This story was produced as part of the nine-part series “Are We Ready? How Schools Are Preparing – and Not Preparing – Children for Climate Change,” reported by HuffPost and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

CHAUVIN, La. — Izzy Allen, 13, has watched gas stations and grocery stores close. She’s seen vines grow over abandoned homes while other houses have been lifted on stilts, ten or fifteen feet off the ground. She remembers that her father, a shrimper, used to have to inch his boat carefully away from the dock behind their house so as not to hit the bayou’s narrow banks. The land has disappeared at such a rapid clip that he can pull it out easily now, even when another boat is passing behind his.

The eighth grader can also remember each of the kids she began school with back at Boudreaux Canal Elementary School. “All the teachers, all the kids, knew everybody’s name,” she recalled on a recent Friday afternoon. But that school closed after she finished first grade in 2013, a victim of declining enrollment after relentless flooding and job losses drove families from the area. The elementary she went to next, Upper Little Caillou, had replaced another nearby school that had shuttered for the same reasons a few years earlier.

Lacache Middle School, which Izzy currently attends, sits along the bayou on one of the lowest-lying tips of Louisiana’s Terrebonne Parish. Every year, she loses classmates who move farther inland or to Texas. It’s a scenario playing out across coastal Louisiana and in other areas of the country vulnerable to floods and storms that are worsening because of climate change.

As sea level rise drives more and more to people seek higher ground — a phenomenon sometimes known as “climate migration” — those who remain will be increasingly left to make do with less. Hampered by school funding formulas based on property tax dollars and student enrollment, these schools are already being forced to cut teaching positions and scrimp on materials and technology. Schools farther inland, meanwhile, are under pressure to accommodate arriving students — forced to increase class sizes and provide support for transient students who lose learning time with each move.

With at least 6,444 schools serving almost 4 million students located in parts of the country at high risk of flooding, it’s a set of challenges that’s only going to become more common. At Lacache, the question is already pressing: When families start leaving the areas on the front lines of climate change, what kind of education — and future — remains for those who stay?

Like many of her students at Lacache, English teacher Summer Skarke can trace her family here back generations. One winter Friday inside her classroom in the two-story brick school building, Skarke was facilitating a discussion with her eighth-grade students about the short story “The Lady, or the Tiger?” — an allegory about making a difficult decision between two unknowns. In Skarke’s bright, colorful classroom, students who couldn’t find a place at one of the crowded desks sat instead on chairs clustered in a corner. Skarke let one student work at her own desk while she walked around the room, checking students’ work and giving out heart-shaped cookies to celebrate Valentine’s Day.

Since Skarke began teaching at Lacache in 1999, the number of students has fallen by almost a quarter to 387. But the number of teachers has declined more precipitously, she said. There are three eighth-grade teachers today, compared to eight when she started, and the vast majority of classrooms now have more than 21 students.

“You have more kids in a class with less teachers, and you have teachers teaching subjects that they’re not 100 percent at,” said Skarke. Teachers double up on subjects — one of her colleagues teaches social studies and science in one 90-minute block.

Teachers and administrators are having to scrimp because fewer students means less per-pupil funding ($9,420 per student in Terrebonne Parish). Losing four or five students can make a dent in the budget equivalent to one teacher’s salary. School enrollment in the Parish has dropped from more than 19,000 in 2008 to around 17,200 early this year. And yet, as school administrators are quick to point out, most costs remain the same. “If you have a school bus going down street A picking up 50 kids, and 25 kids move, you still have that same school bus, but just picking up 25 kids,” explained Philip Martin, superintendent of Terrebonne Parish schools. “It’s resulted in a much more challenging financial environment for us.”

Such financial challenges threaten schools when their populations are at their highest need. Allison Plyer, chief demographer at The Data Center, a New Orleans-based research organization, noted that climate migration tends to leave the poor behind. “The poor often don’t have the resources to be able to leave. They don’t have extended social networks, family and friends, that can help them resettle elsewhere,” Plyer said. “They don’t have money in the bank, and moving costs money. When middle-income people leave, they often take a loss on their house — that’s a choice they can make.” It’s a choice fewer and fewer people in the parish can afford to make. The number of people receiving food stamp benefits grew in Terrebonne Parish from less than 15,000 in 2007 to 23,000 in 2017.

Related: The silence of school teachers on climate change

The decline of the area’s industries is a big factor, too. The BP oil spill in 2010 brought the seafood industry, already flagging due to coastal erosion, to a near standstill. The area has lost thousands more jobs since mid-2014, when plummeting oil prices sparked layoffs. Since the bust began, nearly one of every four people in the labor force have left Terrebonne and Lafourche or stopped looking for work, according to a Houma Today analysis of data from the Louisiana Workforce Commission. 

At Lacache, “what you have left over is a very poverty-stricken population,” said Principal Mark Thibodeaux. “You don’t have a lot of affluent families living out here anymore, they’ve all moved further north.”

The heightened concentration of poverty has made it challenging to teach, said computer lab instructor Simonne Lanigan, as a group of students lingered to get a last few minutes of screen time in the lab while bus numbers were called over the loudspeaker.  

“They’re coming from a place where they’re trying to survive, and I’m asking them to learn, and ‘Hey you’re going to go to college’ and all that,” she said. But circumstances prevent many from learning. “(T)hey need to sleep in class because they didn’t sleep at home, or (they) come to school to eat,” she said. Lanigan increasingly sees her students living with extended family, doubled up in cramped homes. At fundraisers, the school can barely eke out a few thousand dollars from cash-strapped parents, she said.

As schools have retreated from the coast, Lanigan has moved up the bayou with them. She started at Little Caillou and remembers spending days after each storm cleaning out her flood-soaked classroom. She moved with her students to Boudreaux Canal after four destructive hurricanes in a row finally shut that school down. So she wasn’t surprised when Boudreaux Canal closed, too.

Boudreaux’s one-story white wooden building still stands empty along a boat-lined canal that drains into the Gulf just a few miles south. It closed in 2013 when the enrollment dropped from 127 to 87 within five years. “People (are) trying to not live much in the low-lying areas for several reasons: flooding, the potential hurricane damage, and the high cost of insurance to live there. It’s really just not financially feasible to run a school for just 87 kids,” said Martin, the district superintendent.

Students who’ve remained in communities down the bayou often struggle to keep up when flooded roads keep them out of school for days at a time. “Whether or not they’re able to make all of it up depends on how long they’re out,” said Darrell Dillard, principal at Ellender Memorial High School. The school is in Houma, the southernmost city in Terrebonne, where the swollen bayous — the five fingers, as people call them — converge. “I do see an effect. They’re losing time, instructional time.”

The emerging cycle of population loss, economic strain and collapsing services prompted the state last year to suggest in its regional adaptation strategy that bolder steps might be necessary. “(The state) cannot continue to rebuild in place and in replication of what previously existed,” planners wrote. In some parts of the state, schools are becoming the first to enact the plan.

 Related: How Louisiana’s richest students go to college on the backs of the poor

Around the country, school funding formulas tied to property taxes and enrollment threaten to exacerbate the challenges of disaster-hit communities. “It’s going to be sort of a spiral because the fewer schools, the less attractive it’s going to be to families and there will be less ability to even do the infrastructure to do any decent adaption or hazard mitigation,” said Patrick Marchman, a hazard mitigation planner for Michael Baker International, an engineering consulting firm. “When you fund things in the tax structures that we have right now, this is what’s going to happen. It’s one of those things that our systems are not super well designed to handle.”

Some states have created stopgap measures to help. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a budget bill in 2019 that allocated money to “backfill” property tax losses in communities affected by wildfires. Other states, like Iowa and Texas, have granted schools experiencing enrollment declines a grace year before funding follows suit. After that, though, many school districts are on their own.

Mike Wells, superintendent of the Hamburg Community School District, in Iowa, and principal of the district’s K-8 school, saw the enrollment of his school drop from 227 to 199 students in the 2019-20 school year, the first year after historic flooding submerged the area. Next year, his district will lose $200,000 in funding, forcing him to reduce staffing and possibly combine classes. “That second year, you drop off a cliff,” he said. “The state has no solutions that really help us.”

Superintendent Bill Husfelt of Bay District Schools, in Panama City, Florida, has been fighting to get more money from the state. The district received $12 million in state money after Hurricane Michael devastated the area in 2018, shrinking the student population by about 10 percent. But Husfelt said that money won’t solve the district’s problems: So much property was destroyed in the storm that the tax base has eroded and people have nowhere to live. Husfelt was forced to close or consolidate five schools.

These trends demand forward-thinking planning that communities are so far failing to do, argued Rachel Cleetus, policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “People in some cases will have to be on the move and we need to be investing in where they’ll go — making sure there are jobs and schools and all the infrastructure that’s needed,” she said. “If we don’t invest ahead of time in receiving communities, you’ll get a backlash.”

Related: Teaching global warming in a charged political climate

In Terrebonne Parish, school administrators said that an empty site the district recently purchased farther up the bayou could house a new school building if the current trends continue. “In the long range of things, I think we’re going to continue to have a population shift to higher elevation,” said Jack Moore, Terrebonne Parish school district’s risk manager. “If it goes far enough, we’ll abandon more schools — those that were subject to flooding, and the population leaves.”But it’s not something anyone wants to talk about. “If you speak to anyone in those communities, the last thing they want to see leave is their school,” said Moore.

In rural areas like Terrebonne, he noted, generations of families pass through a school’s halls. Schools don’t just serve to educate students; they are often the only community center. And the population effects, Moore said, cut both ways. “(It’s) almost like a death spiral: Once you lose your school, you lose your population as well,” he said.

Izzy, the Lacache Middle School student, worries about this, too. She wants to be able to live here and to watch her younger cousins pass through Lacache’s halls, too. For a recent school project, Izzy and some of her classmates designed a robot that would move sandbags to help protect the coast from storms. She spent time looking at maps of coastal projections and was terrified to see how much more land the parish could lose by 2050. “We’re only graduating in 2024. So, it’s like half of our life that we’re not going to be able to live down here,” she said. “It feels kind of sad. Once you get here, you’re basically attached. It’s hard for us to leave.”

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CHICAGO — When Hilario Dominguez looks around his school, he sees dilapidated bathrooms, students taking recess in the parking lot, and sick kids going through the day without care because there’s a nurse on staff just one day a week. But, beyond the school’s walls, Dominguez, a case manager and special education teacher at Peter Cooper Elementary Dual Language Academy, sees money flowing.

Not far from his school building on Chicago’s Southwest Side, construction crews recently broke ground on “The 78,” a $7-billion waterfront project by luxury real-estate developer Related Midwest. A few miles away, along the Chicago River, developers are building an upscale 55-acre commercial and residential project named Lincoln Yards.

Together these projects could receive up to $2.4 billion in funding through a controversial city program designed to spur redevelopment in blighted neighborhoods. But teachers here say the program, known as Tax-Increment Financing, or TIF, has been a giveaway to corporate developers, and that it is hurting the city’s schools.

The subsidies the city is set to dole out to the Lincoln Yards and The 78 developers were a driving force behind the Chicago Teachers Union’s recent strike, with educators calling on the city to redirect some of that money to help close the $38 million gap between the CTU’s demands and the amount offered by the district. Dominguez was among nine teachers who were arrested during the strike after they entered the building of Lincoln Yards’ developer, Sterling Bay, to protest the project’s $1.3 billion in subsidies.

“Our city continues to say it’s broke, when that’s not the reality,” said Dominguez, while marching with other striking teachers at City Hall in late October. “We know that the reality is actually that our priorities are broken. The city isn’t broke, our priorities are.”

Chicago is not the only city where outrage over corporate incentives has sent teachers out of classrooms and into the streets. In April, hundreds of teachers in Columbus, Ohio, marched to the headquarters of healthcare software company CoverMyMeds, chanting “Pharma got handouts, kids got sold out,” to protest a property tax abatement the company received for a new office complex. The city estimated that the 15-year abatement will cost local schools about $55 million. A year prior, 17,000 Colorado teachers marched on the state’s capitol, demanding that legislators fund “classrooms not corporations.” In St. Paul, teachers began their contract campaign in 2017 with a rally outside U.S. Bank’s operations center, which had been financed through the same redevelopment program used in Chicago. During strikes last year in West Virginia, Kentucky and Oklahoma, teachers loudly called out coal and gas companies’ low tax rates as a drain on school funding.

The unrest signals that educators are moving beyond bread-and-butter issues like salaries and pensions to protest what they perceive as systemic injustices in the way schools are funded. Increased transparency about the financial impact of corporate subsidies on schools, along with a broader public awareness of economic inequality, has emboldened teachers and helped them win allies among parents, community members, and school administrators.

“This is really a matter of trying to challenge the dominant economic power in this country,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “Since the elected officials either have not been able to, or have not been willing to, it’s the teachers of the country who are starting to challenge it.”

Related: When school districts fall into debt and can’t get out

A 4-year-old accounting rule has helped illuminate the extent to which schools are losing out to corporate subsidies: For the first time, thousands of school districts are required to report these figures. In some parts of the country, the numbers are significant. According to a December 2018 analysis of the data by Good Jobs First, which tracks corporate subsidies, schools in 28 states lost at least $1.8 billion over the previous fiscal year as a result of corporate tax subsidies, with nearly $1.6 billion coming from just ten states. If abatements in those ten states were curtailed, the group calculated that the additional revenue could be used to hire about 28,000 teachers.

Like many corporate incentives, Chicago’s subsidy program, TIF, was ostensibly designed to spur development in overlooked parts of the city. But the subsidy, which diverts any new tax revenues in a designated area into development in that same area, rather than into the city’s general coffers, has been used in already-developing (and often gentrifying) areas, to subsidize hotels, private sports fields and luxury apartments that benefit few Chicago residents. A combination of loose restrictions and a lack of transparency and oversight have made the program ripe for abuse.

In 2016, after teacher protests, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel agreed to release $88 million of surplus money from the TIF program to city schools. In October, Mayor Lori Lightfoot released an additional $66 million in TIF funds to the school system to help end the strike, an increase over the $97 million from that program that she had already redirected to schools.

But the teachers’ union and some community organizations said the city could afford much more. An analysis by the TIF Illumination Project, run by local nonprofit CivicLab, estimated that, last year, the subsidy program collected more than $350 million that would otherwise have gone to benefit schools across the city.

The week before the protest at Sterling Bay, Chicago teachers had brought their message to The 78 waterfront project, with a “teach-in” outside its developer, Related Midwest. Reading from a storybook they wrote and illustrated titled “Are You My Mayor?” teachers told the story of a fictional Chicago student, Jayla, who wonders why her cousin’s school in the suburbs has a full-time librarian, nurse and social worker when her school doesn’t. After journeying through city projects financed with subsidies, Jayla finally finds Mayor Lightfoot, who, upon hearing Jayla’s grievances, promises to return the money to the city’s schools.

But in reality, despite campaigning as a critic of the TIF program, the newly elected Lightfoot has been hesitant to push too hard on the status quo. While she agreed to divert the additional $66 million to schools, she added a requirement that the school system repay $60 million to the city for pensions and refused to entertain teachers’ requests that she return more.

“Beyond what we put on the table, there is simply no more money,” Lightfoot said at a press conference during the strike. “We cannot strike a deal based on the illusion that there’s Lincoln Yards money available that we can just shift somewhere else. That’s not realistic and it doesn’t work like that. Enough is enough.”

Rachel Weber, a professor of urban planning and policy at University of Illinois at Chicago, says that technically, Lightfoot is right. “The Lincoln Yards money doesn’t exist yet. They’re basically promising future cash flows—that’s what TIF is doing, it’s not like there was a one-for-one sort of shell game or magic trick where they took money from the school’s budget and gave it to developers,” Weber said, noting that TIF instead affects schools by limiting the taxable base available to them.

For this reason, Weber argues, larger-scale reforms—narrow the use of the program to places that would not experience investment otherwise and institute greater transparency around the program—are needed. The Chicago Teachers Union agrees: It wants the state legislature to limit the parts of the city where the program can be applied. It also wants the state to reconsider a 2017 bill that would direct surpluses from the subsidy program to education. A group of progressive aldermen are pushing to approve an ordinance to automatically send all surplus dollars through the TIF program to schools. Some of its members are aiming much higher: they want to abolish the program altogether.

Byron Sigcho-Lopez, a newly elected alderman who represents the neighborhood where Dominguez’s school is located, said he’d ultimately like to see a TIF surplus institutionalized and the program made more transparent. He credited the teachers’ union for helping to educate people about the drawbacks of the subsidy program. “It took way too long to admit that we do have a problem,” he said. “Inequality is a massive problem in Chicago and we’re going to start to address it when we start making different decisions.”

Related: When school districts can’t raise funds for facilities

Teachers unions across the country are also bringing these issues beyond the negotiating table and to the legislature. In Philadelphia, teachers have pushed the city council to consider legislation that would cap property tax abatements, or remove the most profitable ZIP codes from eligibility, to help fund programs to remove hazardous lead and asbestos from school buildings. Colorado teachers have called on the legislature to commit to reducing or freezing corporate tax breaks until per pupil funding reaches the national average. According to a report published by the Colorado Education Association last month, 92 percent of its members support an end to corporate tax breaks until education is fully funded in the state.

While these efforts have resulted in little legislative change so far, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s largest teachers’ unions, say their members across the country are planning to make corporate giveaways an even bigger focus of teacher actions in the coming months. The American Federation of Teachers plans to draw national attention to the issue as part of its new “fund our future” campaign; the National Education Association is training state affiliates on the Good Jobs First analysis so they can more effectively challenge local tax policies in strikes and walk-outs.

“We have evolved from bargaining simply around, ‘We need more money and it’s up to you to figure out how to get it,’ to being much more explicit around the problems of corporate tax breaks and loopholes,” said Tom Israel, director of state affiliate growth for the National Education Association. “When the economy is recovering, and some people are getting wealthy, but your kids are still suffering, you’re more willing to speak out.”

In Chicago, teachers are eagerly awaiting the changes — increased support staff, caps on class sizes and higher pay — promised in their new contract. But for many, these changes remain distant: social workers and nurses won’t be guaranteed in every school until the fifth year of the contract.

“Our students deserve much more than we won his time around,” said Roxana González, a social studies teacher at Dr. Jorge Prieto Math and Science Academy on the city’s Northwest Side, who was arrested at Sterling Bay during the strike. She’s optimistic, though, that the strike will spur further change in Chicago’s schools and elsewhere by inspiring teachers to “take on austerity and continue to demand that schools be funded, despite this rhetoric that we are always broke, to interrogate that and see if that’s really the reality, to demand certain things that in the past have never been a part of bargaining.”

This story about public school funding was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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