This juicy prize is up for grabs, for both Dems and the GOP, but they better move fast. Think of playing Monopoly and landing on Reading Railroad, failing to buy it — and regretting it for the rest of the game.

How big is the prize? Imagine the politically decisive universe of soccer moms, half of whom have boys, who have been fretting for years over why the girls in their classes, and even their own daughters, do SO much better in school than their sons. 

And why so many of their sons, in later years, qualify as The clearest signal of that problem: the rising number of stories about young men () still living at home, often feeling .

Could the “boys” vote matter? Oh yeah, at least where I sit as a Virginia resident. Glenn Younkin got elected as governor in 2021 here by stirring up parents in places such as prosperous Loudoun County over discipline, masking and transgender students’ bathroom and locker room use. That’s small potatoes compared to the broader boy problems.

The reason this issue has such political potential is there’s a relatively simple explanation for the male school dilemma. And, there’s a fix for the problem that’s somewhat difficult, but definitely doable.

A bit of background. Thanks to the that drew 49 governors and then-President George H. W. Bush, a decision was made to push academic rigor earlier, by about two grades, as I document in my 2011 book, . Bottom line: First graders soon got handed the work that third graders had been doing. 

The governors’ intentions were spot on. The U.S. was slipping behind other countries in academic comparisons. Something had to be done to boost college readiness. This reform should do it, right?

The result, however, was something no one expected. Boys, whose brains aren’t wired for early literacy rigor, fell behind. In short, those same boys looked at the girls, exulting in their comparative literacy excellence, and said, “No thanks. We find video games far more attractive.”

Teachers, who should have known better, in many cases just shrugged their shoulders. Aren’t there meds available for hyperactive boys who can’t adjust to these new standards?

The result, by the numbers, is bracing. I suggest a look at the data by the American Institute for Boys and Men. 

Some quick examples: At age 5, there is a 14 percentage point gender gap in school readiness favoring girls, who are poised to soak up those early academic challenges. Where does that lead? Two-thirds of those in the top decile of high school GPAs are girls; two- thirds of those in the bottom are boys. There is a 15 percentage point gender gap favoring women in students earning bachelor’s degrees.

There are multiple small fixes schools can undertake to correct the boys’ problems. Educators already know what to do: Roughly the same things they did for girls years ago to successfully correct for math and science academic deficiencies. By making math and science into participatory projects, bringing female scientists into their classrooms as role models and focusing on encouraging more girls to take an interest in those subjects, they turned it around. Before being reopened with the pandemic, the disparity between boys’ and girls’ middle school math and science scores had disappeared. 

But I digress.

Again, the question is: Who’s going to get there first and claim the political rewards? My current betting is on Donald Trump, who polls well among young men. A lot of struggling guys find a kindred spirit in the chip-on-the shoulder president. 

For Trump, this is a perfect fit: Confront the mostly female teachers unions, who have historically insisted the “boy problems” are exaggerated. How bad can it be when men dominate Congress and top business jobs? Then claim that “woke” school administrators prefer to focus on girls and minorities. He could demand changes such as an intense focus on boys in elementary school literacy instruction. The exact changes may be less important than the mandate to pay attention, which is what happened with girls and science. 

What’s to lose? They aren’t his supporters. This is such an easy ”get” that I’m surprised that Trump’s staffers haven’t thought of it.

My sentimental bet, however, is on the Democrats, who could potentially use it to help win back the lead they long held — and then lost — as being seen among voters as the more trusted party on education. It’s the ideal issue for moving the party away from the woke wing. I’m thinking former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, currently floating himself as , could run with this, along with centrist Democrats, such as Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who recently described herself as being on

On the surface, this would appear to be a no-go issue for the Democrats. The teachers unions remain among their most valuable allies. Unless, that is, a candidate such as Emanuel gains momentum. Remember ? They called him a bully, a liar and an “imperial mayor.” Exactly the credentials needed to take this on and win the soccer mom votes in affluent suburbs.

The midterm elections aren’t far away, so the race is on. Which party will seize the ripe, vote-rich boys issue?

Yes, it’s that serious, which is why Kamala Harris urgently needs to do something she should have done months ago: seize what appears to be a “red” issue and run with it. Make it her own. Send a message to those right-leaning independent voters who still see her as a San Francisco liberal.

Harris has the perfect issue staring right at her: the indisputable fact that in K-12 schools, lag far behind in earning college degrees and enter the workforce frightfully ill equipped for a modern economy.

Many of those failure-to-launch boys turn into failed-to-thrive adults, who today wear red “Make America Great Again” baseball hats.

Talking up the problem is a win-win for Harris. Yes, it will anger teachers unions and groups such as the American Association of University Women, who persist in denying the obvious, that boys, not girls, are in trouble.

That public anger is pretty much the point. The louder they protest the better. Besides, most of those teachers and activists already voted early for Harris. And it might help to recenter a race where men are rapidly shifting red while women move into the blue camp. 

Will talking about the boy troubles lose female voters? Not necessarily. College women, for example, can look around their campuses, where they make up as much as 60% of the student body, and sense that imbalance as detracting from their own fuller experience of young adulthood. 

But it just might sway some independent male voters, who clearly worry about Harris’s true allegiances. Weighing in on the boys, an issue implausibly seen as a red cause (mostly because so many progressives insist that boys don’t need help) can only help. 

The final win-win: The hardest hit among all males are minorities, the very group Harris is having trouble reaching.

Other than revealing she owns a Glock, Harris hasn’t sent out any firm signals that she’s not a San Francisco progressive. And appearing on air with Howard Stern, toying with an interview with Joe Rogan and sitting down for some tense exchanges with Fox’s Brett Baier doesn’t cut it.

The boy troubles, an ideal choice for Harris, is not a new issue. My book, was published in 2011, one of several books around that time to lay out the problem.

My research focused on schools failing to teach literacy skills to boys – in part by pushing literacy at early ages when boys aren’t ready. Thus, by third grade boys were made to feel like academic underachievers. Understandably, they lost interest in school and dug into video games. Other books focused on the rising rate of fatherless families and the increasing confusion over what it means to be a man, all important contributors to the problem.

Today, the best updates on the gender problems come from author Richard Reeves, who formed the . If anything, the boys’ issues have deepened since my book. Some examples he cites:

• In high school, two thirds of the highest GPA students are girls; two thirds of the lowest scorers are boys.

• In 1972, men were 13 percentage points more likely than women to earn a college degree. Today, women are 15 percentage points more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree.

• In 1979, the weekly earnings of the typical American man who completed high school was, in today’s dollars, $1,017. Today it is $881.

• Deaths among working-class men, what’s often called “deaths of despair,” have risen from 60 per 100,000 in 1991 to 191 per 100,000 by 2022.

So how does Harris seize this issue? I’ll leave that to the political pros, but some obvious options include showing up at a college with lopsided gender gaps to demand answers. 

Or, she could visit a rural county health office in a Trumpy state where the suicide rate among working-class men has soared. Unfortunately, that won’t be hard to find. Again, demand answers. 

Done properly, with gusto, she’ll have her against-the-grain moment, but Harris better act fast. We are two weeks away from what will likely be the closest presidential race in U.S. history and its outcome could turn on whether Harris can reach these disaffected boys-to-men.

is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

Q: Can a school ban a child from praying, or do schools have to provide accommodations for children with certain beliefs? – Isaac T., 17, Flint, Michigan

“You can’t teach a hungry child,” Cooper said. “If a child hasn’t eaten, then clearly that child is going to be more distracted, and it’s going to be more difficult to make sure that they learn.”

Innovative breakfast options, like the breakfast served in classrooms at Glenn Elementary, help improve student success in academics while lowering the need for discipline, said Jim Keaten, the executive director of child nutrition services at .

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“I think it’s starting to show in the academics that the kids being able to eat and focus and spend more time—instructional time— is really making an impact. And they’re focusing on education as opposed to discipline,” Keaten said.

The funding will provide grants of up to $50,000 per school nutrition program to allow schools to better provide students innovative school breakfast options, such as breakfast in the classroom, grab-and-go breakfasts, or second chance breakfasts, when students have the option of eating breakfast during a break.

“Hopefully it can get more school systems and schools involved in this program because we know that it means a lot for them to do this,”&�Բ�����;Cooper said.

Cooper is partnering with the (NCAH) and the (CHI) for this effort.

The governor said the effort would particularly help schools with high numbers of low income students.

The innovative breakfast program at Glenn Elementary, which has been in place for about two years, allows all students — regardless of economic status — to arrive to class early for a free breakfast and receive bonus instructional time with teachers while they eat.

In the past two years, Glenn Elementary School’s performance grade has increased by 15 points, said Principal Matthew Hunt, and the extra time students can spend with their teachers has added about three additional weeks of instructional time for some students.

“Food is the most important school supply, and getting kids off to a good start early in the morning with a good breakfast is, I think, the right thing to do,” said Morgan Wittman Gramann, executive director of NCAH.

Tanitra Edwards, a third grade math and science teacher at Glenn Elementary, said she is a fan of the program as it allows her more time to connect with her students, especially those who might need extra help.

“If there’s a student that I know is needing a little more support or something from a previous day, I’m allowed to work with them (at) that time,” Edwards said. “Of course, if they were in the cafeteria, I wouldn’t have that time with them.”

Cooper participated and observed as students at Glenn Elementary School were served individual bags of breakfast food early in the morning. Students in Edwards’ class worked on an online math game while they ate.

“They just love coming in and having those options available,” Edwards said.

Keaten recalled the stigma he felt as a child eating free breakfast at school, when students who needed free meals were separated from others, letting everyone know who the “poor kid” was. Free universal breakfasts for all students cuts down on that stigma, he said.

“To be able to get all the kids to eat in the classroom with no stigma to me is just a tremendous gain,” Keaten said. “It’s like one of my life goals to take that stigma away from kids.”

The innovative breakfast program at Glenn Elementary emerged due to necessity during the pandemic as students had to eat in classrooms rather than in the cafeteria, Keaten said.

While eating in the classrooms, the school found students had more time to complete homework and receive help while school staff completed administrative tasks and morning announcements before class began, freeing up time during the school day, Keaten said.

Cooper said other ways to mitigate hunger among students include adequately funding public schools and teachers while employing more school social workers and counselors who can help support the “whole child” and their family.

“Our schools can help connect families to services and help children not only get better nutrition, but be safer and have healthier lives all together,” Cooper said.

Expanded breakfast programs will also benefit students who may have food available at home, but aren’t ready to eat first thing in the morning at home, Cooper said.

The $1.4 million in funding comes from the federal Emergency Assistance for Non-Public Schools funds that have gone to the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief fund.

Applications for the grants will open in the next few months. When approved, the school systems will receive the support for their breakfast programs. All funding must be spent by September 2024.

“We celebrate this amazing opportunity to create more access for breakfast for more kids through innovative breakfast programs,” said Lou Anne Crumpler, director of CHI.

In the wake of the pandemic, the U.S. Department of Agriculture provided all public school students across the nation with free breakfasts and lunches, though that opportunity ended at the start of the 2022-23 school year.

Cooper said on Tuesday that state is making efforts toward securing universal lunches for students, though the work is still in progress. The 2023-24 state budget included funding to , which means students qualifying for reduced-price lunches can now eat for free. The co-pay for reduced-price breakfast was eliminated in 2011.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Until eighth grade, Carter Bremer went to school on a standard five-day schedule. After moving to Harrisburg, he stopped going to class on Mondays.

Now a senior at Harrisburg High School, Carter has spent just four days a week in school for the past five years, giving him more time to spend on sports, a job and college-level classes.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on and .

Latino students make up nearly three-quarters of the LAUSD student population.

But Carvalho’s 100-day plan, which promised to narrow academic achievement gaps and increase community engagement, has fallen short for some Latino parents. 

Five members of Parent Warriors, an advocacy group that is part of Families In Schools, spoke about unprecedented challenges, their eagerness for parent engagement, and Carvalho’s future — which they hope prioritizes a seat at the table for them. 

Parent Warriors members:

• Lissette Duarte, parent of a graduate and current LAUSD student.
• Raquel Toscano, parent of a graduate and current student at an LAUSD school.
• Sonia Gonzalez, parent of two students attending a charter school in Los Angeles  
• Mireya Pacheco, parent of a college student and two students attending a charter school in Los Angeles. 
• Monica Martinez, parent of five graduate and current LAUSD students. Her grandchildren also attend LAUSD schools.
• Sandy Mendoza, Director of Community Engagement and Advocacy for United Way of Greater Los Angeles

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

As a parent, do you feel superintendent Carvalho is promoting parent engagement across the district?

Duarte: I had really high hopes for him because he was a teacher and then an assistant principal and then a superintendent that was able to turn around Miami-Dade schools during a recession. And so I was like, wow, this is going to be a really great superintendent for us. But I don’t see that we’ve addressed the widening gaps in proficiency. 

Toscano: He started with the 100-day plan, but I feel that it’s too much on his plate…. I feel that the communication is still not as clear as I would want it to be…As he said, I feel we can come together and work together. But I still think that there’s a gap between all of us. I still feel that even being part of these committees…there’s still no connection. 

Gonzalez: So being a charter school parent, I have yet to see any outreach to charter school parents…what I know about the superintendent has been what comes through news…and things I’ve seen on the internet.  

Martinez: I think it’s a lack of communication because they talk about projects and bring them to the Board of Education but we’re not seeing it in the schools.  

Pacheco: When Mr. Carvalho came to the community, honestly, I didn’t see an invitation to speak to him closely…it was disappointing…I can tell you that I was expecting more. There’s a lack of communication. There’s a lot to be done. 

What has been the most challenging issue you have faced with your child’s education this past year or this school year?

Pacheco: There have been threats using Instagram threats for certain schools. The threat said we’re going to attack and then the school said, no, it was so-and-so. It was a child from the school making a joke…It’s very concerning… for them to not feel safe in the schools. 

Toscano: I feel that we’re failing them. There’s lots we can do but if Carvalho would take a minute to listen to all of us, we all have a story… and it’s just frustrating…There are lots of voices, but we haven’t been heard. 

Duarte: We have a critical issue with the achievement gap and loss of learning. There are around 1100 schools in LAUSD. We’re the second-largest school district in the country. We have nearly 9000 homeless students and about 84% of the students are living below the poverty level. 

How did the three-day strike by school workers affect your family? How do you feel about these strikes, like the teachers’ one a couple of years ago happening during the school year, and what preparations should be implemented?

Gonzalez: …many parents…are just really tired of having the strike used because ultimately nobody’s there to protect the children. Nobody’s there to take care of the missed days.

Martinez: In one way or another, they’re already behind academically… And I don’t want to say anything wrong about teachers. I’m so glad they received their increase. But our children…where is that balance? 

Toscano: My question was, do we really need it? Obviously, I’m for it. They need to get paid. They have families to support… There has to be a different way of negotiating. I think we parents need to be at this negotiation table.  

In terms of college and career readiness, how would you rate LAUSD on its ability to prepare students for college and its ability to help students navigate through the college/career process?

Duarte: They’re not properly preparing students and there isn’t enough support… because …especially with very large campuses, there’s probably only one college counselor. There’s no way to meet the need of getting the FAFSA done or linking them to those services and supports in a timely manner.

Martinez: They don’t have enough staff. The parents do not all have the opportunity to learn to be able to guide their children…And when they graduate, basically go to college blind. 

Gonzalez: There are a lot of good organizations out there that can be brought into the LAUSD school district to help them. The reality is the budgets can’t afford it. 

I’d like to give you this time to speak about the overall rate you give to superintendent Carvalho’s work in his first year in office and also to speak about the issue you care about the most.

Duarte: For me, I’d like to see him focus on a kid first agenda like Students First and allow for collaboration.

Pacheco: What I’d like to add is…Mr. Carvalho, please don’t forget that our children come first… Do not forget that they’re our priority. We will get old and they will continue living in this world.

This article is part of a collaboration between �鶹��Ʒ and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Kristy Maxwell realized something had to change the day she picked her son Levi up from school and found out his teacher had left the autistic kindergartener alone crying and throwing pencils from under his desk.

The Michigan mom switched her son to a school that had a good reputation serving students with disabilities, but things didn’t improve. Because Levi was a “math whiz,” staff ignored his trouble socializing and his difficulty handling the cafeteria’s loud noises, Maxwell said. Meanwhile, she was unsuccessful in lobbying the school to screen her child for autism, a way to secure the extra services required by law for students with disabilities. The mother worried her son might never get the learning support he needed.

Then, in March 2020, the pandemic shifted all classes at his school online and forced the family into an accidental experiment in a new model of education. 

During remote school, Levi could get one-on-one attention sitting next to his mother, who had to temporarily stop her work as a massage therapist due to COVID. His younger sister, who struggles with anxiety, could take breaks to pet the family’s dogs.

“When everything shut down and we were forced to go virtual … my two younger kids did really well,” Maxwell said. 

“We decided after doing that, since the younger two kids did so well outside of a brick-and-mortar [school], keeping them virtual would be the best way to help them academically.”

The Maxwells, whose three kids are now 9, 11 and 15, are among the thousands of families across the U.S. that tried virtual learning for the first time during the pandemic and are now staying with it.

New data indicate that online schools have had a staying power beyond the pandemic that few observers suspected. While some virtual academies have operated for decades, they saw a well-documented in 2020-21, the first full school year after COVID, as many virus-wary parents looked to protect their children from infections and anti-mask families sought a way out of face-covering requirements. But in the following year, even as brick-and-mortar schools fully reopened and mask mandates fell, remote schools mostly maintained their pandemic enrollment gains — and in many cases added new seats.

On average across 10 states, virtual school enrollment rose to 170% of its pre-pandemic level in 2020-21, then nudged up further to 176% in 2021-22, according to data obtained by �鶹��Ʒ. 

The new figures contribute to a more far-reaching understanding because, while have documented the uptick in new fully virtual schools and standalone remote academies offered by districts, scant analyses have provided a national picture of student enrollment in those schools.

‘Looks like it’ll stick’

The trend reveals that for many families virtual learning has become more than a temporary model to get through the pandemic — but rather a long-term option preferred in increasing numbers.

“It looks like it’ll stick,” said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “In some states, the numbers went up temporarily and came back down a bit. But overall, if [families] are staying for a couple of years, I would expect that they would keep it going.”

Six states in the dataset — Arkansas, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota and North Carolina — saw consecutive year-over-year virtual enrollment increases, while four — Florida, Oregon, Wisconsin and Wyoming — saw dramatic upticks in 2020-21, then a slight dip in 2021-22.

“We didn’t know what to expect after the [mask] mandates were lifted, but we maintained our enrollment and we continue to grow,” said Jodell Glagnow, attendance administrator at Wisconsin Virtual Academy.

In Iowa, an extreme case, virtual school enrollment swelled to 373% of pre-pandemic levels in 2020-21 and notched up even further to 388% in 2021-22. The growth corresponded with an increase in the number of approved online schools in the state from three to nearly two dozen over that span, a state Department of Education spokesperson explained.

The data represents K-12 students enrolled in standalone online academies and excludes students taking remote classes offered by their home brick-and-mortar school. The scope, however, varies slightly state by state. For example, the Florida numbers reflect enrollment in the statewide Florida Virtual School, while the Arkansas figures come from its two approved virtual charters and the Michigan tally encompasses students at all 88 providers approved for online instruction.

Oregon was the lone state to provide , revealing white students were overrepresented in the state’s virtual schools in 2020-21, while students with disabilities, those navigating poverty and English learners were underrepresented. Overall, enrollment rose to 172% of pre-pandemic levels that year and reduced slightly the next year. 

GeRita Connor runs Lowcountry Connections Academy, a virtual school in South Carolina. Her school opened last year to accommodate the overwhelming demand for online schooling once capacity was reached at its partner academy, South Carolina Connections, which contracts with the same for-profit provider, Connections LLC, an offshoot of publishing and testing giant Pearson. 

The families who were newcomers to online academies like hers in the fall of 2021, she said, often hadn’t even considered remote schooling before COVID.

“I think that what happened during the pandemic is that families became more aware of the option of virtual learning,” Connor said. “[It] really opened the doors for those opportunities to exist.”

For the Maxwells in Michigan, Levi stayed in the online option his school maintained through the 2020-21 year, then in the fall of 2021 switched to the statewide Michigan Great Lakes Virtual Academy. His younger sister, Aria, briefly returned to school in person, but switched back to a district-run online option in January 2022. In September, she was able to join her brother at Great Lakes.

Rotten apples?

Experts caution the emerging trend could translate to poor academic outcomes. Virtual academies far predated COVID in some states, often with lackluster track records. And during the pandemic, students who spent the most time away from in-person classes suffered the largest learning setbacks.

Research from the using pre-pandemic data shows students at online schools score far worse on academic tests than their peers learning in-person, even when controlling for factors like race, poverty level and disability status.

To now see more and more families enrolling in online learning worries Heather Schwartz, a researcher at the Rand Corporation who has during the pandemic.

“Until we have proof the virtual schools can perform just as well — for at least some students — as traditional public schools, yeah, I’m concerned,” she said.

Participating families and administrators, however, attest to a positive impact on student learning at many virtual schools. Levi Maxwell, for example, has seen his grades improve dramatically while learning online, his mother reports. Last year, he wrote his first story by himself, after struggling for years in English.

But Gary Miron, an education professor at Western Michigan University and outspoken critic of virtual academies, believes the negative experiences outweigh the positive ones and is frustrated to see student enrollment continue to rise.

“It defies market theory,” he said. “You’d think consumers would wake up and say, ‘I’m not going to buy these apples. They’re rotten. I’m going to get another producer.’ But they’re not.”

He also warns that many virtual schools — including Connections Academies — have nonprofit “shells” that contract with for-profit management organizations. Those contracts often include costly management fees and six- or seven-figure salaries for top executives, he said. 

“Those so-called nonprofits are just incredibly profitable,” Miron said.

Connections Academy spokesperson Chantal Kowalski countered that schools in her organization are public and, like traditional brick-and-mortar schools, are governed by boards that “make all material or budget decisions and publicly post board meeting minutes online.” She added that they “contract with Pearson for online education products and services like curriculum and technology.”

Still, GAO education director Jacqueline Nowicki remains concerned about oversight.

“To the extent that the sector grows and becomes larger, I do think the risk to the federal government grows in terms of accountability,” she said.

Virtual schools, real relationships

The primary concern for Lake, of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, is whether students enrolling in online schools lose out on facetime with teachers. Many remote academies rely heavily on asynchronous lessons and offer fewer hours of live instruction than traditional schools.

“Virtual learning can be a great option, but it isn’t a substitute for connections with adults,” she said. “You have to make sure that the virtual program is providing a lot of student-teacher interaction.”

At their Michigan virtual academy, the Maxwells feel like their needs are being well met. The school has provided more specialists to accommodate her children’s special needs than their brick-and-mortar schools ever did, Kristy Maxwell said. But she admits the energy required to keep her children on task through the school day can be considerable.

“It is a lot of work on my part,” the mom acknowledged.

In a nearby Great Lakes state, seventh grader Helena Warren has also felt satisfied with a recent pivot to the Wisconsin Virtual Academy. She transferred in January 2022 and appreciates how much one-on-one time she gets with her teachers through Zoom breakout rooms or phone calls when she needs extra help.

The middle schooler made the switch because the work at her old school was too “basic and easy,” she said, causing her to tune out and get bad grades, including some C’s and D’s. Now her grades are better and the assignments are more challenging. When she demonstrates mastery of a concept, her teacher asks her to help explain it to her peers, which she enjoys.

“She’s doing higher-grade stuff than she would be doing at a regular brick-and-mortar school,” said her proud mother, Melody Warren, who plans for Helena to stay online indefinitely.

“I think she’s gonna go through high school,” Warren said.

Districts that spent the majority of that year learning remotely tended to lose more ground in fourth-grade math scores than districts that reopened sooner. Every 10 additional days of school closures was associated with a roughly 0.2-point loss on NAEP from 2019 to 2022. The pattern was statistically significant and held even when controlling for the share of students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch, a proxy for poverty.

“The districts with more remote learning have larger test score losses,” said Emily Oster, a Brown University economics professor who has tracked school closures through the pandemic. 

“It’s pretty consistent with what we have seen up until now,” added the researcher, an early and ardent supporter of reopening schools during the pandemic shutdown whose positions were .

The finding adds to the that online learning during the pandemic had a negative impact on student learning outcomes, even while there is renewed debate over how strongly the 2022 NAEP scores reflect it. The highly anticipated results released Monday showed the largest drops ever recorded in 4th and 8th grade math.

Peggy Carr, head of the U.S. Department of Education center that administers NAEP exams, played down any possible relationships between school closures and test results.

“There is nothing in this data that tells us there is a measurable difference between states and districts based solely on how long schools were closed,” she said during a Friday press conference.

Oster, who also of the relationship between remote learning and NAEP results, called the National Center for Education Statistics director’s statement “odd” and “not very consistent with what we are seeing in the data.”

However, she acknowledged that there is an element of truth to Carr’s words.

“Maybe what they’re saying is that [school closure] is not the only determinant, and that’s right. It is not the case that there is a straight line between remoteness and test score losses,” she said.

An NCES spokesperson affirmed that stance Tuesday, denying any “simple direct relationship between duration of remote learning and score declines based on NAEP results” in a statement emailed to �鶹��Ʒ.

“Controlling for free- or reduced-price lunch is helpful but not sufficient,” the spokesperson continued. “NCES will be conducting analyses that conform to the highest statistical standards, consider multiple variables and link data collected by NCES to other high quality datasets.”

On the whole, results from what’s known as the Nation’s Report Card revealed the stark drop offs in math and a slide in reading since 2019, the last time the exam was administered. Some individual school systems, however, performed better than expected, including Los Angeles, among the districts which stayed in remote learning the longest and which saw improvements in reading for fourth graders and in both reading and math for eighth graders.

Since the release of NAEP results on Monday, and have conducted several analyses correlating scores with length of school closures and found moderate, statistically significant links. However, those analyses have largely focused on state data, an approach some experts warn against because it lumps districts that reopened quickly with those that stayed shuttered much longer.

“Within states, there’s a lot of heterogeneity in terms of closure policies,” said Tom Loveless, a longtime education researcher who formerly led the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy.

“Looking at district data is superior to looking at state data because that’s where the [reopening] decisions were made,” he said.

�鶹��Ʒ took the district-level approach, crunching data from a sample of large urban school systems included in the NAEP release. Their scores were then matched with closure data from Oster’s , which tracked the percentage of the 2020-21 school year that districts offered remote, hybrid or in-person instruction. From the full sample of 26 school systems, Fresno was removed because it had no publicized 2022 NAEP scores and New York City, the nation’s largest school district, and Shelby County, Tennessee were excluded because they had no district-level school closure data available in the Hub.

Among the 23 remaining school systems, fourth-grade math was the only subject with a statistically significant relationship between district performance and time spent in remote learning. There were weak correlations in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math and no association for eighth-grade reading.

“It was very hard for the little kids to focus on Zoom,” said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the younger students saw more of an impact on literacy skills and early foundational computational skills.”

Her research group analyzed data on the effects of school closures, finding , especially for younger students and those living in poverty. 

“Schools stayed closed too long, especially in urban areas,” Lake said, noting that her judgment is much easier to make now with the benefit of hindsight as opposed to during the height of COVID when the science on infections and transmissibility was still coming into focus.

The variation in the NAEP results represents “shades of badness,” she said. “Some states are celebrating not being as bad as other states, but nobody has much to celebrate here.”

NAEP results must be interpreted carefully, experts caution. They are built to show how students are doing, not to explain the reasons behind their performance, Loveless said. (He compared the exam to a thermometer: “It can tell you if you have a temperature, but it can’t tell you why.”)

However, the exam is also the only U.S. test administered to students in all 50 states, making it “the only game in town when it comes to comparing across states,” said the former Brookings Institution researcher.

�鶹��Ʒ analysis, he said, “makes an addition” to the continued dialogue on the impacts of school closures during the pandemic.

Now, with the extent of pandemic missed learning coming into greater focus across the nation, Lake said, it’s time to hone in on how to respond.

“We’ve just got a lot of work to do to give kids back what they were owed, both academically and developmentally.”

Oster agreed that it may be time to put aside reopening showdowns and instead work toward recovery.

“There is a very reasonable desire to move on from the discussion of, ‘How important were school closures?’ into, ‘How do we fix this?’” she said. “I’m quite sympathetic to that desire to move on.”

Working in a region of rural Arkansas long plagued by teacher shortages, Eveon Rivers seems like the perfect candidate to lead a classroom. With 18 years of pre-K teaching experience, she knows how to work with young people. And a self-described “Greek mythology person,” she has a passion for high school history — the subject she wants to teach.

She’s missing just one qualification: a bachelor’s degree. 

Now, a program that aims to combat rural teacher shortages by upskilling qualified school staff is helping her actualize her dreams — at a bargain price. Rivers pays $75 per month and has only three more semesters left before she graduates and can get her teaching certification.

“Who can beat a BA for $1,800?” said the veteran educator. “That’s a no-brainer.”

Across large swaths of Arkansas, the problem of persistent teacher shortages predated the pandemic, but has “become more apparent” over the last few years, said Karli Saracini, the state’s assistant commissioner of educator effectiveness. In many districts, especially in the southeast Delta region, over 10% of teaching roles are now held by unlicensed educators, according to state data. 

Joe Ross, president of California-based Reach University, believes the solution lies close at hand. Nationwide, over a million paraprofessionals work side-by-side with lead teachers, he points out, and many have the know-how to step into greater responsibility. His school’s model, he said, helps eliminate financial and geographic barriers for those educators so they can gain the credentials necessary to lead a classroom.

“The degree is fully job-embedded from the very first day to the very last day,” Ross explained, meaning candidates continue earning a salary in their existing jobs all the way through the program. Thanks to Pell grants and funding the school receives as an apprenticeship provider, no student pays more than $900 per year, he said, and the program is free for participating districts.

To be eligible, candidates must be employed in a partner school system. They complete half of their degree through on-the-job work, including workplace-based assignments, such as observing and reflecting on the techniques of a veteran teacher, and practicum-style courses that award credit directly for their efforts in the classroom. The other half of the degree comes through online seminars held after work hours and on weekends designed to help the future teachers apply theory to what they’re learning on the ground.

Reach University already serves over 250 learners in Arkansas and roughly 1,000 nationwide.  Now, the program is poised to grow even further. In September, the U.S. Department of Education granted Reach University more than to place some 650 fully certified teachers into high-needs Arkansas classrooms over the next five years. And in late September, Reach received another from the education department to grow its teacher training efforts in Louisiana and is a partner in a separate in that state received by Tulane University. Outside Arkansas and Louisiana, Reach also serves educators in Alabama and California.

In Arkansas, at least . In 2020-21, more than in the state did not employ a single Black, Indigenous, Hispanic or Asian teacher of record, despite some 40% of students holding those racial identities.

“It can change the teacher force by truly opening doors that are currently shut for way too many people,” said David Donaldson, managing partner for the National Center for Grow Your Own educator pipeline programs. There’s recently been a “massive increase” in school officials’ interest in such programs nationwide, he said. But Reach, founded in 2006, is one of the organizations with the most effective and accessible models, he believes.

“To see them spread across the country, they’re really doing good work.”

Some 90% of Reach graduates in Arkansas will be re-hired in the same district after they complete the program, according to the . It’s a boon in the eyes of Carolyn Theard-Griggs, dean of the National College of Education at Chicago-based National Louis University.

“People have a tendency to stay in schools longer if they’re near their home base,” she observed. 

The expansion is much needed, said Saracini, of the Arkansas state education department. Too many otherwise-qualified staff get boxed into lower-paying positions like classroom aides because they can’t afford to go back and study for a degree.

“The people who would make some of our best teachers are some of those paraprofessionals, but they just can’t break that employment and lose those benefits,” she explained. When they do land full-time teaching gigs, however, their pay can more than double.

Furthermore, the training model, Ross argues, mints educators with stronger teaching skills than traditional programs that often graduate and certify candidates after just a semester of student teaching. Reach educators have at least two years working in the classroom under their belts by the time they complete their degrees.

“That will create better teachers,” said the university president. “It will create a rank of graduates who are respected for having this degree.”

Rivers, who will graduate at the end of 2023, agrees.

“I have all this experience. I feel like I’ll be a seasoned teacher,” she said. Her district outside Little Rock, she added, has a job awaiting her when she becomes licensed.

“I want to be a cool history teacher. I want to make it fun for the kids. … I want to dress up, do the props.”&�Բ�����;

For now, on her paraprofessional salary, Rivers has to deliver UberEats and Grubhub in the evenings to make ends meet. On nights her delivery work and course schedule overlap, she sometimes uses a phone stand in her car to join class.

“I like the leeway where I can tune in on my phone,” she said. “It’s so accessible.”

Many of the Arkansas school systems facing the most dire need for licensed teachers, Saracini explained, are also areas where higher education is the least accessible, with no nearby options for four-year degrees. Reach fills in the gap, expanding “in some of our most-needed areas,” she said, by offering a model where candidates can build on their community college credits without needing to commute.

Years ago, Rivers was able to complete her associate’s degree while working pre-K, but lacks her bachelor’s. She had previously worked toward a BA, but was forced to stop when her financial aid dried up. 

When she found out about Reach, it was her “saving grace,” she said. “It’s affordable, it’s flexible and the professors are good.”

Now, she talks about the program to anyone who will listen.

“I tell a lot of people about it,” she said. “A lot of people have been in the school system a long time and a lot of people are just starting. So, if you’re going to be there, why not further your education?”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation and the Stand Together Trust provide financial support to Reach University and �鶹��Ʒ.

Between August 2019 and January 2022, only 24% of investigations prompted by calls from school staff found evidence of abuse or neglect compared to a citywide rate of in 2020 — meaning K-12 workers make allegations that do not get substantiated far more often than most other professions.

Teachers, with whom children spend most of their day, misreport more than any other school staff: Two thirds of their calls to the state hotline are unfounded, according to data obtained by �鶹��Ʒ through a public records request.

Meanwhile, families say the investigations plunge their lives into deep uncertainty and inflict lasting traumas on their kids. Parents describe children with recurring nightmares, fearing every knock on the door may be a caseworker looking to snatch them from their home.

Darcey Merritt, associate professor of social work at New York University, regularly engages with families impacted by the child welfare system in her work and research. She also serves on the Child Maltreatment Prevention Committee of the .

Over the years, Merritt has come to see the system as overly punitive toward poor families who love their children but may struggle to meet their basic needs due to lack of resources. 

The expert believes it’s time to reimagine child welfare to better support those families: “We need to start the whole thing over,” she said.

�鶹��Ʒ spoke to Merritt to learn what issues she sees in child protective services — and what can be done.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

�鶹��Ʒ: What should people who work in schools understand about the child welfare system?

Darcey Merritt: We can’t disentangle neglect from poverty, it’s inappropriate to do so. 

On any given day, 76% of the children and families that are exposed to child welfare are there because of some form of neglect. And neglect is tethered to poverty: supervisory neglect, physical neglect, which refers to people not having appropriate food, clothing and housing. 

A lot of these issues related to neglect are structural issues that are outside the control of parents. Yet [child protective services] is blaming parents for their unfortunate, involuntary socio-economic statuses. So that’s a problem. 

Teachers are mandated to report out of an abundance of caution if they feel like a child is unsafe for whatever reason. But there’s got to be a way where mandated reporters first figure out how to be more useful in addressing the actual problem. If a child has dirty clothes consistently every day, let’s figure out what to do about that without getting CPS involved. 

I think there needs to be changes in state mandating laws, so [reporters] are encouraged, maybe even required, to first figure out how to address the problem. If they don’t have enough child care, well, then let’s find child care. If they don’t have enough food, let’s find food. Laundry machine is broken and they can’t go to the landlord because they’re behind on their rent? Let’s figure that out. These are all things that are happening. 

What might those changes look like?

We need to start the whole thing over and reserve child protective services for those kids who have been physically and sexually abused. We need to have a separate institution, a separate agency or organization, working with communities and neighborhoods to provide support for all the other kids so that the go-to response isn’t to report a child who’s poor. It all comes down to money and what our society is willing to do to make sure that people have a standard level of resources and support to be able to raise their families.

We need to really have more respect for these parents because they love their children and they are victims of an inequitable society.

To make sure I’m understanding correctly, are you saying child protective services should not be the ones responding to neglect charges?

I do not think they should be handling neglect charges. I think that some other agency that’s not connected to the stigma of having a CPS case should respond. Whatever support we put in place, it needs to be untethered from the institution of child protective services.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t help these families. I’m saying the child protective services is not the agency to handle neglect cases that have to do with poverty.

New York State law, as of 2021, requires implicit bias training for mandatory reporters. Does that rule go far enough to mitigate some of these problems?

I don’t think it goes far enough. You can’t just do a training and call it a day. You have to have something in place so that when people are making decisions, you can check whether or not this decision was made because of some unseen bias. For example, ‘Oh, this child’s parent has been involved with the carceral system. Go ahead and report this one.’ That’s how people continue to cycle in between these harmful punitive systems. 

We have our own Western idea of what safety and family well-being means and it’s all from a deficit lens. Rarely do we look at family dynamics and functioning from a strength-based perspective. I interview a lot of moms for my research and all of them say, ‘We love our children, but we needed help.’ 

It’s a really serious problem and the racial disproportionality is going to continue (because impoverished parents have no choice but to rely on the government for welfare). Black children are highly disproportionately involved with the child welfare system and before Black children, Native kids have the highest disproportionality of involvement. People don’t even pay attention to that.

Interesting. I didn’t know that.

The highest is Native American children, then Black children, then Latino children. White children are not overly represented in the system.

Some parents have told me they can’t help but know about child protective services, or, in New York City, the Administration for Children’s Services, because either they’re personally impacted or they know someone who is. Meanwhile, other families are completely oblivious. Have you seen that difference between communities?

It’s true. Once you’re involved, you know what that looks like. Parents’ language is even institutionalized. Have you heard people who are involved with the carceral system say, ‘Oh, somebody caught a case.’ These ACS-impacted moms literally say, ‘Well, I caught an ACS case.’ That language is a thing. 

And another group doesn’t have any idea what ACS is.

What are the harms of overreporting and what are the harms of underreporting [to child protective services]? 

The obvious harm of underreporting is that we may miss children who are in actual danger from parents that abuse their children. 

This whole issue of, ‘out of an abundance of caution, we need to report anything that we suspect might be problematic,’ that’s where the rub lies. We have to figure out how to pull out those issues that are related to poverty. 

The harm of overreporting is that when CPS comes knocking at your door, you are immediately traumatized. The very minute a child is taken from your home for any amount of time, you are immediately traumatized. They then have workers coming in on a regular basis, they’re being mandated to do certain groups and therapy, all kinds of things that don’t relate to the fact that maybe they need some money.

I personally renamed CPS the ‘child poverty surveillance.’ That’s my own little term I’ve made up for them.

You have to be subjective when you’re making a decision about whether or not a child is in danger. And one needs to be really, really reflective about their implicit biases, because [the worry is] a poor Black child will be treated differently than a poor white child. 

You live and work in New York City. Do mandated reporters, like school staff, lean more toward over or underreporting? 

They lean more towards overreporting. 

What messages are those people receiving when they get trained? Is it ‘When in doubt, report?’ Is it, ‘Take every precaution before you do?’ What are folks hearing?

I think they’re hearing, ‘When in doubt, report.’ I think that’s what they’re hearing. 

For the most part, folks are afraid because if you don’t report something and the child ends up really harmed, then the liability is on the mandated reporter. I think they’re being given a double message: ‘When in doubt, report,’ but on the back end, ‘Be careful, because there might not be a need for CPS to be involved.’ 

In schools, especially those that are under-resourced, they don’t have the means to help a family with their basic needs and their financial needs. [Instead], teachers are by law required to report to child protective services. It just makes no sense. The solution does not match the problem. And it causes harm in the meanwhile.

Given the system as it stands, if you are a mandated reporter in a school setting, how do you respond in a way that both protects a child in real danger, but also won’t jeopardize a family for no reason? How do you weigh that judgment call?

It’s hard. 

I had this conversation with my partner who teaches in Philadelphia. He’s not a social worker. I’m a social worker. But he [has to play the role of] a social worker, because he has to do social work as a teacher. 

When something’s going on with a child, my recommendation is to find out what’s happening from the family first. I recommend taking more caution before making a phone call [to the state hotline]. See if you can come up with a solution first. 

That puts a greater burden on teachers because then they end up being social workers as well. So it’s a very fine line, finding out what resources one has at the school, if the nurses or the climate officers or whoever the people are at the school [can help]. 

I’m only speaking about cases where neglect is related to poverty. Now, there are other cases of neglect where a parent intentionally left the child with a child abuser. All the neglect I’m talking about is unintentional. 

Child protective services should not be the go-to for cases of unintentional neglect related to poverty. That phone call should not be made to CPS but to another agency that we just don’t have yet.��

When child protective services investigated Shalonda Curtis-Hackett’s family for neglect in 2021, the Brooklyn mom could measure the personal toll in pounds lost: 20. 

She tried to fight the clawing thoughts that her caseworker “could try and snatch my kids,” a vision she says she still can’t escape in her nightmares.

Though the agency eventually found no evidence her children were malnourished — her husband is a professional chef — the process of having a welfare worker inspect their Bushwick apartment, check the fridge for food and ask prying questions deeply disturbed her children, who are now 8, 10 and 15.

“My children are happy-go-lucky kids and I’ve had to adultify them and tell them about the world much faster than I wanted to,” Curtis-Hackett said. 

The mother, who was also PTA president at her younger children’s school at the time, believes the report came from a K-12 staffer who said her kids’ bones were sticking out, an observation made while the children were attending class via Zoom at the time.

If so, the family is among the thousands of New York City households — disproportionately Black, Hispanic and low income — subjected to unfounded investigations into abuse or neglect initiated by calls from their children’s school. 

In fact, between August 2019 and January 2022, city school employees made over 13,750 false alarm reports to the state child abuse hotline, according to data obtained by �鶹��Ʒ through a public records request to the Office of Children and Family Services. 

Over that time span, the vast majority of school-based reports were ultimately unfounded, including at least 58% of calls from guidance counselors, 59% of calls from principals and 67% of calls from teachers. Less than 1 in 3 teacher reports led to any evidence of wrongdoing.

“Teachers, out of fear that they’re going to get in trouble, will report even if they’re just like, ‘Well, it could be abuse.’ It could be. It also could be 10 million other things,” said Jessica Beck, a middle school English teacher in the Bronx.

Those reports spur investigations that, at their most dire, can lead children to be separated from their parents — a trauma associated with elevated risks of . Even when closed and dropped, investigations can stay on parents’ records for years afterward and erase job prospects in youth-serving fields.

Kamaria Excell is a social worker who has helped dozens of parents recover from the damaging process. She led a 12-week healing program with the community-based organization . The vast majority of participating parents — 95%, she estimates — had investigations that were ultimately dismissed. But the shame, anger and eroded trust did not fade.

“Families deal with the repercussions of careless [child welfare] investigations for years after,” she said.

When a case gets closed, Curtis-Hackett, the Brooklyn mom, added, “it doesn’t stop the PTSD.”

‘When in doubt, report’

In total, only 24% of investigations prompted by calls from school staff found evidence of abuse or neglect compared to a citywide rate of in 2020 — meaning K-12 workers, teachers especially, make allegations that do not get substantiated far more often than most other professions. (Another 16% of K-12 calls led to an alternate response for children determined not to be in imminent harm and 59% were dropped outright.) Even that rate likely overstates the true level of maltreatment, family law attorney David Shalleck-Klein said, because it’s a metric the agency determines “unilaterally” and includes cases that may ultimately be dismissed in court.

The issue extends beyond Gotham, with similar rates of unsubstantiated reports from school staff nationwide. Among mandated reporters, K-12 workers are the most likely to report abuse or neglect and the least likely to have their allegations find evidence of wrongdoing, show.

Like most states, New York requires educators, child care providers, law enforcement officers, health care professionals and social workers to call a hotline if they believe a young person may be experiencing abuse or neglect. But, in practice, that decision is always a judgment call, said Beck, the Bronx middle school teacher. And in NYC schools, it’s a call made by teachers who are mostly white about students who are mostly Black and Hispanic.

“What looks like neglect to a teacher who has privilege might actually be poverty,” said Beck, who is white.

For example, educators are trained that poor hygiene can be a sign of neglect. But if a kid in her class smells, the teacher will speak with the parents rather than immediately calling in a report, she said. Some colleagues in the same situation, though, may call the state hotline, plunging that family’s life into the havoc of a neglect investigation.

The ethos is “when in doubt, report,” said Darcey Merritt, an associate professor of social work at New York University.

“Instead of immediately reporting a suspected neglect situation, find out how to address that need that’s being unmet first,” she suggests.

That is not what a social worker at a Bronx transfer high school — small schools designed to re-engage students who have dropped out or fallen behind — sees on the ground, unfortunately. She asked not to be identified for fear of getting into trouble at work.

“It’s totally C-Y-A, cover your ass. If you’re unsure, just call,” she said.

“They never provide information on what happens after the call,” she continued. “Mandated reporters don’t know that, many times after making a call, 24 hours [later] someone’s going to show up to this person’s house … and start conducting an investigation: a search of their home, checking counters, checking their cabinets, strip searching their young children to check for any bruises or marks, depending on the allegation.”

Instead, the training sessions she has attended have begun by projecting the names and pictures of young people who have died by parental abuse, the social worker said, a tactic she considers “fear mongering.”

The Department of Education said it cares deeply about the well-being of students and is committed to providing support and care at the earliest opportunity.

“While every NYC Public School member is a mandated reporter, we are focused on connecting with children and families who may be in need, providing them access to the vital interventions, supports and services they need to stay safe,” DOE spokesperson Suzan Sumer said in an emailed statement.

The Administration for Children’s Services, the city agency that investigates suspected abuse and neglect, said it is working to cut down on unneeded reports. Overall, school and child care-based reports fell 17% from spring 2019 to spring 2022, it said.

As per a , mandated reporters are required to undergo implicit bias training. And this fall, ACS will hold a series of five-hour trainings in collaboration with the NYC Department of Education to help school staff better understand the citywide resources they can refer families to rather than calling the child abuse hotline, the agency said. Only one representative from each school, however, is required to attend.

“We take our mandate of protecting children and supporting families seriously, while simultaneously being committed to reducing unnecessary child protection involvement with families, particularly families of color,” a spokesperson wrote in an email.

Of in 2020, 36% found evidence of abuse or neglect and 86 children died, according to the . The large majority of those deaths “​​were unrelated to abuse or neglect,” the agency wrote. However, when a child is killed as a result of being beaten or neglected by a family member, the agency frequently for failing to investigate or properly follow through on earlier reports of abuse.

‘School-to-ACS pipeline’

In New York City and across the nation, involvement with child protective services breaks decisively along racial lines.

Citywide, some of children named in ACS investigations are Black or Hispanic, while, together, those racial groups make up 60% of NYC young people. Even among neighborhoods with similar poverty rates, those with greater shares of Black and Hispanic residents face higher rates of investigations, shows.

Child protective services involvement becomes so normalized in many low-income communities, Merritt has noticed, it changes people’s vernacular.

“These ACS-impacted moms literally say, ‘Well, I caught an ACS case,’” as if they’re referring to the criminal justice system, the social work professor said.

Meanwhile, more privileged communities are often unaware of the disastrous effects that system can have, said her NYU colleague Anna Arons, assistant professor of law.

“It is really easy to be a person with money in this country, … particularly white, and not have any sense of child welfare services as anything more than people who are genuinely helping children,” she said. “You might never know there are 50,000 investigations every year in New York City, which is really an astronomical number.”

Curtis-Hackett, for her part, has taken the situation into her own hands. After being reported to child protective services, she no longer wants her family to participate in a system she calls the “school-to-ACS pipeline.”

Last year, she pulled her kids from the public school system. Now, they homeschool.

“I don’t trust the [Department of Education],” she said. “I will not allow my children to be collateral damage.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated national figures for the number of children in 2020 who had died, suffered abuse or neglect, and been reported to CPS by any source, not just educators. Those contextual data have been corrected to reflect New York City’s rates.

Now, to correct the troubling pattern in the new academic year, some school leaders are launching attendance campaigns in hopes of luring more students into the classroom. The techniques include an “” in Charlotte, North Carolina; and new bikes in a district outside Kansas City — and, in San Antonio, the possibility of .

“Not only is it a chance to win something amazing for your family, but it also shows our families and our students, we really want you in school every day, that your attendance matters,” said Judy Geelhoed, executive director of the San Antonio Independent School District Foundation, which coordinated the campaign.

Whether induced or not by incentives such as the prospect of new wheels, early signs show students coming to school at higher rates this year than last, said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works. She works with educators across the country and has been encouraged by their anecdotes.

“I actually am hearing folks saying this year is better,” she said. “Everyone I speak to is like, ‘This is almost like a normal school here. Fingers crossed.’”

Preliminary attendance data for the new school year will not be released in most school districts for several weeks or months. But in Oakland Unified, one of the few school systems that publishes in real time, the numbers are hopeful. So far, just 25% of students have been chronically absent, compared to 45% last year.

That’s a good sign for the rest of the year, said Chang, because “absences in the first month of school … predict absences later in the school year.”&�Բ�����;

Last year was particularly difficult, she noted, because the start of the fall and spring semesters each aligned with a COVID surge: first Delta, then Omicron. With most districts having ditched hybrid learning at that point, students forced to quarantine often found themselves more than a week of content behind before they even began the semester.

But as leaders seek to reverse the trend this year, experts doubt whether attendance incentives are the most effective strategy. 

“Both learning and attendance … they rely on your intrinsic motivation,” said Jing Liu, a University of Maryland education professor who researches absenteeism. “I don’t think this is a very good approach to solve this issue. You might see a bump of attendance in the short run, but I don’t think it can work in the long term.”

indicates that financial incentives tend to be effective in motivating young people only when they reward behaviors students feel they can control; for example, how thoroughly they prepare for a test as opposed to how well they score once they sit down to take it.

Schools can, however, adjust their incentive structures to reward even students who may face more challenges showing up to class, the Attendance Works director pointed out. 

That’s exactly what San Antonio, with its Toyota challenge, has done. Students will earn raffle tickets every marking period not only for high attendance levels, but also for posting rates that improve on their attendance from the 2021-22 school year. 

“We wanted to give an incentive to folks [for whom] … things were holding them back. Sometimes there’s issues happening in the family and we wanted to give families an incentive to say, ‘I’m going to do my best to get my student there every day,’” Geelhoed said.

The $28,000 cost of the car, which the Foundation director noted would be more expensive on the showroom floor, will be covered by sponsors Frost Bank and Cavender Toyota. 

But while a ribbon-adorned shiny SUV may be a tantalizing prospect for many, she knows “this kind of incentive can’t mitigate all the challenges that our students may have.”

The district also deploys specialists to monitor chronically absent students and assist them in getting to campus, including home visits when they aren’t able to contact families, communications manager Laura Short said in an email. They analyze data across the school system to identify which students might be most at risk, she added.

“We believe it takes a whole-district approach to work on student attendance.”

“For me, I really like corn,” Tariq said in an August now watched over 5 million times on YouTube. It’s “a big lump with knobs” and “has the juice,” he explained. “I can’t imagine a more beautiful thing.”

Since then, the maize craze has reached seemingly every corner of the internet. A made by Michael Gregory, a creator behind several other viral mashups like the song, has been played 73 million times on TikTok and used in over a million other videos. Brands such as , and have referenced the clip in their marketing. And Tariq, a New York City second grader, was officially named South Dakota’s “” in early September.

In the original video, holding the microphone for “Corn Kid” and asking questions was Julian Shapiro-Barnum, 23-year-old creator of the internet show , which 2.4 million Instagram users follow. Since April 2021, he has interviewed hundreds of young kids across NYC about everything from the meaning of life to peeing their pants — and countless other conversation starters in between, like fake mustaches, drones and Komodo dragons. 

Across those many exchanges in parks and playgrounds, Shapiro-Barnum has developed an interviewing style that allows his guests to share their authentic, very often hilarious selves and brings viewers into the wonderful world of being a kid.

“I don’t baby the kids and I don’t talk down to them. And I think that really does wonders,” he said. “It really empowers kids to open up and grow and test ideas.”

�鶹��Ʒ spoke with the show’s host over Zoom to hear what it’s like being online famous and find out what’s popping on the corn beat. He also shared how his unconventional family background shaped who he is today and what it meant to him to find out his videos are now being used to train young pediatricians.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

�鶹��Ʒ: What originally inspired Recess Therapy?

Julian Shapiro-Barnum: I’d been doing on-the-street content for a couple years by the time I started Recess Therapy. I was really interested in the idea of talking to real people. … One of my first shows was , which was a democratized late night talk show. I’d sit on a corner with tables and chairs and whoever walked up was the guest.

By spring 2021, I had been playing around with these concepts for a while. I’d always been interested in interviewing kids. I was doing online school at the time (Shapiro-Barnum graduated from Boston University’s College of Fine Arts in 2021) and I’d do homework at the playground or something and see these kids playing around having so much fun. And I was always like, “How do they do it? How do they stay positive during all this?”

For a while, I was thinking about interviewing them about happiness and how they stay happy and eventually I did it. And it was immediately gold because they’re just so honest and authentic and sweet and funny all at the same time. And I was like, this might be something special.

There’s a lightness to the videos. What is it about how kids see the world that’s so fun and joyous?

Kids look at the world through a much less biased scope. I think a lot of their opinions are their own. … They’re not holding back about their own thoughts. They’re not trying to say the right thing — at least until they’re, like, 7. I feel like the interviews are laced with such honesty. You don’t really see that in adults and older kids. They’re not judging themselves.

How would you describe your technique as an interviewer?

I used to come prepared with a lot of questions. At this point, I come prepared with a lot of loose ideas and I really try to find what they’re most excited about. Once I find that, I just follow their joy and their interest. My job really comes in trying to find a way to make them feel comfortable and excited. And then, you know, playing until we find the thing that really is tantalizing for them to talk about for maybe 10 minutes.

One of the things I love about the videos is you validate so much of what kids say. Maybe they’re like, “It sucked when I dropped my ice cream on the ground.” And you’re like, “You’re right, that does suck.” How can adults better connect with kids and validate how they see the world?

I think what adults can do is just give them the space to feel the full expanse of their emotions, you know, let them tire themselves out. A lot of times adults try to make kids fit into the box or mode that they’re in. And so often, I find that they flourish and have so much more fun when they’re given their own space to run on their own energy. 

Also, I feel like a lot of adults don’t give kids the ability to have a full true conversation. So often, I’m told that people like that I don’t baby the kids, and I don’t talk down to them. And I think that really does wonders. It’s a very simple thing that one can do, but I think it really empowers kids to open up and grow and test ideas.

Are there any specific phrases or responses that you find really fruitful?

A lot of times when we’re talking about something, before I move on, I ask, “Is there anything else you want to say about that before we go?” And so often, there is. I might be done and I move on to something else, but they’re still thinking about the last thing. 

I also like to start my interviews by saying, “Is there anything you want to start by talking about?” Letting them bring whatever they’re toying with before I bring them to my conversation. I didn’t used to do that, I used to say, ‘What’s up?” Which really doesn’t work. 

I’ve wanted to ask how you find people to interview. Do you show up at a park and ask around?

My team and I, we show up and we really don’t discriminate. Anyone who walks by we offer the opportunity for an interview. We found that casting the widest net possible is the best strategy because so often, the kid that I think might be too shy, or the kid that I think looks perfect and is super boisterous is not the one that is going to be [best on camera]. I have no perception of it. Often, the really quiet kid is the one who has the most to say. I’m very outgoing. So I’m attracted to high energy, but that’s not everyone.

That’s so interesting. In some ways, that could also be a lesson to educators about how to treat kids in a classroom.

Definitely. I think giving everybody the same space does a lot.

To bring it to Tariq, the “Corn Kid” who has been our biggest video to date, I don’t know if out of 100 kids if he would be my first choice of who I thought would be the funniest, craziest, but he looked really sweet. I really wanted to talk to him. And, you know, he’s amazing. But I wouldn’t have known, you know?

When you made that video, you must have known it was pretty great. But did you expect it to go viral like it did?

Oh, I couldn’t have known. I loved it, it was a great video, but I love so many of the videos that we make. But this one has bewitched the world in such a special way. People just respond so well to his true honest positivity about something that isn’t grand. He’s hyping up something very sweet and small. And I think that’s very special and unique.

I’ve seen a bunch of spinoffs of it, obviously. What are one or two of your favorite pieces of content that have come about because of that video?

I mean, the Gregory Brothers, It’s Corn song reigns supreme in my mind. At this point, I’ve worked with them and I really like them. I think they deserve a lot of credit for making this as big as it got. Their song is the song that has created all the spinoff songs. 

Also, someone did a club remix at a rave. That was pretty funny. I liked that. There’s, like, hundreds of people moshing to It’s Corn. It’s crazy.

That’s awesome. So the video has been watched by millions of people, the remix listened to by millions of people. Tariq, I saw, is the corn ambassador of South Dakota. What have been the impacts of his fame for his family? I did see some of the proceeds from the remix on Spotify went to his family.

Yeah, I mean, he’s making money off of Spotify. He was a in The New York Times [last week]. It’s a good article. I try not to speak on behalf of Jessica and Tariq, but the article really speaks to the ways this opportunity has been beneficial to their family. 

I think they’ve had a lot of fun getting to go places for free. We just went to the Empire State Building together and got an amazing tour. Since the video a lot of companies and people have really welcomed them places, which has been really cool.

Other than It’s Corn, what are your top five favorite videos that you’ve done?

Oh my gosh, there’s so many. I feel really connected to all the kids. Some I’ve had on multiple times and I have a relationship with them and their families. 

But I guess I can give simple answers: 

2. Sloane is great talking about  
3. A , such a good clip
4. Dillon, the , is always a classic recess therapy clip 
5. The

Was there a point where it went from, “OK, this is something I’m doing for fun” to “This strikes a chord and resonates with people?”

The first time I did the in June 2021 (interviewing kids at New York City’s annual parade), the feedback was just so positive. So many people were saying how it meant something to them. And I hadn’t even been doing it very long at that point. I get so many sweet comments from people all the time. I think the show does mean a lot to a lot of people, which is very special and I genuinely appreciate (it) and makes me want to keep doing it. 

I think the first time anyone ever recognized me on the street was like September a year ago, probably. And I was like, “Oh, whoa, people have seen the show and know what I look like.” It’s funny that to some people I’m, like, an internet celebrity. It’s just a weird concept.

What’s the [viewer] note that most sticks with you?

Maybe eight months ago, I got a message from a children’s hospital that they were showing the videos to young doctors to teach how to talk to kids. I was like, “Oh my gosh, you’re using my video for professionals.” Whenever somebody like a child therapist or like a teacher or a doctor reached out and was like, “Hey, this really helped me with what I do,” it means a lot to me. I went to acting school, I did comedy improv. I didn’t go to school to do any of these things. It means a lot that people are learning and using my stuff to make people happy. 

Can you tell me a little bit about your family background? I know that you come from an unconventional family. How has that shaped you?

I have a very large family. I have five gay parents, three moms and two dads. Since I had so many adults in my life raising me, I was never talked down to in the same way. I had a lot of adults in my life I was friends with and who looked out for me and taught me things. The traditional power structure and dynamics weren’t there. 

I’ve definitely brought that into my interviews and my interview technique and the way that I work with kids. Just bringing them that respect and, like I said, not talking down to them. Because I wasn’t, and it meant so much to me when I was a kid. I like to bring that into my interviews.

How do you describe Recess Therapy to older relatives?

Well, they all know about it. My grandpa isn’t on Instagram or anything, but we’ve been on TV a couple of times for news spots and he always gets very excited. I say it’s an online, on-the-street kids interview show where I talk to kids [ages] 2 to 8 about things as big as the meaning of life to as silly as peeing your pants.

You’ve been in The New York Times, you’ve been on ABC, what’s something about yourself you’ve never told the media? 

I don’t think I’ve ever said this, but 9 out of 10 mornings. I have two Eggo waffles toasted with peanut butter and jelly and a glass of 2% milk.

Sandwiched? 

Open face waffles with PB&J. jelly and the peanut butter brand changes. 

You can include that I’ve never said that. That’s my weird thing.

And last, what’s next? Where do you go from here?

I would love to bring the show to other places. I want to travel with it. I want to bring it to TV. I’m a comedian and actor and I’m hoping to have careers in those fields as well. But right now, I’m just really focusing on the show and making fun content and having great conversations and letting the kids show me what I should do next. 

By now, you probably know how it goes.

In an August watched over 5 million times on YouTube, Tariq, better known as “Corn Kid,” describes his favorite starchy vegetable: It’s “a big lump with knobs” and “has the juice,” he explained. “I can’t imagine a more beautiful thing.”

Maybe you’ve also heard the song. A made by Michael Gregory, a creator behind several other viral mashups like the song, has been played 73 million times on TikTok and used in over a million other videos.

But before “Corn Kid” took over the internet, the mastermind behind the mega-hit, Julian Shapiro-Barnum, spent more than a year conducting on-the-street interviews with hundreds of other — dare we say, equally adorable — kids across New York City. In the short clips, little ones speak about every topic from the meaning of life to peeing your pants, sharing their authentic, often-hilarious selves.

The 23-year-old creator launched his internet show in early 2021. The conversations struck a chord with viewers who, during the depths of a global pandemic, were in sore need of uplifting content. 

By the beginning of 2022, the series had already amassed over 1 million followers on Instagram and earned a feature in the New York Times: “”&�Բ�����;

While “It’s Corn” gave a definite boost — the account now has 2.4 million followers — Shapiro-Barnum said there have been many other videos among his favorites. Kids who do especially well in front of the camera, he said, often come back for follow-up conversations and he keeps in touch with many of the families via text.

In an exclusive conversation with �鶹��Ʒ, the creator shared his top five all-time favorite Recess Therapy clips — apart from the video that took over the summer.

Check them out:

Outer Space is TOO degreesy

What if you were President?

Money comes from WHERE?

KOMODO DRAGONS

Gas is too ‘spensive

An increasing share of states are including student perspectives in education policymaking, a new report finds, but making sure those voices are diverse and have real power can remain a challenge.

At least 33 now include formal positions for youth representatives on their state boards of education or as advisors to their state boards or their state superintendent’s office. That’s up from just 25 four years ago, according to an August by the National Association of State Boards of Education. The organization is the only group that carries out nationwide audits of youth representation at the state level of education policymaking, and its prior update came in 2018.

Over that span, three states — Mississippi, Kentucky and Delaware — added positions for student members on their state boards where no such role previously existed. Five more — Virginia, Idaho, California, Arizona and Michigan — created new student advisory councils to guide their state boards or their state chief’s office.

“Students have a very valuable perspective,” said Celina Pierrottet, the report’s author. “Now our state leaders are starting to recognize the importance of capturing that experience and learning from it.”

The pandemic may have spurred some of the recent uptick, with California and Idaho explicitly citing the coronavirus as the reason they created the new positions.

“The effects of COVID-19 have been widespread and created impacts unlike anything that we have ever seen. Youth have experienced their education in ways that are unprecedented, including pivoting to virtual learning,” California State Superintendent Tony Thurmond as he announced a new Youth Advisory Council in September 2021.

“As we reimagine education, we hope to have young people working alongside California’s education professionals and policymakers to build a better tomorrow.”

Rainbow Chen spent two years as a student representative on Vermont’s state board from 2015 to 2017. Over that time she weighed in on several high-pressure topics, from the possible closing of schools amid declining enrollment to how underlying issues like poverty can lead to disparities in standardized test results. Her views, she believes, helped her colleagues understand issues from a more nuanced lens.

“[As] someone who identifies as low income and someone who isn’t from a typically prosperous school in the state, I felt like I had a really great perspective,” she said. “The state board that I was on was extremely welcoming and really desired my voice. I felt very respected, like an equal.”

Still, Chen said, it was achieving voting power in her second year in the role that seemed to force adult members to give her “a lot more respect.”&�Բ�����;

Vermont is one of only six states, plus Washington, D.C,. that give youth members a vote on the board, according to the report.

Massachusetts is another that grants voting privileges to students. But despite that power, Daniel Brogan, who served as the sole student voting member on the state board in 2013-14, recalled officials still not treating him as they did their adult colleagues. During downtime before meetings started, while other members spoke to each other about policy proposals, “usually with me it was more superficial questions, like, ‘How’s school going?’ Not, ‘What did you think about this [policy]?’” he said.

Like Chen, Brogan grew up in a low-income family with parents who had not attended college. Commuting from his home in Barnstable on Cape Cod to Boston for meetings often posed a challenge.  

“There were times where I genuinely had to choose between having school lunch money for the week or having enough money for bus fare to get up to Boston,” he said.

Once a month, the board would convene on Monday evenings until as late as 10 p.m. and again Tuesday morning at 8 a.m., meaning Brogan would return home at midnight only to wake up at 3:30 a.m. to catch the bus back to Boston. 

To attend meetings, the youth rep was forced to miss so much school he received a truancy letter, he said. But he never skipped a board meeting, because “optically people would notice and be more skeptical” of a student, he said, even though several adult colleagues missed at least one meeting.

It’s often those types of challenges that keep low-income or otherwise underserved youth from participating in local government, said Beverly Leon, CEO of , whose organization empowers young people to become civically active through lessons and real-world projects.

“There’s many barriers [to participating in policymaking] that young people face. And of course, there are additional barriers that young people with fewer resources and access to financial and social capital face as well,” she said.

At the local level, just 14% of the nation’s 495 largest school systems include one or more student members, according to a National School Boards Association 2020 . Even when those bodies do include youth perspectives, it’s frequently the voices of those who are more privileged and well connected, said Leon. 

“More often than not, the young people that are entering those spaces either have parents or folks in their community that are bringing them there.”

To ensure a wider array of perspectives, several state boards of education have diversity requirements that guide who they select as student representatives, the national association report finds. Washington, D.C.’s board requires youth representation from the majority-Black Wards 7 and 8, whose residents have been historically underrepresented in city leadership. And the Utah State Board of Education requires that the 15 students comprising its advisory council hail from a balanced mixture of geographies, socio-economic statuses, ability levels, academic achievement levels and school types, including traditional public, charter and online.

“The folks that are most impacted by a policy decision or challenge in a community should have a voice in crafting what an effective solution should look like,” said Leon. “It makes for more effective policy.”

Indeed, youth policymakers or advisors have scored several key wins across the country. While Brogan was on the state board, Massachusetts enacted the nation’s first rule requiring schools to take student feedback into account in their teacher evaluation processes. In 2006, a youth advisory council to the Maine state legislature proposed and successfully lobbied for the passage of a bill to siblings placed in separate homes by child welfare. And in 2016, Washington state’s youth legislative advisors were able to get a passed into law helping students experiencing homelessness land housing and access to other needed services thanks to the creation of new homeless liaison roles in schools.

Within school communities, when youth voices are truly listened to and reflected in policy decisions, it can have a positive impact not only on campus culture, but on students’ academic outcomes like grades and attendance, according to a recent published by researchers at the University of California, Riverside and Northwestern University.

Yet still, youth nationwide remain highly disconnected from political participation and civic education. Only nine states and Washington, D.C. require a full year of government courses, while 31 call for just a semester and the remaining 10 mandate none at all, according to a 2018 from the Center for American Progress. 

That can translate into low levels of engagement stretching into adulthood, Brogan believes.

“When you turn 18, you’re expected to have a switch flip and say, ‘Now you can vote, now you can organize,’” he said. “Unfortunately, I think that leads to … people being completely disenfranchised.”

“It’s really hard to start showing up at [policymaking] spaces if you didn’t know that they were open to you as a young person,” added Leon.

But when youth do gain experience with civic engagement, the impacts are often potent. Just ask Chen what her dream job is.

“I still want to be the Vermont secretary of education in the future. That’s still something I really aspire to be, much influenced by my experience on the Vermont State Board of Education,” said the policymaker-in-training. After graduating from Brown University with a degree in education policy in 2021, she is now studying for a master’s in teaching at Harvard.

Brogan, too, remains committed to uplifting youth voices within schools. He’s studying for his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, researching case studies where governmental bodies included feedback mechanisms for youth perspectives. His master’s thesis was titled: “”&�Բ�����;

Someday, he hopes to continue that work as a professor, but to collaborate with students in the process.

“I really want to make it my life’s goal to work with students. … I don’t want to do things for students — I want to do things with them.”

Correction: The new student advisory boards were created to guide their state boards of education or their state superintendent’s office. A previous version of this article only cited the state boards.

A spate of policies banning books and tamping down teachings on race and gender proliferated nationwide in 2021 and 2022 — but are those rules actually legal? The American Civil Liberties Union has launched a multi-state effort to find out by challenging them in court.

The approach includes a mixture of lawsuits, public records requests and legal letters alleging the right-wing rules violate the First Amendment and other constitutional protections.

In Mississippi, a letter from the organization helped reverse a mayor’s decision to withhold $110,000 in funding from a local library until librarians removed LGBTQ literature. In Virginia, the ACLU urged a state court to dismiss a ban on the sale and distribution of the books and — which it did. And in Florida, a lawsuit litigated by the organization seeks to throw out provisions of the state’s “Stop W.O.K.E.” law that infringe on college and university instructors’ long-established academic freedoms.

“These laws have absolutely no relationship to any legitimate pedagogical interest and, in fact, are purely partisan political tools,” said Emerson Sykes, ACLU staff attorney. “We focus on challenging these laws in court.”

To date, legislation limiting classroom discussion of race and gender has been proposed in 42 states and adopted in 17, according to an . Many outlaw “divisive” topics and lessons that cause students to “​​feel discomfort, guilt, anguish” on account of their race or gender. Some explicitly ban the teaching of critical race theory, a graduate-level scholarly framework examining how racism is embedded in American institutions. The term has become a catch-all many Republicans use to describe teachings about systemic racism.

Right-wing, mostly white parent groups such as and have pushed for the bills, which have been supported almost exclusively by conservative politicians. Those who favor the restrictions broadly argue that classroom teachings about race can serve to divide students and give them a pessimistic view of the country’s history. They contend LGBTQ material can make students vulnerable to sexual predation, though those claims , and should be under the purview of parents, not schools.

Simultaneous moves to ban books have also spread in response to parent activism. With more than in schools and libraries from January through August, 2022 is on track to surpass 2021’s count, which was already “the highest number of attempted book bans since we began compiling these lists 20 years ago,” ALA President Patricia Wong said in an April .

So far, the ACLU has challenged classroom censorship efforts in 10 states, including three lawsuits against rules limiting teachings on race and gender. In its more than 100 years of operation, the organization’s have extended across all political ideologies, including defending the rights of the KKK and Nazis to express their views peacefully. 

The number of challenges to anti-CRT laws could soon increase, said Sykes,

“We are actively tracking and considering litigation in multiple states at the moment.”

Here’s a nationwide look at what has played out so far:

Oklahoma

In October 2021, the ACLU and affiliate organizations filed a lawsuit, BERT v. O’Connor, challenging a statewide bill that restricts public school instruction on race and gender. As a result of the law’s approval, according to the ACLU, school districts in the state have told teachers to avoid using terms such as “diversity” and “white privilege” in their classrooms, and have removed , and other seminal books from reading lists.

The court’s decision will have ramifications for Tulsa, the state’s second-largest school district, which received a in its accreditation status after the State Board of Education found an implicit bias training it administered was in violation of the state anti-CRT law. The city, which was the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that left hundreds of Black residents dead and over 1,250 homes destroyed, had recently doubled down on teaching the dreadful, long-buried episode. The demotion does not prevent teachers from covering that history, but some fear may lead teachers and school leaders to feel as if they are on thin ice.

New Hampshire

New Hampshire is among the 17 states that have passed laws restricting lessons on race and gender. The ACLU’s lawsuit, Mejia v. Edelblut, alleges that the Granite State’s legislation is so vague that it violates the 14th Amendment, because teachers’ innocent misunderstandings can place their jobs in jeopardy. The state chapter of the National Education Association, one of the plaintiffs, said teachers repeatedly voiced they were confused about what they could and could not teach, and were scared of the repercussions for guessing wrong. Letters to the state asking for clarification, the ACLU says, went unanswered.

Florida

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act in April, tamping down on teachers’ and employers’ ability to hold discussions related to race and gender. “We will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces,” DeSantis said.

But the law has already run into legal difficulties. In August, a federal judge placed an injunction on the provisions that apply to the workplace. Now, a group of seven professors and one undergraduate student, represented by the ACLU, have also challenged the law’s restrictions on colleges and universities.

“There is a longstanding history in the Supreme Court and courts across our country of recognizing the freedom of professors, lecturers and educators in higher education to determine what to teach and how to teach it,” said Leah Watson, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Program.

Tennessee

In February, after the McMinn County Board of Education decided to remove the graphic novel from the eighth-grade curriculum, the ACLU of Tennessee calling for the board to share the parent complaints it received over the book.

Virginia

After Virginia initiated proceedings to block the sale and distribution of two books, Gender Queer and A Court of Mist and Fury, the ACLU and ACLU of Virginia filed a alongside several independent bookstores urging a state court to dismiss the obscenity proceedings against the two works. On Aug. 30, the court followed that recommendation and dismissed the attempted ban.

“The First Amendment is clear — disliking the contents of a book doesn’t mean the government can ban it,” the ACLU on Twitter.

Missouri

A Trump-appointed federal judge denied an ACLU motion for a preliminary injunction against the Wentzville School District’s book ban. The ACLU of Missouri originally filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of two Wentzville students after the school district pulled several books with Black, Hispanic, Asian and LGBTQ main characters from the shelves of its libraries. The lawsuit sought to temporarily halt the district’s book review policy. A trial on whether to permanently ban the district from enforcing that policy is .

Montana

The ACLU of Montana in February filed a public records request after officials in Kalispell, Montana held meetings over whether to ban by Jonathan Evison and Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe. The board dismissed the first potential ban and has delayed a decision regarding the second. 

Meanwhile, books were left in the Kalispell book drop in early August. Local police investigated and concluded that the books — none of them controversial titles — were mistakenly donated after being used for target practice, but the unnerving incident spurred the resignation of at least two librarians.

Nebraska

In late May, a Nebraska school district three days after the 54-year-old outlet published an LGBTQ-themed edition. The superintendent of Northwest Public Schools, in Grand Island, Nebraska, said the paper’s final issue was not the sole reason for its elimination. But school board Vice President Zach Mader was , saying, “If (taxpayers) read that (issue), they would have been like, ‘Holy cow. What is going on at our school?’”

In response, the ACLU of Nebraska submitted a public records request for all documents and communication records related to the decision scrapping the publication. The district’s legal representatives have said they are currently . The ACLU also sent a letter to the superintendent warning that the move violated students’ constitutional rights and other federal protections.

“The District’s unlawful attempts to quash student journalism and student opinions violate students’ rights to freedom of speech and equal protection under the Nebraska and United States Constitutions,” said the . “We urge the District to immediately remedy these violations [by] reinstat[ing] both the school paper and the journalism program.”

Mississippi

In January, Ridgeland Mayor Gene McGee withheld $110,000 from the town’s public library, giving librarians an ultimatum: get rid of LGBTQ literature or lose operational funds that had been slated for the building. The ACLU of Mississippi in February responded with a warning letter to McGee. “You have no authority to undertake such measures, and your actions are unconstitutional,” staff attorney McKenna Raney-Gray wrote. Following the letter, the funding was delivered to Ridgeland Public Library.

Idaho

In May, the Nampa School District banned 22 books from libraries and classrooms, including by Khaled Hosseini, by Margaret Atwood and by Toni Morrison. Concerned over a potential First Amendment violation and the possibility of bias in the board members’ decision, the ACLU of Idaho in July filed a public records request for all communications related to the board’s adoption of the policy.

The average increase was 10.8% from 2020-21 to 2021-22 and 16.5% from 2020-21 to 2022-23, according to a late August of 118 large school system budgets published by Burbio, which has tracked K-12 policy through the pandemic.

Nearly 1 in 5 district budgets within that group had grown by more than 25% since 2021.

In many cases, those investments translate to direct benefits for students, said Chad Aldeman, policy director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. School systems have invested in tutoring programs and summer learning experiences to catch students up after many experienced significant delays in their learning due to COVID disruptions such as virtual learning and quarantines. Other districts have used the cash to make long-needed infrastructure improvements such as upgrading ventilation with or .

But with American Rescue Plan money set to expire in 2024, and with U.S. student enrollment projected to drop by due to slowed birth rates nationwide, the Georgetown K-12 finance expert warns that schools for a period of “bloodletting” by 2024-25 when budgets must adjust back down.

“You don’t have to look too far out to see pain coming,” Aldeman said. “That could look like flat or stagnant salaries, that can look like layoffs, that could look like closing schools. The federal money has deferred some of those tough choices or even made it so people can ignore them for a little bit. But they will come and it’s just a matter of when and how hard they hit.”

In Los Angeles, where enrollment has been , the school system released projections for total spending to drop nearly 20% from 2022-23 to 2024-25 — from roughly $11 billion to about $9 billion. Much of the difference represents the ending of stimulus funds.

L.A. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has described that impending fiscal cliff, conjoined with enrollment drops, as a quickly approaching “Armageddon.”&�Բ�����;

Most school leaders have worked to avoid a 2024-25 economic catastrophe in their stimulus spending, said Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators.

“Many superintendents have been careful, anticipating the fiscal cliff, not to use the dollars in ways that would create a problem for them down the line. For example, teacher salaries or the hiring of significant staff that then will have to be let go.”

For 20 years, Domenech worked as school superintendent in Long Island, New York over a period when the region lost 40% of its students.

“For all those years, I never built a school,” he said. “All I did was close schools.”

That’s a difficult task, the school leader acknowledged, because while families understand in the abstract the district must consolidate to prevent taxes from soaring, they usually want to see other schools close rather than their own. But cutting through the noise, school leaders can also understand the process of what Domenech calls “right-sizing” schools as an opportunity to “balance” student populations, he said, desegregating schools racially and socioeconomically.

Aldeman advises superintendents looking at enrollment declines not to kick the consolidation can down the road. Though school closings will inevitably cause disruptions, he said, policymakers can ease the pain with investments like more guidance counselors or improved transportation.

“Now would be a good time to start thinking about [consolidating],” Alderman said. “If we delay it, then the money will run out.”

When COVID struck in 2020, the then-eighth grader’s Upper Valley, New Hampshire middle school campus shut down for several weeks to pivot to virtual learning, like most others across the country. Paige knew then that her daughter Amy — whose name has been changed in this piece for the student’s privacy — was at risk of falling behind even further. Once online school started, live instruction was only on a “part-time basis,” Paige said.

“There was lost learning time,” she said. “Sometimes there weren’t teachers because the teachers were sick.”

Although Paige didn’t know it yet, Amy had dyslexia. For years, the now-17-year-old’s condition went undiagnosed. Meanwhile, it complicated the teen’s part-time job at a clothing store, because she struggled to type in email addresses at the cash register.

In a last-ditch effort to help her daughter, Paige connected with a tutor specializing in phonics-based literacy, who she now works with via a relatively new state program. After beginning tutoring, Amy showed quick improvement on spelling and reading tests administered by her high school, Paige said. Amy’s literacy coach recognized signs of dyslexia and pointed the family toward screening for the disability, which led to her diagnosis and extra services at school.

“I’ve seen progress,” Paige said. “The way [her tutor] works with her is not a way … a teacher would have the time to work with her in a classroom situation.”

That sort of individualized, intensive coaching is a key solution the Granite State has bet on to help students like Amy get back on track after the pandemic. The state is entering its second year offering the scholarship, which uses a digital wallet to provide $1,000 for private tutoring to any young person whose education was negatively impacted by the pandemic. The scholarship is available to all students, regardless of need, and can be applied toward tutoring from state-approved educators.

“When I explain the program to [parents], they become very excited, like, ‘Oh, this is great,’” New Hampshire Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut said. “In some cases, they’re almost like, ‘It’s too good to be true. How can this possibly be?’”

But families in New Hampshire have tapped into less than a third of the available scholarship funds. So far this academic year, 724 young people have received scholarships — accounting for just $724,000 out of a $2.5 million total funded by federal COVID relief cash. Upon inception, the state granted scholarship eligibility only to students from low-income families, but with signups lagging and substantial funds remaining, they made access universal.

State testing in 2022 revealed that more than half of New Hampshire students were not proficient in math and over 40% were behind in English, though scores have rebounded slightly since 2021, according to data provided by the state. Research shows sustained individual or small-group tutoring can be one of the best ways to help children catch up.

“One student might be struggling with functions. Another is struggling with algebraic equations,” Edelblut said. “Those are the kinds of things that in a one-on-one tutoring session with a teacher that can be drawn out, they can be addressed, they can be targeted, and we can fill in those gaps.”

Soon after the Paige family began tutoring, they saw a post on social media about the YES! grant and realized they qualified. Though they’re still working out the logistics of the digital wallet, the funds will cover more than two months of intensive lessons, which will be “definitely helpful, without a doubt,” Paige said.

The program has also served its purpose for student Sylas Marrotte. The scholarship gave him access to a trained special education teacher for twice-a-week math and reading tutoring, grandmother Sherry Newman said.

“My grandson, who already had learning disabilities, was falling way behind [during COVID],” Newman wrote in an email to �鶹��Ʒ. “The tutor was very flexible and supportive.”

The program could help to “democratize” the private tutoring market, which often is available only to wealthier families, said Matthew Kraft, associate professor of education at Brown University. 

But in his eyes, the slow uptake among low-income families is a damning indicator, signaling either poor advertising to the neediest parents or failure to alleviate other barriers such as transportation costs. 

It’s possible many families “just never learned about the program or couldn’t figure out how to sign up or didn’t think that they could make it work,” Kraft said. “I don’t think … they’ve met the demand in that group of students.”

Nationwide, parental interest in learning recovery options has been lower than policymakers would have hoped, according to recent from the Brookings Institute. Despite significant gaps in learning for millions of students across the country, less than a third of families said they wanted their kids to participate in tutoring and less than a quarter said they were interested in district-run summer camps.

Even if all the New Hampshire tutoring funds get disbursed, Kraft observed, it will still only serve 2,500 learners — a drop in the bucket compared to the state’s over 185,000 students, including roughly 50,000 who are eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch, a proxy indicator for the number of students living in poverty.

The New Hampshire Department of Education does not “at this time” know the share of low-income students who have taken advantage of the tutoring scholarship money compared to wealthier youth, Edelblut said. Students could opt for virtual sessions in cases where transportation presented a barrier, he noted.

The YES! scholarship is one of three state-funded tutoring options available to New Hampshire families. The state announced this month that it had that will give more than 100,000 students access to the site’s 24/7 digital tutoring services. Since early in the pandemic, the state has also partnered with Khan Academy founder Sal Khan’s initiative, providing the state’s students with free access to the site’s learning resources. That site has seen about 4,300 New Hampshire visitors, said Kimberly Houghton, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Education, although she did not have figures on how many tutoring sessions students have actually participated in.

Among the 74 individuals and organizations registered by the state as , including specialists in math, literacy, speech and executive functioning, a handful said over email that none or just one student had reached out for tutoring sessions.

But Krista Martin, who runs the Sylvan Learning centers in Portsmouth and Salem, has worked with six students who have used YES! scholarship money to pay for sessions. Two of those families were already paying for Sylvan tutoring services before the grant and now use the funds to offset costs, but the other four enrolled once they received the scholarship, Martin said. 

For the most part, families come in hopes that the sessions will help their kids recover from the pandemic, Martin wrote in an email.

“​​For many of our students, the breakdowns started during the COVID years,” Martin said. “Since the pandemic, we have heard from many families that they want their children to enjoy school again and show interest in what they are learning like they did before COVID.”

For the Paige family, Amy’s struggles began earlier, but YES! has helped — at least a little — along the way. On an August evening in northern New Hampshire, tutor Lynne Howard sat at her dining table and helped the teen break down words into their individual sound components. Howard was a longtime reading specialist in the local schools and now runs a tutoring company called Summit Literacy.

“Say hush,” Howard said.

“Hush,” Amy responded.

“Now say hush but change ‘shh’ to ‘mm,’ ” Howard added on.

“Hum,” Amy answered.

Word by word, sound by sound, Howard and Amy made out ways to fill the student’s learning gaps. They identified prefixes, suffixes, root words, closed and open vowels — steadily making progress to improve her spelling. And their time together ended with praise that, for many years before tutoring, Paige was concerned she’d never hear about her daughter’s literacy.

“And that’s it, you worked hard today,” Howard said at the end of an hour. “Excellent job.”

Rosemely Osorio is swiftly becoming the educator that, years ago, she wished for.

When, at age 9, she and her family came to Rhode Island from Guatemala, Osorio recalls struggling academically as she navigated an unfamiliar system.

“When I came here and I started at the schools, I remember, I didn’t know how to speak any English. … I didn’t have a mentor who told me, ‘Hey, it’s really important that you work extremely hard in high school so then your GPA is good.’ I didn’t know what a GPA was,” she said.

In 2014, she graduated high school, the first in her family to accomplish the feat, but college remained out of reach because of finances and her immigration status — Osorio is a DACA recipient, the Obama-era program that provides deportation relief and work permits to undocumented residents brought here as children.

Now, years later as an adult learner in College Unbound and the Equity Institute’s TA to BA program, she’s just a semester away from earning her bachelor’s degree and teaching certification, key steps toward becoming exactly the role model she yearned for as a young person. At the same time, she works as a paraprofessional in the Central Falls high school she once attended, which serves a high share of Central American immigrant students.

“They see in me someone that they can count on,” said Osorio. “They’re like, ‘Oh, she knows how to speak Spanish. She looks Hispanic. So I can actually talk to her.’”

After only two years in operation, the teacher training program that opened doors for Osorio has scaled up more than six times beyond its original capacity and is launching cohorts in a second city, with talks underway to expand to a third, leaders say.

“The program has grown pretty tremendously,” said Carlon Howard, who helped launch the TA to BA fellowship and is chief impact officer at the Equity Institute. “There’s a lot of interest in initiatives such as these given that, across our country, schools and districts are challenged to find enough educators to staff their buildings.”

The Rhode Island program, which served 13 fellows in its inaugural 2020-21 class, will train 75 paraprofessionals this year. Two new, 10-student cohorts will launch in Philadelphia, where College Unbound already operates other programs, thanks to funding from the school district. Over 40 people remain on the waiting list, said David Bromley, College Unbound’s Philadelphia coordinator. In nearby Camden, New Jersey, the college is working with the teachers union to roll out programs there, too, he added.

“Investing deeply in our staff who already work closely with our students to bring them to the next stage of their career is a shining light of positivity in the midst of a difficult few years,” Larisa Shambaugh, chief of talent for Philadelphia public schools, said in an emailed statement to �鶹��Ʒ.

‘Untapped talent’

Many paraprofessionals are highly skilled educators with years or even decades of classroom experience, Howard said, but still may feel like they have a “glass ceiling above their head” because they lack college degrees and financial resources.

Participants in the fellowship often study tuition-free thanks to the Equity institute’s “last dollar” scholarships covering costs not offset by federal Pell grants.

“We target folks who already work with kids … and all we’re trying to do is help them realize their greatest potential,” Howard said.

TAs are an “untapped talent” pool from which to recruit and train high-quality educators, agreed David Donaldson, managing partner for the National Center for Grown Your Own educator pipeline programs.

Students take two College Unbound courses a semester, scheduled outside of the work day, plus a lab component specifically geared to prepare them to lead a classroom. Thanks to a process at the college for measuring and awarding credits for prior learning experiences, some students are able to take an accelerated path to graduation. Osorio, for example, will finish in under two years.

“It’s been a lot of work,” she admits, cramming in classes while also working full time and taking care of family responsibilities. “But I don’t regret it.”

Addressing diversity, combatting shortages

Educators like Osorio — those who reflect their students culturally and linguistically — are in short supply in Rhode Island’s schools and nationwide. Roughly 1 in 10 teachers in the Ocean State are people of color while 4 in 10 students identify as Black, Hispanic, Indigenous or Asian. Meanwhile, educators of color and those who speak multiple languages improve outcomes for all students, but provide a particular boost to students whose identities they match, research shows.

Classroom aides, on the other hand, tend to be much more racially and linguistically diverse than teachers. The positions generally do not require a college degree and can be more accessible to people from low-income backgrounds. All her fellow teaching assistants, Osorio said, speak Spanish and the vast majority are people of color, whereas the teachers at her school are predominantly white and speak only English.

“To be honest, everything we see is all these teachers in the classrooms with a bunch of Hispanic kids, but the teacher doesn’t speak their language,” said Osorio. “That’s what my biggest motivation was to apply and getting certified was that students need teachers in the classroom that they can relate to.”

David Quiroa is joining the TA to BA fellowship this fall and works as a paraprofessional in his home community of Newport, Rhode Island.

“So many TAs who are in the [Black, Indigenous and people of color] community already have been putting in the work for several years … and they’re never given the opportunity to pursue higher education,” he said. “With TA to BA and College Unbound, it really is showing these communities, ‘Look, we are here, we are federally approved, we have all of the accreditations, we have so (many) established connections here in our community. You guys have been doing the work. We just want to give you your proper salary.’”

Meanwhile, districts across the country are facing acute staffing shortages and going to extreme lengths — including tapping college students or dangling $25,000 bonuses — to entice new hires.

In this climate, the grow-your-own approach is “getting a lot of attention now,” Donaldson said, even though turning to programs that provide a work-based pipeline to train new teachers is a longer-term solution.

His organization recently announced that seven states with existing or emerging apprenticeship programs to train educators launched an all-new National Registered Apprenticeship in Teaching Network. It comes on the heels of a June announcement from Education Secretary Miguel Cardona urging states to invest in grow-your-own programs, including those that begin in high school and with apprenticeship programs.

“Missouri, like other states, is struggling to address staffing issues created by teacher shortages. The Teacher Apprenticeship is an additional, innovative model to help address this issue,” Paul Katnik, Missouri’s assistant education commissioner, said in a release after the network was announced.

The other participating states are California, Florida, North Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming.

‘We got you’

The relationship faculty build with participants is a secret to the program’s success in Rhode Island, and soon in the new Philadelphia cohorts, fellowship leaders and students say.

Osorio’s advisor “has played a big role in the way that I have been able to develop in this program,” said the College Unbound student. In addition to checking in academically and emotionally, the faculty member who runs her teaching lab class allowed Osorio to make up credits when she fell behind after a devastating miscarriage. And when Osorio was short on cash to renew her Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status and fearing she would lose her work permit, she again asked for help.

“Don’t worry about it. We got you,” was the response from College Unbound. “And they actually sent me a check home so I could pay for that application.”

That support is by design, said Howard, who explained that the program trains its faculty to uplift participants and be there for them. Even as the fellowship scales up, he’s confident the family-like culture among cohorts will remain.

The TA to BA leader believes it’s within the program’s reach to train 200 paraprofessionals into full-time teachers in the next three to five years. If all goes according to plan, he hopes to serve 500 by 2030 and may also add a high school teaching apprenticeship component.

Quiroa, the Newport TA, is “thrilled” about the expansion, he said, because there are “absolutely” others in his field who could benefit from the opportunity. “Having this organization, this program, thrive … I think is the best thing we can do to move forward and break a lot of these inequities.”

Osorio, for her part, can visualize the impact that seeing someone like her at the helm of a classroom could have for immigrant students. Hispanic role models were vital in her professional life after graduating high school, she said, and now she can finally pass on the favor.

“I get how important mentors are so now I can be that for those students.”

“Please treat this as you would any illness,” said a from Hendry County School District in Florida. 

The district’s rules specify that staff and students experiencing coronavirus symptoms should stay home, while those who are asymptomatic and fever-free for 24 hours may come to school with or without a face covering.

Across the country, over 95% of the 500 largest school systems had no mask requirement as of Aug. 22, according to an from Burbio, a data service that tracks school policy. Several, however, do still to wear face coverings for three to five days when they return to campus after finishing a five-day quarantine.

Those policies come after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in mid-August eased their K-12 COVID guidelines. Rather than recommending anyone exposed to the virus self-isolate, the CDC now calls for only individuals who test positive or experience symptoms to stay home, effectively doing away with the test-to-stay programs many schools used during the previous academic year. The guidelines still recommend universal masking where COVID levels are high, as they are in several regions of the country, including New York City.

Regardless, the nation’s largest district will return to school with face coverings optional after lifting its mandate last March. Los Angeles, the second largest school system, will do the same. New York City will also end its requirement that students and staff undergo for the virus. 

Breaking the trend, and are enforcing universal masking as students return students to classrooms. Philadelphia’s rule, however, will lift after the first 10 days of school.

Benjamin Linas, a professor of medicine at Boston University, advises schools not to put an outright ban on mask requirements, because the policies can be a helpful temporary tool for staving off outbreaks and preventing missed learning.

“Sometimes schools have to close because they have so much COVID that kids aren’t coming [or] there’s not enough staff,” he told �鶹��Ʒ. “When we’re talking about school mitigation and school masking, we’re talking about learning.”

Indeed, an Albuquerque, New Mexico, charter school on Aug. 16 for a week when over 3% of students and staff tested positive for the virus. And Mannsville Schools, a tiny 95-student Oklahoma district, announced a week-long closure starting Aug. 14.

“Due to an increasingly high number of positive covid tests for both students and staff, we are forced to close for this week to allow time for everyone to get better and not continue to spread the virus,” Mannsville Superintendent Brandi Price-Kelty. “We will make up these days with virtual learning days after Labor Day.”

Other areas have set a higher threshold at which school COVID positivity levels trigger policy changes: 10% in Kansas City means until levels drop, according to the district, and 20% in South Carolina ushers a brief pivot to remote learning, according to the .

“There might be a situation in which you put on masks for 10 days in order to break an in-class cluster and get back to school,” said Linas. “I think people could have more in-person learning and more educational opportunities if we acknowledge sometimes you have to put on a mask in response to an outbreak situation in your own building.”

Thanks to vaccines, COVID hospitalizations and death rates are much lower than they were at the height of the pandemic. But because case rates continue to follow patterns of surges and troughs, infections will still be an issue classrooms must deal with for the foreseeable future, he said. 

“This disease is not yet a common cold, it still does major damage… there’s still a lot of morbidity. [Masking in classrooms when cases spike] is the least invasive policy one could have other than just doing nothing. And I think it would be foolish to do nothing at this point.”

Coming out of COVID-19 isolation, I looked forward to making up for many missed social opportunities with friends. I joined the track team at my new school and did well in my events. I made good friends with some of my teammates and other students on campus, which can be challenging for me as a person with autism. When my mom was looking for a church for us to attend, my track coach shared information about his church, and we began attending on Sundays; I also went to a Wednesday church youth group when my study schedule allowed it. Thanks to social media, I could keep in contact with friends from my former school, and I even have a girlfriend who attended my old school.

But despite it being a terrific year for me overall, I feel profound disappointment in the circumstances that led me to South Torrance. Several racially charged events occurred during my middle school years, such as the George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery murders and trials. As a result, there were many discussions about race and safety in white communities. In the climate at that time, I expected to be safest with the same people who protested, saying, “Black Lives Matter” and “Stop Killing Our Sons.” I thought the people who said my life matters would believe that my education also matters. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the community, accountability, collaboration and support that was talked about at those 8th grade recruitment meetings during my first semester in a school attended mostly by students of color and run mostly by educators of color.

I found myself in a situation where some teachers were not motivated to teach and help their students succeed, some were bullied by their own students and didn’t know how to discipline the class and some repeated the same lessons and shared the answers before they gave tests and quizzes (and some kids still failed!). When my mom, herself an administrator who has been in education for over 20 years, tried to intervene, it was difficult to impossible to get some teachers to respond or administrators or other top education officials to address the problem. Eventually, she started looking for a new home in a different school district and we moved in December.

South High is a predominantly white and Asian ethnic high school where most of the teaching staff is also primarily white and Asian. They treat their students as I expected a school should, providing counselors, tutoring and “Spartan Seminar.” 

Spartan Seminar is a 25-minute session every Wednesday and Thursday, where students sign up for specific classes to catch up on work, get tutoring from the teacher or study for an upcoming test/quiz with that teacher. If you are not doing well in a class or on an assignment, you are expected to attend Spartan Seminar for that class. 

My Spanish teacher has great classroom control. First, he provides us with study guides (not answers!) for upcoming quizzes. He reviews the homework to ensure we are updated on the current unit’s information. Finally, whenever someone does act up, he raises his voice and tells them to stop, which works, and we immediately return to learning.

My algebra teacher at South High was terrific. She showed the class how to work on new equations, like factoring and polynomials. She has a pleasant personality, making learning enjoyable for everyone in her classroom. She didn’t wait for my mom to email or call her; she often emailed my mom if she had information she thought would help me. My friends all agreed that she is a good teacher, which is unusual for a math class, and some even consider her their favorite teacher. 

I finished the semester at South High with 4 As, 2 Bs, and a C. It took much work, and I sometimes spent as many as six hours a night doing homework to learn the subject. I credit my school team and my mom because they challenged me to communicate with them about when I needed help and they created a schedule to review my work and grades to ensure I was on the right track. I was motivated to work harder at South High because I knew it was expected of me. I did not mind staying at my desk for hours and sometimes sacrificing my sleep to get the grades I knew I could if I tried hard. 

Although this was a great school year, I am disappointed that I had to leave a community I loved to find it. I also don’t want to suggest that my old school was not a good school because it was attended and run predominantly by people of color. I was raised by a Black educator, who cared so much about her students that we still go to their weddings, graduations, sporting and social events years after they were in her class.

If I could go back and talk to the staff at my former school, I would want them to know that:

I want to be valued as someone who takes their work seriously.

I want teachers who take their jobs seriously and hold me accountable. 

I want to look up to my teachers, like what I see, and be like them.

I want them to care enough to know who I am because my life matters to them, for them to see my potential and help me reach my goals.

My African-American peers and I want to be educated by teachers who look like us.

We want to hear their stories. We want to hear how they made it to college. If they go, maybe we can go, too. Tell us about African-American fraternities and sororities, dorms and the fun times they had so we know that college isn’t just boring hard work. We want to hear about their mistakes, so we learn from them. 

We want to know about the problems they faced in predominantly white spaces and how they overcame them so that when we have those experiences, we can overcome them, too. 

We want to talk to them about our experiences as African-American students and know that they understand. We sometimes do not want to “air our family business” to people who may not understand or who already stereotype us because we are African American. They don’t understand our community, language, idioms, values or history. They don’t understand us, no matter how well intentioned or woke they are. 

The teachers are the ones who told us they would do all these things for us and it hurts the most to think they are aware of our unmet expectations. I want them to know that, too.

My goal is not to criticize but to remind them that their students need them. We want them to care about us. Some of their students will only care when they do. We are waiting for them.

“It’s actually a little surreal” seeing the rich slate of offerings, said Brodrick Clarke, vice president of the .��

He’s worked at summer learning organizations for over a quarter century, making what used to be a difficult case to school administrators: That districts should offer camp-style July programs to all students rather than enrolling only those who flunked classes during the academic year.

Suddenly, his job has become much easier. 

A growing consensus has elevated summer learning programs to top priority after three consecutive school years disrupted by the pandemic. Several studies, including a 2018 , show camps blending fun and academics give students a leg up in key subject areas. So with millions of students nationwide lagging behind grade level in math and reading, and with schools sitting on billions of dollars in COVID relief cash, summer learning programs have become a go-to solution. 

So far, schools nationwide have poured $3.1 billion in American Rescue Plan dollars into summer and afterschool initiatives, according to an from Georgetown University’s FutureEd think tank. Summer learning has emerged as districts’ “number one priority” for academic recovery spending, said Phyllis Jordan, the organization’s associate director.

“We’re actually investing in programs that we know work and have had results. We just get to do them at a much larger scale because there’s finally funding for it,” U.S. Deputy Education Secretary Cindy Marten told �鶹��Ʒ. 

“If you put enriching, engaging experiences together for kids and give them a chance to be together, they can learn.”

However, the picture remains murky on just how much progress states, districts and community organizations have actually made toward catching up students before the school year re-starts.

“We do not have data on the number of summer programs this year compared to years past,” said Jen Rinehart, senior vice president of strategy and programs at the Afterschool Alliance. “Similarly, we do not have data on the number of students enrolled this year.”

Marten acknowledged she was not aware of any federal effort to track how many youth are engaging in summer learning programs this year and did not clarify when the results of these programs will come into focus.

To fill the gap, �鶹��Ʒ obtained exclusive datasets from , a data service that tracks school policy, and the research-based auditing publicly shared information about districts’ summer offerings. Burbio’s figures include the 200 largest U.S. school systems and CRPE’s cover 100 major metropolitan districts, many of which overlap. Though there are roughly 13,800 districts in the country, the 200 largest account for over a quarter of the nation’s students.

The analysis comes after the Department of Education announced the Engage Every Student Initiative in July to expand access to summer and afterschool offerings. Accompanying the launch, First Lady Jill Biden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona toured programs in Connecticut, Michigan and Georgia.

The Burbio and CRPE numbers reveal that the vast majority of school systems did indeed provide opportunities for students to catch up on learning and most offered their summer programs at no cost to families. Specifically:

• 93% of districts, according to Burbio, and 87%, according to CRPE, offered summer learning programs this year

• 79% of school systems that had programs provided them at no cost to families

• The average program length was 154 hours, just under four weeks and roughly equivalent to 12% of the academic school year. However, some offerings only covered about 30 hours, while others made up nearly 350 total hours

Additionally, most districts offered programs that went beyond rote academics — including activities such as theater, debate and robotics — and about 2 in 5 worked with community organizations to flesh out their camps. Nearly all programs included breakfast, lunch or both:

• Of the districts that offered summer learning opportunities, at least 83% included credit recovery options, 80% mixed academics with enrichment activities such as sports, arts or social-emotional learning, 48% offered programs for students with learning disabilities and 39% had dedicated options for English learners

• 96% of programs provided meals to children and 74% offered free transportation

• At least 39% of districts partnered with community organizations on summer offerings

The data align with recent figures reported by the , which surveyed a representative sample of 859 public schools in June. The figures are not an apples-to-apples comparison with the Burbio and CRPE data because they focus on individual schools rather than districts, but also point to extensive programming nationwide. NCES found:

• Three-quarters of schools offered learning and enrichment programs this summer

• School leaders estimated that 18-20% of their students enrolled, compared to 13-16% during a typical year

• 49% of education leaders said they partnered with an outside organization, 14% offered internship programs and 13% offered summer jobs or work-based learning programs

“When we talk about academic recovery … you can’t do it just within the regular school day,” said Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. “You need to make sure acceleration is extra time. The summer has become that time.”

A question of equity

Maritza Guridy, who has five children in Philadelphia public schools and also works as deputy director of parent voice with the , said some families in her network were able to find programs that met their needs while others were not.

“For those that [registered] early, they were able to get in there. For those that waited, it’s unfortunate,” she told �鶹��Ʒ.

She enrolled her kids in a local chapter of the nationally acclaimed program and also for a shorter stint at an organization called . Among her considerations were aspects like program cost, learning opportunities and emotional supports, but also factors like fun, clear communication from leadership and a building with central air.

In addition to academics, her children have practiced yoga and went for twice-a-week swim lessons at the local YMCA. One day, they came home with a gleeful announcement: “Mommy, I jumped into the deep side of the pool today — and I wasn’t scared!”

It thrilled Guridy, but she knew other families have missed out on similar joys because of barriers such as lack of transportation or no translated information about the opportunity. Guridy wants officials who plan programs to consider accessibility.

“Is [messaging] being offered in different languages?,” she prompts them. “How are parents supposed to enroll their children if they don’t even understand the application?”

It’s an equity issue, said Clarke, the National Summer Learning Association VP.  Youth who don’t have access to summer programs can see academic gains evaporate between June and September, a well-documented concept known as “summer slide.” Now the issue is particularly pressing, because students living in poverty have the starkest pandemic learning deficits.

“Families with access and privilege go into their bank accounts and provide great opportunities for their kids during the summertime,” he said. “The 26 million young people that are on free and reduced lunch … don’t have that luxury to do so. But they certainly need, want and deserve to have those opportunities.”

‘Explosion’ or ‘afterthought?’

With the stakes at an all-time high as schools reel from the pandemic’s impacts, experts have mixed views on whether summer offerings have actually scaled up this year.

“We’re seeing an explosion of programs,” said Ron Ottinger, executive director of , an organization connected to a network of thousands of providers across the country.

Meanwhile, Christine Pitts, who has done her own summer learning analysis as CRPE’s director of impact and communications, has a more pessimistic view.

In 2022, “[districts] were offering less than they were last year. So it’s almost like summer slipped back into that characterization of being an afterthought again,” she told �鶹��Ʒ.

Her team found that school systems provided fewer offerings for English learners and fewer programs with social-emotional supports this summer compared to last.

“It’s hard to speculate at a national level, why that might have dropped off,” said Marten, the deputy secretary. Some districts may have decided their 2021 summer programs had done enough to catch learners up and that they could scale back this year, she said. However, if leaders wanted to maintain programs but were facing a lack of funds, she encouraged them to tap resources from the new initiative.

Contrasting the data Pitts saw, Nicholas Munyan-Penney spoke to officials in over 30 states about their summer learning programs while researching for a report with . The narrative he heard was of continued growth.

“Anecdotally, they’ve said that there’s definitely been an increase in enrollment this summer,” the researcher told �鶹��Ʒ.

Rinehart also cites data that indicate an upward trend. In the spring of 2022, her organization and 90% said they were planning to offer summer programs, compared to 79% at the same time a year earlier. Respondents also indicated they expected upticks in enrollment, with an increased share expressing concern they wouldn’t be able to meet families’ demand for programs.

In one of the only direct comparisons between this year and last, the recently released NCES data found no change between 2021 and 2022, with the share of schools saying they offered summer learning programs holding steady at 75%.

‘How are we going to fill the staff?’

One factor often hindering summer learning expansion has been a staff, only the latest symptom of wider shortages that have affected K-12 schools for much of the past year.

“Officials are finding it very hard to find teachers,” said Domenech. “In many cases, the problem has been that where the district has large numbers of kids sign up for the summer programs, they wind up wanting to cut back because they just don’t have the staff to cover it.”

In Madison, Wisconsin, for example, administrators had to from their summer offerings, about 1 in 6 students who had signed up, because of “unanticipated staffing challenges.”

Gia Maxwell works as a site director at summer learning provider . Throughout the spring, she joined monthly calls with leaders from across the Breakthrough network, which operates in 26 cities. Her colleagues were continually worried about finding enough instructors.

“Everyone was talking about, ‘How are we going to fill the staff? How are we going to fill the staff,’” she told �鶹��Ʒ.

Her Miami program usually finds all 130 youth and 30 adult staff for its summer teaching corps by May, she said. But this year, it took until halfway through teacher training in mid-June to recruit everyone, and they had to hire more teenage candidates than usual. 

The Providence, Rhode Island Breakthrough location was forced to this summer altogether, explaining “we have struggled to recruit students and teachers this year.”

To combat shortages, Arkansas brought in tutors from its to staff summer programs, said Munyan-Penney. In West Virginia, program leaders pulled from teacher training programs in the state to fill out their summer learning staff ranks. And Arizona boosted teachers’ wages 20% for the summer months to entice instructors.

They’re among the states “​​thinking about the staffing issue and being proactive about it,” said the Education Reform Now researcher.

‘Math, Reading and a Little Stampeding’

Several states shared provisional data with �鶹��Ʒ on their summer offerings, though many said they won’t have finalized enrollment or academic impact numbers for months.  

In Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey launched the which state leaders estimate has served about 100,000 campers — 10% of the state’s 1 million students — across 680 sites, including at least one in every county. 

Arizona officials went to great lengths to spread the word about the program. The state ran a including ads on television, radio, social media and in magazines, and direct texts to parents in both English and Spanish informing them of the free programs.

“We targeted lower-income families, as the goal of free summer camp was to see the highest number of campers from families that may not have been able to afford an adventure-style summer camp in prior years,” Kaitlin Harrier, the governor’s senior policy advisor, wrote in an email to �鶹��Ʒ. 

The governor’s office opted for a “summer camp” approach rather than a “summer school” model, describing the opportunities as “Math, Reading, and a Little Stampeding,” said Harrier.

“It is no secret that when kids are having fun, it sets up a great foundation for learning,” she added.

In Connecticut, the state also rolled out a grant program to help providers beef up their summer offerings and defray program costs for low-income youth. The state disbursed roughly $8 million in grants last summer and increased that sum to $12 million for 2022, said Eric Scoville, communications director for the State Department of Education.

Enrollment across a sample of 121 locations nearly doubled, from 17,000 to 32,000, between 2020 and 2021, according to an spearheaded by University of Connecticut researchers. However, it’s too early to tell how many students the state reached this summer, said Scoville.

In North Carolina, all 115 school districts offered one or more summer learning programs this year funded by COVID relief money, each attended by 30 to 200 students, said Todd Silberman, a public information officer at the state’s Department of Public Instruction. The enrollment figures will not be finalized for several weeks, he said, but he expects the total will be lower than 2021, when the state legislature required math, science, English and enrichment summer learning programs.

At the city level, Baltimore City Public Schools has scaled up its programming sharply thanks to COVID relief dollars. The maximum number of youth the 77,800-student district had served between June and August previous to the pandemic had been 9,000, said Ronda Welsh, the district’s extended learning coordinator. But in 2021, they reached 15,000 and have served at least that many again in 2022.

“Our goal was to provide as many opportunities as we could for students in Baltimore,” Welsh told �鶹��Ʒ.

Tulsa, for its part, has also cultivated a thriving summer learning culture, part of a wider “City of Learning” initiative that has been in the works for several years. That infrastructure has made the district into a poster child for community partnership, with over 40 youth-serving organizations contributing to the district’s programming this summer — including clubs for debating, biking and rowing.

“The summer is the time that kids get to experience those things they otherwise would not have the opportunity to do, especially during the school year,” said Jackie DuPont, executive director of the , which orchestrates the connections between the nonprofits and the district.

However, the district has not been able to maintain its high summer learning enrollment. Last summer, about a third of its 33,000 students participated in summer learning — an unusually large share. This year, a total of 7,000 youth engaged in the school system’s initiative, Director of Expanded Learning Jessica Goodman estimated. 

“​​Last summer was really an immediate response to not having kids in our school buildings … so some families just needed that time more than they did this summer,” she told �鶹��Ʒ.

Despite enrollment fluctuations, Marten believes the proliferation of new summer learning programs nationwide will outlast the influx of federal funding.

“Communities will fall in love with these programs,” she said. “They will say, ‘We’re never going to let this stop. We’re not just doing this because there was a pandemic. We’re doing this because this is what’s good for kids. Let’s keep doing it.’”

Late Thursday, Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued a preliminary injunction in a suit challenging the employer portion of Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act, suspending enforcement of the law in the workplace. The Obama-nominated judge wrote in his Honeyfund v. DeSantis : 

“In the popular television series Stranger Things, the ‘upside down’ describes a parallel dimension containing a distorted version of our world. Recently, Florida has seemed like a First Amendment upside down. Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech, while private actors may burden speech freely. But in Florida, the First Amendment apparently bars private actors from burdening speech, while the state may burden speech freely.”

A separate lawsuit filed Thursday morning challenges the portion of the law that applies to colleges and universities.

A federal lawsuit filed Thursday charges that a Florida law designed to “fight back against woke indoctrination” by limiting classroom discussions of race and gender violates the constitutional free speech rights of college students and professors.

Florida’s Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees (Stop W.O.K.E.) Act took effect July 1. It prohibits workplaces and schools from requiring training or instruction that may make some people feel they bear “personal responsibility” for historic wrongdoings because of their race, gender or national origin.

But Jerry Edwards, staff attorney with the ACLU of Florida, one of the legal organizations behind the case, said the law unconstitutionally censors the free expression of higher education students and educators.

“The Stop W.O.K.E. Act is a shameful result of propaganda and fearmongering,” he said in a statement. “A free state does not seek to curtail the inalienable right to free expression in its college and university classrooms.”

The Florida Department of Education did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Florida is one of 17 states that have sought to restrict how educators cover topics related to race and gender, according to a . 

However, it’s the only state that applies its censorship law to higher education, said Leah Watson, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Program.

“There is a longstanding history in the Supreme Court and courts across our country of recognizing the freedom of professors, lecturers and educators in higher education to determine what to teach and how to teach it,” she told �鶹��Ʒ. 

Seven Florida professors and one undergraduate are named as plaintiffs, represented by the national ACLU, ACLU of Florida, NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the law firm of Ballard Spahr. The suit names the state university system’s board of governors and several other officials as defendants. It requests an injunction seeking an immediate halt to enforcement of the bill in colleges and universities.

Plaintiff Russell Almond is an associate professor teaching statistics at Florida State University and covers how to use race as a variable in empirical research. Provisions in the Stop W.O.K.E. Act that prohibit educators from presenting “colorblind” ideologies as racist put his teachings in jeopardy, the lawsuit charges.

Another professor, Dana Thompson Dorsey, will teach a course in “Critical Race Studies: Research, Policy and Praxis” at the University of South Florida this school year. She fears that explaining how racism is embedded in American institutions — a central aspect of the scholarly framework — could put her in violation of the law. While the Sunshine State does not explicitly ban Critical Race Theory, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office has said the law is intended to .

“In Florida, we will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces. There is no place for indoctrination or discrimination in Florida,” DeSantis said after he signed the bill into law in April.

The act forces many educators to present foundational principles of their disciplines in a “false light,” presenting them as “disputed when it’s honestly not,” said Watson. 

Plaintiff Johana Dauphin, a senior at Florida State University, worries that she will be ill prepared for graduate school if the law interferes with her professors’ ability to convey key understandings that students in other states receive.

“I fear that this law will cause my professors to avoid discussing race and gender altogether, which will result in my perspective and lived experience as a Black, female student being effectively minimized and erased in the classroom,” said Dauphin. “As a student, I deserve to see myself and the issues that impact me — including issues around race and gender — reflected in my classroom discussions.”

Thursday’s filing marks the third lawsuit the ACLU has brought against a statewide censorship law. Similar cases in Oklahoma and have yet to be decided.

A previous legal challenge seeking to prevent the Stop W.O.K.E. Act from taking effect was dismissed by a federal judge in June. Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker clarified in a 23-page order that he was not “determining whether the challenged regulations are constitutional, morally correct or good policy.” Rather, the four plaintiffs — two professors, a student and a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant — .

Other lawsuits challenging the Florida law remain undecided. At an early August hearing, Walker appeared to arguments leveled against the state by several businesses, including a Ben & Jerry’s franchise. The federal judge emphasized the vagueness of a particular section that labels training discriminatory if it causes an employee to believe a person of “one race, color, sex, or national origin cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race, color, sex or national origin.”

“Apparently, I’m a person of below-average intelligence, because I have no idea what that means,” said Walker.

John Ohlendorf, an attorney representing the state, defended the provisions: “The state of Florida has a compelling interest in preventing employers from forcing employees to listen to speech that suggests one race is inherently superior to another.”

The case brought Thursday is “framed differently” than prior challenges, Watson said. It has yet to be assigned, but it’s possible Walker could be the one to review it. Should that happen, the ACLU hopes for a speedy ruling, as he has moved in a matter of weeks on previous decisions around the bill. 

“We’re confident the Stop W.O.K.E. Act unconstitutionally infringes upon academic freedom and students’ right to learn,” said Watson. “I’m not able to comment predicting what the court may say.”

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

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

“…27, 28, 29…”&�Բ�����;

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

“…42, 43, 44…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’re learning advanced stuff and we’re able to get ahead,” said 11-year-old Ama Amoateng, between stints on the playground during recess. “It makes me feel smarter.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even the students admit it’s a good time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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