NEW ORLEANS — Last summer, Derrika Richard felt stuck. She didn’t have enough money to afford child care for her three youngest children, ages 1, 2 and 3. Yet the demands of caring for them on a daily basis made it impossible for Richard, who cuts and styles hair from her home, to work. One child care assistance program rejected her because she wasn’t working enough. It felt like an unsolvable quandary: Without care, she couldn’t work; and without work, she couldn’t afford care. 

But Richard’s life changed in the fall, when, by way of a new city-funded program for low-income families called City Seats, she enrolled the three children at Clara’s Little Lambs, a child care center in the Westbank neighborhood of New Orleans. For the first time, she’s earning enough to pay her bills and afford online classes.   

“It actually paved the way for me to go to school,” Richard said on a spring morning after walking her three children to their classrooms. It’s “changed my life.” 

Last year, New Orleans added more than 1,000 child care seats for children from low-income families after voters approved a historic property tax increase in 2022. The referendum raised the budget of the program seven-fold — from $3 million to $21 million a year for 20 years. Because Louisiana’s early childhood fund matches money raised locally for child care, the city gets an additional $21 million to help families find care.

New Orleans is part of a growing trend of local communities passing ballot measures to expand access to child care. In Whatcom County, Washington, a property tax increase added $10 million for child care and children’s mental health to the county’s annual budget. A marijuana sales tax approved by voters in Anchorage, Alaska last year will generate more than $5 million for early childhood programs, including child care.

The state of Texas has taken a somewhat different tack. In November, voters there approved a state constitutional amendment that allows property tax relief for qualifying child care providers. Under this provision, cities and counties can choose to exempt a child care center from paying all or some of its property taxes. Dallas was among the first city-and-county combo in Texas to provide the tax break at both levels. A handful of other cities, including Austin and Houston, as well as counties encompassing swaths of the state, have passed the proposal.

The recent local funding initiatives across the country are focused on younger children — namely infants and toddlers — more than ever before, said Diane Girouard, a senior state policy analyst with Child Care Aware, a nonprofit group that researches and advocates for child care access and funding.

“In the past, we saw more of these local or state driven initiatives focusing on pre-K, but over the last three years, we’ve seen voters approve ballot measures to invest in child care and early learning across a handful of states, cities, counties,” she said.

Part of that trend stems from the impact the lack of child care had on the economy during the pandemic, said Olivia Allen, a co-founder and vice president of the Children’s Funding Project, a nonprofit that researches and supports local efforts to fund early childhood programs.

“The value of child care and other parts of the care economy became abundantly clear to a lot of business leaders in a painful way during Covid,” Allen said.

The recent efforts also come during a time of reckoning in the U.S. over limited child care funding — and limited seats — that impacts families in myriad ways, including, for untold numbers, the ability to hold down jobs and advance in their careers. The number of parents who reported missing work because of child care surged in 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak; it has yet to recede to pre-pandemic levels.

In Louisiana, a 2022 poll of over 3,000 parents by the Louisiana Policy Institute for Children found that more than half adjusted their work or school schedule to take care of children in the months preceding the survey. About 75 percent said they had to take at least one day off of work in the preceding three months because of a child care closure.

Part of the crisis facing many families and child care centers is that care for young children is expensive. The cost is even higher when parents want to send their kids to a high quality center.

In New Orleans, a city with a large population of workers in the service industry and other low-wage jobs, the City Seats funding has been transformative for parents struggling to hold down demanding, mostly non-unionized jobs. The program has also been a boon for the child care centers themselves.

Richard had struggled to find affordable child care off-and-on since dropping out of college when her oldest son, now 12, was born. That’s in spite of the fact that she immediately put her name down for a spot at child care centers when she discovered she was pregnant. “Literally when you see the positive line, you fill out an application,” she said.

Now that she can think about building a career again, Richard has set her sights on finishing her college degree. Her dream is to have a career in forensics.

Another parent, Mike Gavion, who has two children enrolled through City Seats at Early Partners in the Garden District, said the subsidized care allowed his wife to finish school and get a nursing job at a local hospital. Before the program was available, Gavion’s wife had to care for the children, now 2 and 4, at home, and could only make slow progress through the coursework she needed to qualify for a job. 

“It really gave us an opportunity,” Gavion said. “If we had to pay for two kids, I don’t think she would have been able to do nursing school.”

Families in New Orleans who have children from newborn to age 3 and who earn within 200 percent of the federal poverty level qualify for City Seats. But many don’t immediately get a spot: As of April, City Seats had 821 students on its waitlist, according to Agenda for Children, a nonprofit policy and advocacy group that administers the program.

About 70 percent of the City Seats budget pays for children to attend centers that are ranked as high quality on the state’s rating system. The cut-off for income eligibility on City Seats is higher than in other programs to allow more families access to free child care; at Early Head Start centers, for instance, most families have to be within 100 percent of the poverty level ($31,200 for a family of four).

The rest of City Seats budget goes to improving quality: Child care providers have access to a team that includes a speech pathologist, a pediatrician, and social workers. (Those services are only available for children who attend centers through City Seats, however.) The programs are required to pay their staff at least $15 an hour — on average, Louisiana child care workers made $9.77 an hour in 2020 — and abide by strict teacher-to-child ratios and class sizes, as well as receive professional development from early learning experts, according to Agenda for Children.

Funding from City Seats has allowed Wilcox Academy’s three centers in the city’s North Broad, Central City and Uptown neighborhoods to raise average staff pay to $18 an hour. The Academy’s goal is to raise it even higher — to $25 an hour.

“Teachers deserve it. They deserve to go on vacation, they deserve to buy a home, they deserve to buy a car … This is not a luxury,” said Rochelle Wilcox, the Academy’s founder and director. 

At Sea Academy, a child care center in New Orleans East, every family qualifies for some level of assistance. Without it, families would pay $300 a week for toddlers and $325 for infants to attend the center. City Seats funds 90 of Sea Academy’s 175 — soon to be 250 — child care slots, and pays $1,000 per child per month.

The money from City Seats has helped centers like Sea Academy stay open and even expand. 

“We wouldn’t exist without City Seats because we couldn’t have a business that was sustainable,” said Ariann Sentino, the program’s director. “And if we did, it certainly wouldn’t be high quality.”

Valeria Olivares from the Dallas Morning News contributed reporting.

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WARM SPRINGS, Ore. — Rosanna Jackson, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs here, counts herself as one of the resilient ones. Her childhood in the 1970s and 80s was tough. Home didn’t always feel like a safe place to be.

There’s a stigma that leads to people “not talking about their feelings and not wanting everyone to know that they’re hurt or in pain,” she said of many in her community who have dealt with similar childhood trauma.

But that silence can be lethal, Jackson said. Now an adult who has dedicated her life to helping her tribal members be more resilient, Jackson is leading the effort to create the nation’s first suicide helpline staffed by and designed for Native youth.

“I’m hoping that my youth will come out of their shell and help each other,” Jackson said. “It’s OK to not be OK. It’s OK to talk about what’s on your mind.”

Native youth have one of the highest rates of suicide of any demographic in the country, according to federal data. While American Indian and Alaskan Native teenagers reported feelings of sadness and hopelessness that tracked with national averages, they were more likely than their peers of other races to seriously consider suicide, to make a plan to die by suicide and to attempt suicide. That’s according to the latest youth risk behavior survey for high schoolers by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Native leaders say their young people are facing an acute mental health crisis and could particularly benefit from the kind of support a helpline run by and for Native youth would provide.

Related: 3 Native American women head to college in the pandemic. Will they get a second year?

There are only a small number of suicide crisis lines in the country that are staffed by young people. Youthline, the 21-year-old program in Oregon that is behind Jackson’s effort, is one of them. California and Arizona also have long-standing peer lines for teenagers. And while there’s no single national directory of every suicide crisis call center, most don’t cater to people with a specific identity. The Trevor Project is a large helpline for LGBTQ+ youth, but volunteer counselors must be 18 or older to take calls.

If it’s successful, Jackson’s program would be the first crisis line in the nation designed for Native youth.

While many of the issues affecting Native youth are universal to young people today, including the isolation and loss suffered during the pandemic and the threat of climate change, other reasons for desperation in this group are more specific. They include intergenerational trauma (when harmful stress experienced by adults affects how they parent), an ongoing addiction epidemic, poverty and a lack of rural infrastructure. People living on reservations may not have paved roads or potable water, let alone easy access to mental health services.

Annamarie Caldera, 18, who lives near Jackson on the Warm Springs reservation, is on track to be the first young person to pick up the phone — or, more likely, to respond to texts — at the nascent Youthline Native. She was recruited by Jackson last spring and, nearly a year later, has almost completed the 64 hours of training required to answer calls.

Caldera said she was excited at the prospect of finally taking calls. “I get to help people and pass on my vibes to them,” she said.

Caldera was sitting in the reservation’s new call center, a converted classroom decorated with a giant mural depicting three young Native people in traditional garb on one wall and a mural featuring several Pacific Northwest animals in front of Mt. Jefferson, a volcanic peak that can be seen from the reservation, on another wall. The local tribal artist who designed the murals also added a portrait of a young man the tribes lost to suicide in 2020.

While she’s dedicated to supporting her Indigenous peers who are facing down despair, Caldera said it’s important that people know that Native teenagers are not always — or even often — thinking about suicide.

“I’ve had a few people ask me on my social media if … all we think about is killing ourselves and drinking and smoking,” she said. Most of those who’ve asked, she said, are white. “It’s not accurate — not at all.”

She said she spends far more time thinking about school and ways to help her community, which is why she wants to be a call taker for Youthline Native.

“I think it is really important because you’re also Native and you can understand your peers more than any other,” Caldera said.

Related: The pandemic knocked many Native students off the college track

Starting in the 1950s and gaining speed in the 1970s, suicide crisis lines for all ages have been set up by small nonprofits serving limited geographical regions. This didn’t work well for people without a local line or who called at a time no volunteer was available. Moreover, many people didn’t even know the lines existed. To address those issues, local crisis lines joined together in 2005 under a single number — now 988 — that anyone in the country could call at any time.

Volunteers and staff at more than 200 crisis centers now answer approximately 5 million annual calls and texts to 988. People who call the three-digit number are offered the chance to connect to a service for veterans or for LGBTQ+ youth and young adults, all groups at especially high risk for suicide. There’s also a Spanish-language option and an American Sign Language option for video phone callers.

But there is no national Native suicide prevention helpline.

There’s a line called Native and Strong, based in Washington state that is staffed around the clock by Native counselors, but it’s only available to callers with a Washington area code. And there’s the All Nations Hotline, staffed by counselors from the Ponca, Omaha, Lakota and Winnebago tribes for eight to 16 hours a day, but it’s not part of the 988 network.

Youthline is part of the 988 network and there are adults monitoring the line at all hours, even when young people aren’t available to take calls. Although Youthline Native has not fully launched, Youthline’s existing call takers are prepared to talk to anyone who texts “teen2teen” or “native” to 839863. People can also call 877-968-8491 or start a chat from the Youthline website.

Since it’s usually impossible for crisis lines to ensure that the person answering the phone is a match for the person calling, crisis line organizers agree that counselors must be prepared to respond to all callers no matter their age, race, gender or sexual orientation.

And yet, talking to someone with the same background can be incredibly important and healing, especially for Native people, said Rochelle Hamilton, the head of Washington state’s Native and Strong line.

“If you are an Indigenous person — often if you go to talk to a therapist or counselor who is non-Indigenous, you spend the majority of your time talking about what it is to be Indigenous,” said Hamilton, an enrolled member of the Ehattesaht First Nation and a descendent of the Tulalip tribes.

Not only is that annoying and exhausting, especially for someone in a bad mental space, she said, it prevents the therapist and client from addressing the actual crisis. Anticipating some level of disconnect and accompanying frustration, many Native people in crisis never pick up the phone, Hamilton said.

“Indigenous people often and for good reason don’t have a lot of trust outside of their communities,” she said. “They’re relying more on each other. They want to look to each other when they need something.”

When someone calls Native and Strong, the counselor answers by identifying themselves and their tribal or cultural affiliation. Callers know right away that the counselor is saying “I’m Indigenous and I know where you’re from,” Hamilton said.

Related: A vexing drawback to online tribal college: Social and cultural isolation

A non-Native state representative, Tina Orwall, identified the need for a tribal 988 line and advocated for its funding. An existing crisis call center got the contract from the state. The call center consulted formally with tribal leaders who helped to design the Native and Strong program.

Since Native and Strong started taking calls in late 2022, the nearly 30 folks on staff have answered the phone more than 5,000 times, a number that far exceeds original expectations. The high usage of the line proves it’s needed, Hamilton said.

But even with funding secured, Youthline Native has faced more hurdles. Jackson initially had six teenagers interested in being part of the helpline. But only Caldera is close to completing the training. Three others have just started.

Peer-to-peer crisis lines for young people are always hard to staff. Young people are often required to take calls from a physical call center as a measure of protection for their own mental well-being. That creates geographic limits on where volunteers can be pulled from.

Partly to attract a more diverse group of call takers, Oregon’s Youthline recently added three new call centers. In addition to the original center in Southwest Portland, there are call centers in the more diverse neighborhood of East Portland, in Warm Springs and in Bend, a small city in Central Oregon.

When it’s up and running, the small Warm Springs call center will be a lot like the one in Bend, where Eddie Lopez, 17, is among the young people answering the phones.

On a chilly February night, Lopez sat in the cozy call center with half a dozen other teen call takers and three adult supervisors. Lopez moved to Bend, about an hour south of Warm Springs, when he was 15. The transition was brutal, he said. But the gracious welcome he was offered when he arrived inspired him to give something back.

“Obviously, I won’t understand people from all walks of life,” said Lopez, whose family is Mexican-American. But “mental and emotional support is kind of universal in a way,” he said. “Everyone likes to be validated. Everyone likes to feel like they’re not alone. I’m helping even if I don’t understand them as people.”

Lopez read a message on his computer screen from a person saying they felt unloved.

“I also feel better when I talk about my feelings,” the texter wrote. “I just want to heal from them, but I don’t know how to heal?”

Related: A surprising remedy for teens in mental health crisis

The key when texting people who reach out for help is to make sure they know that they are not alone and that their feelings are valid, Lopez said. The teens are taught to avoid giving specific advice; instead, they ask questions.

“I’m very thankful you shared that with me,” Lopez texted back under his alias. “It takes a lot of bravery to be vulnerable. Have you talked to anyone about what you’ve been going through?”

The goal is for the texter to say how they will take care of themselves for that evening, at least. “Since we’re so short term, we kind of have to, like, motivate them to want to help themselves in a way,” Lopez explained. The teen volunteers may list things other people do to calm down, like take a walk or listen to music.

Counselors on the Native and Strong line follow the same protocol, but they also list culturally specific practices, like smudging (the burning of sacred herbs), talking to an elder or eating a traditional food.

Some callers don’t have an Indigenous mode of self-care they rely on, Hamilton said, so counselors will urge them to find one as a way to reconnect with their heritage.

“The reason we are in the place we are right now is because of loss of connection,” Hamilton said.

Both Hamilton and Jackson said they are determined to prove the need for Native-specific call lines and then expand their models. They want to see a nationally available, Native-run helpline available to every Indigenous person struggling with thoughts of suicide.

There was some encouraging news buried in the most recent CDC data on suicide released last year. The rate of suicide for young people fell 8 percent in 2022 and for Native people it fell 6 percent. Yet experts say a one year drop is hardly a trend.

Back in Bend, a call taker named Sarah Hawkins, 18, was chatting with someone worried about a rumor being spread about them at school. Following protocol as the conversation wrapped up, Hawkins asked the middle schooler what would help them tonight.

“IDK,” the texter replied. “Frankly, just talking about it made me feel so much better.”

If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, you can speak with a trained listener by texting 988, the national Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

This story about Native American suicide prevention was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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I grew up in extreme poverty. The ability to access a free, high-quality education in North Texas changed my life. I benefited greatly from the ways community colleges meet students where they are and wrap their arms around them. Classes were small, and I had a clear sense of belonging, despite being the first in my family to go to college.

I still remember having deep discussions with my English professor about author Larry McMurtry. I am a first-generation Latina from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, where everyone looked and sounded like me. But this professor and I both loved McMurtry. It was the first time I connected with someone based on shared academic interests despite entirely different lived experiences.

I did not have the remediation needs or learning gaps that many of today’s pandemic students are experiencing, but I did need support and direction.  The tiny community college I attended put me on a path toward a successful and purpose-driven life, and I’m grateful.

I believe that every community college, and every higher education institution, can do the same for their students — and in doing so, help close pandemic learning gaps. It starts with effective strategies and investment of resources.

However, it won’t be easy. Although enrollment at community colleges is on the rise after steep drops during the pandemic, these schools are facing more challenges than ever before. That’s largely due to the pandemic upending education as we knew it — including at San Jacinto College, where I serve on the board of trustees. Students are showing up with serious needs across academic and nonacademic areas, and community colleges, which are often under-resourced, aren’t always equipped to address them.

Related: Many community college students never earn a degree. New approaches to advising aim to reverse that trend

The pandemic led to sweeping achievement declines in core content areas, and recovery efforts have been uneven and unfinished. Millions of students left high school with large knowledge and skill gaps that may negatively impact their futures, including their earning potential, according to forecasts by leading economists.

Students who learned virtually or in hybrid settings largely missed out on the critical thinking that develops through classroom conversations. Their teachers were focused on keeping them engaged in an online environment and on providing fundamental instruction. They missed hearing their peers and teachers reason, explain and express. This has made the transition to higher education that much more challenging.

To address such students’ needs, community colleges typically enroll them in noncredit, remedial or developmental classes so that they can gain and demonstrate proficiency in areas they didn’t master in K-12.

At the same time, community colleges are struggling to meet the growing mental health needs of today’s students. Past funding models created resource challenges in this area; during the pandemic, employee turnover rates created much higher than normal advisor-to-student ratios. Thankfully, many community colleges were able to bolster mental health support through pandemic relief funding, but we must invest in this critical area in more sustainable ways, such as by focusing on a holistic set of policies and practices that others might learn from.

Higher education also hasn’t mastered how to have important conversations with students about what’s going on in their lives. We have to know them better to effectively support them. Regular surveys and focus groups are essential, and we need to act on the information they provide.

Schools should do a basic needs assessment for each student —at least once a year. Schools that do not run a food pantry, a coat closet or a partnership with local shelters should start doing so. When students don’t have basic needs met, they are unable to focus on academics as much as other students can.

Related: OPINION: A New York model helps community college students reach their goals

We also need better academic data on incoming students. Higher education and K-12 systems typically don’t collaborate, but we should have two-way conversations to ensure that we understand who is going to need developmental support in college and in which areas.

And finally, we should adjust our teaching practices to better support students. As a former developmental education faculty member, I always did a first-day writing assessment that allowed me to learn more about my students personally and about their writing strengths and weaknesses. To help students develop their writing, I also broke essay assignments into smaller pieces so students could get quicker feedback — and I could make quicker assessments of their needs.

That approach should be extended to other courses post pandemic. Providing college students with developmental coursework means creating and delivering compact and efficient lessons to help them fill their K-12 learning gaps. It also means dealing with insecurities about reading and writing deficiencies.

We also need to recognize that many college students are also working part-time jobs and being caregivers. Taking an empathetic stance is vital.

We must get students on their desired higher education pathway as quickly as possible, and avoid holding them in high-school level, remediation courses for extended periods.

In higher education today, a lot is happening to make school leaders feel both energized and daunted. But it’s vital that we focus on the most critical tasks before us. Community colleges must get to know and understand their students so they can meet their needs. 

Michelle Cantú-Wilson is a member of the San Jacinto College Board of Trustees, where she previously served in faculty and administrative roles. She also serves on the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card.

This story about community colleges and learning gaps 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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AUBURN, Washington – After a series of low-paying jobs, Nicole Slemp finally landed one she loved. She was a secretary for Washington’s child services department, a job that came with her own cubicle, and she had a knack for working with families in difficult situations.

Slemp expected to return to work after having her son in August. But then she and her husband started looking for child care – and doing the math. The best option would cost about $2,000 a month, with a long wait list, and even the least expensive option around $1,600, still eating up most of Slemp’s salary. Her husband earns about $35 an hour at a hose distribution company. Between them, they earned too much to qualify for government help.

“I really didn’t want to quit my job,” says Slemp, 33, who lives in a Seattle suburb. But, she says, she felt like she had no choice. 

The dilemma is common in the United States, where high-quality child care programs are prohibitively expensive, government assistance is limited, and daycare openings are sometimes hard to find at all. In 2022, more than 1 in 10 young children had a parent who had to quit, turn down or drastically change a job in the previous year because of child care problems. And that burden falls most on mothers, who shoulder more child-rearing responsibilities and are far more likely to leave a job to care for kids.

Even so, women’s participation in the workforce has recovered from the pandemic, reaching historic highs in December 2023. But that masks a lingering crisis among women like Slemp who lack a college degree: The gap in employment rates between mothers who have a four-year degree and those who don’t has only grown. 

For mothers without college degrees, a day without work is often a day without pay. They are less likely to have paid leave. And when they face an interruption in child care arrangements – whether their child is at a relative’s home, a preschool or a daycare center – an adult in the family is far more likely to take unpaid time off or to be forced to leave a job altogether, according to an analysis of Census survey data by the Education Reporting Collaborative. 

Related: Free child care exists in America – if you cross paths with the right philanthropist

In interviews, mothers across the country shared how the seemingly endless search for child care, and its expense, left them feeling defeated. It pushed them off career tracks, robbed them of a sense of purpose, and put them in financial distress. 

Women like Slemp challenge the image of the stay-at-home mom as an affluent woman with a high-earning partner, said Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“The stay-at-home moms in this country are disproportionately mothers who’ve been pushed out of the workforce because they don’t make enough to make it work financially to pay for child care,” Calarco said. 

Her own research indicates three-quarters of stay-at-home moms live in households with incomes less than $50,000, and half have household incomes of less than $25,000.

Still, the high cost of child care has upended the careers of even those with college degrees.

When Jane Roberts gave birth in November, she and her husband, both teachers, quickly realized sending baby Dennis to day care was out of the question. It was too costly, and they worried about finding a quality provider in their hometown of Pocatello, Idaho.

The school district has no paid medical or parental leave, so Roberts exhausted her sick leave and personal days to stay home with Dennis. In March, she returned to work and husband Mike took leave. By the end of the school year, they’ll have missed out on a combined nine weeks of pay. To make ends meet, they’ve borrowed money against Jane’s life insurance policy.

In the fall, Roberts won’t return to teaching. The decision was wrenching. “I’ve devoted my entire adult life to this profession,” she said.

For low- and middle-income women who do find child care, the expense can become overwhelming. The Department of Health and Human Services has defined “affordable” child care as an arrangement that costs no more than 7 percent of a household budget. But a Labor Department study found fewer than 50 American counties where a family earning the median household income could obtain child care at an “affordable” price. 

There’s also a connection between the cost of child care and the number of mothers working: a 10 percent increase in the median price of child care was associated with a 1 percent drop in the maternal workforce, the Labor Department found.

Related: Inside Canada’s 50-year fight for national child care

In Birmingham, Alabama, single mother Adriane Burnett takes home about $2,800 a month as a customer service representative for a manufacturing company. She spends more than a third of that on care for her 3-year-old.  

In October, that child aged out of a program that qualified the family of three for child care subsidies. So she took on more work, delivering food for DoorDash and Uber Eats. To make the deliveries possible, her 14-year-old has to babysit.

Even so, Burnett had to file for bankruptcy and forfeit her car because she was behind on payments. She is borrowing her father’s car to continue her delivery gigs. The financial stress and guilt over missing time with her kids have affected her health, Burnett said. She has had panic attacks and has fainted at work.

“My kids need me,” Burnett said, “but I also have to work.”

Even for parents who can afford child care, searching for it — and paying for it — consumes reams of time and energy. 

When Daizha Rioland was five months pregnant with her first child, she posted in a Facebook group for Dallas moms that she was looking for child care. Several warned she was already behind if she wasn’t on any wait lists. Rioland, who has a degree and works in communications for a nonprofit, wanted a racially diverse program with a strong curriculum. 

While her daughter remained on wait lists, Rioland’s parents stepped in to care for her. Finally, her daughter reached the top of a waiting list — at 18 months old. The tuition was so high she could only attend part-time. Rioland got her second daughter on waiting lists long before she was born, and she now attends a center Rioland trusts.

“I’ve grown up in Dallas. I see what happens when you’re not afforded the luxury of high-quality education,” said Rioland, who is Black. “For my daughters, that’s not going to be the case.”

Slemp still sometimes wonders how she ended up staying at home with her son – time she cherishes but also finds disorienting. She thought she was doing well. After stints at a water park and a call center, her state job seemed like a step toward financial stability. How could it be so hard to maintain her career, when everything seemed to be going right?

“Our country is doing nothing to try to help fill that gap,” Slemp said. As a parent, “we’re supposed to keep the population going, and they’re not giving us a chance to provide for our kids to be able to do that.”

This story was written by Moriah Balingit and Sharon Lurye of The Associated Press and Daniel Beekman of The Seattle Times. Balingit reported from Washington, D.C., and Lurye from New Orleans. Carly Flandro of Idaho Education News, Valeria Olivares of The Dallas Morning News and Alaina Bookman of AL.com contributed reporting.

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HAZARD, Ky. — Haley Autumn Dawn Ann Crank thinks she might like to become a teacher. There’s a shortage of teachers in this corner of Kentucky, and Crank, who has eight siblings, gets kids.

“I just fit in with them,” Crank said during a shift one February day at the Big Blue Smokehouse, where she works as a waitress.

For now, the recent high school graduate is taking some education courses at the local community college. But to pursue a teaching degree at a public, comprehensive university, she’ll need to commute four hours roundtrip or leave the town she grew up in and loves.

Neither of those options is feasible — or even conceivable — for many residents of Hazard, a close-knit community of just over 5,000 tucked into the hills of Southeast Kentucky. Like many rural Americans, the people here are place-bound, their educational choices constrained by geography as much as by cost. With family and jobs tying them to the region, and no local four-year option, many settle for a two-year degree, or skip college altogether.

Until fairly recently, that decision made economic sense. Mining jobs were plentiful, and the money was good. But the collapse of the coal industry here and across Appalachia has made it harder to survive on a high school education. Today, just under half the residents over the age of 16 in Perry County, where Hazard sits, are employed; the national average is 63 percent. More than a quarter of the county’s residents are in poverty; the median household income is $45,000, compared to $75,000 nationally.

Now, spurred by concerns that low levels of college attainment are holding back the southeastern swath of the state, the Kentucky legislature is exploring ways to bring baccalaureate degrees to the region. The leading option calls for turning Hazard’s community and technical college into a standalone institution offering a handful of degrees in high-demand fields, like teaching and nursing.

The move to expand education here comes as many states are cutting majors at rural colleges and merging rural institutions, blaming funding shortfalls and steadily dwindling enrollments.

If successful, the new college could bring economic growth to one of the poorest and least educated parts of the country and serve as a model for the thousands of other “educational deserts” scattered across America. Proponents say it has the potential to transform the region and the lives of its battered but resilient residents.

But the proposal carries significant costs and risks. Building a residence hall alone would cost an estimated $18 million; running the new college would add millions more to the tab. Enrollment might fall short of projections, and the hoped-for jobs might not materialize. And if they didn’t, the newly-educated residents would likely take their degrees elsewhere, deepening the region’s “brain drain.”

“The hope is that if you build the institution, employers will come,” said Aaron Thompson, president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, which has studied the idea on behalf of the legislature. “But it is somewhat of an experiment.”

Still, Thompson said, it’s an experiment worth exploring.

“To say you need to move to be prosperous is not a solution, and that’s pretty much been the solution since many of the coal mines disappeared,” he said.

Related: After its college closes, a rural community fights to keep a path to education open

At the airport in Lexington, Kentucky, there’s a sign greeting passengers that reads, “You’ve landed in one smart city.” Lexington, the sign proclaims, is ranked #11 among larger cities in the share of the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

But drive a couple hours to the southeast, and the picture changes. Only 13 percent of the residents of Perry County over the age of 25 hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, well below the national average of 34 percent.

Michelle Ritchie-Curtis, the co-principal of Perry County Central High School, said the problem isn’t convincing kids to go to college, it’s keeping them there. Though nearly two-thirds of the county’s high school graduates continue on to college, just over a third of those who enroll in public four-years graduate within six years, compared to close to 60 percent statewide, according to the Council on Postsecondary Education.

In Hazard, as in many rural places, kids grow up hearing the message that they need to leave to succeed. But many return after a year or two, citing homesickness or the high cost of college, Ritchie-Curtis said. Sometimes, they feel ashamed about abandoning their aspirations. They take off a semester, and it becomes years, she said.

Those who make it to graduation and leave tend to stay gone, discouraged by the region’s limited job opportunities. This exodus, and the lack of a four-year college nearby, have hampered Hazard’s ability to attract employers who might fill the void left by the decline of coal, said Zach Lawrence, executive director of the Hazard-Perry County Economic Development Alliance.

Ritchie-Curtis said that having a local option would solve the homesickness problem and could save students money in room and board. It could also help stem the region’s brain drain and alleviate a teaching shortage that has forced the school to hire a growing number of career changers, she added.

To Jennifer Lindon, the president of Hazard Community and Technical College, “it all boils down to equity.”

“If we can provide a [four-year] education, and make it affordable, perhaps we can break the cycle of poverty in Southeast Kentucky,” she said.

Related: MIT, Yale and other colleges are finally reaching out to rural students

Converting Hazard’s two-year college into a four-year institution wasn’t among the options initially considered by the Kentucky General Assembly. When lawmakers asked the state’s Council on Postsecondary Education to study the feasibility of bringing four-year degrees to Southeast Kentucky, it offered three approaches: building a new public university; creating a satellite campus of an existing comprehensive university; or acquiring a private college to convert into a public one.

But the council concluded in its report that each of those alternatives was “in some way problematic.” A new university would be prohibitively expensive and might fail; a new branch campus could suffer the same enrollment challenges as existing satellites; and acquiring a private college would be legally complicated.

The council considered the possibility of allowing the community college to offer baccalaureate degrees — something a growing number of states permit — but worried that doing so would lead to “mission creep” and “intense competition” for the state’s dwindling number of high school graduates.

Instead, the council recommended that the legislature study the idea of making Hazard’s community college a standalone institution offering both technical degrees and a few bachelor’s programs “in line with workforce demand.” Starting small, the council suggested, would allow policymakers and college leaders to gauge student demand before building out baccalaureate offerings.

That approach makes sense to Sen. Robert Stivers, the president of the Kentucky Senate, and the sponsor of the bill that commissioned the council’s study.

“I don’t think you can just jump off the cliff into the lake,” he said. “You need to be a little more measured.”

But Andrew Koricich, executive director of the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges at Appalachian State University, said the region’s residents deserve a comprehensive college. He likened the limited offerings envisioned by the council to former President George W. Bush’s “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

“There’s this idea that rural people should be happy they have anything,” he said.

Koricich pointed to the recent merger of Martin Methodist University, a private religious college, with the University of Tennessee system as proof that the legal hurdles to acquiring a private college aren’t insurmountable.

But Thompson, the CPE president, said that the private colleges in southeast Kentucky are located too far from most residents and the schools weren’t interested in being acquired, anyway. He argued that while a comprehensive university might be “ideal,” it wasn’t realistic.

“In an ideal world, I’d be young again with a great back,” he said. “But in reality, I work with what I’ve got. And that’s what we’re doing here.”

Related: Rural universities, already few and far between, are being stripped of majors

When Stivers was growing up in southeastern Kentucky in the 60’s and 70’s, coal was king. A high school graduate could get a job paying $15 an hour — good money at the time — without ever setting foot in a college classroom, he said.

With mining jobs so abundant, “there wasn’t a value placed on education,” Stivers recalled.

Coal production peaked in eastern Kentucky in 1990, and has been on the decline ever since. Today, there are just over 400 individuals employed in coal jobs in Perry County.

The shrinking of the sector has had ripple effects across Appalachia, hurting industries that support mining and local businesses that cater to its workers. Many residents have migrated to urban centers, seeking work, and once-thriving downtowns have been hollowed out.

By the middle of the last decade, most of the buildings in downtown Hazard were either empty or occupied by attorneys and banks. The only place to gather was a hole-in-the-wall bar called the Broken Spoke Lounge, recalled Luke Glaser, a city commissioner and assistant principal at Hazard High School. When the Grand Hotel burned down, in 2015, a sense of resignation settled in, Glaser said.

The region has also been hard hit by opioids, which were aggressively marketed to rural doctors treating miners for injuries and black lung disease. In 2017, Perry County had the highest opioid abuse hospitalization rate in the nation.

Then, in 2021, and again in 2022, the region suffered severe flooding, which washed away homes and took the lives of almost 50 residents of Southeast Kentucky.

Yet Hazard is also in the midst of what Glaser calls an “Appalachian Renaissance,” a revival being led by 20- and 30-somethings who have come home or moved to the area in recent years. Though Appalachian Kentucky lost 2.2 percent of its population between 2010 and 2019, Hazard grew by 13 percent.

A decade ago, a group of long-time residents and young people began meeting with a mission to revitalize Hazard’s main street. The group, which called itself InVision Hazard, hired a downtown coordinator and brought free Wi-Fi and improved signage to the downtown area.

Over the past four-and-a-half years, close to 70 new businesses have opened within a three-mile radius of downtown, and only eight have closed, according to Betsy Clemons, executive director of the Hazard Perry County Chamber of Commerce. There’s an independent bookstore, an arts alliance that will put on seven full-length productions this year, and a toy store — all run by residents who grew up in Hazard and returned as adults.

The Grand Hotel, which stood as a burned-out shell for years, has finally been torn down, making way for an outdoor entertainment park with space for food trucks and a portable stage, and plans for live entertainment on Friday nights.

As the downtown has transformed, collective feelings of apathy and resignation have given way to a new sense of possibility, Glaser said. Brightly colored murals reading “We Can Do This,” and “Together” adorn the sides of two downtown buildings.

To Mandi Sheffel, the owner of Read Spotted Newt bookstore, the creation of a four-year college feels like a logical next step for a place that was recently dubbed “a hip destination for young people” (a description that both delights and amuses people here).

“In every college town I’ve been to, there’s a vibe, a pride in the community,” she said.

These days, Hazard is feeling that pride, too.

Related: ‘We’re from the university and we’re here to help’

On the vocational campus of Hazard Community and Technical College in February, Jordan Joseph and Austin Cox, recent high school grads, stood alongside a tractor trailer truck, pointing out its parts. In as little as four weeks, they could become commercially licensed truck drivers, a career that pays close to $2,000 a week.

Both men followed dads and grandads into the profession and said they couldn’t imagine sitting in a classroom for four years after high school. Like the sign on the side of the truck they were working on said, they want to “Get in, Get Out, and Get to Work.”

Inside one of the campus’ labs, a pair of aspiring electricians said they doubted many local residents would be able to afford a four-year degree.

“I don’t think you’d get a lot of people,” said Walker Isaacs, one of the students.

Their skepticism underscores a key risk in creating a four-year college in a place that’s never had one: There’s no guarantee students will enroll. Larger forces — including a looming decline in the number of high school graduates, an improved labor market, and public doubts about the value of higher education — could dampen demand for four-year degrees, forcing the college to either cut costs or seek state funding to cover its losses.

Recognizing this risk -and the possibility that employers won’t show up, either – the Council declined to give an “unqualified endorsement” of the idea of turning the community college into a four-year institution, saying further study was needed. In February, Sen. Stivers introduced a bill that calls on the council to survey potential students and employers about the idea and to provide more detailed estimates of its potential costs and revenues.

Converting the college could also cause enrollment to fall at the state’s existing public and private four-years. Eastern Kentucky University, the hardest hit, could lose as many as 250 students in the seventh year after conversion, the council estimated in its report. While the council did not examine the possible effect on private colleges in the region, the president of Union College, Marcia Hawkins, said in a statement that, “Depending on the majors added, such a move could certainly impact enrollment at our southern and eastern Kentucky institutions.”

But on the main campus of Hazard Community and Technical College, there’s growing excitement about the prospect of the two-year college becoming a four-year.

Ashley Smith, who is studying to become a registered nurse, said the proposed conversion would make it easier for her to earn the bachelor’s degree she’s always wanted. With three kids at home, she can’t manage an hours-long commute to and from class.

Another nursing student, Lakyn Bolen, said she’d be more likely to continue her education if she could do so from home. She left Hazard once to finish a four-year degree, and is reluctant to do so again.

“It’s not fun going away,” Bolen said. “We definitely need more nursing opportunities here.”

Dylon Baker, assistant vice president of workforce initiatives for Appalachian Regional Healthcare, agrees. His nonprofit, which operates 14 hospitals in Kentucky and West Virginia, has struggled with staffing shortages and spent millions on contract workers. The shortages have forced the system to shutter some beds, reducing access to care in a region with high rates of diabetes, cancer and heart disease.

“We are taking care of the sickest of the sickest,” Baker said. “We have to give them access to quality healthcare.”

Hazard’s community college already offers some higher-level degrees, such as nursing, through partnerships with four-year public and private colleges in Kentucky. But most of the programs are online-only, and many students prefer in-person learning, said Deronda Mobelini, chief student affairs officer. Others lack access to broadband internet or can’t afford it.

If the conversion goes through, the college will continue to offer online baccalaureates and a wide range of certificates and associate degrees, said Lindon, the HCTC president. She envisions a system of “differential tuition” where students seeking four-year degrees would pay less during the first two years of their programs.

Though the college would still cater to commuters, a residence hall would attract students from a wider area and alleviate a housing shortage made more acute by the recent floods, Lindon said.

Ultimately, the future of the institution will rest with the Kentucky legislature, which must decide if it wants to spend some of its continuing budget surplus on bringing four-year degrees to an underserved corner of the state.

But Lindon is already imagining the possibilities, and the Appalachian culture course that she’d make mandatory for students seeking bachelor’s degrees.

“For too long, we’ve been taught to hide or even be ashamed of where we’re from,” she said. “We want to teach young people to be proud of our Appalachian heritage.”

This story about access to higher education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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School leaders nationwide often complain about how hard it is to hire teachers and how teaching job vacancies have mushroomed. Fixing the problem is not easy because those shortages aren’t universal. Wealthy suburbs can have a surplus of qualified applicants for elementary schools at the same time that a remote, rural school cannot find anyone to teach high school physics. 

A study published online in April 2024 in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis illustrates the inconsistencies of teacher shortages in Tennessee, where one district had a surplus of high school social studies teachers, while a neighboring district had severe shortages. Nearly every district struggled to find high school math teachers. 

Tennessee’s teacher shortages are worse in math, foreign languages and special education

Economists have long argued that solutions should be targeted at specific shortages. Pay raises for all teachers, or subsidies to train future teachers, may be good ideas. But broad policies to promote the whole teaching profession may not alleviate shortages if teachers continue to gravitate toward popular specialties and geographic areas. 

High school math teacher shortages were widespread in Tennessee

Surpluses of high school social studies teachers were next door to severe shortages

Elementary school teacher shortages were problems in Memphis and Nashville, but not in Knoxville

Some school systems have been experimenting with targeted financial incentives. Separate groups of researchers studied what happened in two places – Hawaii and Dallas, Texas, – when teachers were offered significant pay hikes, ranging from $6,000 to $18,000 a year, to take hard-to-fill jobs. In Hawaii, special education vacancies continued to grow, while the financial incentives to work with children with disabilities unintentionally aggravated shortages in general education classrooms. In Dallas, the incentives lured excellent teachers to high-poverty schools. Student performance subsequently skyrocketed so much that the schools no longer qualified for the bump in teacher pay. Teachers left and student test scores fell back down again. 

This doesn’t mean that targeted financial incentives are a bad or a failed idea. But the two studies show how the details of these pay hikes matter because there can be unintended consequences or obstacles. Some teaching specialities – such as special education – may have challenges that teacher pay hikes alone cannot solve. But these studies could help point policy makers toward better solutions.  

I learned about the Hawaii study in March 2024, when Roddy Theobald, a statistician at the American Institutes for Research (AIR), presented a working paper, “The Impact of a $10,000 Bonus on Special Education Teacher Shortages in Hawai‘i,” at the annual conference of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. (The paper has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in an academic journal and could still be revised.)

In the fall of 2020, Hawaii began offering all of its special education teachers an extra $10,000 a year. If teachers took a job in an historically hard-to-staff school, they also received a bonus of up to $8,000, for a potential total pay raise of $18,000. Either way, it was a huge bump atop a $50,000 base salary.  

Theobald and his five co-authors at AIR and Boston University calculated that the pay hikes reduced the proportion of special education vacancies by a third. On the surface, that sounds like a success and other news outlets reported it that way. But special-ed vacancies actually rose over the study period, which coincided with the coronavirus pandemic, and ultimately ended up higher than before the pay hike. 

What was reduced by a third was the gap between special ed and general ed vacancies. Vacancies among both groups of teachers initially plummeted during 2020-21, even though only special ed teachers were offered the $10,000. (Perhaps the urgency of the pandemic inspired all teachers to stay in their jobs.) Afterwards, vacancies began to rise again, but special ed vacancies didn’t increase as fast as general ed vacancies. That’s a sign that special ed vacancies might have been even worse had there been no $10,000 bonus. 

As the researchers dug into the data, they discovered that this relative difference in vacancies was almost entirely driven by job switches at hard-to-staff schools. General education teachers were crossing the hallway and taking special education openings to make an extra $10,000. Theobald described it as “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

These job switches were possible because, as it turns out,  many general education teachers initially trained to teach special education and held the necessary credentials. Some never even tried special ed teaching and decided to go into general education classrooms instead. But the pay bump was enough for some to reconsider special ed. 

Hawaii’s special education teacher vacancies initially fell after $10,000 pay hikes in 2020, but subsequently rose again

This study doesn’t explain why so many special education teachers left their jobs in 2021 and 2022 despite the pay incentives or why more new teachers didn’t want these higher paying jobs. In a December 2023 story in Mother Jones, special education teachers in Hawaii described difficult working conditions and how there were too few teaching assistants to help with all of their students’ special needs. Working with students with disabilities is a challenging job, and perhaps no amount of money can offset the emotional drain and burnout that so many special education teachers experience. 

Dallas’s experience with pay hikes, by contrast, began as a textbook example of how targeted incentives ought to work. In 2016, the city’s school system designated four low-performing, high-poverty schools for a new Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE) initiative. Teachers with high ratings could earn an extra $6,000 to $10,000 (depending upon their individual ratings) to work at these struggling elementary and middle schools. Existing teachers were screened to keep their jobs and only 20 percent of the staff passed the threshold and remained. (There were other reforms too, such as uniforms and a small increase in instructional time, but the teacher stipends were the main thrust and made up 85 percent of the ACE budget.)

Five researchers, including economists Eric Hanushek at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and Steven Rivkin at the University of Illinois Chicago, calculated that test scores jumped immediately after the pay incentives kicked in while scores at other low-performing elementary and middle schools in Dallas barely budged. Student achievement at these previously lowest-performing schools came close to the district average for all of Dallas. Dallas launched a second wave of ACE schools in 2018 and again, the researchers saw similar improvements in student achievement. Results are in a working paper, “Attracting and Retaining Highly Effective Educators in Hard-to-Staff Schools.” I read a January 2024 version. 

The program turned out to be so successful at boosting student achievement that three of the four initial ACE schools no longer qualified for the stipends by 2019. Over 40 percent of the high-performing teachers left their ACE schools. Student achievement fell sharply, reversing most of the gains that had been made.

For students, it was a roller coaster ride. Amber Northern, head of research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, blamed adults for failing to “prepare for the accomplishment they’d hoped for.”

Still, it’s unclear what should have been done. Allowing these schools to continue the stipends would have eaten up millions of dollars that could have been used to help other low-performing schools. 

And even if there were enough money to give teacher stipends at every low-performing school, there’s not an infinite supply of highly effective teachers. Not all of them want to work at challenging, high poverty schools. Some prefer the easier conditions of a high-income magnet school. 

These were two good faith efforts that showed the limits of throwing money at specific types of teacher shortages. At best, they are a cautionary tale for policymakers as they move forward. 

This story about teacher pay was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Starting at about 3 p.m. every day, buses line the driveway of this afterschool program for immigrant and refugee children in Charlotte. Kids, who range from kindergarten through eighth grade, hop off the bus and stream into the building. Inside, they get a meal and a chance to relax before starting activities aimed at improving their English. 

Enrollment in the program, ourBRIDGE for Kids, has bloomed over the last few years, from 35 students when it opened in 2014 to about 230 children in 2023, with more on waitlists. More than half the children speak Spanish, but it’s common to hear conversations in Dari, Pashto, Russian and other languages spoken in the hallways, too. 

To attend ourBRIDGE for Kids, students need to meet one simple requirement — they must attend classes during the regular school day before arriving. But in 2020, when a growing number of children stopped showing up for schooltime classes during the pandemic, ourBRIDGE decided to expand its focus.  

In addition to running its afterschool program, staffers and volunteers started working with families to address the issues that prevented kids from logging into class online or showing up to school buildings. The school district noticed the impact: While other students in Charlotte were becoming chronically absent, children in ourBRIDGE were staying connected to school.  

“We realized before trying to address why your child isn’t going to school, we needed to ask, ‘What’s worrying you right now?’ That question really opened up all the reasons why going to school was not the first priority for many families: housing insecurity, food insecurity, job loss,” said Sil Ganzó, the program’s founder and executive director, who emigrated from Argentina two decades ago. 

Before 2020, the school attendance rate for English language learners across the country was high. In many schools, these students were more likely to show up to class than other groups.  

But that changed when schools shut their doors and classes went virtual. 

The number of students who are chronically absent — generally defined as missing 18 or more days in a school year — has swelled since the pandemic, and the problem is even more alarming among English language learners.  

In California, only 10 percent of English learners were chronically absent in 2019. By 2022, the rate had more than tripled to 34 percent. Other states reported similar trends: Forty percent of English learners in Colorado were chronically absent last year, 10 percentage points higher than the rate for the overall student population.  

The problems are similar in Charlotte, a community with a fast-growing immigrant population and the largest share of English learners in North Carolina by a wide margin. Since before the pandemic, the rate of chronically absent English language learners more than doubled, from 16 percent in 2019 to 36 percent in 2022.  

Related: OPINION: Creating better post-pandemic education for English learners 

Those numbers improved slightly in 2023, but nearly 1 in 3 English learner students are still chronically absent from school, while the overall rate of absenteeism for students is down to 1 in 4. 

Overall, many students are chronically absent now for the same reasons they were before the pandemic, such as illness, disengagement from school or unreliable housing and transportation, said Joshua Childs, an assistant professor at the University of Texas, Austin, who studies chronic absenteeism. But the pandemic intensified these problems.  

“It increased existing inequities around students attending schools,” Childs said. “Our schooling system wasn’t adequately prepared for what a different model, or a disruption, in schooling would look like.” 

That lack of preparation was even more evident in instruction for English language learners. Nationwide, schools struggled to provide a remote curriculum in other languages, and translation services faltered under the weight of virtual learning. And teachers had trouble explaining the logistics of remote learning through translators, a report from the Office of Civil Rights detailed.  

One study out of Virginia found schools were also struggling to keep track of English learners during this time. And a report from a federal watchdog agency on the challenges English learners faced offered, as an example, a district that mailed a workbook home to students in English and Spanish, intending to help Spanish-speakers access the online learning curriculum. However, the effort did nothing to help students who spoke any of the other 90 languages used in the district. 

In the midst of these challenges, ourBRIDGE for Kids found that it could fill some of those gaps. 

The afterschool program, which Ganzó started in 2014, now has more than three dozen employees and over 100 volunteers. The center rents its main campus from a Methodist retirement community for $1 and operates an additional program out of an elementary school.  

Within the last couple of years, the group has hired a few employees to lead its new family services program. 

“We realized we needed to help the families address those and provide some stability so that the kids can actually go to school,” Ganzó said. When parents lost their jobs, volunteers helped connect them to resources, delivered groceries to students’ homes and acted as a call center when families needed help navigating the online learning system.   

Because of its success, the Charlotte school district hired ourBRIDGE to help track down English language learners who haven’t been showing up to school. Charlotte uses a small portion of its ESSER funds to help pay for the services, but the overwhelming majority of ourBRIDGE’s funding comes from donations and grants. The services it provides to families and students are free. 

Related: International newcomer academies offer lessons on how to quickly catch up children who are learning English 

The district contacted ourBRIDGE when staff noticed the positive effect the group had on students and their families, said Nadja Trez, director of learning and language acquisition in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.  

“I took the initiative to reach out and say, ‘I need your help,’” said Trez, who also partners with the nonprofit Latin American Coalition for similar services.  

The district’s English learner population has grown significantly in the past year, from 27,405 students to 30,151. And for the first time in years, the make-up of student languages is changing. In prior years, the top spoken languages in Charlotte schools were Spanish and Vietnamese, Trez said. Now, schools are welcoming a large proportion of Russian speakers, refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine. Overall, students in the district speak 194 different languages.   

But it’s hard for schools to track down families in every community, and families often have needs that go beyond the scope of what a school can offer.  

“Many of our multilingual students, especially at the high school level, have circumstances outside of their control,” Trez said.  

When ourBRIDGE reached out to one family whose student hadn’t been attending class, the group learned the absences were due to a combination of setbacks: both parents were laid off from work, their youngest child recently had a medical emergency that required surgery, and the owners of the apartment they lived in were filing to evict them. The afterschool program connected the family with an organization that provides crisis emergency funding for low-income families and attended court hearings with them to help translate. The family was able to raise the money they needed and stay in their home. 

Another absent student ourBRIDGE was able to locate had a chronic illness, and the family didn’t know how to submit a medical excuse on the online portal. 

“The biggest part of what we do is say, ‘You have to speak up about things,’” said Yeferline Gomez, a family support manager who works at ourBRIDGE. “It’s your right to know these things. It’s your right to ask questions, and it’s your right to have things translated in a way that you understand.” 

Related: Seeking asylum in a time of Covid 

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has its own teams to knock on doors and try to find students who have been missing from class for long periods of time. But it can be difficult for schools to gain trust with families who speak another language and are new to the country, said Brian Harris, a social worker with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools who speaks Spanish.  

“When I show up to the door, I represent something to the Latino population that is not always good — I’m a tall white guy. I look like immigration or police, and I sound like it,” Harris said. “Once you gain their trust, you have it. You’re in, it’s like you’re family. And you can go knock on their door and they’ll answer. But it takes a while to get there.” 

Part of the reason ourBRIDGE has been successful is a simple change the program made a few years ago — it doesn’t communicate with families through translators. Instead, it hires staff and volunteers who are immigrants themselves and speak the same languages. When a new student arrives who speaks a language the current staff do not, the program makes an effort to hire someone who can talk to them.   

“It was day and night. Because parents have a trusting relationship with people from the same country and they have shared experiences,” Ganzó said. “They come to the events and we all have a relationship with them, but they know that person that speaks their language is going to be there, and it’s not a different person every time.” 

On a Thursday in December, third and fourth grade students sat at half a dozen tarp-covered tables at ourBRIDGE’s main campus, paint up to their elbows: red, green, yellow, and a muddy combination of all three.  

Some were talking to each other excitedly in Spanish, others were using their fingers to draw in the paint. 

Flags from various countries are strung across the campus’ hall and classroom ceilings, large letters spelling out “diversity” sit in the entryway across from a painting of a woman in a hijab. Teaching English to students who are new to the country is just one goal of ourBRIDGE, another is to make them feel welcome and celebrate their heritage.  

“We want them to feel proud of their background and their cultures and their traditions and their language and their accents as they learn English and get used to living in the United States,” Ganzó said.  

This story about ourBridge for Kids was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. 

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People who read college applications are a lot like detectives. Without having been there for the event (the student’s K-12 education and life), they must find clues in documents (high school transcripts and student essays) and eyewitness accounts (letters of recommendation) to solve the case (decide whether a student might be able to thrive at the college). 

But even with the extensive applications that each student submits, the detectives (college application readers) must do a lot of reading between the lines, said Tim Brunold, dean of admission at the University of Southern California. 

The clues they have on how students spend their time outside of school are typically limited to a list of sports teams they’ve captained, clubs they joined, volunteer work they’ve done and awards they’ve won. But the application readers often lack key information on other responsibilities or life circumstances students may have, such as caring for siblings or sick family members, working part-time jobs to help pay family bills, or living in a home without a stable internet connection.

And those missing clues often mean a student’s application doesn’t get a fair shake. If a student is getting good grades in spite of being responsible for siblings from after school until bedtime, that could mean the student is even more academically talented than a peer with no such burdens. 

In order to fill this gap, and signal to prospective students that these responsibilities matter, a set of 12 colleges participated in an experiment in which they asked every applicant to go through a list of extenuating home life circumstances or responsibilities and check off which ones they spend four hours or more per week doing.

“We want these kids to essentially get credit for these things that are taking a lot of skills and a lot of time, in the same way that kids who are doing traditional, school-based extracurricular activities are getting credit,” said Trisha Ross Anderson, the college admission director of the Making Caring Common project at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, which helped develop the questions with Common App. (The idea was in development before the Supreme Court ruled that race could not be considered in admissions decisions.)   

“We want to make it easier for students to report this information and talk about it. If students don’t want to have to write their essay about this, for instance, they shouldn’t have to.”

In order to make it fast and simple for prospective students, and to prevent application readers from having to play detective as they try to figure out, “Is there something else going on with this kid?,” they added this optional question to the Common App: 

Sometimes academic records and extracurricular activities are impacted by family responsibilities or other circumstances. We would like to know about these responsibilities and circumstances. Your responses will not negatively impact your application. You may repeat some information you already provided in the Common App Activities section. 

Please select which activities you spend 4 or more hours per week doing: 

• Assisting family or household members with situations such as doctors’ appointments, bank visits, or visa interviews
• Doing tasks for my family or household (cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc.)
• Experiencing homelessness or another unstable living situation
• Interpreting or translating for family or household members
• Living in an environment without reliable or usable internet
• Living independently or living on my own (not including boarding school)
• Managing family or household finances, budget, or paying bills
• Providing transportation for family or household members
• Taking care of sick, disabled and/or elderly members of my family or household
• Taking care of younger family or household members
• Taking care of my own child or children
• Working at a paid job to contribute to my family or household’s income
• Yard work/farm work
• Other (please describe)
• None of these

Across the 12 colleges, 66 percent of the students who applied to these colleges using the Common App checked at least one box, according to Karen Lopez, who manages this project at Common App. A quarter of the prospective students checked four or more boxes.

In the fall of 2022, these 12 colleges included the question in the Common App: Amherst College, Caltech, Cornell University, Harvey Mudd College, St. Olaf College, Transylvania University, University of Arizona, University of Dubuque, University of Maryland-Baltimore County, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

In the fall of 2023, these 23 colleges added the question: Allegheny College, Amherst College, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Boston College, Caltech, College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, College of the Holy Cross, Cornell University, Earlham College, Elon University, George Washington University, Harvey Mudd, Haverford College, Immaculata University, Lafayette College, Maryland Institute College of Art, Nazareth University, Providence College, University of Pennsylvania, University of Richmond, University of Rochester, University of Southern California and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Ross Anderson said that the second-year data will begin being processed in the coming months. She said they also plan to look at how this question affected admissions and enrollments, but they won’t be able to examine that until late summer. Lopez said these are among the factors that will help decide if this question should become a regular part of the Common App. 

Brunold, from USC, said that the people who read college applications are trying to get a “360-degree view of this young person who’s often baring their soul to you,” without knowing them personally. Giving students the opportunity to share information about their lives in this way helps colleges make a more thorough assessment. 

“For us, at a place that unfortunately doesn’t have the capacity to admit anywhere near the number of students who want to come here, we take great care in this process,” Brunold said. 

Whitney Soule, vice provost and dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, said that asking this question and capturing a wider view of students’ lives can help level the playing field for applicants of different backgrounds. 

“What we are trying to do is understand how a student is moving throughout their lives, what their commitment of time is and their responsibility is, and their awareness of themselves relative to other people,” Soule said. “Because that’s going to be incredibly important in our environment when they arrive on our campus, and they’re living and learning within the community of our school.”

This story about student home life was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

The post Sick parents? Caring for siblings? Colleges experiment with asking applicants how home life affects them appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The impact of Black people in early care and education cannot be overstated. Black women, in particular, have played a crucial role in American society, caring for multiple generations of children.

Recent reports indicate that 95 percent of child care workers are female. And although Black people make up only 13 percent of the total U.S. workforce, 18 percent of U.S. child care workers are Black.

Early education and child care represent the most racially diverse and lowest-paid sector of the teaching workforce. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that child care workers make an average of $14.22 an hour. That’s just $29,570 a year. And Black child care educators earn an average of 78 cents less per hour than their white counterparts.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, elected officials praised child care educators for their efforts to keep working and keep the economy going: Without them, parents could not have returned to work. Federal child care stabilization grants also played a pivotal role, keeping these programs open during the pandemic by providing subsidies to child care centers and to families.

Yet, the same officials who funded those grants don’t seem willing to extend that support. Now that the $52 billion pandemic-era funding has expired, many educators and families wonder about the future.

An estimated 70,000 child care programs could close in the U.S. because of the lost federal money, impacting nearly 3.2 million children.

Related: Evictions, high rents and strict rules plague in-home child care

America’s lack of ongoing investment in child care at the national and local levels will disproportionately hurt Black educators, children and families. Pre-pandemic, there was already limited availability of affordable options; new closures will deepen the challenges faced by parents in securing reliable and accessible care for their children.

Recently, 49 percent of parents who responded to a survey said they plan to spend about $18,000 on child care in 2024, while 23 percent will spend more than $36,000. Black median-income households generally spend a quarter of annual pay ($46,774) on child care for one child; very-low-income Black households can spend nearly half. White median-income households devote 15 percent of pay ($75,412) to child care.

I have heard many Black educators, parents and advocates express frustration at the way public officials have overlooked early care and education, especially home-based child care, whose owners typically operate on small margins and are particularly vulnerable to funding losses.

Millions of young children spend time in home-based child care, also known as family child care (FCC). Yet, there were 10,000 fewer family child care programs in the United States in 2022 than in 2019. This is in addition to the drop of more than 90,000 (42 percent) licensed family child care homes between 2005 and 2017.

Black educators I speak with advocate for all families to have access to early learning programs that meet their child and family needs. They believe that this can be achieved if more states increase funding for child care and commit to making systems more inclusive of FCC programs in order to give FCC educators access to the opportunities, support and resources they need to thrive.

For example, Maryland now includes FCC programs in state-funded pre-K programs, and last year California became the first state to launch a retirement fund for child care workers, inclusive of home-based child care programs.

We must advocate for similar policies at the national and local levels to increase investment in child care, including funding for higher wages, subsidies for low-income families and support for programs.

Related: OPINION: Home-based child care providers deserve better pay, working conditions and respect

I think about FCC educator Tiffany Taylor, CEO of The Baby Play Place Inc. in New York. As a Black female family child care educator, she is seldom taken seriously or recognized as a leader and professional in her field.

From being called a “babysitter” to being on the receiving end of racist, sexist and derogatory remarks, she and other Black child care educators must routinely navigate and overcome obstacles to providing high-quality child care to families in their communities. They must also deal with low pay, inflation, lack of benefits and high employee turnover. These challenges are forcing many Black family child care educators to close their doors, adding to the already depleted options for family child care across the country.

Still, Tiffany is aware of the impact she and other educators have on our country’s youngest learners. She refuses to give up. She is determined to advocate for additional investment by showing how better wages, funding and resources for child care can positively impact our communities.

Black early educators have made tremendous sacrifices to help hold up this country’s economic recovery. Yet they still face daily discrimination and inequities.

It’s time to give them the respect — and the funding — that they deserve.

Erica Phillips isexecutive director of the National Association for Family Child Care, the largest national organization focused on supporting family child care (FCC) educators, who offer high-quality early care and education in their homes.

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

The post OPINION: After years of silent sacrifices and unseen struggles, Black women are still holding up the child care industry appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

SAN FRANCISCO — It was two days before the start of the school year, and Lauren Koehler shrugged off her backpack and slid out of a maroon hoodie as she approached the blocky, concrete building that houses the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Enrollment Center. Koehler, the center’s 38-year-old executive director, usually focuses on strategy, but on this August day, she wanted to help her team — and the students it serves — get through the crush of office visits and calls that comes every year as families scramble at the last-minute for spots in the city’s schools. So when the center’s main phone line rang in her corner office, she answered.

“Good morning! Thank you for waiting,” Koehler chirped, her Texas accent audible around the edges. “How can I help you?”

On the line, Kelly Rodriguez explained that she wanted to move her 6-year-old from a private school to a public one for first grade, but only if a seat opened up at Sunset Elementary School, near their house on San Francisco’s predominantly white and Asian west side. Koehler told her the boy was fourth on the waitlist and that last year, three children got in.

“We will keep our fingers crossed,” Rodriguez said, sounding both resigned and hopeful.

Stanford professor Thomas Dee predicted this. Not this specific conversation, of course, but ones like it. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, public school enrollment in the United States had been trending downward, thanks to birth-rate declines and more restrictive immigration policies, but the decreases rarely exceeded half a percentage point. But Dee said, between fall 2019 and fall 2021, enrollment declined by 2.5 percent.

At the leading edge of this national trend is San Francisco. Public school enrollment there fell by 7.6 percent between 2019 and 2022, to 48,785 students. That drop left SFUSD at just over half the size it was in the 1960s, when it was one of the largest districts in the nation.

Related: A school closure cliff is coming. Black and Hispanic students are likely to bear the brunt

Declining enrollment can set off a downward spiral. For every student who leaves SFUSD, the district eventually receives approximately $14,650 less, using a conservative estimate of state funds for the 2022–23 school year. When considering all state and federal funds that year, the district stood to lose as much as $21,170 a child. Over time, less money translates to fewer adults to teach classes, clean bathrooms, help manage emotions and otherwise make a district’s schools calm and effective. It also means fewer language programs, robotics labs and other enrichment opportunities that parents increasingly perceive as necessary. That, in turn, can lead to fewer families signing up — and even less money.

It’s why Koehler is trying everything she can to retain and recruit students in the face of myriad complications, from racism to game theory, and why educators and policymakers elsewhere ought to care whether she and her staff of 24 succeed.

Answering calls in August, Koehler had a plan — lots of little plans, really. And she hoped they’d move the needle on the district’s enrollment numbers, to be released later in the year.

Koehler arrived at SFUSD in May 2020, which also happens to be when most believe the story of the district’s hemorrhaging of students began. During Covid, the district’s doors remained closed for more than a year. Sent home in March 2020, the youngest children went back part-time in April 2021; for the vast majority of middle and high school students, schools didn’t reopen for 17 months, until August 2021. In contrast, most private schools in the city ramped up to full-time, in-person instruction for all grades over the fall of 2020.

It was the latest skirmish in a long-standing market competition in San Francisco — and the public schools lost. The district’s pandemic-era enrollment decline was three times larger than the national one.

Related: A school created a homeless shelter in the gym and it paid off in the classroom

“My husband and I are both a product of a public school education, and it’s something we really wanted for our children,” said Rodriguez, the first caller. But her son ended up in private school, she explained, because “we didn’t want him sitting in front of a screen.” It was a conversation that has played out repeatedly for Koehler these past few years. But public schools staying remote for longer is not the whole story, not even close.

Remote schooling accounted for about a quarter of the enrollment decline nationally, Stanford’s Dee estimates. The bigger culprit, especially in San Francisco, is population loss. Even before the pandemic, the city had the fewest 5-to-19-year-olds per capita of any US city, about 10 percent of the population, which is roughly half the national average.

Then, starting around the time Koehler arrived, fewer new kids came than usual and more residents moved to places like Florida and Texas. A recent Census estimate found 89,000 K-12 students in San Francisco, down from about 93,000 in 2019. That decline represents more than half of SFUSD’s pandemic-era drop.

It’s difficult to pinpoint how many children migrated to private school in response to SFUSD’s doors’ staying closed, since many did, but at the same time, some private school students also moved away. But Dee’s research shows that private schooling increased by about 8 percent nationally. (Homeschooling numbers also grew, although the number of kids involved remains small.)

And these aren’t the only reasons Koehler’s task can seem Sisyphean.

“You guys should be able to find out how many spots are open!” a father sitting outside Koehler’s office said, frustrated after visiting the enrollment center once a week all summer.

Koehler nodded sympathetically and told him his son was sixth on the waitlist for Hoover Middle School and that three times that many got in last year.

Since 2011, families have been able to apply to any of the city’s 72 public elementary schools, submitting a ranked list of choices. The same goes for middle and high school options. When demand exceeds seats, the enrollment center uses “tiebreakers,” mandated by the city’s elected school board, that try to keep siblings together, give students from marginalized communities a leg up, and let preschoolers stay at their school for kindergarten. After that, living near a school often confers priority. A randomized lottery for each school sorts out the rest, which leads to the entire system being referred to locally as “the lottery.”

OPINION: Public school enrollment losses are a big problem

Sixty percent of applicants got their first choice in the lottery’s “main round” in March 2023. Almost 90 percent were assigned to one of their listed schools. That makes for a lot of happy campers. It also makes for parents like the father with a wait-listed son, holding out for a better option.

Though she responded to him with unwavering calm, Koehler was frustrated too. She knew a seat would be available for his son, but state law prohibited her from letting the boy sit in it until an assigned student told the enrollment center they wouldn’t attend or failed to show up in the first week of school.

“I appreciate your patience,” she said, scrawling her cell number on a business card.

To avoid this bind, Koehler and her team have been experimenting with over-assigning kids, the way airlines overbook flights. New, too, is Koehler’s transparency about wait-list standing. In fact, at the beginning of August, every wait-listed family received an e-mail sharing its child’s standing, plus how many kids on the list got in last year. Koehler and her staff hope promising data will encourage parents to hang in there, while a disappointing forecast will open their minds to another school in SFUSD.

Overbooking and transparency represent incremental change. “I annoy some people on my team to no end by being like, ‘Well, I don’t know if we’re ready for this really large step, but let’s take a small step,’” Koehler said. “Let’s put as many irons in the fire as we can.”

Koehler’s next caller said, “The students are not getting their schedules until 24 hours before school starts, which is completely absurd!” Her voice fraying, the mother shared her suspicion that this was true only for kids coming from private middle schools, like her son. Koehler explained that the policy applied to all ninth graders, but still, she said, “I’m sure that’s stressful and annoying.”

Another caller had her heart set on Lincoln High School, down the block from the family’s home. But her son had been assigned to a school lower on the family’s list and an hour-long bus ride away. Koehler suggested several high schools that would have been a short detour on the woman’s way to work south of the city, but the mother began to cry. She had no interest in “Mission High or whatever,” even when Koehler pointed to Mission’s having the highest University of California acceptance rate in SFUSD.

Related: Dallas students flocking to schools that pull students from both rich and poor parts of town

Family and friends are most influential in shaping people’s attitudes about schools, research specific to SFUSD shows. So if they’ve heard bad things, Koehler’s singing a school’s praises often does little to change their minds. Parents also turn to school-ratings websites, which studies say push families toward schools with relatively few Black and Hispanic students, like Lincoln, which currently scores a 7 on GreatSchools.org’s 1-10 scoring system, while Mission rates a 3.

As the mother on the phone grew increasingly distressed, Koehler responded simply, “I hear you.” And then, “I know this is really hard.”

She learned these lines from her therapist husband. Before they met, Koehler was an AmeriCorps teacher at a preschool serving kids in a high-poverty community. By her own admission, Koehler was “a totally hopeless teacher,” and she couldn’t stop thinking about “all these systems-level issues.” When her pre-K class toured potential kindergartens, she said, “The schools were just so different from each other.” She realized, “Where you are assigning kids — and what their resourcing level is — matters.”

After getting a master’s in public policy at Harvard, Koehler took a planning job with Jefferson Parish Public School System in New Orleans and then became a director of strategic projects with the KIPP charter school network in Houston. She moved to the Bay Area in 2018 to work for a different charter network, and that’s when she met the handsome, “uncommonly honest” school counselor. When she joined SFUSD in 2020, her husband struck out into private practice. “I feel like I get training every day,” quipped Koehler of his reassurances at home.

Now, she has her staff role-play parent counseling sessions, practicing skills picked up during trainings on de-escalation, listening so that people feel heard, and other forms of “nonviolent communication.” They try to make families feel understood and give them a sense of autonomy and control.

Often, they succeed. Often, they fail.

When phone lines quieted, Koehler began to call parents from the waiting area back to a sunny conference room featuring two massive city maps dotted by district schools.

The first family told her they live in Mission Bay, a rapidly redeveloping area where a new elementary school isn’t scheduled to open until 2025. They were excited about a school one neighborhood over, until they tested the two-bus commute with a preschooler. Then they realized that the city’s recently opened underground transit line goes straight from their home to Gordon J. Lau Elementary. Koehler wasn’t optimistic about there being openings; it’s a popular school.

When the computer revealed one last spot, she squealed à la Margot Robbie’s Barbie, “You are having the luckiest day!”

But the next parent, Kristina Kunz, was not as lucky. “My daughter was at Francisco during the stabbing last year,” she told Koehler. The sixth grader didn’t witness the March 2023 event, but when the school was evacuated, she thought she was about to die in a mass shooting. Once home, she refused to go back. Kunz told Koehler the family would have left the district, but they’d already been paying Catholic school tuition for her brother after he’d felt threatened at another middle school a few years earlier. “That was literally the only option,” Kunz said, “and we absolutely can’t afford it this year.”

Related: Fewer kids are enrolling in kindergarten as pandemic fallout lingers

Koehler read Kunz the list of middle schools with openings, all in the city’s southeast, which has a higher percentage of Black and Hispanic residents than other parts of the city. “Huh uh,” Kunz said, “none of those.” She’d take her chances waiting for a spot to open at Hoover on the west side.

The next parent, a woman who’d recently sent a vitriolic e-mail to the superintendent, said, “There’s no seats open in middle schools.” When Koehler rattled off the schools in the southeast that still had openings, the mother shrugged, as if those didn’t count.

Koehler closed her eyes and quickly inhaled. What she didn’t get into, but was perpetually on her mind, is what she’d read in “Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools,” by Rand Quinn, a political sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

San Francisco segregated its schools from its earliest days. In 1870, students with Asian ancestry were officially allowed in any school, but often weren’t welcome in them, leaving most Asian American kids to learn in community-run and missionary schools. In 1875, the district declared schools open to Black students too, but nearly a century later, in 1965, 17 schools were more than 90 percent white and nine were more than 90 percent Black. A large system of parochial schools thrived alongside a handful of nonreligious, exclusively white private schools.

Public school desegregation efforts began in earnest in 1969 with the Equality/Quality plan, which, though modest, involved busing some students from predominantly white neighborhoods. An uproar followed, and the district, which had more than 90,000 students at its 1960s zenith, saw its numbers drop by more than 8,000 students between the spring and fall of 1970 as families fled integration. Over the next dozen years, SFUSD’s rolls decreased by more than 35,000, owing to white flight and also to the last of the baby boomers aging out and drastic public school funding cuts in the wake of a 1978 state proposition that largely froze the property tax base.

After 1980, enrollment bounced back a little, but then for years it plateaued at roughly 52,000 students. During the 1965–66 school year, more than 45 percent of the district’s students were white. By 1977, just over 14 percent were. Today, that number is just under 14 percent. All of which is to say, when white families left in droves, they never really came back.

There have been about half a dozen similar initiatives since Equality/Quality — with names like Horseshoe and Educational Redesign — and each time, some west-side parents mounted opposition. Quinn quoted a former superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, who said at the outset of one of those “neighborhood schools” campaigns in the early 2000s: “They’ve said racist things I hadn’t heard since the late ’60s…talking about ‘in that neighborhood, my child might be raped!’”

It’s not just white families who object to their kids being educated alongside a significant number of Black children, said longtime Board of Education Commissioner Mark Sanchez. “You see that in the Latinx population and Asian population as well.”

In nearby Marin County, home to some of the nation’s most affluent suburbs, private schools opened one after the other in the 1970s. At least another 10 independent schools popped up in San Francisco proper, stealing market share from both SFUSD and the city’s parochial sector and pushing overall private school enrollment above 30 percent for the first time. Today, approximately 25 percent of San Francisco’s school-aged children attend private school, compared to 8 percent in the state of California and similar shares in many large cities. A November San Francisco Chronicle investigation found that at least three independent schools have applied for permits to expand or renovate their campuses in order to make room for more students. At one private school, enrollment is projected to more than double.

When Americans think of segregation academies, they think of the South, said Sanchez, but San Francisco has long had its own. In part because the city didn’t offer quality schooling to children of color. “You’ll see a lot of second-, third-, fourth-generation Latinos that will just only put their kids in Catholic school.”

These personal decisions have a ripple effect beyond decreasing SFUSD’s budget. Research has shown that advantaged, white families’ turning away from public schools sends a signal to others about their quality. Other studies reveal that when private schools are an option, recent movers to gentrifying neighborhoods are more likely to opt out of public schools. And it is well-established that segregated environments breed people who seek comfort in segregated environments.

“It’s kind of a chicken-and-the-egg thing,” Sanchez said: Private schools are there in part because of racial fear, and racial fear is perpetuated in part because private schools are there.

In 2015, in the southeast part of the city, SFUSD opened Willie Brown Middle School, a state-of-the-art facility that includes a wellness center, a library, a kitchen, a performing arts space, a computer lab, a maker space, a biotech lab, a health center, and a rainwater garden, in addition to light-filled classrooms. With small class sizes, bamboo cabinets, few staff vacancies, and furniture outfitted with wheels, it could easily be a private school.

Related: For some kids, returning to school post-pandemic means a daunting wall of administrative obstacles

But Willie Brown remained under-enrolled, year after year, even after the school board passed a policy giving its graduates preference for Lowell High School, known as the “crown jewel” of SFUSD. Last year, enrollment jumped when Koehler’s Enrollment Center overbooked the school in the first round, parents decided to give it a shot, and kids ended up happy. About 20 percent of the student body is now white, yet still, spots remained open two days before the start of school this past fall.

To some observers, Willie Brown is just the latest iteration of a failed “if you build it, they will come” narrative in San Francisco. In the second half of the 1970s, the district created new programs and “alternative schools,” akin to other cities’ magnet schools, to attract back families that had fled. Later, Superintendent Ackerman promised a flood of investment in schools in the southeast, including new language programs. There was a small effect on enrollment, Quinn said, but only on the margins.

So when the parent said, “There’s no seats open in middle schools,” Koehler understood that lots of factors influence which schools work for a family and which don’t. But there was also an echo of 1960s anti-integration parent groups. 

“I’m sorry,” she replied, “I know this is really stressful.”

A 17-year-old newcomer to the US entered the Enrollment Center and sat across the conference room table from Koehler. She asked when he’d arrived in San Francisco.

“Domingo.”

“Ayer?” Koehler asked. (Yesterday?)

“No, domingo pasado.” (Last Sunday.)

In New York City and other large cities, an increase in asylum-seeking families has been credited with stopping public school enrollment declines. Migrant children have come to San Francisco too, and Koehler’s team has tried to reduce the paperwork hurdles they and other families face when trying to enroll.

But Koehler would need to meet many more kids like this one to stave off school closures.

She’d also need charter school enrollment to stop increasing.

The next parent, also a recent immigrant, stepped into the conference room with a stack of papers issued by the Peruvian government and the conviction that her son needed to be placed in a different grade than the one specified by his age. She made it clear to Koehler that the family would jump at the first appropriate placement offer: SFUSD’s or at Thomas Edison Charter Academy. Koehler scrambled to get the boy assessed and recategorized.

Charter schools were first authorized in San Francisco in the 1990s. Though their share of the education market is smaller here than in places like New Orleans, charter enrollment has steadily increased, with new schools often inhabiting the buildings of schools SFUSD had to close. Now, approximately 7,000 students attend charter schools rather than district ones.

On August 30, 2023, SFUSD families received an e-mail from the superintendent saying, “We are going to make some tough decisions in the coming months and all the options are on the table.”

Each time a student leaves the district, SFUSD has less money to operate that student’s old school. But the heating bill does not go down. The teacher must be paid the same amount. A class of 21 first graders — or even a class of eight — is no cheaper than a class of 22.

Related: In a segregated city, the pandemic accelerated a wave of white flight

It stands to reason that closing under-enrolled schools and reassigning their students and the funds that go with them to different schools, as many districts across the country are currently poised to do, should produce better educational outcomes for all. But it often doesn’t, as experiences in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans illustrate. Sally A. Nuamah, a professor at Northwestern University, has described school closures as “reactive” and urged policymakers to focus instead on the root causes of declining enrollment, like the lack of affordable housing that drives families out of cities.

Koehler can control those things about as readily as she can dig a new train tunnel or decrease school-shooting fear. But she might be able to improve the district’s reputation.

Her team started by modernizing marketing efforts, like going digital with preschool outreach, producing a video about each school, and rebooting the annual Enrollment Fair, a day when principals and PTA presidents sit behind more than 100 folding tables. Parents used to push strollers through the throngs to grab a handout and snippet of conversation; now, schools play videos and offer up QR codes too.

For two years, SFUSD has also worked with digital marketing companies. One “positive impression campaign” included social media posts pushed out by the San Francisco Public Library and the Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families. Images feature photos of smiling students alongside the names of the SFUSD schools and colleges they attended: For example, “Jazmine – Flynn Elementary School – Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 – O’Connell High School – Stanford University.” In addition to online ads, the district has purchased radio spots and light-pole ads. It’s mailed postcards.

Koehler would like to increase the current outlay of about $10,000 a year, but it’s hard to spend on recruitment when instruction remains underfunded, even if increased enrollment would more than offset the cost. Especially since, at some point, marketing becomes futile. With a finite number of kids in the city, initiatives to increase market share become “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Dee likes to say. (Private school-board members and admissions directors in San Francisco are also expressing alarm at population declines.)

And in San Francisco, any PR campaign contends with two major sources of bad PR: the press and parents. Koehler understands why journalists report on what’s going wrong in SFUSD: It’s their job. But she sees loads of negative headlines and very few accounts of the many things that are going right. Readers are left with the impression that private schools in the city are objectively better at serving students, which just isn’t true.

Some parents have left SFUSD or refused to enroll their kids because of substantive complaints, like with the district’s decision not to offer Algebra I in eighth grade (starting in 2014). There is also some real scarcity in the process, as in Rodriguez’s case: There simply isn’t enough room on Sunset’s small campus for everyone who wants to be there. And individual families have unresolvable logistical constraints, and in very rare cases, truly legitimate safety concerns. But a lot of it has to do with timing — and fear.

When David, a father of two, rang the Enrollment Center, it was with the air of a man who just wanted to do the right thing.

After touring SFUSD’s George Peabody Elementary, David and his wife decided the school would be a great fit for their incoming kindergartener. There was something special about it, and they wanted her to learn in a diverse setting.

But they also wanted a backup plan, having heard horror stories of the lottery’s vagaries. “We had two number-one choices,” he said: Peabody and a Jewish private school. They applied to both. In March, their daughter was offered a spot at the private school — and one at a different SFUSD school they liked less. “If we got into Peabody in the first round, we would have gone to Peabody,” said David, who asked that his full name be withheld to protect his privacy. Instead, they signed a contract with the private school. “We put our daughter on the waitlist” for Peabody, he said, “and then kind of forgot about it.”

When the family got an e-mail offering a spot, on the Saturday before school started, they were excited enough to click “accept,” even though they would have lost their private school deposit. Then they learned that Peabody’s after-school program was full. “There was just no way that we could have made it happen without aftercare,” David said. So he called the Enrollment Center to offer the spot to another family.

Hearing David’s story, Koehler sighed. If she had been able to place his child at Peabody in the first round, aftercare would have been available there, but in August the only programs with openings were located offsite. Because that didn’t work for David’s family, Koehler was left with a seat sitting open at a high-demand school.

Private schools can require open houses, interviews, and a tuition deposit to help screen out all but the most interested families and reveal information about their likelihood of accepting an offer. But SFUSD has tried to do away with hurdles like that, since they disadvantage the already disadvantaged. With no way of gauging intention to attend, Koehler has to hold seats from March until August for thousands of students who ultimately won’t use them. And she can’t just overbook aggressively, because there are always outliers. This year, one of the city’s biggest middle schools saw every single child who was assigned in March, save one, show up in August. Private schools can more easily absorb extra kids if they overdo it with admissions a little, but Koehler risks a massive fiscal error under the district’s union contract. And overbooking risks leaving other SFUSD schools under-enrolled, something single-campus private schools don’t have to worry about.

It leaves SFUSD an unpredictable mess able to enroll fewer families than it otherwise would. And because the process is a mess, more families apply to multiple systems to hedge their bets and end up holding on to multiple seats, making it all more of a mess.

But change is coming. In 2018, the school board passed a resolution to eventually overhaul SFUSD’s school assignment system. Starting in 2026, citywide elementary school choice will be replaced by choice within zones tied to students’ addresses. The task of sorting out the details has fallen to Koehler’s team, along with a group at Stanford co-led by Irene Lo, a professor in the school of engineering who has been trained to design and optimize “matching” markets like this one.

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If Lo could start anywhere, she’d centralize the application process so that families would rank their true preferences: public, private, and charter. One algorithm could then assign the vast majority of seats in a single pass, largely eliminating delays like the one David’s family experienced. But private schools stand to lose ground by agreeing to that, and many public school supporters would argue that this condones and uplifts private and charter schools. So instead of centralization, Lo will start with prediction.

She’ll use AI and other modern modeling tools to anticipate what parents will like. Then there’s “strategy-proofing,” a term from game theory. Essentially, it means trying to set up a system that incentivizes parents to be truthful. Over the decades, families have taken advantage of loopholes allowing students to attend a different school than the one designated by their address. And not just a few families. In the late 1990s, it was more than half. To gain an advantage, they’ve also lied about their student’s ethnicity, “race-neutral diversity factors” such as mother’s education level, and their zip code. Any way each system could be gamed, it was gamed.

Lo said the new six or seven zones will be drawn so each comes close to reflecting the district’s average socioeconomic status. Layered on top of that will be “dynamic reserves” at each school, basically set-asides giving lower-income students first dibs on some seats to make sure diverse zones don’t segregate into schools with wealthier students and others with concentrated poverty. City blocks will be used as a proxy for students’ level of disadvantage.

It all sounds great. It also all sounds familiar. In the early 1970s, Horseshoe featured seven zones and assignment to schools so as to create racial balance. Educational Redesign relied on quotas to make sure no ethnic group exceeded 45 percent. The current lottery uses “microneighborhoods” to capture disadvantage.

What makes Koehler and Lo think the outcome could be different this time?

Lo admitted that they’re trying “another way of putting together the same ingredients.” It’s still guesswork, but with her cutting-edge tools it should be more accurate than the guesswork of the past. And while parents still won’t have complete predictability, they’ll have more than before.

“I understand this is really difficult,” Koehler said to the last parent of the day.

With the waiting room empty and back offices quiet, Koehler approached each member of her staff: “Go home, because I know this is going to be a really long week.”

It’s likely to be a very long year—and decade—for the enrollment center.

San Francisco was 40 percent white as of the last Census, but only 13.8 percent of its public school enrollment was. Even if Lo works the unprecedented miracle of getting schools to reflect the district’s diversity, there is no hope that they will reflect the city’s without a major change in the way parents have behaved for decades. The data is clear: Without a critical mass of white students in a school, a significant number of parents won’t consider it.

Still, many families are choosing SFUSD, including some of those Koehler talked to in August. Kunz’s daughter got into Hoover off the waiting list. A few months into the school year, her mother said, she is thriving. Her older brother, the one who was pulled out of public middle school, chose SFUSD’s Ruth Asawa School of the Arts over a well-regarded Catholic high school.

Rodriguez, the mother who wanted to send her first grader to Sunset, learned a few days after her call with Koehler that everyone assigned had shown up, and her son wouldn’t be offered a spot. But Koehler’s team had another suggestion near the family’s home: Jefferson Elementary School. Rodriguez almost rejected it in favor of private school, but she’s relieved she didn’t.

“The community’s been very, very welcoming,” she said in October. “His teacher’s wonderful; she has almost 20 years of experience. It has a beautiful garden. The principal is really involved.” A few months later things were still going well: “Jefferson is just fantastic,” she said in December: “We’ve been really, really pleased.”

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But Rodriguez said she’s still “recovering” from the enrollment process. “I also worry about the future of it, as we hear potential school closures, budget deficits,” she said. The family is considering selling their house, in favor of a place somewhere else in the Bay Area “where there aren’t so many of the issues that SFUSD is running into.”

In October, David said he and his wife wouldn’t necessarily send their second child to the Jewish private school: “I think we probably will look at Peabody again.” And if that happened, he said, they may even move their oldest over to SFUSD. But by December, his outlook was different. David said his family has been very happy with the private school experience.

Koehler knew about each of these outcomes and thousands more like them, and she hoped they would amount to a turned tide, with enrollment starting to creep up rather than down.

This fall, she and her team learned of SFUSD’s preliminary numbers: Enrollment increased from 48,785 to 49,143. That said, hundreds of those kids are 4-year-olds, sitting in “transitional kindergarten” spots newly added to a statewide specialized pre-K program. In essence, enrollment had flatlined.

Koehler felt nonetheless undaunted. The stable numbers mean “that our outreach is working,” she said. “We are not losing people at the rate that we otherwise might.”

And not all of her plans, her incremental tinkering, have come to fruition yet. “One of my random dreams is that we could do aftercare at the same time as we do enrollment,” she said. She also pointed to SFUSD’s efforts to realign program offerings with what parents want most, spread more success stories, better compensate teachers, and get a bond measure on an upcoming ballot. For the 2025–26 application cycle, her team would like to automatically assign families to multiple waiting lists, “which we hope will make at least the process seem less cumbersome and frightening,” she said. Add in Lo’s changes, Koehler said, and “we’ll draw people back who right now are frustrated by our process.”

“I have a sense that the future will be positive.”

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

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