a diverse workforce can broaden a company’s perspective, he said. “We have to understand how people think. It’s all about getting into a target audience’s shoes.”

Google’s Grow with Google HBCU Career Readiness Program provides digital education and funding to help expand the pipeline of Black tech workers, who represent only 4.4 percent of Google employees in the United States, even though 13.4 percent of the U.S. population is Black. Last year —facing criticism, including from one of its own former diversity recruiters that it previously didn’t seriously consider Black engineers from HBCUs for jobs — the company’s CEO met with the presidents of five HBCUs. Google has now added a new program called Pathways to Tech to provide those universities with technology resources.

To recruit new airline pilots , fewer than 4 percent of whom are Black and another 14,500 of whom the Bureau of Labor Statistics says will be needed each year through at least the end of this decade, United Airlines has teamed up with historically Black Delaware State University, Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina and Hampton University in Virginia. Delta has formed a partnership with Hampton, too, and Southwest with Texas Southern University in Houston.

The NFL announced last month that it would offer month-long clinical rotations to students from the historically Black Howard University College of Medicine, Morehouse School of Medicine, Meharry Medical College and Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science as a way to increase diversity among NFL physicians, only 5 percent of whom are Black.

“It’s really important for us to have that pipeline” from HBCUs, said Ketema, at Northrop Grumman, which also has collaborations with HBCUs and this fall will hold its fourth annual “HBCU Invitational,” during which it invites students to interview for jobs and participate in workshops and other activities.

It’s important that employers give more than lip service to these partnerships, Ketema’s colleague, Chris Carlson, Northrop’s director of university recruiting, said.

“One thing that we all know from working with HBCUs is the students can truly tell if a company is there to check a box — just showing up at a career fair to collect resumes — or if the company is in it with a school,” Carlson said.

Marshall agreed that the onus is on employers to live up to their diversity goals.

“This is not a story about HBCUs,” he said. “It’s about companies and corporations that are under increased pressure from their stakeholders, their shareholders, their customers saying, ‘You can no longer sit on the sidelines. You’ve got to do something.’ ”

“I don’t think the burden is on the HBCU side. I think the burden is on the corporations that suddenly woke up and found Jesus.”

In the meantime, HBCUs are indisputably enjoying a surge of employer interest.

“It’s great for HBCUs to get this attention,” said IBM’s Logan. “For a long time I think they were overlooked and now they’re getting the recognition they’ve always deserved.”

This story about was produced by , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and published in partnership with the .��

Like so many of her peers returning to classes after two years of pandemic isolation, Crockett High School senior Klyrissa Porter often feels overwhelmed.

But the Austin, Texas, teen noticed when she would reach out to her friends to share that her mental health was suffering, the replies she received were not exactly what she’d hoped for. 

“They’d just be like, ‘LOL, same,’” Porter said.

The hallways are full of teens struggling, she said, but no one seems to be able to help anyone else move forward. “Everyone is going through a lot, and because of that �ɱ�’v�� forgotten how to be friends,” she said, “…to be there for each other, support each other, love each other.”

That’s particularly difficult for Porter who has been part of Students Organizing for Anti-Racism (SOAR) since her freshman year to help confront the systemic racism at school. But confronting such large troubling issues on campus requires stamina people seems to have lost during the pandemic, said students in SOAR, which meets as a regular class at Crockett. 

To honor diverse perspectives, they first have to relearn how to hear and see beyond themselves. 

“There is not a person in the world who doesn’t have something they’re going through,” Porter’s classmate, senior Lilly Swearingen said. 

Now, the same skills they use to ground their anti-racist work are helping the SOAR students rebuild the basic social skills and healthy relationships they lost during the pandemic. 

Specifically, they said, have helped them repair their relationships and see themselves in the context of community again. 

When the students in Crockett High School in Austin gather to address conflict or deepen their connection to each other, they usually gather in a circle and pass a talking piece from student to student while answering a question or responding to a prompt. 

These circles, familiar fixtures in social and emotional learning and restorative discipline, have sacred roots, said Iztac Arteaga, the restorative practices specialist at Crockett. Circles have been healing and grounding for Indigneous communities for centuries, and their power is more vital than ever in the middle of a nationwide teen mental health crisis.  

“When people feel held and seen and valued as humans, there’s just so much more that can be done as you’re navigating difficult situations,” Ateaga said. 

Difficult situations abound.

As Arteaga teaches students and teachers how to participate in and eventually facilitate circles, she is adamant that the practice not become perfunctory or sloppy. While it’s tempting  to just, for instance, grab a dry-erase marker to serve as a talking piece, she said, for a circle to be most effective, it also has to be, in some sense, sacred.

“If we knew the history and how indigneous people literally died and lost their lives to maintain these practices we’d probably treat it with a little more respect,” Arteaga said. 

Instead of a dry-erase marker for a talking piece, the group should choose something to convey respect, and remind them of their shared values. Same with the centerpiece, where students can rest their eyes if looking at each other becomes uncomfortable or painful. 

In her position, Arteaga facilitates and teaches “community-building” circles, which start out light, giving people the opportunity to know each other. Cross-talk and phones are not allowed. She also does trauma-informed “mediation” circles when a conflict has occurred between students or between students and teachers. 

When they returned to school, the first emotion Porter noticed was anger. Fights broke out, people lost their tempers daily. “It got to the point that we were scared to come to school,” she said, as other students nodded along with her. 

Circles at Crockett are uniquely suited for these complicated dynamics. While punitive discipline might address the behavior, restorative practices like those students learn in SOAR, speak to the pain behind the outbursts. 

“SOAR gives us a place to express ourselves, and a space where everyone can just say what they need to say,” said junior Daniella de Guzman. 

Community circles gather students to address harm done and feelings hurt, but instead of doling out punishments according to a policy handbook, each member of the circle can say what they need. Even the offending party gets the chance to express the unmet needs or pain that led to their hurtful actions. Addressing the pain keeps them in the community, and accountable to it. 

Arteaga knows the power of circles to sustain community, not just as a facilitator in schools, but as a participant.  As an Indigenous person whose ancestors were colonized out of their home and identity, ceremony is critical to her understanding of her own heritage. She participates in circles with the broader Indigenous community in Austin, and confers with the people there about how to best facilitate the practice in schools. 

It’s a careful balance, she said. Some aspects of ceremony need to be exclusive to Indigenous communities, because of the long history of cultural appropriation. 

Circles are a sacred part of the governance, community preservation, and identity of Indigenous groups, Arteaga explained, and were part of the religious and cultural practices outlawed for most of the history of the United States until the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act.

While she recognizes the circles happening at school will be inherently less authentic to Indigenous culture—the circles in the SOAR class are named after the houses in the Harry Potter series—Arteaga wants them to be respectful of it as they gather around a centerpiece—often a fire—and designating a talking piece to pass from person to person.

“If we knew the history and how Indigenous people literally lost their lives to maintain these practices, we probably would treat it with a little more respect,” Arteaga said.  

While she sometimes has to educate students and teachers simultaneously, the teacher for the SOAR class had the kids well-versed and acclimated to circles, Arteaga said. With the additional grounding in history and tradition, the SOAR students have been able to facilitate on their own. Her goal is for more students and adults on campus to be able to do the same, so that circles become a regular and reliable resource. Skilled listeners and communicators can strengthen the entire support network of the school.

Freshman Will Haskell actually did learn a lot about himself during the pandemic, he said, and he knew that what he’d learned about his own mental health would help his friends, but after two years online, starting the conversation in person is challenging. “SOAR has helped me to be able to actually talk about it,” Haskell said. 

Knowing how to offer help is one skill the kids are developing, so is asking for help. Circles teach them the importance of asking for consent in both roles.

A lot of kids seemed totally dissociated— disconnected from their thoughts, feelings, and emotions, Swearingen said. They shove the feelings down to make it through the day, and some then overshare with their friends online. She calls it “trauma-dumping” and says it’s almost a trend now. 

When one person posts about a mental health challenge, she said, their comments will often fill with others echoing the complaint, or even seeming to “one-up” the severity of the original poster’s distress. “If we can at least tone it down a little bit, it would help a lot.”

Even when it’s not competitive, she said, rarely do teens ask for consent before sharing their burdens via social media or direct messages. They don’t check to see if the recipient is in the right place to receive the extra weight. For two years students were isolated from each other in real life, she said, but grew accustomed to constant, around-the-clock access to one another on social media.

“It’s an expectation that has been set and it’s very uncomfortable,” Swearingen said.

Circles provide a structured way for students to listen, to see that others are going through their own struggles, without immediately hopping on board to trauma-dump. When the talking piece moves to their hands, they will have a turn. 

That predictable, structured place to safely share is critical, especially for students who want to take on society’s bigger challenges, Swearingen said. “It puts us in a spot where we can be vulnerable with each other, and because we can be vulnerable together we can be productive.”