LOS ANGELES — When Abram van der Fluit began teaching science more than two decades ago, he tried to ward off classroom disruption with the threat of suspension: “I had my consequences, and the third consequence was you get referred to the dean,” he recalled.

Suspending kids didn’t make them less defiant, he said, but getting them out of the school for a bit made his job easier. Now, suspensions for “willful defiance” are off the table at Maywood Academy High School, taking the bite out of van der Fluit’s threat. 

Mikey Valladares, a 12th grader there, said when he last got into an argument with a teacher, a campus aide brought him to the school’s restorative justice coordinator, who offered Valladares a bottle of water and then asked what had happened. “He doesn’t come in … like a persecuting way,” Valladares said. “He’d just console you about it.”

Being listened to and treated with empathy, Valladares said, “makes me feel better.” Better enough to put himself in his teacher’s shoes, consider what he could have done differently — and offer an apology.

This new way of responding to disrespectful behavior doesn’t always work, according to van der Fluit. But “overall,” he said, “it’s a good thing.”

In 2013, the Los Angeles Unified School District banned suspensions for willfully defiant behavior, as part of a multi-year effort to move away from punitive discipline. The California legislature took note. Lawmakers argued that suspensions for relatively minor infractions, like talking back to a teacher, harmed kids, including by feeding the school-to-prison pipeline. Others noted that this ground for suspension was a subjective catch-all disproportionately applied to Black and Hispanic students.

A state law prohibiting willful defiance suspensions for grades K-3 went into effect in 2015; five years later, the ban was extended through eighth grade. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law adding high schoolers to the prohibition. It takes effect this July.

A Hechinger Report investigation reveals that the national picture is quite different. Across the 20 states that collect data on the reasons why students are suspended or expelled, school districts cited willful defiance, insubordination, disorderly conduct and similar categories as a justification for suspending or expelling students more than 2.8 million times from 2017-18 to 2021-22. That amounted to nearly a third of all punishments reported by those states.

As school districts search for ways to cope with the increase in student misbehavior that followed the pandemic, LAUSD’s experience offers insight into whether banning such suspensions is effective and under what conditions. In general, the district’s results have been positive: Data suggests that schools didn’t become less safe, more chaotic or less effective, as critics had warned.

From 2011-12 to 2021-22, as suspensions for willful defiance fell from 4,500 to near zero, suspensions across all categories fell too, to 1,633, a more than 90 percent drop, according to state data. Those numbers, plus in-depth research on the ban, show that educators in LAUSD didn’t simply find different justifications for suspending kids once willful defiance was off limits. Racial disparities in discipline remain, but they have been reduced.

Meanwhile, according to state survey data, students were less likely to report feeling unsafe in school. During the 2021-22 school year for example, 5 percent of LAUSD freshmen said they felt unsafe in school, compared with more than three times that nine years earlier. As for academics, state and federal data suggest that the district’s performance didn’t fall after the disciplinary shift, although the state switched tests over that decade, making precise comparison difficult.

“It really points out that we can do this differently, and do it better,” said Dan Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law. 

Related: Preventing suspensions: Tackle discipline problems with empathy first

A pile of research demonstrates that losing class time negatively affects students. Suspensions are tied to lower grades, lower odds of graduating high school and a higher risk of being arrested or unemployed as an adult. Losen said this is in part because students who are suspended not only miss out on educational opportunities, but also lose access to the web of services many schools offer, including mental health treatment and meals.

That harm is less justifiable for minor transgressions, he added. And “what makes it even less justifiable is that there are alternative responses that work better and involve more adult interface for the student, not less.”

In part because of this research, Los Angeles, and then California, increasingly focused on disciplinary alternatives as they eliminated or narrowed the use of suspensions for willful defiance. 

LAUSD gradually scaled up its investment, rolling out training in 2015 for teachers and administrators in “restorative” practices like the ones Valladares described. Educators were also encouraged to implement an approach called positive behavioral interventions and supports. Together, these strategies seek to address the root causes of challenging behavior. That means both preventing it and, when some still inevitably occurs, responding in a way that strengthens the relationship between student and school rather than undermining it.

The district also created new positions, hiring school climate advocates to give campuses a warm, constructive tone, and “system of support advisors,” or SOSAs, to train current employees in the new way of doing discipline. From August to October 2023, SOSAs offered 380 such sessions; since July 2021 alone, more than 23,000 district staff members and 2,400 parents have participated in restorative practices training, according to LAUSD.

All that work has been expensive: The district budgeted more than $31 million for school climate advocates, $16 million for restorative justice teachers and nearly $9 million for the SOSAs for this school year. Combined with spending on psychiatric social workers, mental health coordinators and campus aides, the district’s allocation for “school climate personnel” totaled more than $300 million this year.

That’s money other districts don’t have. And it’s part of what prompted the California School Boards Association to support the recent legislation only if it were amended to include more cash for alternative approaches to behavior management.

Troy Flint, the organization’s chief communications officer, said administrators in many remote, rural districts in particular do not have the bandwidth, or the ability to hire consultants, to train staff on new methods. Their schools also often lack a space for disruptive students who have had to leave class but can’t be sent home, and lack the adults needed to supervise them, he said. “You often have situations in these districts where you have a superintendent or principal who’s also a teacher, and maybe they drive a bus – they don’t have the capacity to implement all these programs,” said Flint.

The state’s 2023 budget allocated just $7 million, parceled out in grants of up to $100,000, for districts to implement restorative justice practices. If each got the full amount, only approximately 70 districts would receive funding — when there are more than a thousand districts in the state. Even then, the grants would give each district only a small fraction of what LAUSD has needed to make the shift.

Related: Hidden expulsions? Schools kick students out but call it a ‘transfer’

Even in LAUSD, the money only goes so far. The district of more than 1,000 schools employs nearly 120 restorative justice teachers, meaning only about a tenth of schools have one. Roughly a third of schools have a school climate advocate. SOSAs are stretched thin too, in some cases supporting as many as 25 schools each, and some budgeted SOSA positions haven’t been filled. There’s also the continual threat of lost funding: In recent years, the district has been using federal pandemic funding, which ends soon, to pay for some of the work. “School sites are having to make hard choices,” said Tanya Ortiz Franklin, an LAUSD school board member.

And money hasn’t been the district’s only challenge. Success requires buy-in, and buy-in requires a change in educators’ mindsets. Back in 2013, van der Fluit recalls, his colleagues’ perspective on the ban on willful defiance suspensions was often: “What is this hippie-dippie baloney?” Teachers also questioned the motives of district leaders, wondering if they wanted to avoid suspending kids because school funding is tied to average daily attendance. 

Now, most days, van der Fluit sees things differently — but not always.

Last year, for example, when he asked a student who was late to get a tardy slip, she refused. She also refused when a campus aide, and then the restorative justice coordinator and then the principal, asked her to go to the school’s office. The situation was eventually resolved after her basketball coach arrived, but van der Fluit said it had been “a 20-minute thing, and I’m trying to teach in between all of this stuff.”

That sort of scene is rare at Maywood, van der Fluit said, but it happens. There are students “who just want to disrupt, and they know how to manipulate and control and are gaslighting and deflecting.” He described seeing a student with his phone out. When van der Fluit said, “You had your phone out,” the student denied it. Van der Fluit said there are days he feels “the district doesn’t have my back” under this new system. Researchers, legislators and school board members, he said, wear “rose-colored glasses.”

His concerns are not uncommon. But according to Losen, in LAUSD, “The main issue for teachers was that the teacher training was phased in while the policy change was not.”

In recent years there has been some parental pushback too: At a November 2023 meeting of the school district safety and climate committee, for example, a handful of parents described their kids’ schools as “out of control” and decried a “rampant lack of discipline.”

Ortiz Franklin acknowledged an uptick in behavioral incidents over the last three years, but attributed it to the pandemic and students’ isolation and loss, not the shift in disciplinary approach. Groups like Students Deserve, a youth-led, grassroots nonprofit, have urged LAUSD to hold the line on its positive, restorative approach.

“Our schools are not an uncontrollable, violent, off-the-wall place. They’re a place with kids who are dealing with an unprecedented level of trauma and need an unprecedented level of support,” said W. Joseph Williams, the group’s director.

District survey data presented at the same November meeting, meanwhile, suggests most teachers remain relatively committed to the policies: On a 1 to 4 scale, teachers rated their support for restorative practices at around a 3, on average, and principals rated it close to a 4.

Even van der Fluit, who maintains that the new way takes more work, said: “But is it the better thing for the student? For sure.”

At Maywood, Marcus Van, the restorative justice coordinator who met with Valladares after the teen argued with a teacher, said students have a chance to talk out their problems and grievances and resolve them. In contrast, Van said, “When you just suspend someone, you do not go through the process of reconciliation.”

Often, so-called defiant behavior is spurred by some larger issue, he said: “Maybe somebody has parents who are on drugs [or] abusive, maybe they have housing insecurity, maybe they have food insecurity, maybe they’re being bullied.” He added: “I think people want an easy fix for a complicated problem.”

Valladares, for his part, knows some people think suspensions breed school safety. But he said he feels safer — and behaves in a way that’s safer for others — when “I’m able to voice how I feel.”

Twelfth grader Yaretzy Ferreira said: “I feel like they actually hear us out, instead of just cutting us out.”

Her first year and a half at Maywood, she was “really hyper sassy,” according to Van. But, Ferreira recalled, that changed after Van invited her mom and a translator to a meeting: “He was like, ‘Your daughter did this, this, this, but we’re not here to get her in trouble. We’re here to help.’” Now, the only reason she ends up in Van’s office is for a water or a snack.

Van der Fluit said the new approach is better for all kids, not just those with a history of defiance. For example, the class that watched the tardy slip interaction unfold saw adults model how to successfully manage frustration and de-escalate a situation. “That’s incredibly valuable,” he said, “more valuable than learning photosynthesis.”

The Maywood campus is calmer than it used to be, educators at the school say. Students, for the most part, no longer roam the halls during class time. There’s less profanity, said history teacher Michael Melendez. Things are going “just fine” without willful defiance suspensions, he said.

Nationally, researchers have come to a similar conclusion: A 2023 report from the Learning Policy Institute, based on data for about 2 million California students, concluded that exposure to restorative practices improved academic achievement, behavior and school safety. A 2023 study on restorative programs in Chicago Public Schools, conducted by the University of Chicago Education Lab, found positive changes in how students viewed their schools, their in-school safety and their sense of belonging.

In Los Angeles, many students say the hard work of transitioning to a new disciplinary approach is worth it.

“We’re still kids in a way. We are growing, but there’s still corrections to be made,” said Valladares. “And what’s the point in a school if there’s no corrections, just instant punishment?”

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

The post What happens when suspensions get suspended? 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.

Related: Gifted education has a race problem. Can it be fixed?

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.”

Related: New data: Even within the same district, some wealthy schools get millions more than poor ones

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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SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — At 19, Elizabeth Clews knew attending community college while balancing a full-time job and caring for a newborn would be hard. But she wanted to give it a shot.

After a few months, the single mom, who had just exited the foster care system, realized she wasn’t doing well enough to pass her classes at Ventura College. “All I could really focus on was taking care of my baby and making sure that I kept a roof over our heads,” she said.

Clews thought her performance would improve if she quit work. But when she logged into the school’s online portal to register for a second semester, a message popped up that she described as saying, “You can enroll for classes, but you’re not gonna get financial aid.” Clews was in danger of failing to meet a standard called SAP, or “satisfactory academic progress,” which is attached to nearly all federal financial aid for higher education — including grants, loans and work study — and most state aid too.

“I didn’t really know it was a thing,” Clews said, “I didn’t understand any of the financial aid terminology.” But one thing she knew with utter clarity: She couldn’t pay tuition and fees out of pocket. So, she dropped out.

The number of students across the U.S. affected by satisfactory academic progress requirements each year likely runs in the hundreds of thousands, yet until recently the issue garnered almost no attention from news media, academics and policy makers. “It’s not a noisy problem” because it doesn’t impact people with social capital and power, said Christina Tangalakis, associate dean of financial aid at Glendale Community College in Southern California.

Now, a loose coalition of nonprofits, legislators and financial aid administrators are trying to reform what they describe as overly punitive, vague standards that keep many students capable of earning a degree from obtaining one. The state of Indiana was an early actor, creating a grant in 2016 for returning students who had “SAP-ed out” of federal funding. Last month, California enacted legislation to make all colleges align their requirements for “satisfactory academic progress” with the federal minimum standard.

At the federal level, 39 nonprofit organizations sent a letter in August asking the U.S. Department of Education to clarify the rules around the SAP minimum requirements. And in Congress, Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat, is expected to re-introduce SAP-related legislation that would give students a second chance at aid.

Related: ‘Revolutionary housing’: How colleges aim to support formerly incarcerated students

The logic behind satisfactory academic progress rules is that giving aid to students who are unlikely to graduate is a bad investment, wasting students’ time and taxpayers’ dollars.

The policy was created in 1976, and at first, each college or university was left to set its own standards. Then, in a 1981 report to the Senate, the General Accounting Office said tougher ones were needed. Citing little evidence, the agency asserted that $1.28 million had been accessed inappropriately.

“It was Reaganomics and welfare reform and this idea of deserving and undeserving poor,” said Debbie Raucher, the director of education for John Burton Advocates for Youth, or JBAY, a California nonprofit. The stance was “if a student isn’t pulling their weight, they don’t deserve our help,” she said.

Under current federal rules, students must maintain a 2.0 GPA or higher, complete at least 67 percent of credits attempted and stay on track to finish a degree in no more than 150 percent of the time it usually takes (for example, six years for a four-year degree). During the Obama administration, SAP regulations were further tightened in an attempt to prevent low-performing for-profit institutions from lining their pockets with taxpayer dollars.

“SAP is my number one enemy, my arch nemesis.”

Elizabeth Clews, University of California, Santa Cruz student who was kicked off financial aid because of SAP requirements when attending community college

Once a student becomes ineligible for financial aid after failing to make SAP, that status stays with them forever.

Some students appeal, but that process can be complicated and riddled with inconsistencies. Campuses aren’t required to offer appeals. Those that do must limit  grounds to “the death of a relative, an injury or illness of the student, or other special circumstances,” according to federal regulations. What circumstances qualify as “special” varies tremendously. For example, some schools explicitly allow students to appeal if they are struggling to balance school and work demands, while others explicitly disallow appeals on the same grounds, according to a 2023 analysis by JBAY.

At 20, Clews didn’t know anything about an appeal, but two years later, she felt “this itch to try again,” and attempted to re-enroll at Ventura. When she got a similar notification, a more mature Clews “decided to do some investigating.” She had experienced homelessness and food insecurity, but didn’t see those circumstances on the appeals list. Her takeaway was: “Oh, well you didn’t die, you didn’t get your leg cut off, so there’s no reason that you shouldn’t have been successful.”

So Clews worked as a waitress and in retail for the next five years.

“It was Reaganomics and welfare reform and this idea of deserving and undeserving poor.”

Debbie Raucher, the director of education for John Burton Advocates for Youth

This turn of events was, in part, the luck of the draw. Some schools are more stringent than the federal rules require: For example, JBAY identified 10 colleges in California that mandate a course completion rate between 70 and 80 percent, not 67. Some institutions require a 2.0 GPA every term, while others consider SAP satisfied if a student’s cumulative GPA is above the threshold. In deciding whether students are progressing fast enough, some colleges include remedial coursework and classes taken in pursuit of an old major, while others don’t. Raucher, of JBAY, said Ventura’s currently posted policy isn’t significantly stricter than average, but wouldn’t have offered Clews “the full leniency allowed by federal regs.” (A Ventura representative said in an email that the school follows federal and state guidelines.)

Fearful of government audits, financial aid administrators tend to take a conservative view of the regulations, Raucher said.

Both JBAY’s analysis and a 2016 study place the number of students who don’t meet SAP requirements at more than 20 percent of Pell grant aid recipients, with that share higher for community college students.

“This is not a fringe issue that 1 percent of students are facing,” Raucher said.

Related: Overdue tuition and fees — as little as $41 — derail hundreds of thousands of California college students

Glendale Community College’s Tangalakis, who has served at four different colleges in her 22-year career, said the policy can undermine colleges’ equity efforts. Institutions must demand rigor, she said, and that’s why they have an “academic progress” requirement for all students that is distinct from SAP.

But since SAP standards are sometimes stricter than the schools’ individual policies, Tangalakis said, low-income students “have to meet a higher standard simply because they have financial need.” The appeals process also often results in staff laying “a lot of unnecessary judgment” on students, she said, and may retraumatize students, who can be asked to prove hardships such as domestic violence.

“Ultimately, it’s just a very powerful message that says you don’t belong here,” Tangalakis said.

Two analyses place the number of students who don’t meet SAP requirements at more than 20 percent of aid recipients, with that share higher for community college students

After taking on a senior role at Glendale, she made changes. Tangalakis instructed her team to assess SAP using the most liberal interpretation of the federal regulations and to handle appeals generously, allowing consideration of anything a student thinks relevant and accepting a statement completed online or via phone (rather than demanding documentation from third parties as some schools do).

The result has been striking: According to Tangalakis, the share of students who lost aid for failing to make SAP fell from 9.3 percent in 2017 to 6.4 percent in 2021. And she found that students who failed SAP in 2021 went on to complete degrees and certificates at a significantly higher rate than those who’d failed in 2017. These gains were even larger for students from traditionally disadvantaged backgrounds. 

Other research confirms SAP’s disparate impact along racial lines: In 2021, for example, JBAY found that Black students, Native American students and foster youth who received a Pell Grant ran afoul of SAP provisions at more than twice the rate of white, Filipino and Asian students.

In theory, if students who “SAP-out” find another way to pay for college, they can requalify for aid if they improve academically. But for most students, that creates a Catch-22, Raucher said: They can’t re-enroll without financial aid, and they can’t get financial aid without re-enrolling. State aid that bypasses SAP status can springboard adults returning to college out of that Catch-22. But most don’t offer it.

“Ultimately, it’s just a very powerful message that says you don’t belong here.”

Christina Tangalakis, associate dean of financial aid at Glendale Community College in Southern California

In practice, this means that students who fall short of SAP standards are significantly more likely to drop out. In the 2016 study of one unnamed community college system, for example, the majority of those who failed SAP, approximately 60 percent, dropped out. For many students, “there is no plan B,” Tangalakis said, and SAP is “just a de facto end to their academic journey a lot of times.”

Even just receiving a SAP warning can produce that result: An analysis of data from Minnesota community colleges, for example, showed that only half of students who received a notice that they were in danger of failing to make SAP in the fall of 2013 tried to return that spring.

That, it turns out, is what happened to Clews. The message she initially received from Ventura was a warning, not notice that she was already ineligible. A financial aid deposit for what would have been her second semester showed up in her bank account, but by then she’d left the area to try to find reliable shelter and employment. Of course, when she didn’t show up for those classes, she officially failed SAP. (The money was taken out of her tax refund.)

Related: Is California saving higher education?

Years later, the pandemic hit and Clews found herself in an unusual position – with free time. Yes, she was home-schooling two kids, but with restaurants and stores closed, she couldn’t work. She said she filed an appeal letter but couldn’t receive aid while it was pending. Normally, that would have meant no school, but like millions of Americans that year, Clews received pandemic stimulus checks from the federal government.

After reenrolling with that money, her GPA shot up. Clews said, “I was doing really well, and I realized, ‘Oh, it wasn’t that I wasn’t smart enough, I just didn’t have the resources and the support that I needed to be successful.’ ”

That jibes with a small 2021 interview study that did not detect a difference in motivation between Pell-eligible students who were meeting SAP and those who weren’t. The study suggests that students who fail SAP requirements often do so because their life circumstances are different, not because they’re less “cut out” to succeed academically. Other research shows that students who SAP-out stop pursuing a degree more often than their peers with similarly low GPAs who aren’t subject to SAP.

“What SAP policies end up doing is targeting students who are coming in with the biggest existing barriers, and then doubling down,” said Raucher, whose organization helped develop the California SAP reform bill.

That legislation, which passed unanimously, requires that colleges use the least stringent definition of SAP allowed by the federal regulations for state financial aid, in effect dictating how all aid is administered. It also encourages colleges to better communicate the policy to students and mandates changes to the appeal system, including creating a review process for denied appeals, and prohibits institutions from disenrolling a student for nonpayment of tuition while an appeal is pending.

The federal legislation Booker, the Democratic senator, is expected to introduce would be similar to a bill he proposed in 2020, allowing a renewal of SAP eligibility when a student “stops out” for two years or more. The 2020 bill didn’t advance in Congress, but Booker may have a co-sponsor this time around, as talks with several Republican senators are in progress.

“The satisfactory academic progress standard is not without its flaws,” said Virginia Foxx, a Republican congresswoman from North Carolina who serves as chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. “Senator Booker’s bill isn’t perfect, but I am always willing to find common ground to improve policies and outcomes for students.”

In the meantime, organizations including JBAY and the national nonprofit Higher Learning Advocates have asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to encourage schools to make the appeals process more user-friendly, among other changes. Tanya Ang, managing director of Higher Learning Advocates, said reforming SAP has bipartisan support because eliminating “unnecessary hoops” for degree completion helps more people gain skills they can use in the workforce.  

In theory, stringent SAP requirements tell students where they stand and force them to improve. But the 2016 study didn’t find that SAP policies had much of an incentivizing effect, on average.

The message Clews received was the opposite: Don’t try. Because if at first you don’t succeed, there’s no chance to try, try again.

In 2022, she completed her classwork at Ventura and transferred to the University of California, Santa Cruz. Clews plans to become a teacher. “I’m thankful to be where I’m at,” she said, “but I definitely feel like it shouldn’t have been so hard to get back to school.”

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

The post The hidden financial aid hurdle derailing college students appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

LOS ANGELES — Citrus College was Kyshawna Johnson’s third attempt at higher education. 

She first enrolled in a community college at age 18 while living with her grandmother, who was her foster care guardian. But the house was too chaotic to focus on studies, and without support, Johnson dropped out. She gave it another go at 19, but said when foster care support money stopped, she was forced to leave her grandmother’s house and college.

Her aunt and uncle offered her a room in 2016, and for nearly eight months, Johnson experienced a stable, calm home. She enrolled again and excelled at Citrus in Glendora. But her housing arrangement didn’t last. All her apartment applications were rejected, even though she could afford the rent from jobs at T.J. Maxx and a movie theater. She bounced from one friend’s couch to another. Then she lived in her car for six months, each night trying to find a parking spot under a streetlight.

“It was just scary,” she said. Her grades fell to Ds, and she thought, “College just may not be for me.”

But before dropping out a third time, Johnson connected with Jovenes Inc., an East Los Angeles nonprofit that helps homeless youth. The organization paid for her to stay in a room in a woman’s house. Finally, she had a place “just to be, and focus.”

For many former foster care students like Johnson — young adults with few resources to navigate independence — housing instability is a major impediment to completing a college degree. Nationally, reports indicate that 20 to 40 percent of youth aging out of foster care lack stable housing. Housing-insecure students take fewer classes, earn fewer credits and are more likely to leave college before graduating, research shows.

California has made significant moves to offer housing assistance to students with foster care experience, yet a comprehensive solution that identifies these students early and offers housing well-suited to their needs remains elusive.

One model gaining popularity is called “college-focused rapid rehousing,” which received $19 million in state funding during the 2022-23 school year across California’s three higher education systems. Sometimes Jovenes master-leases apartments for students to live in while working with a case manager to find a more permanent solution. Other times, as in Johnson’s case, the organization offers a rental subsidy. The goal is to provide a place to live right away and a path to self-sufficiency. For example, at first a participant might pay little or nothing for their living space, then housing costs incrementally increase.

Another fix is dorms. But such housing is a rarity at community colleges, where most former foster care students begin their higher education. With state funding help, several of California’s community colleges have plans to build housing, but space is not specifically dedicated to students from the foster care system.

Advocates say investing in both the Jovenes model and a new type of dorm designed for community college students with foster care experience could significantly change their dim college prospects.

Related: California helps college students cut their debt by paying them to help their communities

Students with foster care backgrounds often must overcome hurdles rooted in their K-12 education. In California, these youth — who disproportionately identify as LGBTQ+ and Black — are more likely to be chronically absent, attend high-poverty schools and experience disruption because of transfers.

Those who do enter college are often less academically prepared and are more likely to require significant financial and mental health support. Like Johnson, they typically work more hours than ideal for a college student.

Among 18-year-old young adults with foster care experience, more than 80 percent said they wanted to complete a degree from a four-year college. But only 4.8 percent had attained that goal four years later, according to the California Youth Transitions to Adulthood Study.

“Housing is probably the number one challenge that foster students face,” said Debbie Raucher of John Burton Advocates for Youth, a California nonprofit that helps youth who have been in foster care or homeless.

A 2015 study found that students who had experienced homelessness were 13 times more likely to have failed college courses and 11 times more likely to have withdrawn from them or failed to register.

Johnson said Jovenes “gave me a chance, and my life turned around.” Her grades shot up to all As. She applied to Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma and received a full scholarship, including housing.

Related: ‘Revolutionary housing’: How colleges aim to support formerly incarcerated students

A major move to disrupt the foster-to-homelessness pipeline at the federal level began with legislation in 2008 that helped states extend foster care services from 18 to 21 years of age.

Since then, California lawmakers have passed a slew of budget expansions and laws to benefit students with foster care experience. In 2009, for example, the state passed legislation requiring many schools to give them priority for on-campus housing. In 2015, the state required some colleges to allow them to stay in dorms over academic breaks for free.

California has also gradually expanded their financial aid and increased funding for campus-based support programs, which include NextUp, Guardian Scholars, and more. Recently, the state increased foster student rent subsidies in higher cost-of-living areas.

But holes remain.

Young people who exited the foster system before age 18, for example, typically don’t qualify for extended services, including a government program that gives housing support through age 24.

For those who qualify for rental subsidies, the California market is so tight that appropriate units, especially close to campus, are rarely available. Plus, students with foster experience struggle to find landlords who will rent to them because they rarely have co-signers, solid credit histories or first and last month’s rent.

Some research suggests that on-campus housing provides the most stable living arrangement for them. But even increased financial aid often doesn’t go far enough to cover all housing costs, said Raucher. Dorms can also be hard socially, because these students tend to be older, and many have children.

Related: Overdue tuition and fees – as little as $41 – derail hundreds of thousands of California college students

This is where Jovenes — and others like it — come in. The organization’s College Success Initiative supports students attending 10 L.A. County colleges. At least 30 percent of Jovenes clients have known foster care experience, said Eric Hubbard, a Jovenes leader.

Jovenes case managers meet with their counterparts on college campuses to give students with foster care experience the support others often get from parents: help connecting with therapists and finding apartments to rent, vouching for them with landlords and financial support.

Academic achievement “skyrockets,” Hubbard said, “once you place someone in an environment where you don’t have to worry about where you’re going to sleep.”

When students at Cerritos College were housed by Jovenes, they became significantly more likely than the rest of the student body to receive a degree in two years and matriculate at a four-year institution, he said.

In 2019, California passed legislation meant to replicate the Jovenes model, and the number of students served has grown.

During the 2021-22 academic year, eight CSU campuses referred students and funneled about $5.2 million to Jovenes and eight other housing providers throughout the state. The program served 1,598 CSU students in 2021-22, up 40% from the year before. Those helped showed a 91% retention or graduation rate, according to a CSU report.

However, the Jovenes model is expensive — roughly $10,000 to $20,000 a year per student according to Hubbard — because it covers not only housing, but also support services and program administration. Another downside is that a significant chunk of money ultimately goes to private landlords.

Some are advocating for community-college based dorms dedicated specifically to students with foster care experience as a more sustainable solution. 

Raucher sees cause for optimism. The state recently allocated funds to build subsidized dorms on community college campuses and passed additional legislation to fast-track the effort.

Meanwhile, a bill introduced in the state Senate in February, which is eligible to move forward next year, would amend California’s financial aid programs to guarantee housing for students with foster care experience.

Johnson, who graduated from Oral Roberts with a 3.9 GPA in April 2022, said she is devoted to turning around the lives of students whose experiences she knows all too well.

She accepted a job with Jovenes as a live-in resident manager at one of the larger buildings, and she said she’s trying to be that “one caring adult” research shows is so important to the educational success of students.

This story about Jovenes 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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DAVIS, Calif. — Only streetlights cut the darkness as University of California, Davis student Malik Vega-Tatum climbed into his car on a Wednesday morning in January. After arriving at La Tourangelle Community Garden in Woodland 20 minutes later, he got right to work, using a hoe to tend frost-kissed rows.

Since the school year began, Vega-Tatum has given more than 356 hours of his time to Yolo Farm to Fork, a nonprofit that supports school gardens and farm-based education. In exchange, he will receive $700 a month for 10 months from the #CaliforniansForAll College Corps program, class credit and experience with food production science. When he reaches the 450-hour mark, he’ll get a $3,000 award. He’ll graduate with $10,000 less debt and with work experience he hopes will give him an edge when he applies to medical school next year.

Vega-Tatum has held jobs before, but College Corps is different. Conceived as a domestic Peace Corps or “California GI Bill,” it is designed to help students pay for college while facilitating community service throughout California to help the state tackle some of its most pressing challenges. Some 3,200 students, many of them the first in their families to attend college, are participating in the inaugural year of the New Deal-esque program, in service jobs in K-12 education, food insecurity and climate mitigation.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose administration launched the program, has called it a way “to restore the social contract between government and its citizens,” one “that says if you work hard and dedicate yourself in service to others, you will be rewarded with opportunity.” The participants, who attend 46 educational institutions from College of the Siskiyous near the Oregon border to the University of San Diego, need opportunity.

Sixty-eight percent of College Corps fellows are low income, in a state where the average student loan debt is roughly $37,000. More than 15 percent have lived in California for years, but lack the immigration documentation necessary to qualify for most financial aid. The creators of the program hope other states will replicate it. Yet critics and academics have raised concerns about its high price tag and administrative overhead, and the fellows’ experiences make it clear that the program is no panacea.

Related: Debt without degree: The human cost of college debt that becomes ‘purgatory’

Up to 70 percent of undergraduate students work, but jobs have historically been seen as an academic hazard. “As you increase the number of hours you work, it crowds out opportunities for a host of things, from sleeping to studying,” said Anthony Abraham Jack, an assistant professor of education at Harvard University and author of “The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students.”

Yet working during college is also associated with increased earnings afterward. These findings hold across many controls, including socioeconomic status and work experience before college, suggesting that the relationship is causal. Working in college signals to employers “that this person has soft skills, that they can get there, that they can take direction, that they can collaborate as part of a team,” said Daniel Douglas, a researcher and lecturer at Trinity College who has studied the issue.

When work aligns with a student’s course of study, college jobs can also impart hard skills and build social networks. Low-income students are less likely to have those networks through family and acquaintances or be able to build them through unpaid internships. Jobs bring recommenders into the lives of students, which is especially important for transfer students like Vega-Tatum who don’t have as many years on campus to form bonds.

The 24-year-old now runs hurdles for the UC Davis track team while pursuing a double major in psychology and African American studies, and obstacles peppered his path off the track as well. Vega-Tatum grew up in Stockton, a community mostly known for its high crime rate, and played three sports in high school. “The plan was to get offers” from four-year colleges, he said, “and everything be paid for.” That didn’t happen. So he enrolled in community college before starting at UC Davis in the fall of 2020.

While Vega-Tatum nurtured seedlings on that Wednesday in January, UC Davis junior Markeia Warren, 19, arrived for her College Corps job as a teacher’s aide for a sixth-grade classroom at Patwin Elementary School in Davis.

The school looks different than hers did back in Inglewood, California, and not just because there are so many white faces, while Warren is one of the more than 80 percent of College Corps fellows considered a person of color. She wasn’t reading at age level in kindergarten, she said, so for first grade, she was placed in a Special Day Class, a setting that’s intended for students with severe disabilities. She languished there until seventh grade, reading “baby books like ‘Cat in the Hat,’” she recalled.

Her grandfather, who worked in a cookie factory, and her mother, who was a caregiver for the elderly, didn’t know enough about the education system to question it. Even after Warren excelled in high school and was told she should apply to college, she thought, “I don’t think I’m what college is supposed to look like … and I don’t think I can pay for it.”

But she made it work with financial aid plus 30 hours of work a week at a gas station. “It was pretty stressful,” she said, “I’d be like, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t have time to do this assignment.’”

Warren learned about College Corps from an email targeting first-generation students and thought, “I’m not going to waste my time.” But then, she said, “I saw that big dollar sign and was like, ‘You know what? Let me pull up.’” Now she’s been able to spend time at Patwin and on classes instead of the gas station. Looking back on elementary school, “it seemed like no one cared,” Warren said, “So that’s why I want to work in education, because I know there may be students who feel like that.”

She laughed as she added, “Markeia Warren shall fix the system.”

Related: Unpaid college fees keep thousands of students from graduating

In a sense, she’s already helping to do that. Staffing issues plagued many school districts before the pandemic, and then got more dire. At Patwin, Principal Ben Kingsbury said he’s had to cover for absent teachers and aides and cope with a big drop in volunteer support from parents. “Everything gets stretched thinner and thinner,” he said, until there’s a point where “if we lose one more person, things stop working.”

College Corps fellows provide “extra eyes and ears, and it just makes the whole system less fragile,” said Kingsbury. While schools and community organizations often struggle with episodic volunteerism, the yearlong commitment — perhaps more, if the fellows apply for a second year — means “you can build capacity and students can get something out of that,” he said.

Of course, long-term volunteers have been placed at schools through the federal AmeriCorps program for decades. But those grants can be hard to manage for smaller school districts and the nonprofits the College Corps program targets, said Stacey Muse, who was the executive director of Nevada Volunteers before being hired by UC Davis in part to assist with College Corps.

College Corps addresses other shortcomings of federal programs. Federal Work-Study, which reaches 600,000 students each year with a budget of roughly $1 billion, typically offers students $2,340 to work part time on campus, which isn’t enough to cover their expenses. Yet, if they work additional jobs, they can lose their eligibility for federal financial aid. And research has found that the program disproportionately benefits students at more expensive institutions.

In contrast, under a pandemic-era waiver from the U.S. Department of Education, the $10,000 that students receive via College Corps doesn’t count against their federal financial aid eligibility. There’s no guarantee, though, that the waiver will be extended.

College Corps also benefits students like Elena Orozco, 36, who are excluded from federal financial aid and Federal Work-Study. “I am undocumented, so my family, the help that’s available, it’s not very much,” said Orozco, a student at Sacramento City College who moved to California from Mexico with her mother when she was 4.

Before College Corps, she juggled classes while supporting her young son by working in restaurants, sometimes two shifts a day, never knowing how much money she’d bring in or when she’d be free to reclaim the sleeping boy from relatives. Each time he got sick, she worried about getting fired. Now that she’s a fellow, working at an organization that supports primarily non-English-speaking families, she can pick her 9-year-old up from his after-school program and spend the evening with him.

But not all student parents can participate in College Corps, because of its requirement of a full-time course load. And working out in the community, rather than on campus, has downsides. “The more time you spend away from campus, the smaller the window for you to access institutional resources” like “career services, mental health services,” said Jack, the Harvard professor.

As an undergrad at Amherst, Jack had the opportunity to see four-star generals, doctors, poets, activists and more. Missing out on those events doesn’t just come at a cultural and educational price; it also affects something else research shows is essential to collegiate success: belonging.

“Eighty percent of college happens outside of class time,” Jack said. “When you see your peers are able to go to any and every event that you can’t,” he added, “it can eat at a student’s sense of belonging.”

The College Corps program costs about $155 million a year, more than $146 million of which is paid by the state.

Markeia Warren said she doesn’t have time to attend events of the sort Jack described, since she works for Target and California Youth Connection, an organization focused on transforming foster care, on top of her hours at Patwin. But the College Corps work feels meaningful: “It doesn’t feel like I’m working,” she said. “It feels like I’m having fun.”

She does, however, go to EDU 198, Davis’ mandatory College Corps class. Sessions cover job training topics like understanding nonprofit organization structures and what to watch out for in a Craigslist job posting (for example, cash-only, a too-good-to-be-true wage, typos, text shorthand like “pls,” and the offer to work from home).

Vega-Tatum said the class has helped him build a bit of a community on campus. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, we’re just classmates,’” he said. “It’s more like, ‘We’re in this together.’”

Related: ‘Revolutionary’ housing: How colleges aim to support formerly incarcerated students

The College Corps program costs about $155 million a year, more than $146 million of which is paid by the state. The rest comes from federal AmeriCorps money. More than half the program’s budget goes to College Corps’ administrative overhead, which includes the salaries of student advisers (each of whom works with about 40 fellows, far lower than the typical caseload), and those who manage relationships with the program’s 600 partner organizations.

Critics have said that administrative share is too high, but Josh Fryday disagrees. “Service programs don’t work if you just throw people out there and say, ‘Go serve,’” said Fryday, a former Navy officer who is California’s chief service officer, a cabinet-level position created under the Newsom administration. “It’s not like your defense budget is just hiring a bunch of soldiers to just go out there and do it. You have to have an entire infrastructure and support system to actually allow them to do their job.”

Fryday said he and Newsom were inspired by the concept of service embraced by Sargent Shriver and Robert F. Kennedy, and also by research on the power of volunteering to stave off anxiety and depression and underemployment statistics (41 percent of college graduates ages 22 to 27 are underemployed, meaning they are working in jobs that typically do not require a college degree).

“Let’s deal with, one, the student debt crisis, but let’s also deal head-on with the crisis of our democracy where people feel very isolated from each other,” Fryday recalled. The state has since launched several volunteerism programs that double as workforce development, including ones open to youth not on the college track.

“As you increase the number of hours you work, it crowds out opportunities for a host of things, from sleeping to studying.” Anthony Abraham Jack, an assistant professor of education at Harvard University

Anthony Abraham Jack, an assistant professor of education at Harvard University

“We believe strongly the federal government should be doing this, and every state should be doing this,” said Fryday. He said the state has contracted with the education research group WestEd to complete a two-year evaluation of the program’s impact on college completion and other measures.

For an individual, especially at a community college, participating could mean “the difference between them graduating or being able to successfully transfer to a four-year institution or not,” Jack said. “California is a model” in that sense, but “this is not a cure-all” for low-income students, he said.

Indeed, Vega-Tatum describes a mixed bag. On the one hand, the program offers him the flexible scheduling that research shows is more conducive to academic success. He can shape his work hours around exams and ice baths after track practice. And food production and nutrition tie into Vega-Tatum’s intellectual interests and his desire to give back to communities like his, which have a lot more going on than just gun violence, he said. That makes his hours in the garden a far cry from the ones he spent hiding in the bathroom of a warehouse he was working in at the time, thinking, “What am I even doing here?”

At the same time, he said, “Work is work.” After heading home to grab a shower and a handful of snacks that Wednesday, Vega-Tatum got in a workout, went to a biology professor’s office hours, prepared a study guide, went to a class, and, at 7 p.m., sat for an exam. Afterward, he drove home, ate dinner, did homework, and made a to-do list for the next day. At 11:40, he turned off his light, his alarm set for 5 a.m. so he could make it back to the garden by daybreak.

Warren sleeps even less. But the monthly disbursement from College Corps pays for almost two-thirds of her rent. The way she sees it, “You’re literally getting paid to pursue your dreams.” She added: “I started pursuing my passion at 19. I don’t know people that can say that, especially from where I grew up.”

This story about College Corps 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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FULLERTON, Calif. — On an unremarkable November morning, Jimmie Conner is hunched over his laptop at a dining table in an open-concept kitchen flooded with light. The fourth-year student at California State University, Fullerton, lives in the John Irwin House, a residence for formerly incarcerated students just over four miles from the CSUF campus. The house, in a pleasant Orange County neighborhood with a park, a reservoir, and horse stables, is furnished in a modular style. Two chairs by the fireplace sit ready for one-on-one tutoring, a cluster of ottomans nearby can accommodate a study group, and spaces to hunker down with a book or notes abound: a couch by the front door layered with pillows and blankets, a desk tucked into a corner, a fire table on the patio, and a backyard. Before living here, Conner was at a halfway house, and for the 14 years before that, he was in prison, most recently at the California Men’s Colony.

The walls of the John Irwin House are more window than anything else, like another space at CSUF designed for formerly incarcerated students: the library’s “study and hangout place,” with its sparkling floor-to-ceiling panes, formally known as the Center for Hope and Redemption. Amid all this glass, Conner feels a bit like Cinderella—lucky to be getting an educational experience that’s a perfect fit for him.

Colleges and universities are expecting an influx of students like Conner soon. The vast majority of incarcerated people are currently ineligible to receive Pell Grants, federal financial aid for low-income students. But that decades-long ban will end this summer, thanks to legislation passed in 2020. Nicholas Turner, the president of the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform, estimates that more than 767,000 people will be able to apply for funds to pursue a credential or a degree through an in-prison education program. At least 95 percent of the people in American prisons are eventually released, with more than 600,000 released each year. These numbers make it clear that the United States will soon have many more people reentering society prepared to attend classes on a college campus.

A significant percentage of these new students will face such substantial barriers that they won’t return for a second semester. That’s a loss for society, for formerly incarcerated individuals, and for the college communities to which they would otherwise have made valuable contributions.

It’s a loss that the John Irwin House has a track record of forestalling. Since the residence’s opening in 2018, 21 CSUF students have been given safe, secure housing with wraparound services provided by formerly incarcerated staff members who reinforce a culture of striving and mattering. Twenty of the 21 have either graduated or remain in school, and several are pursuing advanced degrees. The model has been so successful that colleges and universities around the country are exploring plans to reproduce what one staff member calls a “revolutionary” housing solution.

“My parents didn’t gangbang, but my brothers did,” says the 32-year-old Conner, recounting his childhood in Compton, Calif., as he sits at the sleek desk in his pristine bedroom. His brothers encouraged him to focus on school instead, he says, but “you see them with girls and cars and money and think, ‘Hey, this must be the lifestyle.’” He adds, “Differential association—I learned that in one of my criminal theory classes.” He joined their gang when he was 10, already knowing everyone’s name and how to throw up signs.

His first arrest was at age 12. A couple years later, he was present at a shooting. Under the old felony murder rule, which California reformed in 2019, Conner was charged as if he’d pulled the trigger. He didn’t want to take the plea deal, but he couldn’t say “It wasn’t me” without being labeled “a rat or whatever,” he says. Plus, the loved one who fired the shot would have faced life in prison if the case had gone to trial. So Conner took the deal and, at age 14, was sentenced to 17 years behind bars.

The majority of people sent to prison enter without a high school diploma or a GED certificate, yet almost 70 percent of those who are incarcerated hope to obtain a postsecondary credential. Ultimately, less than 4 percent of them graduate from college, compared with the nation’s overall rate of 29 percent, according to a 2018 report. Meanwhile, roughly two-thirds of well-paying jobs are projected to require a bachelor’s degree or higher by 2031, as the US labor market’s share of unskilled employment continues to decline.

Project Rebound, the California State University program that runs the John Irwin House, was established in 1967 to support formerly incarcerated students at San Francisco State University. It now spans 15 CSU campuses, where it offers academic counseling, opportunities to network, financial advice, tutoring, a community, help in accessing campus resources, financial aid, and more. At CSUF, 106 students participate, bringing the total to more than 300 since 2016. Eight of them live in the John Irwin House, named for Project Rebound’s founder.

The proponents of programs like Project Rebound often cite recidivism numbers to justify their existence, and they’re right: Higher education significantly reduces the likelihood that a person will be sent back to prison. Formerly incarcerated people who participate in postsecondary education programs are 48 percent less likely to be incarcerated again than those who do not—and with each degree they attain, the rate drops. For Project Rebound participants, the recidivism rate is less than 1 percent; for John Irwin House residents, it’s zero.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, I gotta get more of these; I gotta get into college.’ I became a crackhead to education.”

Jimmie Conner, student at California State University, Fullerton, and resident at John Irwin House

But recidivism is just one measure. College degrees are also linked to higher rates of engagement in activities like voting and volunteerism. Those who hold them are less likely to live in poverty, rely on public assistance, or be in poor health, and these effects are passed down through generations. For people who have been incarcerated, college graduation translates to higher wages, more hours worked, and lower unemployment. Though a degree doesn’t erase the stigma of a criminal record, it can shift an employer’s focus from seeing the candidate as a liability to seeing them as someone with potential.

When he was incarcerated, Conner spent a lot of his time reading, but at first he had no intention of enrolling in anything. He was just chasing down a fascination he’d harbored from third grade until he was put in handcuffs in middle school: space. “Anything that involved astronomy, physics, I read it,” he says. A peer in the prison noticed his reading and signed him up for a GED class. Conner was skeptical, but once he had that certificate in hand, “I was like, ‘Yeah, I gotta get more of these. I gotta get into college.’ I became a crackhead to education.”

Related: From prison to dean’s list: How Danielle Metz got an education after incarceration

Conner made a case for transferring to the California Men’s Colony because it offered community college courses. “To us, it was like Harvard,” he says. There, his grades were good enough that he qualified for release one year early. In the months that followed, Conner lived in a halfway house, working a warehouse job and taking classes at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, with the goal of transferring to CSUF. But when he was accepted, Conner knew it would be too expensive to take an Amtrak train and a bus each day from his parole-approved housing 30 miles away. So he told Project Rebound staff, with whom he’d been in touch since writing them a letter from prison, “I’m gonna get a car. I’ll just sleep in my car.”

Housing challenges like Conner’s are hardly unusual. Study after study lists housing as a primary barrier to educational access for formerly incarcerated students. Formerly incarcerated people are nearly 10 times more likely to be homeless. They are often prohibited from living in public housing or on campus. Landlords tend to deny their applications. Some are forced to crash in costly motels or couch-surf.

While housing designed for formerly incarcerated people does exist, it often isn’t ideal for students: Transitional housing tends to be located far from campus, often in high-poverty neighborhoods, and comes with requirements that conflict with class times and make it hard to learn (such as blackout periods on electronic devices). And for those who live with family, there can be a host of pressures that make academic success difficult.

Instead of getting a car, Conner accepted an invitation to dinner at the John Irwin House, where, unbeknownst to him, he was vetted to ensure that he’d left “prison politics” behind. As a resident there, Conner would be expected to contribute a third of his take-home pay as rent each month. Two-thirds of that money would go toward the house’s upkeep, and the rest would be put in a savings account, to be returned to him when he moved out.

To help free him from a correctional mindset, Project Rebound wouldn’t test Conner for drugs or tell him when to eat meals or turn off his lights. He would have a curfew, but one that allowed him to attend evening classes and discussion groups (11 PM on weekdays). He knew he’d also have to maintain a GPA of 3.0 or higher, attend workshops, and participate in Project Rebound’s community service programs. What Conner didn’t realize he’d be signing up for was a new extended family.

Romarilyn Ralston is now the executive director of the CSUF branch of Project Rebound. But back in 2016, she was hired in part to answer the mail. Weeks into the job, Ralston announced, “We need a house,” because so many of the applicants’ letters mentioned housing insecurity. She wanted to house “people who are deserving of a quality life,” she says, but “most of all we wanted them to have a community of people who understood how things sometimes can go the wrong way…. There are 48,000 collateral consequences [of incarceration] that exist to trip you up, but all you need is one community to help pick you up.”

In 2017, Ralston had been the one to pick up James “JC” Cavitt, who came running into her office as an undergraduate on the verge of quitting his first job on campus. Cavitt had been assigned to read e-mails, make edits, and forward the revised information, but since he was straight out of prison, he says, “I didn’t know how to operate e-mail. I didn’t know what an attachment was.” Ralston gave him a crash course, and Cavitt—who has since graduated and received a master’s degree—says his life trajectory was forever changed. He now works as the program director for CSUF’s Project Rebound and is pursuing a PhD at a private university nearby.

But Cavitt wouldn’t have felt comfortable asking Ralston for help had he not known that she’d spent 23 years in prison herself—one more than he had. He says college administrators and faculty rarely understand the “trauma of incarceration [or] the unique needs of our population.”

One of those needs is a dedicated space to escape the well-documented stigma of incarceration on college campuses. This protective effect is especially important for Black men like Conner and Cavitt. Studies have noted their “double disadvantage,” and Conner has lived it: When he went jogging between classes at CSUF, people would cross the street to avoid him.

Cavitt says that he, too, has gotten looks that communicated: “What are you doing here?” It’s a question that formerly incarcerated students, who are often in the grip of impostor syndrome, tend to ask themselves. But there’s an evidence-backed antidote to that malady: a sense of belonging. Students who feel they belong tend to be more engaged; they enjoy school more, achieve at a higher level, and are less likely to leave without a degree.

But belonging can be hard. Conner had trouble relating to his peers’ precollegiate experiences. Most are at least 10 years younger, so when they were watching Disney’s latest release or playing soccer at recess, he was in prison learning how to fashion a knife from a CD case. At 18, he witnessed a man being stabbed repeatedly right in front of him with an improvised plastic blade. Why? Because the man smelled like a stick of deodorant he wasn’t supposed to use.

Having lived through countless violent, unpredictable incidents like that, “I didn’t really like talking to people,” Conner says. When he first got to school, he kept to himself. At the house, he’d stay in his room. “You’re stuck in a cage all the time. You come home, and you put yourself in another cage unknowingly.”

Research shows that formerly incarcerated students can have difficulty building social connections and asking for help, because of the way incarceration erodes social trust and contributes to increased rates of PTSD. “People might think that’s a maladaptive response, but inside, that’s a survival mechanism,” says Yehudah Pryce, who lived in the John Irwin House as an undergraduate before completing a master’s degree and a doctorate in social work.

Related: Pipeline to prison: Special education too often leads to jail for thousands of American children 

Conner’s housemates understood, and they knew what to do: “They’d tell me, ‘Come out! Say hi to people!’” He did, and he learned that he could breathe around them—“like an exhale,” he says. Conner watched one of his housemates sit and study for hours at a time, “with his headphones on, typing away. That’s who we idolized; that’s who we wanted to be like.” So they mimicked him.

The men would cook for one another and, when work and school schedules allowed, watch TV or play video games. But when Cavitt visited during midterms and finals, “the house would be eerily silent,” he recalls. “They’d be like, ‘Nope, don’t bother me right now, I’m studying.’”

“The house would be eerie silent. They’d be like, ‘Nope, don’t bother me right now, I’m studying.’ ”

James “JC” Cavitt, program director for Project Rebound at California State University, Fullerton

That vibe was “sort of like osmosis” to Charles Jackson, 58. After he moved last fall, Jackson says, “my grades, my studying, everything has gotten better.” This is a common experience. Cavitt says the average GPA of Project Rebound participants is significantly higher than CSUF’s as a whole, and the average GPA of house residents is higher still. Eighty-eight percent of CSUF students who weren’t scheduled to graduate returned to school last fall; 96 percent of John Irwin House residents did. Of the house residents who have graduated, five out of six went on to pursue graduate degrees, and all of them are currently employed.

But wouldn’t living in a dorm also provide this kind of academic osmosis? For many formerly incarcerated students, that isn’t an option, for various reasons. Most dorms are available only nine months a year, and living on campus is prohibitively expensive. Many formerly incarcerated students don’t have family wealth, are required to pay court-imposed restitution, or, because of their age, have less time to pay off student loans. People who look “out of place” are also more likely to have their ID checked or have campus security called on them.

Moreover, dorms aren’t conducive to the requirements of probation and parole. The day after Jackson moved into the house, he says, his parole officer knocked on the door to request a drug test “and said, ‘Here. Here’s a cup.’” If that happened at a dorm and a set of earbuds later went missing, who would people suspect? And other people’s partying poses a risk: A roommate’s pills or a whiff of marijuana in the hall can be cited as a parole violation.

None of these concerns come into play at the John Irwin House. Residents don’t feel the need to look over their shoulders, to watch out for police helicopters or naysayers. Pryce says the ability to let his guard down or to pay just $80 for rent, because that’s a third of what a dishwashing job brings in, “was just such a weight off me…knowing that I didn’t have to come up with some money scheme.” It left more focus for studying, but also, he says, “I think more highly of myself that I’m worthy to be here.” And mentoring and encouragement are available 24/7. For all these reasons, he says, “that housing component—it’s just a total game changer.”

But would it be enough for Conner? He wanted to major in business and move to Silicon Valley after graduation, but in his first semester he failed a required math course. Then he found out his mom was dying. He took the class again and did his best while managing hospice care. He failed again.

“There are 48,000 collateral consequences [of incarceration] that exist to trip you up, but all you need is one community to help pick you up.”

Romarilyn Ralston, executive director of Project Rebound at California State University, Fullerton

Then his mother died, and Conner was devastated. “That was a lot of pressure,” he says. “I got my brother calling me from prison every single day, and I’m the decision-maker. I gotta help pay for the funeral.” It was all too much. Something had to go. So one day in 2020, Conner let Cavitt know that he was done with Project Rebound and would be moving out of the house.

“I saw my little brother just literally crumble,” Cavitt says. They talked about the logistics of living elsewhere, including costs like electricity, water, trash, and Wi-Fi that Conner hadn’t considered “because he’d been incarcerated pretty much all of his life.” Cavitt had lost his own mother the year before, and they talked about grief and how it can exacerbate a person’s tendency to withdraw. Cavitt remembers leveling with him: “I said, ‘Little brother, you’re doing it again…. You are pulling away instead of leaning into the community that is here to help you and support you and wrap their arms around you through this difficult time.’”

Conner was given a bitter pill, Cavitt says, but he swallowed it.

When the expansion of the Pell Grant program goes into effect next school year and more Americans leave prison ready to begin or complete bachelor’s degrees, few campuses will be ready.

The small number of colleges that run education programs in prison tend to cobble together housing for those who enroll in classes on campus after their release, often through referrals or in graduate student housing or “dry” dorms. The Prison Education Project at Washington University in St. Louis puts students in touch with sympathetic landlords who are willing to overlook their lack of a credit history through “an informal, pick-up-the-phone pipeline,” says Kevin Windhauser, the program’s director. A few other universities give them housing subsidies, which is essentially what CSUF does for female Project Rebound participants faced with housing insecurity, since they tend to be custodial parents.

But most colleges provide no housing support designed for these students. Research indicates that only around one-third of California’s colleges offer any services tailored to formerly incarcerated students, let alone housing, and that 72 percent of those are community colleges. Turner, of the Vera Institute, says the national numbers are surely much lower, since “what’s happening in California is the leading edge.”

But more Irwin-style housing is on the way. The nonprofit Thrive for Life has run a house for formerly incarcerated students in New York City since 2019, including some enrolled at New York University and Columbia, and it’s forging partnerships with additional schools, such as Marquette University, which plans to open a house in Milwaukee next fall. Project Rebound is in the process of opening new houses at Sacramento State and Fresno State, and Renford Reese, a professor at Cal Poly Pomona and the founder of the Prison Education Project, has developed plans for lots he owns in Pomona. If he finds an investor, his projects will serve approximately 60 formerly incarcerated students taking classes at Cal Poly Pomona, Pitzer College, and Mt. San Antonio College.

Related: Opinion — Prison learning must be high quality and lead to a degree

Julie O’Heir, the director of the Prison Education Program at Saint Louis University, is attempting to replicate the Project Rebound model there but cites two primary impediments—finances and staffing—that boil down to a budgeting issue. At CSUF, rent from the residents covers a tiny portion of the John Irwin House’s operating expenses. Brady Heiner, an associate professor who founded the Project Rebound program at CSUF and has served as its executive director, says that to establish proof of concept, the house initially relied on philanthropic investments from several foundations.

After four years of running the John Irwin House out of a rental home, Heiner and others brought the program’s success to the attention of state legislators. In 2021, California allocated $5 million to Project Rebound. Part of CSUF’s piece of that pie—supplemented by money from the school’s capital fund, a private donation, and a matching gift—went toward buying its current home.

However, that onetime lump sum “is not enough to sustain us over the long term,” says Heiner, who is now the interim executive director of the overarching CSU Project Rebound Consortium. To keep the John Irwin House open, Project Rebound will have to keep fundraising.

Those who study the issue find this state of affairs frustrating. Melissa Abeyta, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and a cochair of NASPA’s Formerly Incarcerated Students and System Impacted Families Knowledge Community, says: “Across the nation, we have universities with Greek houses. Why would this student population not be deserving of similar residential halls?”

The practice of affinity housing is well established, and many colleges have a program like the First-Generation Living Learning Community at the University of Texas at Austin “for first-generation college students to connect on a deeper level.” Members of sports teams often live together, and the University of California, Berkeley, offers extensive co-op housing with, for example, a building for vegetarians. In other words, colleges and universities know how to do affinity housing.

And “they have the money,” says Stanley Andrisse, an assistant professor at the Howard University College of Medicine who runs the nonprofit Prison to Professionals and its transitional house for formerly incarcerated scholars in Baltimore. “It’s about whether they have the interest or the willingness.”

Abeyta observes that, partly because they don’t understand the benefits, “some college presidents are very uncomfortable with the idea of having formerly incarcerated students on campus.” A 2022 study, citing Abeyta’s work, concluded that formerly incarcerated Latinx students possess a unique mix of knowledge and abilities drawn from their time in prison and on the streets. Abeyta has called these assets “carceral capital.”

Less than 4 percent of people released from prison ever graduate from college, compared with the nation’s overall rate of 29 percent, despite an estimated 70 percent aspiring to obtain a postsecondary credential.

Andrisse has it. Before he became a research scientist, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison on three felony convictions. “I made a good amount of money selling drugs, and those same skills that got me locked up, I’m still using those skills to secure million-dollar grants,” he says. Project Rebound participants say professors rely on them to start classroom discussions and persuade younger students to attend office hours and tutoring. Formerly incarcerated students also serve as role models of what Ralston calls “grit and grind.”

“They are additive to our campus, just like our veterans,” says CSUF’s president, Framroze Virjee. Virjee supported the John Irwin House from the beginning, and the first time he visited it, he cried. “There but for the grace of God goes any one of us,” he says, describing “amazing people who got caught up in things.”

When one house resident was close to dropping out, Virjee scheduled a standing phone call with him every night at 7 o’clock for three months. “Literally one of the best days of my life,” Virjee says, was when “I got to hand him his diploma as he crossed the stage.”

After Conner left for class on that unremarkable November morning, Lance Swann drove over to the John Irwin House to share some good news. The 31-year-old junior, who teaches classes at Ironwood State Prison on the side, had moved out in August. He rented a room in a house for a few months to establish a rental history, and now he’d been offered his own lease in “a pretty nice area of Anaheim.”

Cavitt jumped to his feet, wrapping the younger man in a bear hug. The jubilation lasted for a minute or two, and then Cavitt asked to see the document. “Let’s review it,” he said. “Because landlords can sneak some stuff in there. Same thing when you go in—first thing you do is take pictures.”

When Cavitt arrived at the house a few hours earlier, Conner had been there studying. “That would have been the worst decision ever, if I’d have left Project Rebound,” Conner told me. “It would be a whole different me. Maybe I would have got in trouble again.”

Instead, Cavitt recalled, Conner “began to thrive”: He opened up and became “more vulnerable about his feelings and emotions, stuff he had repressed for years.” He also started reaching out to professors and going to office hours. “I’m advocating for myself, speaking up,” Conner confirmed.

These days, the two men talk mostly about grad school. Conner has his sights set on at least one more degree.

“I’m watching this man grow into his own, right before my eyes,” Cavitt says.

When they run into each other in early December, Conner is on his way to campus to tutor another student. “From Project Rebound?” Cavitt asks.

“Nah,” Conner responds, just a classmate who needed help.

“Wait a minute, who are you?” Cavitt teases. “When did you start doing this?”

Conner doesn’t know exactly who he’s becoming, but he does know who to thank. Being around people like Cavitt, he says, makes him think, “Damn, I can do this.” The rubber bands on his braces flash CSUF orange as he says, “It’s crazy how good my life went.”

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

The post ‘Revolutionary’ housing: How colleges aim to support formerly incarcerated students appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

SAN FRANCISCO — On a Friday evening in the fall of 2019, Maria Flores stood waiting with her “crazy heavy” duffel bag and her teenage son outside the office of a man whose home she cleans. A friend of hers had told him that Flores had been evicted from the apartment she had lived in for 16 years. There, the single mom had paid $700 a month in rent ever since she’d moved in eight-months pregnant. Now, one night at a motel cost as much as $250.

“Every single day I was looking for a place to live,” Flores said.

He’d offered two air mattresses, keys to his office, and permission to sleep there on weekends. For the better part of a year, Flores, who asked to use only one of her two surnames, lived that way: Back and forth, spend and scrimp. But there was no shower or kitchen at the office. And on this Friday, someone was working late. Flores’ son, who asked to be referred to by his middle name, Mateo, begged to go to a motel, but Flores told him if they did, they’d have no money for food.

Still, she didn’t want to go to a shelter.

“Everything that I heard, it was something about drugs, it was something about people being in a quarrel,” Flores said.

There was one other option. A few months earlier, she’d heard about a family shelter inside an elementary school gym. Every evening, after the students and teachers left, partitions were snugged to the back wall, creating three-sided squares for kids and caregivers to set up sleeping pads on the floor. Cafeteria-style tables in a connected room hosted dinner and, later, homework. Only families with a child enrolled in the San Francisco Unified School District could be admitted, and Mateo was a high school junior.

“I didn’t want to,” Flores said of calling the school-based shelter that Friday night, “but I was so tired.” Standing on the sidewalk in a neighborhood known for open-air drug dealing, with the sky growing darker, and then darker still, she decided she and Mateo didn’t have a better option. She took out her phone and dialed the number.

The idea of optimizing school district property for evening and weekend use isn’t new, but Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 Community School (BVHM, for short) appears to be the first modern public elementary school to have hosted a long-term, overnight family shelter.

“As far as our knowledge in the entire country, we are the first people to do it,” said San Francisco City Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who was instrumental in advocating for the program.

Some objected: Shelter should not be the responsibility of a school, they argued.

And yet, “We were the folks that were willing to do it,” said Nick Chandler, the BVHM community school coordinator.

His school serves approximately 600 students in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, three blocks from the exclusive Adda Clevenger School and across the street from a restaurant serving a $16 roasted octopus appetizer. Just under 60 percent of the students are English language learners, and just over 60 percent have been deemed socioeconomically disadvantaged, though that’s an undercount according to the school’s staff who say many of their families are also undocumented or under-documented.

One night in 2017, a desperate parent talking to Chandler in the school’s front lobby asked: “Can we stay here?”

The answer that night was no, but the question hung in the air. The school’s wellness team had noticed more and more families in crisis. They’d try to make referrals to the city and nonprofits, but often nothing would come of it. Sometimes the waitlists were too long and sometimes it wasn’t clear what list a family should even be on.

“The process is so intense and it requires so much documentation and follow-through and systemic understanding,” said Claudia DeLarios Morán, BVHM’s principal. “So it was a frustrated group of social workers and counselors and teachers saying, ‘What happened to this child?’”

Kids without a regular place to sleep at night weren’t showing up ready to learn, Chandler added. “And how could they? Your brain is not relaxed. You’re not in learning mode, you’re in survival mode, you’re in flight or fight mode.”

BVHM’s staff had been trained in trauma-informed care, but they wanted to help kids not just to overcome, but to avoid altogether the experience of sleeping in a car, living in an overcrowded apartment, or having a parent stay in an abusive relationship to keep a roof over their heads. The staff knew the office common area couldn’t work, but the gym was a different story. Like most school gymnasiums, it has domed fluorescent lights affixed to the rafters, blue gymnastics mats cushioning the walls, and basketball hoops. The adjacent room, with those six tables and a microwave, sports a teacher-lounge vibe.

When not a single teacher objected, the BVHM team brought the idea of hosting a shelter for the school’s families to Ronen, the city supervisor, and the group then pulled in Shamann Walton, a member of the San Francisco Board of Education at the time. They were careful not to suggest having a shelter would solve everything.

“This is a band aid,” Ronen said. “This is not a root-cause fix of the problem of childhood homelessness in this country.”

Over the course of April and May 2018, Ronen, Walton and others fielded questions at public meetings. “We didn’t ask Claudia [DeLarios Morán] and Nick [Chandler] to take this on on their own,” Ronen said, “We stood up, and we took the heat with them.”

And there was heat. A vocal minority worried that a shelter would draw an unsavory crowd to the neighborhood, that the gym would be left smelling like urine, the playground littered with needles and cigarette butts.

School administrators took questions, submitted during the meetings and afterward, and created an FAQ document they posted online.

“How will the administration guarantee … that no drugs, alcohol, or weapons will come on to the premises?” is one. “Will people with a criminal record … [or] mental illness be allowed to sleep in our school?”

The answers reflect patience with these two questions and others laden with assumptions about who experiences homelessness and how: “The participants will be BVHM students and their immediate families. These are the same people at back to school night, performances, daily drop off and pick-up,” the BVHM team replied.

Much of the pushback centered around, “Why us?” Some commenters worried school administrators would be in over their heads running a shelter and others suggested alternatives, like transitional housing or co-living spaces. “Our program is a response to a lack of space in these,” the administrators answered, adding that a third party would manage the BVHM initiative.

Another proposal: Ask other BVHM families to open their homes instead. The school welcomed offers. They received none, Chandler said.

“The PTA meetings were hell, with this undercurrent of disliking poor people,” said Sam Murphy, a white BVHM parent, who witnessed this back-and-forth. 

The school’s Spanish immersion program attracts some privileged families in a competitive lottery system, and one woman told Murphy the shelter, by then dubbed the “Stay Over Program,” would “lower the cachet of the school.”

Despite the loud objections from some, the school had, in Chandler’s words, a “real strong voice from our folks that had been there or had been in similar situations.” With the bulk of the community on board and the support of the mayor, the project moved forward.

It started as a pilot program, funded entirely by the city, with a joint use agreement allowing a Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing program to be operated on school district property by Dolores Street Community Services, a community-based organization with experience running shelters. This kind of interagency and public-private cooperation may seem intuitive, but it can be quite a logistical feat. In this case, that included getting the approval of the fire department, planning commission, and city attorney, as well as integrating the program into the city’s preexisting web of access points and services — and, on top of that, building political alliances.

“There are a hundred ways to shut this kind of idea down,” Ronen said. But the idea persisted and turned into a plan and then a place.

The shelter soft launched in November 2018; in January 2019, after an architect from the neighborhood offered to figure out how to install showers beside the gym and a construction company did the work pro bono, the Stay Over Program at BVHM, first of its kind, officially debuted.

Before then, Chandler said, he and other school staff “knew the families, we didn’t know the services; the city knew the services, they did not know the families.” Now, that has changed.

The idea that schools can act as resource hubs for students and their families is known broadly as “community schooling” and has proven successful across the country.

“A vast body of research shows that schools and communities can mitigate the effects of poverty by providing support to children and families to address basic needs such as housing instability,” said Pedro Noguera, dean of the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education.

Students experiencing homelessness are more likely to display symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression — even behaviors that look like ADHD. “[T]he experience of homelessness is associated with difficulty with classroom task engagement and social engagement,” according to a report by the Learning Policy Institute. (Core operating support for the Learning Policy Institute is provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, one of the many funders of The Hechinger Report, which produced this story.)

These students are also more likely to be referred for discipline, including suspension. They are more likely to attend schools with concentrated poverty, and they score significantly lower on state testing than other economically disadvantaged students. Students grappling with homelessness are also less likely to graduate high school and less likely to attend college. They are more likely to change schools and be chronically absent.

“For English language learners experiencing homelessness,” the report concludes, “fewer than 9 percent met or achieved state standards in mathematics.”

Nationally, 37 percent of students experiencing homelessness are chronically absent, according to Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. That percentage is likely much higher now, she said, in light of pandemic-related barriers.

A 2020 report from UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools, funded in part by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, found that several indicators of educational distress — including suspensions and absenteeism rates — are, on average, worse for Black, American Indian, Pacific Islander, and multiracial students experiencing homelessness. (The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative is one of the many funders of the Hechinger Report.) Thanks to a racial knowledge gap in the data, it’s unclear whether that pattern extends to Latino students, said UCLA’s Edwin Rivera, co-author of the 2020 report.

Not enough BVHM families have used the Stay Over Program to make a dent in the school’s overall statistics, but, said DeLarios Morán, “For families that stayed there, absolutely it stabilized their attendance.”

Maribel Chávez, a first-grade teacher at BVHM, said that before one of her students started sleeping in the gym, he usually arrived late and with an empty stomach.

“Not having a specific place that they are coming from every day, there wasn’t a routine,” she said. He would miss the opening song and the preview of the day’s schedule. She’d try to give him a quick recap and “scrounge up some snack,” but it wasn’t enough. He threw objects, tried to leave the classroom, and hit other students.

For a while, his was one of several families living in a single apartment. He shared a room with his mom, Olga, who prefers to use only her first name, and his two brothers. Then other residents of the unit started to complain about his oldest brother cooking after his late shift. Little conflicts became bigger ones until Olga found herself trying to hold off using the bathroom so she wouldn’t run into anyone in the hallway. After calling the police to say she suspected one woman had intentionally left the stove on, filling the apartment with gas, she left. They stayed with a variety of family members and friends for more than a month before Olga and her two youngest sons landed in the BVHM gym.

With lights out at 9 p.m., breakfast every morning, and a transition straight to the school’s before-care program, Chávez said, she found the first grader “in my line and ready to go” at the start of each school day.”

She noticed a shift in his demeanor (“happier”) and behavior (“so much calmer”). He and the other students who have utilized the Stay Over Program “were able to come in and be present, to do their work and learn,” she said.

Soon, the benefit of small group instruction and literacy interventions kicked in. “The other day we were reading together,” Chávez said, “and I was like, ‘Wait! Wait. Wait. Did you just read that?’”

Stories like this one make DeLarios Morán feel that it is indeed her school’s responsibility to help students find safe and reliable housing.

“If the child is not stable, that’s a barrier to their education,” she said. “So that’s why we felt like as an educational institution, we had a mandate.”

But while public schools are required to offer a handful of services to students who are experiencing homelessness, the federal legislation that channels money to districts to support those services can’t be spent on housing. The available funding, known as McKinney-Vento after two U.S. Congressmen who championed the legislation, has long been grossly inadequate. That said, other federal funding streams are available to support a district-city partnership like this one, including money from FEMA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. State dollars are often at hand. And in San Francisco, a business tax passed in 2018, a 2020 health and recovery bond and private donations together provide hundreds of millions more.

Ronen, the city supervisor, acknowledged that San Francisco’s comparatively large budget for addressing homelessness has facilitated the program, and being a sanctuary city helps too. She thinks any similar program would need a principal and staff who aren’t scared of innovation, maintain a problem-solving mindset, and see basic needs as part of their mission. But none of that is specific to BVHM.

“It’s a community school mentality, and BVHM is not the only community school in the country,” she said.

She did offer a caveat to others wishing to replicate the program: “It should only happen if that is what your community is asking for,” she said. “If this was top down, if I have this idea and impose it upon the school and the school district, it would not have worked. But is San Francisco a unicorn? I don’t think so.”

Related: A multilingual, multicultural call center helps families of color cope with remote learning

DeLarios Morán was more bullish: “They just have to follow the blueprint,” she said. “We’ve done it now. So, it’s not like they have to create the wheel.”

When the shelter first launched, it was only for BVHM families, but the per-person cost to the city was too high to make fiscal sense. In March 2019, the school board voted unanimously to expand the program to include students and families from any district school. Monthly occupancy jumped approximately eight-fold: As of January 2020, more than 30 schools had referred students, rendering the program cost-effective, according to a January 2020 evaluation by the San Francisco Controller’s Office.

Dafne is a junior in high school. Her family left the city after her mother lost a catering job during the pandemic and couldn’t pay rent. They drove to Orange County to stay with her mom’s aunt, just until things got better. But a year passed, and then a few more months. When catered events resumed, her mom got her job back and an invitation to stay at a friend’s place in San Francisco until a few paychecks added up to enough for a rent deposit. But four more people turned out to be too many for the friend’s husband, leaving Dafne, her mom, and two sisters sleeping in their car.

Dafne said an elementary school gym isn’t an ideal place to sleep either. At BVHM, she was regularly woken up by a shelter monitor walking by at night and the persistent banging of the old building’s heating system, a sound like a baseball bat colliding with an iron pipe. It punctuated conversation at 2- to 20-second intervals one rainy night this winter. But space heaters, or even white noise machines, aren’t an option because of old electrical wiring.

Moving away meant Dafne lost her spot at the selective high school she’d gotten into, but as a student at a different city high school now, her plans remain ambitious. She wants to go to college and ultimately “focus on real estate and flipping houses.” One of her sisters hopes to be a lawyer. The other, a teacher. At BVHM, the three girls spread out across the tables to do homework, much better than using flashlights in a crowded car, Dafne said.

And the gym felt much safer than the car had, with people peering in the windows at all hours. “We would try to cover it, but it was still scary,” Dafne said.

Related: Children will bear the brunt of a looming eviction crises

One of the program’s core components is to do more than shelter families like Dafne’s; walking through the door brings with it entry into a case management system that guides them through the complicated process of finding affordable housing.

Back when she’d been evicted, Flores had connected with a few housing programs, but “[t]hey just were talking about shelters,” she said. When she and Mateo first arrived at BVHM in fall 2019, she brushed off case management attempts because she didn’t want to hear more of the same.

Still, she appreciated having a reliable place to stay. “I cannot complain, being in a shelter,” she said, “At least you don’t feel so lonely.” Headaches she experienced while looking for housing every day started to subside. She was sleeping again. “We were making jokes,” she said, “We had that community.”

Many participants credit that atmosphere to Jacqui Portillo, the program director from Dolores Street Community Services.

“The way she talks,” Flores said, “that’s what convinced me that I can trust her. Jacqui is like an angel for me.”

Portillo grew up in El Salvador and went to six years of medical school there, stopping shy of a degree. Instead, she became a nurse and helped run her husband’s business. Their children lived a middle-class existence with swimming lessons and their own rooms until the couple separated. That’s when Portillo headed to the U.S. with her daughters, the oldest of whom was 8. They stayed, for years, in one half of a garage.

“When I came to this country, my life changed,” she said, “I didn’t have language. I didn’t have money.”

She bought her children their first computer with singles, tips from a waitressing gig. Now in their twenties, the oldest went to Wellesley, the middle to Vassar, and “my baby,” she said, to U.C. Berkeley. Portillo wants the kids in the Stay Over Program to have the same level of success.

Once she has a family in the gym, Portillo calls her contacts and asks them to reach out. “If the family doesn’t answer calls from those contacts, she said, “I ask them, ‘What’s happened? Jorge is calling you!’” She keeps gently pestering until the connection is made: “We work with the social worker from the school. We work with the immigration office. We work with everybody,” she said.

For newcomer families especially, Portillo offers empathy, not sympathy. And empathy is what fuels her determination to make the program’s small budget stretch as far as possible. But Portillo refuses to take credit for any accomplishments, including sacrificing her own “off” hours to keep the gym open full-time over the 2021 holiday break rather than making everyone leave by 7 each morning. “God was always with me,” she said.

Before the pandemic, experts believed a large number of students experiencing homelessness were not identified; now, the situation is likely much worse. These kids had even greater difficulties accessing online instruction than their low-income, housed peers.

And yet, at BVHM, the Stay Over Program operated 24/7 during the district’s protracted school closure. Children attended classes via Zoom in the room with those cafeteria-style tables and the help of shelter monitors and a case manager, who made sure adults stayed quiet in the gym next door. During breaks they had access to the school’s playground and garden. Over the course of 2020, the program served 146 students. When a family tested positive for Covid, they quarantined in the school’s auditorium.

“Everything was so nice,” Flores said of her time staying in the gym. She still texts with three of the women she met there. “We go and eat breakfast and stuff. So, I have good memories. Really, I do.”

Related: 420,000 homeless kids went missing from schools’ rolls last year. They may never be found

At first, Flores was a newbie, and then she was one of “the old ones.” But others kept leaving, their housing success stories swirling in their wake, and Flores realized she was the last. Eventually, she decided to let Portillo help with her case management. Soon thereafter, she was placed in a residential shelter with a private room for her and Mateo. It wasn’t what she’d envisioned. “When I saw the room, it was like what’s in the military,” she said. “A small room, and it has — what do you call it? — bunk beds.”

Disappointed, she sat down and cried. So did Mateo. “I felt like I was so abandoned,” Flores said.

She had kept all her meetings, done everything right, and still had so much further to go to reclaim the type of home she’d had before being evicted. Situations like this were one of the only negative findings in the Controller’s evaluation. Participants called getting more permanent housing a “waiting game” and said “people get bounced from place to place.”

One of the best things about the Stay Over Program, educators here said, is that rather than adding a burden on educators, it has relieved one. Having a clear protocol for connecting families with case managers who specialize in housing has allowed teachers to teach and allows Chandler, the community school coordinator, to focus on mental health interventions and other areas of need.

“It let us stick to our expertise,” he said. He also noticed a higher level of trust, both from families who’d utilized the program and others who now believe he might actually have the power to help with their problems.

Part of that has to do with the Stay Over Program’s unique features. There is no limit on the number of nights families can stay, families can reserve spots rather than needing to line up for first-come-first-served entry each night, and absence for a night or two doesn’t result in removal. That was important to Flores when she first arrived. She and Mateo wanted to keep sleeping at the office a few nights a week “to be like it used to be, just the both of us,” she said.

These policies are probably also responsible for the program’s unusual continuity. The evaluation found that families stayed a median of 20 days, more than six times longer than at San Francisco’s most comparable shelter, located in a Baptist church. (It closed during the pandemic and has yet to reopen.) But it could be the site. Of the families surveyed for the controller’s report, 79 percent said it was “very important” to be able to stay somewhere familiar, like their child’s school or another school in the district.

When first asked, more than 90 percent of the survey respondents reported that Stay Over Program staff, 90 percent of whom are bilingual, treated them “excellent” or “good.” After they’d stayed two weeks or more, still close to 80 percent said the same. Nearly all said their child really liked (or felt very comfortable) staying in the gym, a number that surprised Ronen given initial concerns about students facing stigma. Duffield, the expert on national homelessness policy, found these results “remarkable.”

The positive reviews don’t mean everything is perfect. Flores said she and Mateo couldn’t take advantage of the free dinner provided, because 7 p.m. was too late for him to eat, but the Stay Over Program can’t open any earlier because BVHM’s after-school program uses the space. Families only have access to small lockers and otherwise have to carry their belongings in and out each day. Having to shower before 6:00 a.m. on the weekend was so early for Glen McCoy and the grandchild he and his wife are raising, that they would drive to a Safeway parking lot and fall back to sleep in the car. Some nights, the banging of the pipes just doesn’t let up.

And yet, Olga — the mom of the now-reading 6-year-old — described the space as “tranquilo,” calm. She stopped having panic attacks and got treatment for a urinary tract infection she’d developed trying to avoid using the bathroom in her shared apartment.

The stability and community offered by the program is temporary, and the path to stable housing provided by this district-city partnership is as long and frustrating for each individual family as the pursuit of eliminating homelessness has been for San Francisco and the nation. But it’s something. And for individual children it has been everything.

“We will not fix homelessness until the federal government believes that housing is a human right,” Ronen said. “Hopefully we will not need [a program like] this in the future, but right now we do.”

Flores and Mateo hadn’t actually been abandoned. They continued to get help from a caseworker, and they finally moved into a subsidized studio apartment in November 2021.

There’s a bathroom they can access any day, at any time. Their showers don’t have a time limit. Flores thinks it sounds silly, but of everything in that crazy-heavy duffel bag she carried around for more than two years, it was the toothbrush that weighed most heavily on her. “It’s something that is private, something that nobody wants to see you use,” she said. And now it stays at home.

They got boxes out of storage. “I have my furniture,” Flores said, “my vacuum!” All the clothes she had looked forward to wearing again no longer fit, a consequence of eating out for more than two years. But now that they have a kitchen, she’s cooking again: “We’re trying to eat some healthy things,” she said.

Mateo doesn’t have to deal with the bunk beds that creaked so loudly he worried about waking his mom, he’s not awoken by shelter monitors at night, and a bed in the apartment beats an air mattress in an office. He’s getting the sleep he needs to focus on his classes at the City College of San Francisco: math, English, and criminal investigation.

But he still doesn’t have his own room, and Flores said they won’t stay here permanently.

“It’s another stop,” she said. “We are getting closer.”

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

The post A school created a homeless shelter in the gym and it paid off in the classroom appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

In the spring of 2020, Chelsea Kelley’s second grader received live instruction from his teacher just once a week for 45 minutes. That meant that Kelley had to get him set up with schoolwork he could do alone, lay out Legos on the floor beside her chair for his 4-year-old brother and hope for the best as she joined Zoom discussions about what must be done for families grappling with school closures across California.

“Please ignore the airplane,” she recalled telling her colleagues as her younger son climbed into her lap, miniature jet plane held high.

Kids were busting into Zoom meetings across the country at that point in the pandemic, but for Kelley, whose job is to help design California’s statewide education policy, and her female colleagues, the situation held special resonance.

“We were our own experts,” said Kelley, a principal consultant to the California State Assembly Committee on Education. “We are living and experiencing what our children are experiencing on a daily basis.”

Having mothers like Kelley occupy seats at the education policymaking table is relatively new for California. Twenty years ago, those seats were filled almost exclusively by men: male elected officials, male staff supporting them from behind the scenes and male lobbyists targeting their persuasive efforts at those staffers.

“Males in every leading role,” said Misty Padilla Feusahrens, who now works for the speaker of the State Assembly, which is California’s version of the House of Representatives. Hers is a distinctly powerful position. She succeeded Rick Simpson, who served nine speakers, from 1991 to 2016, advising them and other Democratic caucus members on education policy.

Staffers like Padilla Feusahrens help draft policy and negotiate the final terms of legislation alongside elected officials and fellow staffers. Other key education players in the legislature include staffers assigned to three committees: education (naturally), budget and appropriations.

Kelley’s boss, Tanya Lieberman, runs the team advising the elected officials on the Assembly Committee on Education. She said she is the first woman in almost 30 years and the first woman of color to do so. Her counterpart on the Senate side is female. The principal consultant focused on education for Assembly appropriations is female. Padilla Feusahrens’s equivalent on the Senate side, a staffer working on education issues for the president pro tempore, is female. The list goes on. There are male staffers involved, of course, but they no longer dominate.

77% of teachers are women, but only 31% of district chiefs are.

Having that many women in top roles in education policymaking is still rare. Across the country, the vast majority of the education workforce is female. Seventy-seven percent of teachers are women, but only 31 percent of district chiefs are, according to an April 2019 report by Chiefs for Change, a bipartisan nonprofit. The report’s authors called on “school systems, school boards, mayors and governors nationwide to make urgent changes to shift the gender balance at the very top levels of education leadership.”

Across the nation, that change may be on the way, and in California it already includes legislative staffers like Kelley, Padilla Feusahrens and Lieberman.

“It’s very exciting to have all of these women in decision-making positions,” said Senator Connie Leyva, chair of the California Senate Education Committee. “This is how we change the conversation at the table.”

Yet Rick Simpson, Padilla Feusahrens’s predecessor, was skeptical that having women in top positions would ultimately affect policy decisions.

“I suspect it’s not going to have a whole lot of impact,” he said, “because [policies are] largely based on the fiscal imperatives, the political imperatives.” Whatever differences arise due to senior education staffers being female he said, would be “at the margin.”

Simpson said the gender imbalance during his time as a staffer wasn’t that noticeable. “I don’t really recall noticing that there was a gender imbalance as much as in hindsight there seems to have been,” he said.

Delaine Eastin, a woman who served as an Assembly member when Simpson was a young committee consultant, did notice.

“I made a suggestion, and they just glossed over it,” said Eastin of a meeting during that time. “Ten minutes later, one of the men made the same exact suggestion, and everybody raved about what a brilliant idea it was.” (She later became the state’s superintendent of public instruction.)

Related: PROOF POINTS: When women studied with women, they persisted, study finds

Though the percentage of state legislators who are female varies widely from state to state, nationally, after January’s swearing-ins, the 30.2 percent of statehouse seats held by women is a record high, said Jean Sinzdak, Ph.D., associate director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. Six times more women hold these positions now than in 1971, she said, but in just one state, Nevada, are they the majority, and in only 12 others do they make up more than 34 percent of the total. That leaves 37 states where women hold 34 percent or less of legislative seats.

30.2% of statehouse seats are held by women nationally, a record high.

Similar demographics aren’t kept for legislative staffers, but Hechinger Report interviews with state staffers proved revealing. Many state legislative committees don’t have dedicated education staffers — take, for example, Pennsylvania, Idaho, Delaware and New Hampshire. Other education committees list only men in these positions on their websites (for example, Tennessee). In Oregon, Colorado, Kentucky, and North Carolina, the number of women in these roles has equaled or surpassed that of men since the turn of the century. The Iowa Senate has had gender parity among education analysts for at least eight years, and Arkansas seems to have followed a similar trajectory as California, with its Assembly education committee staffed by a woman since 2019 after being staffed by a man for more than 20 years.

But does having a critical mass of female staffers really impact how policy is made? And are any resulting differences significant, or just “at the margin”? This is where California’s experience is instructive, especially since the pandemic began.

Many of the women in top positions in California weren’t comfortable commenting on the record. As a rule, staffers don’t, leaving the public debate to those they call “the electeds.” Plus, the men they replaced tend to have been mentors they respect, explained Lieberman.

Kelley, who served in the same principal consultant role under Lieberman’s predecessor, said that before Lieberman took over, “deals were cut, and we were told about it later. Now, we’re a team, and work gets shared. We get pulled in on everything to give advice. It’s a new day.”

Padilla Feusahrens, who has worked at the statehouse since 1999, remembers doing all the background work on policy proposals and then not being asked for her input on major decisions about the final policies. Now that she’s in charge, she said, “every opportunity that I have to have a discussion at a critical decision-making point, I try to bring in the consultant that worked on that policy.”

“When you’re the only one, you don’t have much choice but to conform to the culture. When there are many of you, you get to shape the culture.”

Tanya Lieberman, chief consultant, Assembly education committee, California

As the pandemic took hold, Assembly staffers in the speaker’s office and the education, budget and appropriations committees could easily have fought over territory. Instead, Lieberman said, “We all kept a giant spreadsheet of all the issues we were tracking. It crossed every single policy topic, so we were thinking about instruction, we were thinking about teacher credentialing, we were thinking about funding, we were thinking about attendance, we were thinking about early childhood education, we were thinking about athletics — every aspect of school suddenly had to be rethought.”

Related: Just 3% of scientists and engineers are Black or Latina women. Here’s what teachers are doing about it.

Samantha Tran, senior managing director of education policy at Children Now, a nonpartisan research, policy and advocacy organization, noticed. “I find the process more accessible. Like, I don’t have qualms about just picking up the phone and calling folks and talking stuff through. There definitely seems to be an openness to that, and in my experience, it is different.” Tran said she’s not sure if it’s “a gender thing or a timing thing or a context thing.”

“Lots of us are moms, and because we’re living these experiences personally, we provide a different lens.”

Misty Padilla Feusahrens, special assistant to California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon

Lieberman thinks gender plays a role.

“When you’re the only one, you don’t have much choice but to conform to the culture,” she said. “When there are many of you, you get to shape the culture.”

The heightened inclusiveness seen since she took over in 2018 is not some caricature of femininity, all chitchat and smiles, she said. “It’s strategic. We know that collaboration is a really powerful lever for solving problems.”

According to research, she’s right. Crafting policy collaboratively leads to better proposed policy (likely thanks to information sharing and delegation of tasks), increases the probability that legislation will pass and builds the relationships, trust and communication channels needed to be effective in the future.

Women’s willingness to collaborate is “a residue of how women have been asked to work,” wrote Daisy Gonzales, deputy chancellor of the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, in her 2016 dissertation for a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Women’s relative lack of power historically means they have “had to figure out how to do their job without the titles and authority to make those decisions.”

Related: The jobs where sexual harassment and discrimination never stopped

Some of the state’s top education policymakers also say that their role as mothers affects how they think about policy.  “Lots of us are moms, and because we’re living these experiences personally, we provide a different lens,” said Padilla Feusahrens. 

Kelley said that has been more true than ever during the pandemic: “Having women make decisions about policymaking while also living firsthand the choices of those decisions is different than with men.”

During the spring of 2020, some of these staffers’ children were offered three hours of live, interactive teacher instruction a day, whereas Kelley’s son was just read a book once a week. Others had something in between. As a result, Lieberman said, “The requirement that there be daily live interaction with teachers became something that was really important to all of us working on this, and it ended up in the law.”

Indeed, SB 98, which the governor signed in late June, requires that, in order to receive state funding, districts must provide “daily live interaction with certificated employees and peers for purposes of instruction, progress monitoring, and maintaining school connectedness.”

Though male staffers with school-age children can be equally attuned to the details of their kids’ educational lives, men in general are not.

Today, “research consistently shows that fathers do more than fathers in 1960,” said Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, a professor at Ohio State University who focuses on psychology and population research pertaining to families, “but they still don’t do as much child care and parenting as mothers do, even mothers who work full-time.”

Women’s willingness to collaborate is “a residue of how women have been asked to work.”

Daisy Gonzales, deputy chancellor of the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office

When mothers, like Kelley, have kept their jobs and are ostensibly splitting the work evenly with male partners, there can still be imbalances.

“My husband and I have split up the day,” she said. “During certain hours, I’m in charge, and during certain hours he’s in charge, but guess who the kids come to anytime they need something?”

Related: Will the pandemic finally level the playing field for working moms?

Luckily, working on a team where women aren’t the minority meant no one judged her competence just because her laptop keyboard was doubling as a toy jet’s runway, or lost faith in her seriousness when her older son informed everyone listening “I had a normal poop today.” (Researchers theorize this is one benefit of women’s caucuses: They make space for more deep engagement in policy by increasing comfort.)

“I do think that it’s made an incredible difference” to have women in decision-making roles for education policy during the pandemic, said Heather Hough, executive director of Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), an independent research center at Stanford University. “If you are a woman who has small children at home, you see how hard it is every day. And so there’ve been a lot of conversations that I’ve been in where, because that’s the experience of so many of the people who are part of the conversation, they really come critically to discussions about how well distance learning is working, as well as what kind of supports parents and families need at home to be able to do this.”

“A lot has changed. A lot still needs to change.”

Misty Padilla Feusahrens, special assistant to California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon

The historical absence of women in education leadership, the writers of the Chiefs for Change report asserted, has disserved students “by squandering the promise of many of the nation’s best education leaders.” It is also “a problem of fairness, of representation.”

At the end of the day, many of these women and other female legislative staffers still report to men and, disproportionately, white men. (And that’s not only true for the legislature. While the heads of California’s public education systems are all Black or Latino for the first time, not one of them is female.) Padilla Feusahrens works for a man. Lieberman also reports to a man. And most of the men holding elected positions in California are white. In fact, though white Californians make up 37 percent of the state’s population, they account for 54 percent of state legislators, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

“A lot has changed,” says Padilla Feusahrens: “A lot still needs to change.”

In the meantime, Kelley said, she and her colleagues will continue to “take direct examples from our homes about what is not working, and use that as the starting place for policy change.”

This story about education policy 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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GALT, Calif. — Sixth-grader Audrianna Lesieur had just finished arranging 23 words on scraps of paper into five columns when Val Seamons appeared at her side. “Why is this over here?” the veteran teacher asked. Audrianna scooped up the word in question and anxiously scanned the columns for its proper home. “Where’s your ‘Confidence’ strength?” Seamons asked. “Tell me why it’s here.” As Audrianna lifted her bowed head, her classmate William Maestas chimed in, “You can do it!” With that, she ably defended her original choice, and Seamons bustled down the table to the next student.

Terms like “Caring” and “Competing,” as well as “Confidence,” are very familiar to students at Lake Canyon Elementary School. They’re among the 10 “talent themes,” or strengths, used to underpin learning in the school district here. Starting in preschool, teachers try to spot students’ natural talents; by kindergarten, each child’s top strengths appear on a “personalized learning plan,” a new type of report card. Second-graders sing a rendition of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” that replaces “there was a cow” with “there was ‘Dependability.’ ” And in fourth grade, students at all five of Galt’s public elementary schools take an online quiz known as a “strengths assessment” in which their sense of how much they relate to certain statements — such as, “For me, everything has to be planned” — helps identify their strengths.

At first glance this strength-based approach seems like the educational equivalent of kitsch, a bit fringe and hardly necessary. Certainly it’s not yet in widespread use. But Karen Schauer, the superintendent of Galt Joint Union Elementary School District (who lists her top strengths in her email signature) said that in her nearly 40 years as an educator, “It’s just one of the most powerful things I’ve ever been a part of.” Jenifer Fox — who wrote the book “Your Child’s Strengths” and in 2014 helped create The Delta School in Wilson, Arkansas, which uses the strengths approach — went further, calling it “the magic bullet.”

But what is it, exactly?

Though grounded in complex positive psychology research, the strength-based approach boils down to a simple rule: Focus on what students do well. It feels natural to do the opposite, because pulling up areas of weakness can seem like the best way to help children grow, says Lea Waters, a psychology professor at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, and the author of a book called “The Strength Switch.” Yet focusing on the traits and skills kids don’t have can lead them to become disengaged, Waters says, while focusing on strengths produces greater levels of happiness and engagement at school and higher levels of academic achievement.

The first step, she says, is helping students learn what strengths are and figure out which ones they display most. Then teachers can provide opportunities to use those talents and, theoretically, even allow students’ strengths to drive some choices of curricular content.

It’s different from “character education,” a method focused on instilling various traits like grit and perseverance, because a strength-based approach focuses on what children already have going for them. And while it could be considered a form of personalized learning, most schools experimenting with the strengths approach don’t yet allow students’ passions to influence their academic subject matter or learning pace. Instead, students’ strengths tend to drive their choices for extracurricular activities or during more open-ended portions of the school day like “genius hour.”

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Most teachers who try the approach start by giving a quiz. The one Galt’s fourth-graders take comes from the CliftonStrengths Youth Explorer, a framework developed and sold by Gallup, the 82-year-old management consulting company best known for its public opinion polling. (Gallup spun off the youth version from a talent test used with adults in corporate settings.) Waters uses a different list of strengths, called Values in Action, when working with educators in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.S. Others use strength systems designed by the British Centre of Applied Positive Psychology or by Thrively, a California-based startup.

While the number of schools using the method isn’t tallied anywhere, the number of tests taken could serve as a loose proxy for interest in it. Jon Burt, who heads Gallup’s K-12 education consulting arm, said that each year over 1 million students in the U.S. take one of that company’s quizzes. Jillian Coppley Darwish, president of Mayerson Academy, a nonprofit that advises educators, said that her organization has introduced the Values in Action framework to nearly 70 schools in the U.S., and Thrively’s president, Alex Cory, said that about 44,000 teachers across the 50 states have signed up for Thrively accounts.

Still, there’s a difference between interest and implementation. “What people struggle with is how to make it come alive in schools,” said Fox. Waters agrees, saying that most schools don’t really move past the assessment.

Not so in Galt. There, Meghan McFadyen asks kids in her mixed fourth- and fifth-grade classroom who have “Presence” among their top strengths to help peers, because in theory no performance anxiety will block them from taking leadership positions. And Seamons weaves strengths into the sixth-grade curriculum. She teaches about Nancy Wake, a member of the French Resistance in World War II who evaded the Nazis, sometimes by parachute. Seamons said her students said, “Oh man, she definitely, definitely was an ’Achiever.’ ”

She also uses strengths language as a form of discipline. Instead of chastising a student doing group work for being “too bossy,” for instance, she will suggest dialing back on “Achieving,” the drive to accomplish. Undesirable behavior still gets corrected, but by pointing out a surplus of something good, not a deficiency.

Monica Garcia, a parent, said her kindergartner recently climbed up on the kitchen counter to get a snack. Before learning about strengths, she said, she would have shouted at the child for being careless. Instead, she said, “Wow. Okay, great, I’m glad you’re being independent, however, your safety is my concern.”

The strength-based approach can be especially important for students with special needs, said Marian Hamrick, a teacher at Galt’s Fairsite Preschool who treats her autistic students’ physical lashing out as a laudable ambition to communicate.

Mayerson Academy’s Darwish said it’s not just semantics: “We know that people respond infinitely better — both in terms of their continued engagement and motivation, and ultimately their behavior change — when they are approached with a positive lens.”

Administrators in Galt say recent test results support that notion. From 2014-15 to 2016-17, the percentage of the district’s students meeting or exceeding standards rose from 37 to 43.1 in English language arts and from 25 to 35.9 in math. Schauer notes that in the last two years, course failures and suspensions have decreased while attendance and self-reported engagement levels have increased. That said, introducing the strength-based approach is only one of several changes the district has made in recent years.

Is strength-based instruction feasible in most schools?

Private schools like Arkansas’ Delta School and New York City’s Riverdale Country School (which has a phone app students can use to access a strengths list) are likely to have the resources to explore promising trends like this. How did Galt end up at the forefront of strength-based instruction?

The Galt district in Sacramento County serves 3,600 elementary-age students, approximately 60 percent of whom are Hispanic or Latino. Over 20 percent aren’t fluent in English, and about half qualify for the federal free or reduced-price meal program. An area joke calls Galt “the lowest place in California,” referring to its 47 feet of elevation above sea level while also taking a jab at its people’s hardship. After the Great Recession that began in December 2007, the community’s unemployment rate skyrocketed. Folks moved away, and the district had to close an elementary school. Schauer said her team began strengths work with a small group of adults as they frantically looked for grants. When the district won federal Race to the Top funding in 2012, Schauer expanded the strengths program. But she said it isn’t expensive.

That depends. Thrively offers a free version for individual teachers that includes access to its test, but charges $10,000 for its District Pro package, which covers more students and adds more video content. Gallup works on a similar model, Burt said, charging different amounts for different levels of hand-holding and access. Mayerson Academy does too, but its work is frequently supported by grants.

Jennifer Collier, who champions strength-based learning in Galt as the district’s extended learning supervisor, says ideally there would be a Gallup-trained strengths coach like her at each school.

Expense is not the only hurdle. “You have to actually have a culture of strengths built into the school,” Waters said, claiming that her research shows that you can’t just teach strengths to students; the adults in the schools must also learn the method and model it. In Galt, strength terms drip from the walls, printed on flags and on signs pinned to bulletin boards. Most teachers rattle off their top strengths in conversation, having taken the adult version of the quiz either during a 2013 districtwide training or in one of the seminars provided for parents, bus drivers, custodians, food services staff and others.

Not everyone in Galt has fully embraced the approach, however. Some educators pushed back, viewing it as one more fad sucking time away from their core mission. Others try to implement it, but fall short. Recently, one teacher snarkily told a student, “Your strength is impulsiveness.”

Full implementation has been elusive in other ways as well. Substitute teachers haven’t been trained in the approach. And Lori Biser, the middle school’s counselor, said that while she’d like to incorporate strengths into conversations about course choices and career paths (a best practice highlighted in a case study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology), she can’t remember them for 900 students and is loath to consult her computer during a counseling session.

And there are reasons to question the method’s effectiveness. The studies Waters cites as evidence of the approach’s ability to increase happiness and engagement involved several positive psychology interventions, not just strengths work, and the support for claims of heightened academic achievement largely involve more traditional character education, not the strength-based approach used in Galt. Gallup’s marketing materials offer statistics linking positivity to increased engagement by students, but the company’s numbers don’t offer evidence that the strength-based approach itself — and not just upbeat and encouraging teachers — makes the difference.

There’s another concern: that a strengths lens, implemented poorly, could end up pigeonholing kids by leaving adults thinking, “This one’s the kind one; this one’s the brave one,” as Waters said.

Then there’s the fear that students who are taught they have natural strengths and weaknesses won’t internalize the idea that they can improve and develop new talents with hard work.

Related: Growth mindset guru Carol Dweck says teachers and parents often use her research incorrectly

To prevent that, Waters said educators must make sure to convey that some strengths may “be more prominent in one child than another,” but that all children have all the strengths.

Val Seamons certainly does that. When she asked students to indicate which strength best represents them by moving to stand near posted signs, Maria Warda looked uncertain. “Sometimes I’m not, but sometimes I am,” the sixth-grader explained. Nodding knowingly, Seamons replied: “So maybe you have the ability, but you don’t always practice it? Well that’s the case with everybody.” After a pause she added, “And just because you have a weakness in something doesn’t mean you don’t have the ability to overcome that.”

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

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