Almost every day at the public elementary school she attended in Montgomery County, Maryland, Stephanie heard comments about her weight. Kids in her fifth grade class called her “fatty” instead of her name, she recalled; others whispered, “Do you want a cupcake?” as she walked by. One classmate spread a rumor that she had diabetes. Stephanie was so incensed by his teasing that she hit him and got suspended, she said.

But nothing the kids did upset her as much as the conduct of her teachers.

For years teachers ignored her in class, even when she was the only one raising her hand, said Stephanie, whose surname is being withheld to protect her privacy. “I was like, ‘Do you not like me or something?” she recalled.

She felt invisible. “They would sit me in the back. I couldn’t see the board,” she said. When Stephanie spoke up once in middle school, a teacher told her, “I can’t put you anywhere else because you’re going to block other students.” She burned with embarrassment when her classmates laughed.

Nearly 20 percent of children in the U.S. — almost 15 million kids — were considered obese as of the 2020 school year, a number that has likely increased since the pandemic (new data is expected next year). The medical conditions associated with obesity, such as asthma, diabetes and sleep apnea, are well known. Children with obesity are also more likely to have depression, anxiety and low self-esteem.

Far less discussed are the educational outcomes for these children. Research has found that students with obesity are more likely to get lower grades in reading and math and to repeat a grade, and twice as likely to be placed in special education or remedial classes. They are also significantly more likely to miss school and be suspended or receive detention, and less likely than their peers to attend and graduate from college.

Researchers have suggested different reasons for this “obesity achievement gap,” including biological causes (such as reduced cortical thickness in the brain in children with obesity, which is linked to compromised executive functioning, and higher levels of the hormone cortisol, linked to poorer academic performance). They have also examined indirect causes of poor performance, such as that kids with obesity might miss school more often because of medical appointments or bullying. 

But a relatively new area of research has shifted attention to educator bias. Studies have found that teachers often perceive children with obesity as emotional, unmotivated, less competent and non-compliant. That can lead to teachers giving these students fewer opportunities to participate in class, less positive feedback and lower grades.

Weight bias is part of American culture, said Rebecca Puhl, deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut, who has studied childhood obesity and bias. “Teachers are not immune to those attitudes,” she said. While many school districts have tried in the last 20 years to reduce childhood obesity through more nutritious meals and increased exercise, Puhl and other experts say schools also need to train teachers and students to recognize and confront the weight bias they say is hampering the education of an increasing number of children.

Some advocates argue that childhood obesity, which has steadily risen over the last 40 years, should be seen as an “academic risk factor” because of its lasting effects on educational and economic mobility. “There’s certainly been a big push for racial and ethnic diversity, for gender identity diversity, that’s so important,” said Puhl. “But weight is often left off the radar, it’s often not getting addressed.”

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Stephanie, now 18, has struggled with obesity her whole life. Within her family, being overweight never felt like a problem. But school was different.

Beginning in kindergarten, her classmates told her she looked like a Teletubby, she said. Even teachers made comments related to her weight. “If someone brought pastries for a birthday, they would ask, ‘Are you sure you want to eat that? Why don’t you try carrots and hummus?’” Stephanie recalled. Once Stephanie listened as an educator told her mother to put her on a diet. She stopped eating lunch at school after that. “When I was home, I ran to food because it was like the only place I would feel comfortable eating,” she said.

There were a handful of occasions teachers noticed her for something besides her weight. Stephanie smiled as she recalled a time when an English teacher praised an essay she wrote; when she won second place prize in a coding camp; when she was named ‘cadet of the year’ in JROTC during remote school during the pandemic. In elementary school, she received the President’s Award for Educational Achievement, designed to reward students who work hard, often in the face of obstacles to learning.

It wasn’t enough to make her feel like she had educators on her side. “In school, they want you to confide in teachers, they made us believe that we can go to teachers for anything,” she said. “If you have no friends or if there’s no one to trust — you can always find a teacher who you can feel safe with, you can always trust them. So, I would try, but they always pushed me away.”

One interaction in particular shattered her confidence. Toward the end of seventh grade, Stephanie stayed to ask a question after class. Her teacher asked if she was a new student. “‘How did you not notice I was in your class and the entire year I turned in work?” Stephanie wondered. “That’s when I started to feel like I’m a shadow.” From that point on she stopped caring about getting good grades. 

Liliana López, a spokesperson for Montgomery County Public Schools, said that teachers are not “expressly trained on weight bias,” but they “elevate all the identities individuals hold as valuable and we work with staff to identify ways they can create spaces full of affirmation, validation and significance for those identities.” Celeste Fernandez, spokesperson for the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, said her organization does not offer specific training or information on weight bias.

Related: A surprising remedy for teens in mental health crises

Researchers are increasingly identifying links between poor outcomes for students with obesity and teacher’s attitudes toward kids. In 2015, Erica Kenney, an associate professor of public health nutrition at Harvard University, helped lead a team that analyzed data from a representative sample of children from across the nation. The researchers examined, among other things, whether the kids’ weight gain influenced teachers’ perceptions of their abilities and their standardized test scores.

Gaining weight didn’t change a child’s test scores, the researchers found, but, based on surveys, it was significantly linked to teachers having lower perceptions of students’ ability, for both girls and boys. In other words, kids who gained weight faced a small but significant“academic penalty” from their teachers, Kenney said.

A separate study, involving 130 teachers, found that educators were more likely to give lower grades to essays if they believed a child who was obese had written them. For the study, Kristin Finn, a professor in the school of education at Canisius University, in Buffalo, New York, took four essays written at a sixth grade level and paired them with stock photographs of students who looked similar but some had been digitally altered to appear overweight. The overweight students received moderately lower scores.

Finn found that the teachers were more likely to view the students with obesity as academically inferior, “messy” and more likely to need tutoring. In surveys, teachers also predicted that students with obesity weren’t good in other subjects such as math and social studies.

“To be able to make a judgment about somebody’s mathematical abilities based on a short essay seemed pretty remarkable,” said Finn. Yet, teachers maintained that they were personally unbiased in their evaluations. “They all think that they’re treating these children fairly,” she said.

Teachers’ perceptions of children’s academic potential matters: Their recommendations can affect not only students’ grades, but also their access to higher level courses, competitive programs, specialized camps and post-secondary opportunities including college.

Girls are at particular risk of being stigmatized for being obese, research has found. In one study, nearly a third of women who were overweight said they had had a teacher who was biased against them because of their weight. Students who face other barriers including poverty are also more likely to be penalized for being overweight, what is called a “double disadvantage.”

Related: One state mandates teaching climate change in almost every subject – even PE

Covid, which hit during the spring of Stephanie’s eighth grade year, was a welcome interruption. She loved learning in the privacy of her home and not being “judged for my body,” she said.

When schools reopened in the fall of 10th grade, Stephanie couldn’t bear the thought of returning. She had gained weight during remote learning, some 100 pounds. Citing her asthma and her father’s diabetes, she applied for a waiver that would permit her to attend classes virtually. But “the real reason was because I was ashamed of what I look like,” she said.

She received the waiver and continued her high school studies at home.

After a 2022 diagnosis of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, which had made her body resistant to insulin, Stephanie decided to undergo bariatric surgery. Following the operation, Stephanie lost more than half her body weight. When she returned to her high school to take exams, people were suddenly nice to her, she said. It frustrated her, she said: “I’m the same person.”

Negative perceptions of people with obesity start early. In one study, children as young as 3 who were shown drawings of people of varying weights perceived the obese people as “mean” more often than “nice.” In another study, when 5- and 6-year-olds were shown images of children of different body sizes, most said they did not want to invite the heavier children to their birthday party.

Experts argue that administrators and teachers must become more sensitive to and knowledgeable about the challenges facing children with obesity. Yolandra Hancock, a pediatrician who specializes in patients with obesity and a former teacher, said she frequently intervenes with educators on behalf of her patients with obesity. One 7-year-old boy was often late to class because he found it difficult to climb the three flights of stairs to get there.

“The assistant principal actually told him if he wasn’t so fat, he would be able to get up the stairs faster,” Hancock said. She explained that the student wasn’t walking slowly because of “laziness” but because obesity can cause a bowing of the leg bones, making it hard to navigate steps. Giving the student more time between classes or arranging for his classes to be on the same floor would have been simple fixes, she said.

In another case, an elementary school student with obesity was getting into trouble for requesting frequent bathroom breaks, a result of his large abdomen putting pressure on his bladder, similar to what happens during pregnancy. “He came close to having an accident,” Hancock said. “His teachers wouldn’t allow him to go to the restroom and would call his mother to complain that he wasn’t focusing.” She wrote to the school requesting that he be allowed to go to the restroom whenever he needed. “If you don’t allow them to do what it is that their body needs,” Hancock said, “you’re creating more barriers to them being able to learn.”

Research has found that teachers can play an important “buffering role” in reducing bullying for children with obesity. In one study, children who believed educators would step in to prevent future bullying did better in school than those who didn’t share this conviction.

But often teachers don’t intervene, said Puhl, the University of Connecticut researcher, because they believe that if students “want the teasing to stop, they need to lose weight.” Yet “body weight is not a simple issue of eating less and exercising more,” she added, but is instead a highly complex condition influenced by genetics, hormones, culture, environment and economics.Bullying and mistreatment don’t motivate people to lose weight, Puhl said, but often contribute to binge eating, reduced physical activity and weight gain.

One way to help, would be for schools to include body weight in their anti-bullying policies, Puhl said. At present, most schools’ anti-bullying policies protect children on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender identity, disability and religious beliefs, “but very few mention body weight.” That lack is really shocking, she added, “because body weight is one of the most prevalent reasons that kids are bullied today.”

This spring, Stephanie went back to school to attend her graduation ceremony and receive her diploma. She still struggles with body image but is determined to put her negative experiences behind her and start fresh in college this fall, she says.

She plans to study psychology. “I want to understand people better, because I didn’t feel heard and there were a lot of things I didn’t speak about,” she said. “I just want to help people.”

Contact the editor of this story, Caroline Preston, at 212-870-8965 or preston@hechingerreport.org.

This story about childhood obesity awareness 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 Kids with obesity do worse in school. One reason may be teacher bias  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Reporter Kavitha Cardoza shares an inside look at her recent story on a superintendent who was shown the door after winning national attention for serving English learners. This is an edition of our Future of Learning newsletter. Sign up today to get it delivered straight to your inbox.

Heath Grimes, the superintendent of Russellville City Schools in Alabama, had already received several accolades for his work with English learners when I spoke to him in June 2023 for a story on teacher apprenticeships. So I was surprised at the end of the call when he told me his contract had not been renewed. This happened while he was the elected president of the School Superintendents of Alabama. It was obvious he’d been surprised as well. 

I’ve reported on English learners for years and knew their educational outcomes often lagged behind their non-English learner peers because districts don’t always offer the training or have the resources to support them. Yet this conservative Alabama community of 11,000 people, where the district’s English learner population is at 33 percent, was seeing a lot of success. What went wrong?

I began digging, and after months of reporting and research, I finally got to see Russellville for myself in March 2024. Being there reminded me of my eight years reporting in rural Illinois — families had roots that ran generations deep, people valued tradition and “the way things have always been done,” and everyone turned out to support the high school football team. When Grimes had the football field re-turfed so the newly created soccer team could play there as well, it seemed like an apt metaphor for the changes happening in the wider community.

When a former board member told me, “People bleed black and gold” (the school colors), he was only mildly exaggerating. I learned how essential the Russellville school system is to the fabric of the community. The school board provided leadership and a steadying hand as the community struggled through demographic shifts, and educators figured out new methods of instruction and created award-winning classes to support English learners. I learned how, when given a chance, the parents of English learners, often immigrants who were very poor, worked long shifts and didn’t speak English, proudly gave of their time and resources to the district. And I learned how what happens inside a school building is only a part of the story that cannot be separated from the politics of education that happens outside it.

I spoke with dozens of educators, board members and parents, but also a woman who worked at the hotel where I stayed whose niece attended the middle school, a Taco Bell cashier where I ate every night who was an alum, and a couple in a Walmart parking lot who were shopping for school supplies. 

Getting to the bottom of why a dedicated superintendent was shown the door was both exhausting and exhilarating. Gradually I built trust with community and school system insiders, and some 18 people, many of whom had knowledge of the events, told me that small-town politics and anti-immigrant sentiment contributed to the superintendent’s departure. (The Russellville mayor and the school board attorney wrote in response to my questions that English learners had thrived in the district long before Grimes and that anti-immigrant sentiment did not play a role in the decision to not renew his contract.)  

Read my story, which was part of a collaboration between Hechinger and palabra, an initiative of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, along with AL.com. You can also find it in Spanish. I’d love to hear your reactions and ideas for other stories you think we should cover on English learners, school leaders and other topics. – Kavitha Cardoza

Here’s what stood out from a new report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education: the idea of “redesigning schools for the generative AI era.” According to the report’s authors, this means that teachers and schools should emphasize “skills only the human mind possesses,” such as critical and creative thinking, to help students learn how to work with AI. Some districts, like Houston Independent School District and Gwinnett County Public Schools, have already begun working on initiatives like this. It reminded me of calls during the pandemic years about redesigning schools to better meet the needs of students – yet ultimately school systems saw little change. The report highlights some of the more positive thinking on how AI can potentially solve challenges that school systems have faced for years, including teacher shortages and academic recovery. 

In other news: The Department of Education announced this month it was once again changing how the 2025-26 FAFSA form will be launched and processed in an effort to minimize some of the problems with the messy rollout of its 2024-25 form. The application will open to a limited number of students and colleges during a testing period starting Oct. 1 and will be available for all students by Dec. 1, the department says. 

More on the Future of Learning

“Many kids can’t read, even in high school. Is the solution teaching reading in every class?,” The Hechinger Report

“What education could look like under Harris and Walz,” The Hechinger Report

“What education could look like under Trump and Vance,” The Hechinger Report

“California’s two biggest school districts botched AI deals. Here are lessons from their mistakes.” CalMatters

“New St. Paul Public Schools program will center Black culture and history,” Sahan Journal

“What does Universal Service Fund ruling mean for E-rate?” K-12 DiveThis story about the Russellville superintendent was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

Javeria Salman contributed reporting.

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

The post Investigating why a high-performing superintendent left his job  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Nota de la editora: Este reportaje sobre las escuelas de Russellville fue producido por palabra, una iniciativa de la Asociación Nacional de Periodistas Hispanos,  The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente y sin fines de lucro que se enfoca en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación, y AL.com.

RUSSELLVILLE, Alabama — Lindsey Johnson y Yesenia de la Rosa estaban usando estrategias diferentes para impartir la misma lección de inglés sobre letras mudas, sentadas en extremos opuestos de ese salón de clases de primer grado en la Escuela Primaria West. En esa tarde de marzo, Johnson, la maestra del aula, estaba leyendo un cuento con niños de 6 y 7 años que dominaban el inglés. Los estudiantes de la asistente bilingüe, De la Rosa, aún estaban aprendiendo el idioma, así que, aunque les estaba leyendo el mismo cuento, iba más lento, traduciendo palabras, actuando emociones y mostrándoles fotos en su iPhone.

Valentina, de 6 años, que llevaba puesta una camiseta negra con un logo de Nike en dorado y mallas, había llegado hacía menos de dos semanas desde Guatemala. Sentada en el suelo, cerca de la silla de De la Rosa, su mejilla casi tocaba la pierna de su maestra. De la Rosa solía trabajar con ella de forma individual, ya que la niña no sabía letras ni números, ni en español ni en inglés. Cuando Valentina fue al kínder en su país natal, lo único que hacía era colorear. “Así que cuando llegó aquí, eso es lo que pensaba que iba a hacer. Solo dibujar”, dijo De la Rosa. “Pero aquí es distinto”.

El distrito escolar de la ciudad de Russellville creó el puesto de De la Rosa a principios de 2021, como parte de un esfuerzo más amplio por ayudar a educar a su creciente población de alumnos que hablan inglés como segundo idioma. Muchos de los estudiantes de inglés, como se les llama, tienen padres provenientes de México o Guatemala que trabajan en una planta avícola cercana y en empleos locales en la industria y la construcción. Hoy, el 60% de los niños del distrito son hispanos/latinos y aproximadamente un tercio son estudiantes de inglés.

Johnson dijo que, sin De la Rosa, no podría comunicarse con más de la mitad de sus alumnos, ni entender los desafíos a los que se enfrentan. Johnson sabía que Yeferson, un estudiante de inglés de Guatemala, era uno de los niños más inteligentes en la clase, ya que leía más de 100 palabras, muy por encima de la meta de 60. “Es una esponja. Lo absorbe todo”, dijo Johnson. Pero ella supo gracias a De la Rosa que Yeferson se estaba destacando a pesar de sus muchas responsabilidades en casa: su mamá trabajaba turnos nocturnos, por lo que Yeferson lavaba la ropa, fregaba los platos y cuidaba de sus hermanos menores. Dijo Johnson: “Tener un asistente bilingüe hace una gran diferencia”.

Russellville quizás no dé la impresión de ser una comunidad que va a invertir e innovar a favor de los estudiantes inmigrantes. Es una ciudad políticamente conservadora del noroeste de Alabama, con una población aproximada de 11.000 habitantes, y en la que un 72% de los votantes optó por Donald Trump en las últimas elecciones presidenciales. 

Cuando la planta de procesamiento avícola abrió, en 1989, la población hispana de Russellville era aproximadamente el 0,5% del total de habitantes. En 2000, había aumentado al 13% y, en 2020, era casi del 40%. Al principio, al distrito escolar, como a muchos otros del país, se le hizo difícil dar cabida al creciente número de estudiantes de inglés, que abandonaban los estudios en altos porcentajes, estos eran empujados a clases de educación especial y después mostraban escasos progresos académicos. Sin embargo, sus logros importan: hoy en Estados Unidos, más de uno de cada 10 estudiantes es un estudiante de inglés como segundo idioma y, en una época en la que la matrícula en los centros públicos en general está disminuyendo, se encuentran entre los grupos de estudiantes que más rápido están creciendo del país.

A principios de 2015, cuando el entonces superintendente anunció su retiro, el distrito reclutó para el puesto a Heath Grimes, que en aquel momento era el superintendente del sistema escolar del cercano condado de Lawrence. Grimes, de 48 años, quien se autodenomina sureño conservador y hombre de fe de la Alabama rural, se propuso abordar la reforma de la enseñanza para los estudiantes de inglés por completo, estableciendo actividades extracurriculares culturalmente relevantes y conectando con la comunidad hispana. Se sintió el impacto de dichos esfuerzos: la porción de estudiantes hispanos que tomaron clases de nivel avanzado (AP, por sus siglas en inglés), así como cursos de doble matrícula en el colegio comunitario local, aumentó. También lo hizo la participación de los padres. Y Grimes lideró un esfuerzo para convencer a los legisladores de que cambiaran la fórmula de financiación del estado de Alabama para los estudiantes de inglés como segundo idioma, multiplicando por más de ocho la asignación estatal, hasta llegar a los $18,5 millones. El distrito y Grimes recibieron el reconocimiento estatal y nacional por su labor con los estudiantes de inglés.

“Cualquier distrito con una población significativa de estudiantes de inglés ha acudido a Heath (Grimes) porque él se adelantó a los acontecimientos ”, dijo Ryan Hollingsworth, director ejecutivo de los Superintendentes Escolares de Alabama, que representa a los 150 distritos escolares del estado. “Es simplemente increíble ver lo que ha podido lograr en un distrito pequeño sin muchos recursos”.

Pero a medida que la figura de Grimes ascendía a nivel estatal, según los educadores y residentes locales, su relación con los dirigentes de la ciudad comenzó a desmoronarse. Luego, a mediados de mayo de 2023, un miembro de la junta escolar le informó a Grimes que su contrato, que terminaba en junio de 2024, no sería renovado. Grimes aceptó retirarse cuando terminara su contrato al año siguiente, a cambio de un aumento en el salario de su último año. A partir de noviembre, intenté hablar con miembros de la junta escolar, con el alcalde y con miembros del ayuntamiento acerca del distrito escolar y de Grimes, y en un principio no respondieron a mis reiteradas solicitudes de entrevistas. (Cuando me presenté ante al alcalde, David Grissom, sobre la calle en Russellville, me dijo “sin comentarios” y se marchó). Pero a  lo largo de los meses, sin embargo, pude hablar con más de 60 funcionarios estatales, administradores locales, docentes, exmiembros de la junta escolar, líderes comunitarios y residentes, incluyendo personas que conocí en negocios y en la calle, en Russellville. Dichas entrevistas indican que la decisión de forzar a Grimes a dejar el cargo como superintendente surgió de una maraña de políticas de pueblo pequeño, una antipatía profundamente arraigada hacia los inmigrantes y una añoranza de la ciudad que Russellville solía ser.

“Heath Grimes puso a los estudiantes primero. Y esto al final pudo haberlo perjudicado”, dijo Jason Barnett, superintendente del Consejo de Educación de la ciudad de Guntersville, en el norte de Alabama, y uno de las docenas de líderes de distrito en el estado que trabajaron de cerca con Grimes. Aproximadamente, 18 educadores y líderes comunitarios en Russellville, muchos de ellos con conocimiento de los acontecimientos, me dijeron que el apoyo de Grimes a la creciente población de estudiantes que aprenden inglés fue clave para que perdiera el apoyo entre los principales dirigentes de la ciudad. Muchos de los líderes pidieron no ser citados por temor a represalias o a tensar las relaciones en esta pequeña comunidad. Un administrador escolar, que no quiso ser identificado por miedo a perder su empleo, dijo de Grimes: “Muchas personas dijeron que el aumento en la población indocumentada se debía a que él hizo de las escuelas de Russellville (y por ende la ciudad) un lugar acogedor en el que los inmigrantes querían vivir. A la gente no le gustó eso”. 

A principios de julio volví a buscar a Grissom; a Daniel McDowell, al abogado de la junta escolar,  y a Greg Trapp, quien fue hasta hace poco el presidente de esa misma junta. Les compartí mis hallazgos tras meses de reportajes, junto con una lista detallada de preguntas para ellos. McDowell y Grissom respondieron con declaraciones por escrito en las que afirmaron que los estudiantes de habla hispana habían prosperado en el distrito mucho antes de que llegara el superintendente Grimes, y negaron que su dedicación a los estudiantes de inglés hubiera propiciado su partida. “Los inmigrantes de los países latinoamericanos han venido mudándose a Russellville durante los últimos 25 años y siempre han sido bienvenidos en la ciudad y al cuerpo estudiantil”, escribió Grissom. “Mirando hacia atrás, nuestra escuela preparatoria ha coronado a una reina latina de baile de bienvenida, votada por el cuerpo estudiantil, y ha reconocido al primer estudiante latino graduado con las mejores calificaciones. Esos eventos ocurrieron mucho antes de que el Dr. Grimes llegara a Russellville”.

Inmigrantes no bienvenidos 

Antes de que Grimes llegara a Russellville, los legisladores estatales aprobaron, en 2011, la ley HB 56, considerada ampliamente como la ley antiinmigrante más severa del país. Dicha ley daba a la policía la autoridad para detener a las personas que creían que no tenían documentos legales para vivir en Estados Unidos, y tipificaba como delito que las empresas contrataran a estas personas a sabiendas y que los propietarios alquilaran a quienes carecían de documentación. Además, las universidades públicas no podían admitir estudiantes sin documentos de inmigración y, aunque, según la ley federal, las escuelas K-12 están obligadas a acoger a los estudiantes sin importar su estatus de ciudadanía, la legislación de Alabama también exigía que los distritos escolares recopilaran información sobre el estatus de ciudadanía de sus estudiantes. Aunque partes de la ley fueron posteriormente anuladas por un tribunal federal, el mensaje era claro: los inmigrantes no eran bienvenidos.

Por todo eso, cuando Greg Batchelor, entonces presidente de la junta escolar de la ciudad de Russellville, buscaba un nuevo superintendente escolar, en el 2015, sabía que las cosas se volverían controversiales. La población hispana de la ciudad era del 22% y seguía creciendo. Algunos antiguos residentes “anglo”, como se autodenominaban los miembros de la población de raza blanca, se referían despectivamente al centro de la ciudad como “Pequeño México”, y se quejaban de oír hablar español y de ver las casas coloridas que asociaban con la comunidad hispana.

Batchelor y otro exmiembro de la junta escolar, Bret Gist, recordaron haber oído a antiguos residentes decir que estaban inscribiendo a sus hijos en escuelas privadas o marchándose de Russellville porque no querían que sus hijos fueran “la minoría”. A otros les preocupaba que los estudiantes de inglés hicieran bajar las calificaciones de los exámenes y dañaran la reputación de su distrito escolar. En aquel entonces, apenas cinco distritos del estado tenían una población de estudiantes de inglés superior al 10%; la de Russellville era la segunda más alta, con un 16%.

Batchelor, que también es presidente de la junta directiva de CB&S, uno de los bancos comunitarios más grandes de Alabama, dijo que sabía que la futura economía de la ciudad dependía del próximo líder escolar: “Si nuestra comunidad sobrevive y le va bien, solo podrá ser tan buena como eduquemos a nuestros niños”. También expresó que creía que los estudiantes hispanos de la ciudad merecían las mismas oportunidades que sus compañeros de clase, y que estaba profundamente influenciado por su padre, quien fue miembro de la junta escolar de Russellville durante 20 años. “Mi papá solía decir que todos se ponen los pantalones de la misma manera, una pierna a la vez”, recordó Batchelor.

En ese momento, Grimes, un exmaestro de educación especial  y entrenador de fútbol americano,  se encontraba en su sexto año como superintendente del condado de Lawrence. En su primer mandato de cuatro años, había cerrado tres escuelas secundarias debido a una caída de la matrícula y a un déficit presupuestario que heredó. “Es muy inusual en Alabama que un superintendente cierre escuelas en un condado y luego sea reelecto, y él fue reelecto”, dijo Batchelor. “Sentí como que él no temía tomar decisiones difíciles”. Gist, el exmiembro de la junta escolar, recuerda la emoción que sintieron los integrantes de la junta tras la entrevista con Grimes. “Yo estaba listo para que llegara y tuviera un gran impacto”, dijo Gist.

El 11 de mayo de 2015, Grimes fue votado por unanimidad como el nuevo superintendente escolar de Russellville. 

Nuevas estrategias

Kristie Ezzell, quien se jubiló de las escuelas de Russellville en 2022 después de 31 años en los que trabajó bajo cuatro superintendentes, presenció la transformación de primera mano. Como maestra de segundo grado en la década de 1990, enseñó a una de las primeras estudiantes de inglés del distrito. Ezzell recordó a una niña pequeña que intentaba una y otra vez comunicarse, pero a quien Ezzell no podía entender. “Comenzó a llorar y luego comencé a llorar yo, y las dos nos quedamos paradas ahí y nos abrazamos y lloramos”, recordó Ezzell. “La barrera idiomática entre nosotras era simplemente desgarradora”. 

El crecimiento rápido de la población de estudiantes de inglés había tomado por sorpresa a los educadores de Russellville. En todo el distrito, había apenas un maestro titulado para enseñar inglés como segundo idioma, ningún intérprete y muy poco desarrollo profesional. “Nos llegaban estudiantes que no hablan una pizca de inglés, sus padres no hablan una pizca de inglés, y se espera que nosotros los eduquemos”, me dijo una maestra, quien pidió no ser identificada para evitar consecuencias. “Y yo ni siquiera sabía si están pidiendo ir al baño o si tienen hambre”. La situación también era injusta para los estudiantes angloparlantes, que perdían tiempo de aprendizaje porque sus maestros tenían la mente en otras cosas, dijo . “Simplemente era un desorden en todos los sentidos”.

Grimes, que no habla español y tenía poca experiencia con estudiantes de inglés en sus roles anteriores, dijo que lo primero que escuchó fue: “¿Cómo vas a solucionar esto?”. “Creo que pensaban que yo iba a hacer, de alguna manera, que la población de estudiantes de inglés desapareciera”, me dijo. “Y mi actitud fue: ‘No, no vamos a hacer eso’”. En lugar de ello, les pidió a los educadores: “Aceptar, Acoger, Celebrar”. “Primero, tienen que aceptar que su distrito está cambiando. Y, cuando abracemos ese cambio, vamos a ver algunos cambios muy positivos que vamos a poder celebrar”, recuerda que les dijo. “Y todo eso se ha hecho realidad”.

Para entonces, Ezzell era directora de la Escuela Primaria de Russellville. Recordó la primera reunión que tuvo Grimes con maestros, en la que presentó las calificaciones de los exámenes de los estudiantes, desglosados por escuelas. “Me hundí en mi asiento y vinieron lágrimas a mis ojos porque nuestros resultados no eran muy buenos”, me dijo.

Su mensaje, según Ezzell, fue simple: “No más excusas. Nuestros maestros ya no van a decir: ‘Bueno, son estudiantes de inglés’. Eso no está bien. (Estos estudiantes) van a crecer igual que todos los demás”. Mientras exponía sus expectativas, los maestros comenzaron a mirar nerviosos a su alrededor, recordó. Algunos lloraron y uno tuvo que dejar el salón. A algunos les preocupaba que Grimes estuviera criticando sus competencias; otros lo desestimaron por forastero, dijo Ezzell. Pero, ella recordó, una cosa estaba clara: “Sabíamos que hablaba en serio”, dijo. “Era muy empático con todo lo que estábamos enfrentando, pero afirmó: ‘Esto no puede continuar’”.

Cuando Ezzell se fue a casa esa noche, no podía dejar de pensar en la reunión. Era consciente de lo duro que trabajaban sus maestros. “Nunca dejaron de enseñar”, dijo. Pero las pésimas estadísticas le demostraron que no se estaban enfocando en las cosas indicadas. Ezzell me dijo que, desde ese momento, ha comenzado una misión para encontrar mejores formas de educar a sus estudiantes: “Dediqué mi vida a ello”.

Grimes dijo que la actitud predominante era que los estudiantes de inglés eran una carga, una percepción similar a la que se tenía de los estudiantes de educación especial a los que él una vez enseñó. Entonces trajo a una profesora y asesora educativa, Tery Medina, que explicó que los niños inmigrantes eran estudiantes del distrito bajo la ley federal. Siendo ella misma refugiada cubana, dirigió debates con los docentes sobre las similitudes entre la cultura hispana y la sureña. “Aman a la familia. Son trabajadores y muchos tienen fe en Cristo. Eran todas esas cosas con las que todos se podían identificar”, recordó Grimes. Por su parte, Medina dijo que estaba impresionada con la apertura que Russellville tuvo con estos estudiantes. Durante el mandato de Grimes, “Russellville fue una pequeña joya”,  dijo, “allí no se veía a los estudiantes de inglés como una carga”.

El distrito también invirtió en el desarrollo profesional de los maestros, asegurándose de que tuviera lugar durante las horas de trabajo, dijo Ezzell. Expertos, libros, videos, planes de lecciones detallados… para los maestros, en ese momento, era como una maraña de aprendizaje continuo. Lentamente, los educadores comenzaron a compartir estrategias y a impartir clases juntos. “¿Conoces el dicho, ‘Cuando sabes más, haces mejor?’”, me preguntó Ezzell. “Eso fue lo que sucedió”. Los maestros experimentaron, hicieron sus lecciones más interactivas y se guiaron por las más recientes investigaciones. Algunos maestros incluso crearon lo que se convirtió en una premiada clase de ciencia en tres idiomas: inglés, español y q’anjob’al, un dialecto guatemalteco. “Les dedicábamos tiempo para que fueran a aprender las mejores prácticas. Y eso benefició a todos los estudiantes, no solamente a los estudiantes de inglés”, dijo Ezzell.

No todos en el distrito aceptaron el cambio. Grimes recordó haberse reunido con una maestra que estaba a cargo de una clase en la que el 30% de los estudiantes estaba reprobando. Ella no lo veía como un problema, dijo Grimes. “(Su actitud) era como: ‘Vengo haciendo esto durante 20 años y no vas a decirme lo contrario’”. Según Grimes, dicha maestra se jubiló poco después; algunos otros maestros renunciaron.

Pero los maestros que se quedaron dijeron que podían ver que los estudiantes empezaban a responder a los nuevos enfoques. Los estudiantes de inglés comenzaban a participar más en clase; ya no se sentaban al fondo del salón. Muchos más de ellos comenzaron a tomar clases AP, de nivel avanzado, así como también clases de doble inscripción en el Colegio Comunitario Northwest College. “Los motivamos. Y cuando motivas con amor, vas a tener éxito”, dijo Ezzell.

El distrito comenzó a acumular galardones. Varias de sus escuelas recibieron el codiciado Blue Ribbon School of Excellence (un premio a la excelencia). Desde 2021, la escuela secundaria Russellville ha sido nombrada una de las mejores 25 escuelas en Alabama por U.S. News & World Report. En 2022, fue el único distrito de Alabama en el que predominan las minorías que recibió una nota  “A” en el boletín de calificaciones del estado; en 2023, Russellville fue uno de los dos únicos en el estado nombrado como “Spotlight District” (Distrito destacado) en lectura y alfabetización, y su escuela secundaria fue reconocida como Escuela de Excelencia A+ College Ready, designación otorgada por una organización sin fines de lucro contratada por el departamento de educación estatal para maximizar la preparación para la universidad.

El núcleo de las estrategias de Grimes, además del fomento del conocimiento  cultural y del desarrollo profesional, eran los educadores bilingües. En un principio, Grimes colocó intérpretes en cada escuela para ayudar con las traducciones cotidianas, pero sabía que los maestros necesitaban aún más ayuda en los salones de clases. Sin embargo, una escasez nacional de educadores bilingües exigía creatividad. Grimes decidió enfocarse en contratar asistentes bilingües, que ganaban la mitad del sueldo de un maestro. Se comunicó con el reverendo Vincent Bresowar, de la Iglesia Católica del Buen Pastor de Russellville, para que lo ayudara a correr la voz sobre los puestos que se ofrecían.

El tamaño de la congregación de Bresowar había crecido a medida que habían ido llegando familias inmigrantes a Russellville; su iglesia había construido recientemente un nuevo edificio de $4,5 millones para adaptarse a ese aumento. 

Sus feligreses, mientras tanto, trabajaban largas e irregulares jornadas, tenían problemas económicos y a menudo cargaban con traumas. “El sufrimiento es muy intenso y puede ser muy difícil”, me dijo Bresowar. Además, sabía cómo la barrera idiomática podía exacerbarlos malos entendidos. El reverendo dijo que su propia comprensión y aprecio por la comunidad hispana cambió una vez que aprendió a hablar español y compartió tiempo con ellos. “Creo que mucha gente tiene miedo porque no puede comunicarse y eso hace más difícil acortar la brecha”, dijo Bresowar. 

Él puso a Grimes en contacto con feligreses y, en 2021, usando fondos destinados a la pandemia, Grimes contrató a una docena de asistentes bilingües de esa comunidad. Al mismo tiempo, puso a esos asistentes en contacto con un programa de aprendizaje, gestionado por la organización sin fines de lucro Reach University, para que ellos pudieran simultáneamente formarse como docentes. “Fue un punto de inflexión”, dijo Grimes sobre esa ayuda adicional en las escuelas. 

Elizabeth Alonzo fue una de esas asistentes bilingües. Se incorporó al plantel de la Escuela Primaria West, de Russellville, (la escuela de la maestra Johnson y de la asistente bilingüe De la Rosa), en 2021, donde trabajaba mayormente con estudiantes de segundo grado en pequeños grupos y también servía de intérprete durante actividades escolares y para comunicarse con los padres. Mientras caminaba por un pasillo en una reciente jornada escolar, niñas hispanas de otras clases dejaron sus filas y corrieron a darle un abrazo rápido.  “Al principio era como: “Oh, ¿tú hablas español? Sus rostros se iluminan, ¿sabes?”, dijo Alonzo, quien nació en Alabama y fue criada allí por padres inmigrantes. En el pasado mes de diciembre de 2023, completó los cursos para convertirse en maestra y espera quedarse en West. 

Si lo consigue, será la sexta maestra hispana del distrito, mientras que, cuando llegó Grimes, había solo una. El nivel de recursos para los estudiantes de inglés es muy distinto del que había cuando ella iba a la escuela. Cuando Alonzo estaba en el kinder de una escuela del condado, su prima fue retirada de su clase de primer grado para hacer de intérprete para ella, recordó. “Y, luego, cuando yo estaba en primer grado, me sacaban de clase para ayudar a mi hermano menor”. Alonzo asistió a las escuelas de Russellville de 2008 a 2013. 

Otro maestro de Russellville, Edmund Preciado Martínez, también recordó haberse sentido aislado cuando era estudiante en Alabama a fines de la década de 1990. A veces, confundía palabras en español y en inglés, dijo, por lo que a menudo se sentía demasiado avergonzado como para hablar en clase. “Eso me llevó a educación especial porque pensaban que algo andaba mal conmigo”, recordó.

Era maestro en un distrito cercano cuando se enteró de los cambios que Grimes estaba implementando en Russellville y decidió solicitar un empleo. Hace seis años, fue contratado para trabajar con estudiantes de inglés en la escuela secundaria de Russellville.

Cada año, dijo Preciado Martínez, los docentes eligen un lema alrededor del cual unirse, como #whateverittakes (lo que sea necesario) or #allin (completamente comprometidos). La camaradería allí es muy diferente a las historias que ha escuchado de sus colegas en otras partes del estado, quienes hablan de compañeros que se quejan de los estudiantes de inglés e incluso se refieren a ellos de manera despectiva y con insultos.

“Siempre que necesitamos algo, simplemente lo pedimos y ellos hacen su mayor esfuerzo por conseguírnoslo”, dijo Martínez refiriéndose a los líderes de su distrito. “E incluso, si no pueden, buscan alternativas que podemos utilizar”.

“Hay espacio para todos nosotros” 

Grimes también se enfocó en involucrar a los padres hispanos en la educación de sus hijos. Se dio cuenta de que muchos de ellos se sentían demasiado intimidados o avergonzados para hablar con los educadores; en sus países natales, a veces se consideraba una falta de respeto cuestionar a un docente o incluso preguntarle sobre el progreso de su hijo. Así que se dedicó a entablar relaciones, frecuentando comercios hispanos, reuniéndose con líderes comunitarios y traduciendo al español todos los anuncios en la página web y Facebook del distrito escolar.

Dichos esfuerzos cambiaron la experiencia escolar de la madre Analine Mederos. Ella había abandonado la escuela en México en séptimo grado y deseaba con desesperación que sus hijos recibieran una buena educación. Pero, dijo Mederos, cuando su hija mayor se inscribió en las escuelas del distrito de Russellville, en 2006, ella no estaba involucrada en su educación en absoluto. “No interactuaba con los maestros porque no hablaba mucho inglés. La mayor parte del tiempo me daba miedo hablar”, me contó. Sentía que los empleados de la escuela la miraban por encima del hombro por la barrera idiomática, y no le veía sentido a hablar. “Si tienes preguntas, ¿quién te va a ayudar?”, dijo. “Así que, dijeran lo que dijeran, yo decía: ‘Bueno, está bien’”.

Pero con su segundo hijo, que ahora está en el décimo grado, ha tenido una experiencia completamente distinta. “Grimes ha hecho un gran… no sé ni cómo decirlo… un gran impacto. Especialmente con la comunidad hispana”, me dijo. Y agregó que a su hija le encanta la escuela, y que a su hijo, que está en la enseñanza media, no ve la hora de hacer la prueba para el equipo de fútbol. Cuando ve a Grimes en la comunidad, dice que se siente lo suficientemente cómoda como para hablarle de sus hijos: “Te va a escuchar. No va a fingir que te está escuchando. No; realmente escucha”. 

Ahora, a Mederos se le hace más fácil seguir las reuniones escolares. Hace apenas unos años, en la escuela primaria, había apenas un intérprete para 600 niños, por lo que la escuela solamente podía programar reuniones con los padres cuando un niño estaba en problemas o reprobaba. Ahora, con seis asistentes bilingües, el personal de la escuela puede tener reuniones individuales con cada familia al menos una vez al año, y también ofrecen dos días completos de actividades para padres en inglés y en español. Los padres saben que habrá un intérprete presente y eso manda un mensaje claro. “Nuestros padres saben que los estamos acogiendo y que los valoramos”, me dijo la directora Alicia Stanford.

El evento Mes de la Herencia Hispana que Grimes inició en la escuela secundaria Russellville se ha convertido en una gran celebración para todo el distrito, en la que los estudiantes aprenden sobre distintas culturas y tradiciones, hacen presentaciones de baile, leen a autores célebres e investigan sobre figuras históricas. Pero quizás sea el programa de fútbol, que Grimes puso en marcha, el que  ha obtenido la mayor respuesta. Antes de la llegada de Grimes, los estudiantes habían hecho lobby por el programa, sin éxito, pero él comprendió que era una parte querida e importante de la cultura latinoamericana. “Querían algo que fuera suyo”, dijo Grimes. 

Grimes no tenía fondos para una nueva cancha de fútbol, por lo que mandó a reemplazar el césped del campo de fútbol americano, y los estudiantes comenzaron a jugar allí en 2017. En 2021, cuando el equipo de fútbol de Russellville, los Golden Tigers, jugó en las semifinales estatales, tanto familias hispanas como no hispanas acudieron en masa. “Todos estaban animando, ‘Sí, se puede’, ‘Yes, we can‘”, recordó Grimes cuando nos reunimos en su oficina en marzo. El logo de la escuela es una antorcha como la de la Estatua de la Libertad, y hay una tradición escolar de levantar los puños cerrados para mostrar unidad y orgullo. “Toda la comunidad latina se pone de pie con sus antorchas en alto ―añadió―, y están cantando: ‘Russ-ell-ville, Russ-ell-ville’. Eso fue muy, muy poderoso”.

La pared de la oficina de Grimes estaba adornada con trofeos deportivos de eventos como este, junto con credenciales académicas enmarcadas, incluido su título de doctorado. Fue el primer miembro de su familia en ir a la universidad. También había fotos familiares y de antiguos alumnos, junto con una Biblia desgastada en su escritorio.

Batchelor, el expresidente de la junta escolar, dijo que, aunque en algunas ocasiones el proceso fue difícil, gracias a los esfuerzos sostenidos de Grimes y a su ejemplo, familias de todos los orígenes poco a poco vieron que mejorar los resultados de los estudiantes de inglés significaba que todo el sistema escolar mejorara. “Creo que la comunidad ha aceptado que hay espacio para todos nosotros”, dijo Batchelor.

No todas las ideas de Grimes funcionaron. Al principio, separó a los estudiantes de inglés del resto de los alumnos durante las clases curriculares, pero luego abandonó la idea cuando los maestros le dijeron que no estaba funcionando. Ahora, las escuelas combinan la enseñanza a los alumnos de inglés en grupos pequeños, por un lado, y por otro, con lecciones junto a toda la clase. Luego de que un acto de “vuelta a clases” demorara más de lo previsto, porque Grimes pidió que cada frase fuera traducida, él decidió realizar reuniones escolares simultáneas donde los padres podían elegir entre escuchar en inglés o en español.

Y no ha sido fácil sostener todo lo conseguido. Entre 2019 (cuando los asistentes de educación bilingües fueron contratados) y 2021, los estudiantes de inglés de algunos grados registraron grandes avances en los exámenes para medir su nivel de dominio del idioma inglés. Por ejemplo, los niveles de desempeño de los estudiantes de segundo grado pasaron del 46% al 84% y, los estudiantes de tercer grado, del 44% al 71%. Pero el progreso desde entonces no ha sido consistente; los porcentajes de estudiantes que dominan el idioma en algunos grados cayeron en 2023 por debajo de las cifras de 2019. Los administradores dicen que se debe a que la cantidad de estudiantes de inglés como segundo idioma sigue aumentando mientras que el número de educadores no, lo que significa que los niños reciben menos atención individualizada.

Pero la buena disposición que Grimes género al abrazar a las familias hispanas dio sus frutos de maneras inesperadas. En 2018, el distrito necesitaba reparar los techos de los edificios escolares pero no tenía los fondos para completarlos, dijo Grimes. Alguien de la comunidad hispana llamó a Grimes, ofreciendo hacer el trabajo gratis, dijo. “Ofrecieron voluntariamente su tiempo, sus esfuerzos, su energía y sus materiales, y completaron esos edificios”, él me dijo.

Hoy en día, los comercios hispanos dominan el centro de la ciudad, un área de unas pocas manzanas que hasta hace poco estaba llena de edificios deteriorados y vacíos. Hay tres panaderías mexicanas, dos tiendas de comestibles atinas, tres barberías, salones de manicura y una carnicería. Los dueños de los comercios se esfuerzan por apoyar al sistema escolar, dijo Yaneli Bahena, quien hace cuatro años se graduó  en el distrito escolar de Russellville y ahora es propietaria de un negocio llamado The Ville Nutrition.

Un restaurante mexicano se encargó del catering para un evento de “vuelta a clases” de 200 personas, las panaderías suelen donar pan y dulces, y algunas peluquerías ofrecen cortes de pelo gratuitos antes del comienzo del año escolar.  El campo de fútbol está rodeado de carteles de negocios hispanos locales que han patrocinado al equipo. La propia Bahena patrocina comidas para eventos escolares, y dona mochilas y material escolar. “La escuela me dio un sentimiento de esperanza”, dijo. “Tuve muy buenos maestros. Todos se preocupaban por mi”. En la escuela secundaria, notó que, a diferencia de años anteriores, se incluía a los estudiantes en las excursiones y se los animaba a cursar materias optativas. Bahena dijo que algunos de sus compañeros de clase se quedaron en la escuela en lugar de abandonar los estudios para irse a trabajar gracias al “empuje de ayuda” de los educadores. Ella también le dio crédito a Grimes: “Todo lo que han puesto para estos niños no sería posible sin el superintendente”.

Abogando a nivel estatal 

En 2019, ansioso por encontrar socios y apoyo para su labor con los estudiantes de inglés, Grimes comenzó a hablar con otros líderes del distrito que enfrentaban desafíos parecidos, y a intercambiar sobre cómo sería abogar por esos estudiantes en todo el estado. A nivel nacional, aproximadamente cinco millones de niños son estudiantes de inglés y la mayoría de ellos hablan español en casa. Pero, aunque la mayoría son ciudadanos estadounidenses, rara vez reciben el apoyo que necesitan, en parte porque su educación ha sido politizada, según Thelma Meléndez de Santa Ana, una exsuperintendente y secretaria auxiliar de educación K-12 de Estados Unidos en la administración de Barack Obama. “La gente ve el mundo (en términos de) una cantidad de recursos limitada. Entonces siente que, ‘si les estás dando tal cantidad a ellos, entonces me la estás quitando a mi’”, dijo.

En parte como consecuencia de dicha actitud, dicen los expertos, las calificaciones de lectura y matemática de estudiantes de aprendizaje de inglés a nivel nacional se encuentran entre las más bajas de todos los subgrupos de estudiantes, sus índices de graduación de la escuela secundaria van a la zaga y tienen menos probabilidades de ir a la universidad. “Necesitamos a estos niños, y los necesitamos que se eduquen”, dijo Patricia Gándara, codirectora del Proyecto de Derechos Civiles en la UCLA y experta en estudiantes de inglés como segundo idioma. “Representan una parte muy grande del futuro de este país”.

Al año siguiente, en 2020, Grimes fundó una coalición de superintendentes llamada Alabama Leaders Advocating for English Learners (Líderes de Alabama abogando por los estudiantes de inglés), bajo el paraguas de una operación estatal, el Council for Leaders in Alabama Schools (Consejo de líderes de escuelas de Alabama). “Su pasión era evidente y no se iba a detener”, dijo Hollingsworth, de Superintendentes Escolares de Alabama. “Si sigues tocando la puerta, tocando la puerta, eventualmente alguien va a abrir la puerta. Y eso fue más o menos lo que pasó”.

La coalición de superintendentes encabezada por Grimes logró presionar a la legislatura para obtener más fondos para los estudiantes de inglés, hasta $150 por estudiante, frente a los $50 a $75 de 2015. Los distritos con una población de estudiantes de inglés superior al 10% reciben $300 por estudiante. Para Russellville, eso significó un aumento cuadruplicado de los fondos dedicados a los estudiantes de inglés, llegando a $400.000, en un momento en el que los fondos de la ciudad disminuyeron. Grimes recibió un premio estatal por sus “excepcionales aportes y defensa incansable de la financiación para los estudiantes de inglés en las escuelas de Alabama”. Gracias, en parte, a sus esfuerzos, el estado ahora tiene apoyo educativo para los distritos, 12 instructores y un director estatal de aprendizaje de inglés. Grimes también abogó por que las calificaciones de los estudiantes de inglés en los exámenes solo se tuvieran en cuenta en el boletín estatal de notas después de que hubieran estado matriculados por cinco años (aproximadamente lo que tardan los estudiantes en aprender un nuevo idioma). Esa ley, que tiene sus críticos, entró en vigor el año pasado.

Barnett, del Consejo de Educación de la ciudad de Guntersville, dijo que los esfuerzos de Grimes por los estudiantes de inglés ayudaron a persuadir a otros líderes de distrito de que ellos también podían hacer ese trabajo. “Russellville es un gran lugar, pero no hay nada especial allí que no pueda suceder en cualquier otro lugar”, dijo. “No hay nada en el agua. Definitivamente se puede replicar”.

Durante siete años, Grimes y la junta escolar de Russellville trabajaron bien juntos, dijeron tanto él como exmiembros de la junta. Pero el disgusto de otros líderes de la ciudad surgió pronto, me dijeron varias personas. Grimes había comenzado a chocar por cuestiones de financiamiento con el alcalde de la ciudad, David Grissom, quien fue electo por primera vez en 2012. Un residente de Russellville cercando al funcionamiento del gobierno de la ciudad ―que pidió no ser identificado por temor a represalias― dijo que Grimes había hecho enojar a Grissom y a algunos miembros del ayuntamiento desde el principio, cuando señaló públicamente que su presupuesto para las escuelas era de $200.000 menos que el de su predecesor. (McDowell, escribió un correo electrónico en el que me decía que antes de ocupar el puesto se le informó a Grimes sobre el recorte y que había estado de acuerdo con el mismo). Los miembros del ayuntamiento “no tomaron bien que se les pusiera contra la pared o que se les hiciera quedar mal. Así que, desde ese momento, Grimes estuvo marcado”, me dijo el residente. Grimes también enfureció a Grissom cuando se negó a apoyar públicamente al candidato preferido del alcalde para un puesto en el ayuntamiento, en 2020, prefiriendo mantenerse neutral, me dijeron varias personas. 

Al responderme, Grissom no hizo comentarios sobre esos detalles específicos, pero escribió que “había entrevistado y había sido entrevistado por varias cientos de personas de todas las razas y etnias” sobre el desempeño de Grimes y que algunas de las personas con las que habló estaban insatisfechas con el superintendente. Planteó preguntas sobre si Grimes había estado en su oficina a diario, si trataba a los empleados de manera diferente y si gastaba demasiados fondos del distrito en conferencias. Grimes dijo que a veces viajaba por todo el estado por su trabajo, que las conferencias eran para el desarrollo profesional y (estaban) aprobadas por la junta, y que, como líder, a veces tenía que tomar decisiones que desagradaban a la gente, porque estaba sopesando diferentes perspectivas y necesidades. Dijo que estaba asombrado por las declaraciones del alcalde, porque ni el alcalde ni nadie más le había mencionado tales preocupaciones anteriormente. Gist y Batchelor, antiguos miembros de la junta escolar, dijeron que nunca habían escuchado semejantes quejas de nadie en los casi ocho años que llevaban trabajando con Grimes. “Ni una sola palabra”, dijo Gist. El expediente laboral de Grimes no contenía información alguna que indicara que había preocupaciones con el desempeño del superintendente. Ni el alcalde ni el abogado de la junta escolar ofrecieron aclaraciones sobre por qué, si existían tales quejas, no fueron comunicadas a Grimes. 

Mientras tanto, a medida que Grimes seguía invirtiendo esfuerzos para ayudar a los estudiantes de inglés, sus números aumentaban todos los años, duplicándose durante su mandato, hasta alcanzar el 33% de los estudiantes.

Después de aquella elección para miembros del ayuntamiento de 2020, en un esfuerzo ampliamente visto como destinado a destituir a Grimes como superintendente, Grissom e integrantes del ayuntamiento comenzaron a reemplazar a los cinco miembros de la designada junta escolar que había apoyado a Grimes. (En su correo electrónico, el alcalde Grissom escribió que los miembros del ayuntamiento tienen el derecho a reemplazar a los integrantes de la junta escolar y que lo habían hecho también previo al mandato de Grimes). En mayo de 2023, Greg Trapp, el miembro de la junta escolar, le informó al superintendente que no iban a renovar su contrato al expirar el año siguiente.

Gist, el exmiembro de la junta escolar, dijo que, aunque en un principio quedó sorprendido por la decisión del Ayuntamiento de reemplazarlo a él y a otros, tenía lógica dada la antipatía que tenía dicho organismo hacia Grimes. “Así es la política en un pueblo pequeño. Para que ellos pudieran controlar el sistema, tenían que deshacerse de los miembros de la junta escolar que estaban haciendo las cosas bien”, dijo. Y agregó: “Esa era la única manera en la que podían sacarlo”. Lo que les disgustó fue saber que la decisión no estaba motivada por lo que era mejor para los estudiantes. “Si hubieran querido reemplazarme por alguien mejor, eso está bien”, me dijo Gist. “Pero cuando lo hicieron por razones personales, eso me molestó”.  (Intenté comunicarme con Trapp por lo menos tres veces, y también traté de contactar a otros miembros de la junta, y no respondieron a mis solicitudes de comentarios.) Batchelor, quien fue reemplazado poco después de que votó a favor de mantener a Grimes, también dijo que la decisión mayoritaria de la junta fue un error: “Creo que es el mejor superintendente en el estado de Alabama”.

En marzo de 2024, el distrito nombró a un nuevo superintendente, Tim Guinn, un exdirector de la Preparatoria de Russellville, quien también había sido candidato a superintendente cuando Grimes fue electo. Más recientemente, había trabajado como superintendente del distrito de Satsuma. Guinn no respondió a repetidas solicitudes de entrevista.

Programas se desmoronan

Algunos de los programas y las prácticas que Grimes implementó parecen estarse desmoronando. A partir de junio, la mayoría de los asistentes bilingües, cuyos salarios se pagan con dinero de la asistencia por la pandemia y expira en septiembre de 2024, no habían sido contratados de nuevo. Además, los contratos de algunos docentes bilingües no fueron renovados. La junta escolar no ha dicho si tiene previsto seguir adelante con las mejoras que Grimes había planificado para los estudiantes de inglés de secundaria y preparatoria. Una escuela chárter de inmersión en dos idiomas, por la que Grimes había abogado y la junta había aprobado, estaba programada para abrir en 2025. Sin embargo, el proyecto ha sido descartado. (McDowell no comentó en un correo electrónico sobre los planes del distrito para los estudiantes de inglés. En cuanto a los asistentes bilingües, escribió que algunos de ellos no habían sido recontratados de nuevo porque los subsidios federales habían expirado. Grimes dijo que tenía previsto pagar por sus salarios mediante una combinación de fondos de las reservas del distrito escolar y fondos resultantes de la jubilación de algunos docentes: “Tomas decisiones con base a tus prioridades”, comentó. 

Grimes y la junta escolar habían acordado que él permanecería en su cargo hasta el final del año escolar de 2023-2024, mientras el distrito buscaba un reemplazo. Pero una semana después de mi visita a Russellville, McDowell acusó a Grimes de intimidar a la gente que hablara conmigo, según Grimes, y le dijo al superintendente que no podía pisar propiedad escolar o hablar con empleados del distrito fuera de su papel de padre, según Grimes. En ese momento, Grimes dejó las responsabilidades cotidianas de su cargo, pero seguirá en la comunidad hasta que su hija de 14 años termine la secundaria. Su esposa también sigue siendo maestra en el distrito. (En un correo electrónico y en una entrevista, McDowell dijo que nunca había acusado a Grimes de intimidar a nadie y que tampoco le prohibió al superintendente pisar terreno escolar.)  Fue también después de mi visita que más de una docena de educadores con los que hablé en Russellville me dijeron que ya no se sentían cómodos siendo identificados, por temor a perder sus empleos. The Hechinger Report y palabra acordaron retrasar la publicación de este artículo hasta que Grimes recibiera su último sueldo el 30 de junio.

En julio de 2024, Grimes empezó a trabajar a tiempo completo en Reach University, la organización sin fines de lucro que forma a asistentes bilingües para que se conviertan en docentes, como su director regional de asociaciones en Alabama, Misisipi y Tennessee. 

Los últimos seis meses han pasado factura. Grimes ha dicho poco públicamente sobre su partida y le ha dicho a la mayoría de las personas de la comunidad que se está jubilando. Cuando estuvimos almorzando juntos en un restaurante local, El Patrón, otros comensales se acercaron una y otra vez para desearle lo mejor. Dos de ellos le dijeron en broma que se veía demasiado joven para jubilarse. Grimes se rió y les siguió la corriente pero, una vez que se fueron, sus hombros se hundieron y parpadeó para contener las lágrimas.

“He pasado mi carrera muy entregado, muy comprometido en hacer lo que era mejor para los niños”, me dijo en voz baja. “No sentía que yo mereciera acabar de esta manera”. 

Afirmó que no se arrepiente de los cambios que hizo por los estudiantes de inglés de la ciudad. “Jesús amaba a la gente que los demás no amaban. Y ese fue parte de su mensaje: amas a tus enemigos, amas a tus vecinos, amas a los extranjeros y amas al pecador”, dijo. “Yo veo a Dios en esos niños”.

The post ¿Un trabajo demasiado bien hecho? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

RUSSELLVILLE, Ala. — Lindsey Johnson and Yesenia De La Rosa were taking different approaches to teaching the same English lesson on silent letters as they sat at opposite ends of this first grade classroom in West Elementary School. On this March afternoon, Johnson, the classroom teacher, was reading a story with the 6- and 7-year-old children who were fluent in English. The students of bilingual aide De La Rosa were still learning the language, so while she read the same story, she went slower, translating words, acting out emotions and showing them pictures on her iPhone.

Valentina, 6, wearing a black T-shirt with a gold Nike logo and leggings, had arrived less than two weeks earlier from Guatemala. She sat on the floor near De La Rosa’s chair, her cheek almost touching her teacher’s leg. De La Rosa worked with her individually because she didn’t know any letters or numbers, in Spanish or in English. When Valentina went to kindergarten in her home country, all she did was color. “So when she came here, that’s what she thought she was going to do. Just drawing,” De La Rosa said. “But here it’s different.”

The Russellville City school district created De La Rosa’s position in early 2021 as part of a larger effort to help educate its growing population of students who speak English as a second language. Many of the English learners, as they’re called, have parents from Mexico or Guatemala who work at a nearby poultry plant and in local manufacturing and construction jobs. Today, in the district, 60 percent of children are Hispanic/Latino and roughly a third are English learners.

Without De La Rosa, Johnson said she wouldn’t be able to communicate with more than half of her students, or understand the challenges they face. Johnson knew that Yeferson, an English learner from Guatemala, was one of the smartest children in the class, already reading more than 100 words, well above the goal of 60. “He’s a sponge, he soaks everything up,” Johnson said. She learned from De La Rosa that he’s doing well in spite of his many responsibilities at home: His mom works night shifts, so Yeferson does the laundry, washes the dishes and looks after his younger siblings. Said Johnson: “Having a bilingual aide makes a world of difference.” 

Russellville may not seem like a community that would be home to investment and innovation for immigrant students. It’s a politically conservative city in northwestern Alabama of about 11,000, where 72 percent of voters chose Donald Trump in the last presidential election. When the poultry processing plant opened in 1989, the Hispanic population was about 0.5 percent. By 2000, it had grown to 13 percent, and in 2020, it was almost 40 percent. The school district, like many around the country, struggled early on to accommodate the rising numbers of English learners, who were dropping out at high rates, being pushed into special education classes and showing little academic progress. Yet their success matters: Today in the U.S., more than 1 in 10 students are English learners and, at a time when overall public school enrollment is falling, they are among the country’s fastest-growing groups of students.

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.

In early 2015, when its superintendent announced his retirement, the district recruited Heath Grimes, then superintendent of the nearby Lawrence County school system, for the job. A self-described Southern conservative and man of faith from rural Alabama, Grimes, 48, set about overhauling instruction for English learners, establishing culturally relevant extracurriculars and reaching out to the Hispanic community. Those efforts had an impact: The share of Hispanic students taking Advanced Placement classes and dual enrollment courses at a local community college went up. Parental involvement increased. And Grimes led an effort to lobby lawmakers for a change in the state funding formula for English learners, boosting the state’s allocation more than eightfold, to $18.5 million. The district and Grimes won state and national recognition for their efforts with English learners.

“Any district with a significant English learner population has looked to Heath because he’s been ahead of the game,” said Ryan Hollingsworth, the executive director of the School Superintendents of Alabama, which represents the state’s 150 school districts. “It is just amazing to see what he’s been able to do in a small district with not a lot of resources.”

But as Grimes’ star rose statewide, according to local educators and residents, his relationship with city leadership started to unravel. Then, in mid-May 2023, a member of the school board told Grimes that it would not be renewing his contract, which was to end in June 2024. He agreed to retire when his contract ended the following year in exchange for a bump in his final year’s salary. Starting in November, I tried to talk with school board members, the mayor and City Council members about the school district and Grimes, but they did not respond initially to my interview requests. (When I introduced myself to the mayor, David Grissom, on the street in Russellville, he told me “no comment” and walked away.) But over the months, I was able to talk to more than 60 state officials, local administrators, teachers, former school board members, community leaders and residents, including people I met in businesses and on the street in Russellville. Those interviews suggest that the decision to force out Grimes as superintendent stemmed from a tangle of small-town politics, deep-rooted antipathy toward immigrants and a yearning for the city Russellville used to be.

“Heath Grimes put students first. And this ultimately may have hurt him,” said Jason Barnett, superintendent of the Guntersville City Board of Education in northern Alabama and one of dozens of district leaders in the state who worked closely with Grimes. Approximately 18 educators and community leaders in Russellville, many of them with knowledge of the events, told me that Grimes’ support for the growing English learner population was key to his loss of support among top city leadership. Many asked not to be quoted for fear of retaliation or straining relationships in this small community. One school administrator, who did not want to be identified for fear of losing their job, said of Grimes: “Many folks said the increase in the undocumented population was because he made Russellville schools a welcoming place that immigrants wanted to live in. People didn’t like that.”

In early July I went back to Grissom, school board attorney Daniel McDowell, and Gregg Trapp, who was until recently school board president, with my findings from months of reporting and a detailed list of questions. McDowell and Grissom replied with written statements that said that Spanish-speaking students had thrived in the district long before Grimes’ arrival and denied that the superintendent’s commitment to English learners had led to his departure. “Immigrants from Latin American countries have been moving to Russellville for the past 25 years and have always been welcomed into the city and the student body,” wrote Grissom. “Looking back, our high school has crowned a Latina Homecoming Queen, as voted by the student body and has recognized the first Latino Valedictorian. Those events took place long before Dr. Grimes came to Russellville.” 

Before Grimes arrived in Russellville, state lawmakers in 2011 had passed HB 56, widely considered the harshest anti-immigrant law in the nation. It gave police authority to stop individuals they believed did not have legal documents to live in the United States, and made it a crime for businesses to knowingly hire, and landlords to rent to, those who lacked documentation. Public colleges couldn’t admit students without immigration documents and, even though, under federal law, K-12 schools are required to serve students regardless of citizenship status, the Alabama legislation also called for school districts to collect information on their students’ citizenship status. While parts of the law were later struck down by a federal court, the message was clear: Immigrants weren’t welcome.

So when Greg Batchelor, then president of the Russellville City school board, was looking for a new school superintendent in 2015, he knew things would get controversial. The city’s Hispanic population was 22 percent and growing. Some longtime “Anglo” residents, as members of the white population call themselves, derisively referred to the city’s downtown as “Little Mexico” and complained about hearing Spanish spoken and seeing the colorfully painted houses they associated with the Hispanic community.

Batchelor and another former school board member, Bret Gist, recalled hearing from longtime residents who were enrolling their children in private schools or leaving Russellville because they didn’t want their kids to be “the minority.” Others worried that the English learners would drag down test scores and hurt their school district’s reputation. At that time, only five districts in the state had an English learner population above 10 percent; Russellville’s was the second highest, at 16 percent.

Batchelor, also chairman of the board of CB&S, one of Alabama’s largest community banks, said he knew the city’s future economy depended on the next school leader: “If our community survives and does well, it’s only going to be as good as we educate our kids.” He also said he believed that the town’s Hispanic students deserved the same chance as their peers, and he was deeply influenced by his father, who’d served on the Russellville City school board for 20 years. “My dad used to say everybody puts their britches on the same way, one leg at a time,” Batchelor recalled.

At the time, Grimes, a former special education teacher and football coach, was in his sixth year as Lawrence County superintendent. In his first four-year term, he had closed three high schools because of falling enrollment and a budget shortfall he inherited. “It’s very unusual in Alabama for a superintendent to close schools in a county and then be reelected — and he was reelected,” said Batchelor. “I felt like he’s not afraid to make tough decisions.” Gist, the former school board member, remembers the excitement the board felt after Grimes’ interview. “I was ready for him to come in and make a big impact,” Gist said.

On May 11, 2015, Grimes was voted in unanimously as Russellville’s new school superintendent. 

Kristie Ezzell, who retired from Russellville schools in 2022 after 31 years under four superintendents, saw the transformation firsthand. As a second grade teacher in the 1990s, she taught one of the district’s first English learners. Ezzell remembers a little girl who kept trying to communicate, but Ezzell couldn’t understand her. “She started crying and then I started crying and we both stood there and hugged and cried,” Ezzell recalled.“The language barrier between us was just heartbreaking.” 

The rapid increase in the English learner population had taken Russellville educators by surprise. The entire district had just one teacher certified to teach English as a second language, no interpreters and very little by way of professional development. “We had students come in that don’t speak a lick of English, their parents don’t speak a lick of English, and we’re expected to educate them,” one teacher, who asked not to be named to avoid repercussions, told me. “And I didn’t even know whether they are asking to go to the bathroom or are they hungry.” The situation was also unfair for the English-speaking students who missed out on learning time because their teachers were preoccupied, she said. “It was just a mess all the way around.” 

Grimes, who does not speak Spanish and had little experience with English learners in his previous roles, said the first thing he heard was: “How are you going to fix this?” “I think they thought I was going to somehow make the English learner population go away,” he told me. “And I was like, ‘No, we’re not going to do that.’” Instead, he asked educators to “Accept, Embrace, Celebrate.” “You first have to accept that your district is changing. And when we embrace that change, we’re going to see some very positive changes that we’ll be able to celebrate,” he recalled telling them. “And every bit of that has come true.”

By then Ezzell was principal of Russellville Elementary School. She recalled Grimes’ first meeting with teachers, where he presented student test scores broken down by school. “I sunk down in my seat and tears came to my eyes because our data was not very good,” she told me.

His message, according to Ezzell, was simple: “No more excuses. Our teachers are not going to say anymore, ‘Well, they’re English learners.’ That’s not OK. They are going to grow just like everybody else.” As he laid out his expectations, teachers started looking around nervously, she recalled. Some cried and one had to leave the room. A few worried that Grimes was criticizing their competence; others dismissed him as an outsider. But she says one thing was clear. “We knew he meant business,” she said. “He was very empathetic for everything we were dealing with, but he said, ‘This cannot continue.’”

When Ezzell went home that evening, she couldn’t stop thinking about the meeting. She knew how hard her teachers worked. “They were never not teaching,” she said. But the dismal statistics proved to her they weren’t focusing on the right things. From then on, Ezzell told me, she was on a mission to find better ways of educating her students: “I dedicated my life to it.”

Related: English learners stopped coming to class during the pandemic. How one group is helping

Grimes said the prevailing attitude was that English learner students were a burden, similar to perceptions of the special education students he once taught. So he brought in a professor and education consultant, Tery Medina, who explained that immigrant children were district students under federal law. A Cuban refugee herself, she led discussions with teachers on similarities between Hispanic and Southern culture. “They love family. They’re hard workers and many have faith in Christ. It was all these things that everyone could relate to,” Grimes recalled. For her part, Medina said she was impressed with Russellville’s embrace of these learners. Under Grimes, “Russellville was a little gem,” she said, “where English learners were not seen as a burden.”

The district also invested in professional development for teachers, ensuring that it happened during work hours, said Ezzell. Experts, books, videos, detailed lesson plans — to teachers at the time, it felt like a blur of continuous learning. Slowly, educators began sharing strategies and co-teaching classes. “You know the saying, ‘When you know better, you do better?’” Ezzell told me. “That’s what happened.” Teachers experimented, made their lessons more hands-on and followed the latest research. Some teachers created what became an award-winning science class in three languages: English, Spanish and Q’anjob’al, a Guatemalan dialect. “We were making time for them to go and learn best practices. And it benefited all students, not just English learners,” Ezzell said.

Not everyone in the district bought into the change. Grimes remembers meeting with one teacher who led a class in which 30 percent of students were failing. She didn’t see it as a problem, Grimes said: “It was like, ‘I’ve been doing this for 20 years and you’re not going to tell me different.’” She retired soon after, Grimes said; some other teachers resigned.

But teachers who stayed said they could see that students were beginning to respond to the new approaches. English learners began participating more in class, no longer sitting at the back of the room. More started taking AP exams, as well as dual enrollment classes at nearby Northwest Shoals Community College. “We pushed them. And when you push with love, you’re going to have success,” said Ezzell. 

The district began to accrue accolades. Several of its schools received the coveted Blue Ribbon School of Excellence. Since 2021, Russellville High has been named one of the top 25 schools in Alabama by U.S. News & World Report. In 2022, it was the only majority-minority district in Alabama to receive an “A” grade in the state report card; in 2023, Russellville was one of only two in the state named a “Spotlight District” for reading and literacy, and its high school was named an A+ College Ready School of Excellence, a designation given by a nonprofit contracted with the state education department to maximize college readiness.

Core to Grimes’ strategy, along with building cultural understanding and professional development, were bilingual educators. Early on, Grimes placed interpreters at each school to help with day-to-day translation, but he knew teachers needed more help in the classroom. A national shortage of bilingual educators, though, required creativity. Grimes decided to focus on recruiting bilingual aides, who earn half the pay of teachers. He reached out to the Rev. Vincent Bresowar at the Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Russellville to help spread the word about the positions. 

Bresowar’s congregation had ballooned in size as immigrant families moved to Russellville; his church had recently built a new $4.5 million building to accommodate the increase.

His parishioners, meanwhile, worked long, irregular hours, struggled financially and often carried trauma. “The suffering is very intense and can be very difficult,” he told me. In addition, he knew how the language barrier could exacerbate misunderstandings. Bresowar says his own understanding and appreciation for the Hispanic community changed once he learned Spanish and spent time with them. “I think a lot of people are scared because they can’t communicate and it makes it harder to bridge the gaps,” Bresowar said. 

He connected Grimes to parishioners, and in 2021, using pandemic funds, Grimes hired a dozen bilingual aides from that community. At the same time, he connected them to an apprenticeship program, run by the nonprofit Reach University, so they could simultaneously train to become teachers. “It was a game changer,” Grimes said about that additional school help. 

Elizabeth Alonzo was one of those bilingual aides. She joined the staff at West Elementary in 2021, where she worked mostly with second graders in small groups, as well as interpreting for school activities and communicating with parents. As she walked down a hallway on a recent school day, Hispanic girls from other classes broke out of their lines and ran to give her a quick hug. “At first it was like, ‘Oh, you speak Spanish?’ Their face just lights up, you know?” said Alonzo, who was born and raised in Alabama by immigrant parents. Last December, she completed the coursework to become a teacher and hopes to stay on at West. 

If she does, she’ll be the sixth Hispanic teacher in the district, up from just one when Grimes arrived. The level of resources for English learners is very different from when she was in school. Her cousin was pulled out of first grade class to interpret for her when she was in kindergarten in a county school, she recalled. “And then when I was in first grade, I would be pulled out of class to help my younger brother.” Alonzo attended Russellville schools from 2008 to 2013. 

Related: Inside the Christian legal campaign to return prayer to public schools

Another Russellville teacher, Edmund Preciado Martínez, also remembers feeling isolated as a student in Alabama in the late 1990s. He sometimes confused Spanish and English words, he said, so was often too embarrassed to talk in class. “It landed me in special education because they thought something was wrong with me,” he recalled. 

He was a teacher in a nearby district when he heard about the changes Grimes was making in Russellville and decided to apply for a job. Six years ago, he was hired to work with English learners at Russellville High School. 

Every year, he says, teachers choose a slogan to unite around, like #whateverittakes, or #allin. The camaraderie is very different from stories he’s heard from counterparts around the state, who talk about their colleagues complaining about English learners and even referring to them with derogatory language and slurs.

“Whenever we need something, we simply ask for it and they do their best to get it for us,” Martínez said of his district’s leadership. “And even if they can’t, they find alternatives that we can use.”

Grimes also focused on involving Hispanic parents in their kids’ education. Many were too intimidated or embarrassed to speak to educators, he realized; in their home countries, it was sometimes seen as disrespectful to question a teacher or even ask about their child’s progress. So he set about building relationships by patronizing Hispanic businesses, meeting with community leaders and translating into Spanish all announcements on the district website and its Facebook account.

Those efforts changed the school experience of parent Analine Mederos. She’d dropped out of school in Mexico in seventh grade, and was desperate for her children to get a good education. But when her eldest daughter enrolled in Russellville schools in 2006, Mederos says she wasn’t involved in her education at all. “I was not interacting with the teachers because I didn’t speak very much English. I was afraid to talk most of the time,” she told me. She felt school employees looked down on her because of the language barrier, and she didn’t see a point in speaking up. “If you have questions, who’s going to help you?” she said. “So whatever they say, I was like, ‘OK, fine.’” 

But with her second child, now a 10th grader, it’s been a completely different experience. “Grimes has done a huge, I don’t even know how to say like a big impacto, especially with the Hispanic community,” she told me. Her daughter loves school, she said, and her son in middle school can’t wait to try out for the soccer team. When she sees Grimes in the community, she said she feels comfortable enough to talk to him about her children: “He’s going to listen. He’s not going to act like he’s listening. No, he does listen.”

Mederos finds it easier to follow school meetings now. Just a few years ago at West Elementary, there was just one interpreter for 600 children, which meant the school could schedule meetings with parents only when a child was in trouble or failing. Now, with six bilingual aides, school staff can have one-on-one meetings with every family at least once a year, and they also offer two full days of programming annually for parents in English and Spanish. Parents know there will be an interpreter in the room and that sends a clear message. “Our parents know we’re embracing them and we appreciate them,” Principal Alicia Stanford told me. 

A Hispanic Heritage Month event that Grimes started in Russellville High School has now grown into a big districtwide celebration, where students learn about different cultures and traditions, perform dances, read celebrated authors and research historical figures. But a soccer program Grimes started has received perhaps the biggest response. Students had lobbied for the program before Grimes’ arrival with no success, but he understood that it was a beloved and important part of Latin American culture. “They wanted something that was theirs,” he said. 

Related: English language teachers are scarce. One Alabama town is trying to change that

He didn’t have funds for a new soccer field, so he had the football field re-turfed, and students began playing in 2017. In 2021, when the Russellville Golden Tigers soccer team played in the state semifinals, both Hispanic and non-Hispanic families turned out in droves. “Everyone was cheering, ‘Sí, se puede,’ ‘Yes, we can,’” recalled Grimes when we met in his office this March. The school’s logo is a torch like that on the Statue of Liberty, and there’s a school tradition of holding up clenched fists to show unity and pride. “The whole Latino community stands up with their torches raised,” he added, “and they’re chanting, ‘Russ-ell-ville, Russ-ell-ville.’ That was very, very powerful.” 

Grimes’s office wall was decorated with sports trophies from events like these, along with framed academic credentials including his doctorate degree. He was the first in his family to attend college. There were also photos of his family and past students, along with a well-worn Bible on his desk.

Batchelor, the former school board president, says that, while the process was sometimes challenging, through Grimes’ sustained efforts and example, families of all backgrounds gradually saw that improving the outcomes of English learners meant that the entire school system was better. “I think the community has embraced the fact that there’s room for all of us,” he said. 

Not all of Grimes’ ideas worked. Early on, he separated English learners from other students during academic classes, but scrapped it after teachers told him it wasn’t working. Now schools do a combination of teaching English learners in small groups and with the entire class. After a back-to-school event took hours longer than expected because he asked for every sentence to be interpreted, Grimes decided to hold separate but simultaneous school meetings, where parents could choose to listen in Spanish or English. 

And it hasn’t been easy to sustain all of the gains. Between 2019 (when the bilingual aides were hired) and 2021, English learners in some grades recorded big increases on language proficiency tests. For example, proficiency levels for second graders went from 46 to 84 percent, and for third graders, 44 to 71 percent. But the growth since then hasn’t been consistent, and proficiency levels in 2023 for some grades fell below 2019 numbers. Administrators say that is because the number of English learners continues to increase while the number of educators has not, so children are receiving less individualized attention.

But the goodwill Grimes generated from embracing Hispanic families has paid off in unexpected ways. In 2018, the district needed roof work on school buildings but didn’t have the money to complete it, Grimes said. Someone in the Hispanic community called Grimes, he said, offering to do the work for free. “They volunteered their time, their efforts, their energy and their materials, and they completed those buildings,” he told me.

Today, Hispanic businesses dominate the downtown area of a few blocks, which until recently was full of deteriorating, vacant buildings. There are three Mexican bakeries, two Latin grocery stores, three barber shops, nail salons and a carnicería, or butcher shop. Business owners make it a point to support the school system, said Yaneli Bahena, who graduated four years ago from the Russellville school district and now owns a business called The Ville Nutrition. 

A Mexican restaurant catered a 200-person back-to-school event, bakeries often donate bread and treats, and some salons provide free haircuts before school starts. The soccer field is ringed by banners from local Hispanic businesses that have sponsored the team. Bahena herself sponsors meals for school events and donates backpacks and school supplies. “School gave me a sense of hope,” she said. “I had really good teachers. Everyone cared about me.” In high school, she noticed that, unlike in years past, the students were included on field trips and encouraged to take electives. Bahena said some of her classmates stayed in school instead of dropping out to work because educators “pushed help.” She, too, credited Grimes: “Everything they put into these kids would not be possible without the superintendent.”

In 2019, eager to find partners and support for his work with English learners, Grimes began chatting with other district leaders facing similar challenges and discussing what it would look like to advocate for those students statewide. Nationally, about 5 million children are English learners and most of them speak Spanish at home. But even though most are U.S. citizens, they rarely get the support they need, in part because their education has become politicized, according to Thelma Melendez de Santa Ana, a former superintendent and assistant U.S. secretary of K-12 education in the Obama administration. “People see the world [in terms of] a limited amount of resources. And so they feel, ‘if you’re giving them that amount, then you’re taking away from me,’” she said.

In part as a result of that attitude, experts say, reading and math scores for English learners nationally are among the lowest of all student subgroups, their high school graduation rates lag behind, and they are less likely to go to college. “We need these kids and we need them educated,” said Patricia Gándara, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and an expert on English learners. “They represent a very large part of the future of this country.” 

The next year, in 2020, Grimes founded a coalition of superintendents called Alabama Leaders Advocating for English Learners, under the umbrella of a state operation, Council for Leaders in Alabama Schools. “His passion was evident and he was not going to stop,” said Hollingsworth of the School Superintendents of Alabama. “If you keep knocking on the door, knocking on the door, eventually somebody’s going to open the door. And that’s kind of what happened.”

The superintendents coalition led by Grimes successfully pressed the Legislature for more funding for English learners, to $150 per student, from about $50 to $75 in 2015. Districts with an English learner population above 10 percent receive $300 per student. For Russellville, that meant a fourfold increase to $400,000, at a time when city funding declined. Grimes received a state award for his “remarkable contributions and tireless advocacy for English Learner funding in Alabama schools.” Thanks in part to his advocacy, the state now has instructional support for districts, 12 coaches and a state director of English learning. Grimes also advocated for English learners’ test scores to count on the state report card only after they’ve been enrolled for five years (approximately the time it takes for students to learn a new language). That law, which has some critics, went into effect last year.

Related: How one district is addressing the trauma undocumented students bring to school

Barnett of the Guntersville City Board of Education said Grimes’ efforts with English learners helped persuade other district leaders that they could do the work too. “Russellville is a great place, but there’s nothing special there that it can’t happen anywhere else,” he said. “There’s nothing in the water. It certainly can be replicated.”

For seven years, Grimes and the Russellville school board worked well together, he and former board members said. But discontent among other city leaders surfaced early on, several people told me. Grimes had started to clash with the city’s mayor, David Grissom, who was first elected in 2012, about funding. A Russellville resident close to the workings of city government who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation says Grimes had angered Grissom and some City Council members early on when he noted publicly that his schools budget was $200,000 less than that of his predecessor. (McDowell, the school board lawyer, wrote in his email to me that Grimes was made aware of this cut after he took office and had agreed to it.) City Council members “did not take kindly to having their feet held to the fire or being made to look bad. So from then on, Grimes was marked,” the resident told me. Grimes also angered Grissom when he declined to publicly support the mayor’s choice for a City Council seat in 2020, preferring to stay neutral, several people told me. 

In his response to me, Grissom did not comment on those specifics but wrote that he “had interviewed and have been interviewed by several hundred people of all races and ethnicities” about Grimes’ performance and that some of those he spoke with were dissatisfied with the superintendent. He posed questions about whether Grimes had been in his office every day, treated employees differently, and spent too much district money on conferences. Grimes said that he sometimes traveled around the state for his work, that the conferences were for professional development and approved by the board, and that as a leader he did sometimes have to make decisions that displeased people because he was weighing different perspectives and needs. He said he was shocked by the mayor’s statements because neither the mayor nor anyone else had previously brought such concerns to him. Gist and Batchelor, the former school board members, said they had never heard any such concerns from anyone in their roughly eight years of working with Grimes. “Not one word,” said Gist. Grimes’ personnel file did not contain any information indicating concerns with the superintendent’s performance. Neither the mayor nor the school board lawyer would provide any clarification about why, if such complaints existed, Grimes was not notified. 

As Grimes continued to invest in efforts to help English learners, their numbers rose every year, doubling in size during his tenure, to 33 percent. After the 2020 City Council election, in an effort widely seen as intended to remove Grimes as superintendent, Grissom and City Council members began replacing members of the appointed five-member school board that had supported Grimes. (In his email, Mayor Grissom wrote that the council has the right to replace board members and had done so prior to Grimes’ tenure as well.) In May 2023, Greg Trapp, the school board member, informed the superintendent they would not renew his contract when it expired the following year.

Gist, the former school board member, said that while he was shocked at first by the City Council’s decision to replace him and others, it made sense given the Council’s antipathy toward Grimes. “That’s small-town politics. In order for them to control the system, they had to get rid of the school board members that were doing it right,” he said, adding: “That’s the only way they could remove him.” What upset him was knowing the decision wasn’t driven by what was best for students, he said. “If they wanted to replace me with somebody better, that is fine,” he told me. “But when they did it for a personal reason, that bothered me.” (I reached out to Trapp at least three times, as well as to other board members, and they did not respond to my requests for comment.) Batchelor, who was replaced soon after he voted in favor of keeping Grimes, also said the board’s majority decision was a mistake: “I think he’s the best superintendent in the state of Alabama.”

In March 2024, the district named a new superintendent, Tim Guinn, a former Russellville High School principal, who was also a candidate for the superintendent position when Grimes was chosen. Most recently he’d worked as superintendent of the Satsuma district. Guinn did not respond to repeated interview requests. 

Already, some of the programs and practices Grimes put in place appear to be unraveling. As of June, most of the bilingual aides, whose salaries are paid for by pandemic aid that expires in September 2024, had not been rehired. In addition, some bilingual teachers did not have their contracts renewed. The board has not indicated if it has plans to move ahead with improvements Grimes planned for middle and high school English learners. A dual-language immersion charter school, which Grimes had advocated for and the board had approved, was set to open in 2025. It has been scrapped. (McDowell did not comment in an email on the district’s plans for English learners. Regarding the bilingual aides, he wrote that some of them were not rehired because the federal grants had expired. Grimes said he had planned to pay for their salaries using a combination of district reserves and funds he would save from teachers retiring: “You make decisions based on what your priorities are.”)

Grimes and the board had agreed for him to stay on until the end of the 2023-2024 school year as the district searched for a replacement. But a week after my March visit to Russellville, McDowell, the school board lawyer, accused him of intimidating people into talking to me, according to Grimes, and told the superintendent that he could not be on school property or speak to district employees unless it was in his capacity as a parent. At that time, Grimes stepped down from the day-to-day responsibilities of his job, but he will remain in the community while his 14-year-old daughter finishes high school. His wife also remains a teacher in the district. (In an email and in an interview, McDowell said that he had never accused Grimes of intimidating anyone nor banned the superintendent from school grounds.) Also after my visit, more than a dozen educators I spoke with in Russellville told me that they were no longer comfortable being identified for fear of losing their jobs. The Hechinger Report/palabra agreed to delay publishing this piece until Grimes received his last paycheck on June 30.

Last month, Grimes started a full-time position with Reach University, the nonprofit that trains the bilingual aides as teachers, as its regional director of partnerships in Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. 

The past six months have taken a toll. Grimes has said little publicly about his departure and has told most people in the community that he’s retiring. When we were having lunch together at a local restaurant, El Patron, other diners kept stopping by to wish him well. Two of them joked about how he looked far too young to retire. Grimes laughed and played along, but after they left, his shoulders slumped and he blinked away tears.

“I’ve spent my career very invested, very committed to doing what was best for kids,” he told me quietly. “I didn’t feel like I deserved for it to end this way.” 

He said he doesn’t regret the changes he made for English learners in the city. “Jesus loved the people that everybody else didn’t. And that was part of his message — you love your enemies, you love your neighbors, you love the foreigners, you love the sinner,” he said. “I see God in those children.” 

Rebecca Griesbach of AL.com contributed reporting.

This story about Russellville schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and palabra, an initiative of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, along with AL.com. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. Subscribe to palabra’s newsletter.

The post A superintendent made big gains with English learners. His success may have been his downfall appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

By Liz Willen

For many high school seniors and others hoping to attend college next year, the last few months have become a stress-filled struggle to complete the trouble-plagued, much-maligned FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

The rollout of this updated and supposedly simplified form was so delayed, error-ridden and confusing that it has derailed or severely complicated college decisions for millions of students throughout the U.S., especially those from low-income, first-generation and undocumented families.

The bureaucratic mess is also holding up decisions by private scholarship programs and adding to public skepticism about the value of higher education — threatening progress in efforts to get more Americans to and through college.

To see the impact in person, The Hechinger Report sent reporters to schools in four cities — San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore and Greenville, South Carolina — to hear students’ stories. Because we found them through schools, most of those we interviewed had counselors helping them; for the millions of students who don’t, it’s an even more daunting task.

“It was stressing me every day,” said one San Francisco senior who was accepted to 16 colleges but could not attend without substantial financial aid. Some became so frustrated they gave up, at least for now. Others said they will turn to trade schools or the military.

Students whose parents are undocumented had special worries, including concern that naming their parents would bring immigration penalties (although the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act forbids FAFSA officials from sharing family information).

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To give students more time to weigh options, more than 200 colleges and universities pushed back their traditional May 1 commitment deadlines, some until June 1, according to the American Council on Education, which keeps an updated list.

Despite heroic efforts by counselors and a slew of public FAFSA-signing events, just 40.2 percent of high school seniors had completed the FAFSA as of May 10, in contrast to 49.6 of last year’s seniors at the same time, according to the National College Attainment Network. The numbers do not bode well for college enrollment, nor for the many high school graduates who will not get the benefits of higher education. 

No one in Damiana Beltran’s family went to college, so she didn’t picture it in her future. But at the end of her junior year, “everybody” at Mission High School in San Francisco started talking about applying, so she did. San José State University admitted her, as did a few other schools. Excited, Beltran entertained visions of becoming a psychologist and showing her younger brother that “you don’t have to be from the wealthiest family” to go to college.

But the online FAFSA form wouldn’t let Beltran, who is a U.S. citizen, submit her application because her mother, who isn’t, doesn’t have a Social Security number. They tried using her individual taxpayer identification number but got an error message. Leaving the field blank didn’t work either. Beltran’s mother skipped work to get help at the school’s Future Center, but still, no dice. Eventually, they mailed in a paper version.

When May 1 passed with no offer of aid — or even an indication that her FAFSA had been received — Beltran decided to give up on attending the schools that would require her to pay for housing and a meal plan. If she went to nearby San Francisco State University, living at home would mean not asking her mother to take on debt. “I want to go to San José, but I don’t want to do that to her,” a teary Beltran said in April. “I think about it a lot during classes. During the whole school day, it’s in the back of my head.” She’s had trouble sleeping.

Her classmate Josue Hernandez also lost sleep over the FAFSA. It took him about a month and two submission attempts to access the part of the online form that would allow him to upload his undocumented parents’ IDs to verify their identity, he said. Once he did, it took about three more weeks to process. The senior, who had received local news coverage for being accepted into 16 out of 20 schools, said he thought to himself, “It was 12 years of hard work, and I finally got in, but I might not even be able to go.”

Hernandez’s other hope was scholarships. He cut back his hours at an after-school job to work on the applications and had to stay up late into the night to do the homework he’d pushed aside. Most of his free periods, including lunches, went to figuring out how to pay for college. “It was stressing me every day,” Hernandez said.

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Finally, the University of California, Berkeley, told him that his FAFSA had gone through, and financial aid would pay for almost everything; the SEED Scholars Honors Program would likely take care of the rest. “It’s finally over,” he said.

But it was not over for Jocelyn, another Mission High senior, who asked to be referred to by first name only, to protect her family’s privacy. She said that her father had been working two jobs waiting tables and her mother had been saving what she could from the household budget for quite some time; they had amassed $1,000.  Jocelyn had saved $200 from working at an organic bagel shop. Room and board at San José State, her top choice too, runs $20,971 a year.

But that gap wasn’t her sole source of anxiety. By sending her undocumented parents’ names to the government in the FAFSA form, she feared she’d put them at risk, even though federal regulations forbid FAFSA officials from sharing private data with others.

Jocelyn, who wants to be a neonatal intensive care nurse, didn’t share the FAFSA difficulties with her dad, who only went to middle school in Mexico, or her mom, who never got to go to school. “They’re just gonna say, ‘Stay in San Francisco, problem solved,’ ” she said. But she already takes a class at City College of San Francisco, a community college, and finds the idea of enrolling there, with so many “grown adults,” discouraging. A friend of the family who did that and then transferred to a four-year school told Jocelyn she felt lonely having missed out on the first-year bonding. Now Jocelyn thinks she’ll go to San Francisco State, live at home for a year, and then move into an apartment. But she’d still need financial aid to make that work. “It’s like, back to square one,” Jocelyn sighed — and then said she might forgo college and get a full-time job instead.

That’s not too far from Alessandro Mejia’s plan. As a senior in the challenging Game Design Academy at Balboa High School, he has the coding skills to major in computer science at one of the four-year colleges he got into. “College is my first choice,” Mejia said in late April, but he was eyeing trade school. Financing college “would just be much harder on our family,” he said, and “being an electrician or a car mechanic doesn’t seem too bad.” Of abandoning a tech career, he said, “I’m a little frustrated, but I feel like I developed a good work ethic in school so … it’s not completely a waste.”

School counselor Katherine Valle listened to Mejia with carefully concealed horror. “It’s shocking to hear,” she said. The Game Design Academy “is our hardest pathway, and we don’t have a lot of Latino males in it. To know he did that and is going to end up being a mechanic is just …” She couldn’t find words.

Valle said that for her students whose parents have white-collar jobs, the new FAFSA was everything promised: “easier process, less questions.” But it took kids in Mejia’s family income bracket many attempts to complete. He has the same potential as his wealthier peers, but those kids are “10 steps ahead,” she said. “It’s not fair.”

Mejia finally submitted his FAFSA on April 29. He said if he didn’t hear back by the new decision deadline for California State University institutions, May 15, he wouldn’t enroll.

With less than a week to spare, Mejia learned his FAFSA had been processed. He committed to San Francisco State. Jocelyn did, too, though she would have preferred San José State. For Beltran, though, the May 15 deadline came and went; she was “still waiting for my FAFSA to come in,” she said, and hadn’t submitted an intent to register.

Samaya Acker stayed on top of her college plans all year. She applied for early action admission at 17 colleges, submitted her FAFSA application for financial aid two days after the window opened and came up with a backup plan to join the military, just in case.

Most of those preparations went well.

Acker, an 18-year-old senior at Air Force Academy High School on Chicago’s South Side who has “Power” tattooed in script on her arm, was accepted by 16 colleges (her top choice, the University of Chicago, was the only one to turn her down) and planned to spend a few months in the Air National Guard to help pay for college. But as scholarship and deposit deadlines approached, her FAFSA application was still classified as “pending” three months after she submitted it.

“It really put me on edge,” said Acker, whose high school years were interrupted first by Covid and then by the birth of her son halfway through her sophomore year, but who still is graduating with a weighted grade-point average over 4.0.

With Acker’s college decision deadlines looming, her counselor, Ashley Spencer, pulled her from class one day in mid-April to look over her options, whatever FAFSA results she got. “We are getting close to the end with you, slowly but surely,” Spencer said.

About a week later, Acker was awarded a Gates Scholarship, which pays the full cost of college attendance for high-achieving students from underrepresented groups. Acker, who is Black, accepted her offer of admission from Chicago’s Loyola University, where tuition alone is more than $52,000 per year. She plans to become an anesthesiologist. (The Gates Foundation is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

A few miles away, a group of students at Hubbard High School in southwest Chicago were not as lucky.

The FAFSA delays have created unique challenges for students with undocumented immigrant parents — including students at Hubbard. At a late-April meeting with Dulcinea Basile, the school’s college and career coach, four seniors whose parents are undocumented said they had spent months waiting for the federal government to fix a glitch that prevented parents without Social Security numbers from submitting financial information. “How many times have we logged in and it says ‘FAFSA not available’?” Basile asked rhetorically.

The glitch was finally fixed, but all four were still waiting, in early May, to find out how much financial aid they might receive.

“There’s really not much I can do,” said Javier Magana, 18, who was still trying to figure out whether he could afford any of the colleges that had accepted him. “It’s definitely been frustrating because I’ve been trying my best.”

Ixchel Ortiz, 17, plans to go to a Chicago community college, but said if she didn’t receive financial aid, even that would have to wait.

Isaac Raygoza and Octavio Rodriguez, both 18, said they had a few four-year college options but likely wouldn’t be able to pursue any of them without a FAFSA answer.

Rodriguez said he had been repeatedly frustrated by trying to complete the FAFSA. “I would go home and wait 20 to 30 minutes on hold, and we didn’t get anywhere,” he said. In late April he was notified that he had misspelled his own name on the application; in mid-May, he was still waiting to hear whether he needed to re-apply from scratch.

“I’m slightly stressed,” he said in mid-May.

Raygoza said he had submitted his application on time but had failed to notice an error message that prevented it from being processed. He resubmitted it in late April.

“I was just shocked it was never processed,” he said. “I had to do it all again.”

All four said they would likely take a year off to work if they didn’t get aid.

At the Academy for College and Career Exploration in Baltimore, juniors and seniors have weekly class, run by the nonprofit organization iMentor, to help them understand and pursue postsecondary options, including colleges and various types of financial aid. Counselor LaToia Lyle worries about the long delays with FAFSA, because most of her students are low-income and will be first-generation college students, so they don’t always have someone to help them at home, and the delays could mean decisions had to be made quickly.

She helps them compare tuition costs and reminds them that housing deposits are not refundable and book fees add up. “Even gaps as small as $500 can make a difference,” she said.

For Zion Wilson and Camryn Carter, both seniors, the delays and the need to constantly try to log into FAFSA accounts that froze were frustrating, but both students said they were relieved when glitches with the forms meant their college commitment deadlines got pushed back.

“The last thing I wanted to do was make a fast-paced decision,” said Wilson, an ebullient 17-year-old with a wide smile. “I kept bouncing between different things. I felt the FAFSA delay gave me more of a chance to decide what I actually wanted to do.”

She had applied for computer science programs at several colleges but was nervous about taking out loans. Even though Baltimore City Community College would be tuition-free for her, she worried she wouldn’t have enough money to spend if she wasn’t working. But her family wanted her to go to college, especially because her elder sister had enrolled but dropped out after the first year.

Wilson was admitted to her top three choices — BCCC, University of Maryland Eastern Shore and Coppin State University — but even with scholarships, she decided not to go. Instead, Wilson plans to go straight into the workforce through a program called Grads2Careers, where she will get training in information technology.

“It kind of sounded like I can just do the exact same thing that I would be doing if I went to college, but I can just start now versus waiting two years to start,” Wilson said. After a two-week training period, she will be paid between $15 and $17 an hour, she said.

In the end, she filled out her portion of the FAFSA, but told her parents not to do theirs. “Why make my parents do this long thing and put in their tax information, if I’m not going anywhere that requires it?”

Wilson is relieved not to have to think about college anymore. “I think I made the right choice, and having some money in my pocket will also be a good push for me to continue to advance up.”

Her classmate Carter, 18, is a serious student who is also on the baseball, wrestling and track teams. He has never wavered from his childhood decision to study biology. It began, he said, when he was about four years old, and his grandmother tuned to the National Geographic channel on TV.

“I was like, ‘stop, stop, stop,’ ” he said, recalling the video of a lion attacking a zebra. Carter was hooked. He started watching the channel every day. “I fell in love with ants, ecosystems, that just sparked my interest in biology.”

Carter applied to 14 colleges. He said filling out all the forms was challenging because the delayed release of the FAFSA meant he was doing it at the same time as he was taking a demanding course load, including AP Literature and AP Calculus. “It was really time-consuming and really work-heavy with a lot of essays, a lot of homework,” he said. “It’s pretty tough to do that at the same time while I’m doing college supplemental essays and my personal statement.”

But the FAFSA delay also meant that his mother had more time to finish the form, something she had been putting off for months. Because he is the oldest of four children, his mom hadn’t had to complete a form like this that asks for a lot of personal information, including tax data, he said.

“My mom was just brushing over it,” he said. “But I was like, ‘No, you really have to do this because this is for my future. Like, you don’t do this, I’ll have so much debt.’ So I was just telling her to please do this and please get on it.”

She did, but Carter said it likely wouldn’t have happened without the delay.

Carter got into his dream school, the University of Maryland, College Park, with a full scholarship, including tuition, meals and accommodation. His second choice, McDaniel College, also offered him a generous scholarship, but he says he still would have ended up paying $6,000 a year, which he didn’t want to do. “Definitely money was a big factor,” he said. He said he’s excited about starting a new chapter in September: “I feel like UMD is the perfect fit for me.”

Chylicia and Chy’Kyla Henderson worked hard to graduate early from Eastside High School in Greenville, South Carolina. The sisters filled their schedules and took virtual classes as well, so that Chylicia, now 18, could be done with school a semester early and Chy’Kyla, 17, could graduate after her junior year. Both want to attend college but need financial aid to afford it.

Their mom, Nichole Henderson, said the stress of trying to fill out both their FAFSA forms at once led her to take her daughters and two other graduating seniors she knew to a FAFSA workshop at a local college in April. Even with help from someone there, she found the forms confusing — Chylicia’s asked for Nichole’s tax information, she said, but Chy’Kyla’s did not.

“I don’t think there was a lot of help surrounding the whole FAFSA process,” Nichole said. “As a parent, it’s stressful. Especially when you have two.”

Chylicia is thinking about pursuing a degree in nursing or social work, and leaning toward starting at Greenville Technical College, a community college. But the school emailed her saying they needed more information on her financial aid application; it wasn’t clear if the issue stemmed from the FAFSA form or something else, she said.

Then, on May 8, she got an email from South Carolina Tuition Grants, a program that provides up to $4,800 in need-based scholarships, saying she was tentatively approved for the full amount. She still hasn’t resolved the paperwork issue at Greenville Technical College, though, and so isn’t sure yet whether she’ll be able to enroll there.

And if Chylicia’s application is missing information, the family worries that Chy’Kyla’s will have the same issue. Like her sister, she’s considering starting out at a community college, but Chy’Kyla also applied to a handful of schools in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia. By May 8, she said, she hadn’t received word about financial aid from any schools or any need-based scholarship programs.

“We’re just playing the waiting game,” their mother said.

Heather Williams, a school counselor at Riverside High School in Greenville, said students told her they struggled simply to complete and correct errors in their forms.

“Some of the errors they’ve had were just missing a signature,” Williams said. “Trying to circumvent that and fix it was hard for students because you can make corrections, but it was hard to get back in and [do it]. It was a lot of, ‘If I click this, then what?’ And being aware there’s an error, but not sure how to fix it.”

The FAFSA process has always been complicated, but the truncated timeline this year made it significantly more stressful, said Nicole Snow, a school counselor at J.L. Mann High School, also in Greenville County. Normally, her students and their families start filling out their FAFSA forms in the fall, but this year, they couldn’t access the form until January.

“By January and February, we’ve almost kind of lost those seniors that have already done their [college] applications,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh, let’s pull you back three months later and open up FAFSA.’”

The delay created some challenging decisions for students like Braden Freeman. Freeman, who is the student body president at J.L. Mann, submitted his financial aid application in January, right after it opened up. In March, he was told he got a full scholarship to attend Southern Methodist University in Texas, but by May 1, he still hadn’t heard back from his other top choices — the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Virginia — on how much need-based and merit-based aid he would get. Those colleges had pushed back their decision deadlines because of FAFSA delays.

Instead of waiting to hear back from UNC and UVA, Freeman decided to put a deposit down at Southern Methodist, whose deadline was May 1. The full scholarship was a big factor in his decision. “With the rising cost of tuition, I just can’t take on that much alone,” he said.

Both UNC and UVA eventually sent Freeman his financial aid packages a week before their deadline to enroll, which was May 15. Freeman said he still planned to attend Southern Methodist.

“I’m fortunate enough to not be incredibly dependent on need-based aid,” Freeman said. “For kids that are waiting on that and don’t know, I can imagine that would be way worse.”

This story about FAFSA applications 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 Four cities of FAFSA chaos: Students tell how they grappled with the mess, stress appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

MORGAN CITY, La. — Jenna Gros jangles as she walks the halls of Wyandotte Elementary School in St Mary’s Parish, Louisiana. The dozens of keys she carries while she sweeps, sprays, shelves and sorts make a loud sound, and when children hear her coming, they call out, “Miss Jenna!” 

Gros is head custodian at Wyandotte, in this small town in southern Louisiana. She’s also a teacher-in-training.  

In August 2020, she signed up for a new program designed to provide people working in school settings the chance to turn their job into an undergraduate degree in education, at a low cost. There’s untapped potential among people who work in schools right now, as classroom aides, lunchroom workers, afterschool staff and more, the thinking goes, and helping them become teachers could ease the shortage that’s dire in some districts around the country, particularly in rural areas like this one. 

In two and a half years, the teacher training program, run by nonprofit Reach University, has grown from 50 applicants to about 1,000, with most coming from rural areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama and California. The “apprenticeship degree” model costs students $75 dollars a month. The rest of the funding comes from Pell Grants and philanthropic donations. The classes, which are online, are taught by award-winning teachers, and districts must agree to have students work in the classroom for 15 hours a week as part of their training.

“We have overlooked a talent pool to our detriment,” said Joe Ross, president of Reach University. “These people have heart and they have the grit and they have the intelligence. There’s a piece of paper standing in the way.” 

Efforts to recruit teacher candidates from the local community date back to the 1990s, but programs have “exploded” in number over the past five years, said Danielle Edwards, assistant professor  of educational leadership, policy and workforce development at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Some of these “grow your own” programs, like Reach’s, recruit school employees who don’t have college degrees or degrees in education, while others focus on retired professionals, military veterans, college students, and even K12 students, with some starting as young as middle school.

“‘Grow your own’ has really caught on fire,” said Edwards, in part because of research showing that about 85 percent of teachers teach within 40 miles of where they grew up. But while these programs are increasingly popular, she says it isn’t clear what the teacher outcomes are in terms of effectiveness or retention. 

Related: Teacher shortages are real, but not for the reasons you’ve heard

Nationwide, there are at least 36,500 teacher vacancies, along with approximately 163,000 positions held by underqualified teachers, according to estimates by Tuan Nguyen, anassociate professor of education at Kansas State University. At Wyandotte, Principal Celeste Pipes has three uncertified teachers out of 26. 

“We are pulling people literally off the streets to fill spots in a classroom,” she said. Surrounding parishes in this part of Louisiana, 85 miles west of New Orleans, pay more than the starting salary of $46,000 she can offer; some even cover the full cost of health insurance. 

Data suggests not having qualified teachers can worsen student achievement and increase costs for districts. An unstable workforce also affects the school culture, said Pipes: “Once we have people here that are years and years and years in, we know how things are run.”

As Gros walks the hallways, she stops to swat a fly for a scared child, ties a first grader’s shoelaces and asks a third about their math homework. Her colleagues had long noticed her calm, encouraging manner, and so, when a teacher’s aide at Wyandotte heard about Reach, she urged Gros to sign up with her. 

Gros grew up in this town — her father worked as a mechanic in the oil rigs — and always wanted to be a teacher. But with three children and a salary of $22,000 a year, she couldn’t afford to do so. The low cost and logistics of Reach’s program suddenly made it possible: Her district agreed to her spending 15 hours of her work week in the classroom, mentoring or tutoring students. She takes her online classes at night or on weekends.

Current employees are also in the retirement system, meaning the years they’ve already worked count toward their pension. For Gros, who has worked for 18 years in her school system, that was an important consideration, she said. 

Pipes said people like Gros understand the vibe of this rural community — the importance of family, the focus on church, the love of hunting. And people with community roots are also less likely to leave, said Chandler Smith, the superintendent in West Baton Rouge Parish School System, a few hours’ drive away. 

His district is the second-highest paying in the state but still struggles to attract and retain teachers: It saw a 15 percent teacher turnover rate last year. Now, it has 29 teacher candidates through Reach. 

Related: Uncertified teachers filling holes across the South 

In West Baton Rouge Parish, Jackie Noble is walking back into the Brusly Elementary school building at 6:45 p.m. She’d finished her workday as a special education teacher’s aide around 3:30 p.m., then babysat her granddaughter for a few hours, spent time with her husband, and picked up a McDonald’s order of chicken nuggets, a large coffee and a Coke to get her through her evening classes. Some Reach classes go until 11 p.m. 

Noble was a bus driver in this area for five years, but she longed to be a teacher. When she mustered the courage to research options for joining the profession, she learned it would cost somewhere between $5,000 to $15,000 a year over at least four years. “I wasn’t even financially able to pay for my transcript because it was going to cost me almost $100,” she said. 

When Noble heard about Reach and the monthly tuition of $75 a month, she said, “My mouth hit the floor.”

Ross, of Reach University, said he often hears some variation of: “I had to choose between a job and a degree.” 

“What if we eliminate the question?” he said. “Let’s turn jobs into degrees.”

Brusly Elementary is quiet as Noble settles down in a classroom. She moves her food strategically off camera and ensures she has multiple devices logged in: her phone, laptop and desktop. Sometimes the internet here is spotty, and she doesn’t want to take any chances. 

It’s the night of the final class of her course, “Children with Special Needs: History and Practice.” Her 24 classmates smile and wave as they log on from different states. They’ve been taking turns presenting on disabilities such as dyslexia, brain injuries and deafness; Noble gave hers, on assistive technologies for children with physical disabilities, last week. 

Reach began in 2006 as a certification program for entry-level teachers who had a degree but still needed a credential. It then expanded to offer credentials to teachers who wanted to move into administration as well as graduate degrees in teaching and leadership. In 2020, Reach University started the program focused on school employees without a degree.

Kim Eckert, a former Louisiana teacher of the year and Reach’s dean, says she was drawn to the program because, as a high school special education teacher, she saw how little opportunity there was for classroom aides in her school to boost their skills. She started monthly workshops specifically for them.  

In growing the Reach program, Eckert drew from her teacher-of-the-year class, hiring people who understood the realities of classroom management and could model what it’s like to be a great teacher. She shied away from those who haven’t proven themselves in the classroom, even if they have degrees from top universities. “Everybody thinks they can be a teacher because they’ve had a teacher,” she said, but that’s not true. 

The 15 hours a week of “in-class training,” which can include observing a teacher, tutoring students or helping write lessons, is designed to allow students to test out what they’re learning almost immediately, without having to wait months or years to put their studies into practice. Michelle Cottrell Williams, a Reach administrator and Virginia’s 2018 teacher of the year, recalls discussing an exercise in class about Disney’s portrayal of historical events versus the reality. One of her students, a classroom aide, shared it with the fifth graders she was working with the next day. 

Noble says she’ll carry lessons about managing students from the bus to her classroom. She was responsible for up to 70 students while driving 45 miles an hour — so 20 in a classroom seems doable, she said. 

She can’t wait to have her own classroom where she is responsible for everything. “Being with the students approximately eight hours a day, you make a very, very larger impression on their lives,” she said. 

Related: In one giant classroom, four teachers manage 135 kids — and love it 

In May, Reach graduated its first class of teachers, a group of 13 students from Louisiana who had prior credits. The organization’s first full cohort will walk across the stage in spring 2024. 

There are promising signs. Nationwide, about half of teacher candidates pass their state’s teaching licensure exam; more than 60 percent of the 13 Reach graduates did. All of them had a job waiting for them, not only in their local community, but in the building where they’d been working. 

But Roddy Theobald, deputy director of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research and researcher at the American Institutes for Research, says far more research is needed on “grow your own” programs. “There’s very, very little empirical evidence about the effectiveness of these pathways,” he said. 

One of the challenges is that the programs rarely target the specific needs of schools, he said. Some states have staffing shortages only in specific areas, like special education, STEM or elementary ed. “Sometimes they result in even more teachers with the right credentials to teach courses that the state doesn’t actually need,” he said. 

Edwards, one of the first researchers to study “grow your own” programs, is investigating whether teachers who complete them are effective in the classroom and stay employed in the field long term, as well as how diverse these educators are and whether they actually end up in hard-to-staff schools. 

“States are investing millions of dollars into this strategy, and we don’t know anything about its effectiveness,” she said. “We could be putting all this money into something that may or may not work.” 

Ross, of Reach University, says his group plans to research whether its new teachers are effective and stay in their jobs. In terms of meeting schools’ specific labor needs, Reach has agreements with other organizations such as TNTP (formerly The New Teacher Project) and the University of West Alabama to help people take higher-level courses in hard-to-fill specialties such as high school math. But while Reach staff look at information on teacher vacancies before partnering with a school district, they don’t focus on matching the district’s exact staffing needs said Ross: “Our hope is the numbers work themselves out.”

In Louisiana, Ross said he believes the organization could put a serious dent in the teacher vacancy numbers statewide. Some 84 percent of all parishes have signed on for Reach trainees, he said, and 650 teachers-in-training are enrolled. That amounts to more than a quarter of the teacher vacancy numbers statewide, 2,500.

“We’re getting pretty close to being a material contribution to the solution in that state,” he said. 

His group is also looking to partner with states, including Louisiana, to use Department of Labor money for teacher apprenticeships. At least 16 states have such programs. Under a Labor Department rule last year, teacher apprenticeships can now access millions in federal job-training funds. Reach is in talks to use some of that money, which Ross says would allow it to make the programs free to students and rely less on philanthropy.  

A straight-A student since her first semester, head custodian Jenna Gros expects to graduate without any debt in May 2024. She expects to teach at this same elementary school. At that point, her salary will almost double.

She said she loves how a teacher can shape a child’s future for the better. “That’s what a teacher is — a nurturer trying to provide them with the resources that they are going to need for later on in life. 

I think I can be that person,” she said. She pauses. “I know I can.” 

This story about grow your own programs 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 To fight teacher shortages, schools turn to custodians, bus drivers and aides  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

SALINAS, Puerto Rico — Fue poco lo que su familia pudo rescatar. Solamente unas sillas plásticas, algunas fotos, su uniforme escolar.

La inundación el pasado otoño que devastó el hogar de Deishangelxa Nuez Galarza, estudiante de quinto grado en esta área costera del sur de Puerto Rico, también provocó en el cierre de su escuela primaria, El Coquí, durante tres días mientras el personal limpiaba un pie de agua lodosa de cada salón del primer piso. Deishangelxa siempre cuidaba sus útiles escolares.

“Cuido mis cosas de la escuela”, dijo, “porque un día yo quiero ser enfermera”.

Deishangelxa perdió dos semanas de clases, algo que le disgustó.

Se trataba de la más reciente pausa en una educación que ha sido caracterizada por interrupciones casi constantes. Deishangelxa comenzó el kinder en la Escuela Ana Hernández Usera en el 2017, año en el que el huracán María azotó la isla. Las escuelas en todo Puerto Rico permanecieron cerradas por un promedio de cuatro meses.

Ana Hernández Usera nunca volvió a abrir. Como más de 260 escuelas en Puerto Rico con una matrícula baja, cerró de manera permanente como parte de medidas más amplias para reducir costos. Deishangelxa se trasladó a El Coquí, pero la isla no tendría tregua de los desastres naturales. Tenía 8 años en enero del 2020 cuando terremotos estremecieron la isla, obligando el cierre de su escuela durante tres meses mientras los ingenieros inspeccionaban las estructuras físicas del edificio para asegurarse de que no hubiera peligro para que los estudiantes regresaran.

Relacionado: Los bebés y niños pequeños afroamericanos y latinos a menudo pierden las terapias tempranas que necesitan

Cuando se reanudaron las clases, no fue por mucho tiempo. Pocas semanas después, las escuelas volvieron a cerrar por el Covid-19. A Deishangelxa, que tenía 9 años en ese momento, se le hizo difícil el aprendizaje virtual y se retrasó considerablemente. En agosto del 2021, después de olas sucesivas de infección durante las que las escuelas abrieron y cerraron, la instrucción en persona se reanudó para los estudiantes de la isla, pero duró poco. Apenas un año después, el huracán Fiona desató su furia contra la isla, causando inundaciones extensas y daños a la infraestructura. Deishangelxa tenía 10 años cuando las escuelas volvieron a cerrar en septiembre del 2022 — en esta ocasión por dos semanas.

Los percances que ha tenido Deishangelxa se reflejan en todo Puerto Rico. Desde el 2017, varios desastres naturales han golpeado a la isla — diezmando casas, devastando la red eléctrica y destruyendo la infraestructura. Ese trauma recurrente, lo que un residente llama el “TEPT colectivo de la isla”, ha sido agravado por la pobreza extensa y los desafíos burocráticos.

El sistema escolar de Puerto Rico es excepcionalmente vulnerable a los desastres naturales que se están volviendo más comunes en los Estados Unidos debido al cambio climático, y al mismo tiempo está extraordinariamente mal preparado para ayudar a los niños a recuperarse de los contratiempos de aprendizaje que conllevan. La isla ha enfrentado corrupción y mal manejo por parte del gobierno local, miles de millones en deuda y emigración masiva que ha resultado en una pérdida crítica de profesionales y en esencia ha reducido a la mitad la población estudiantil de la isla, de casi 550,000 en el 2006 a 276,413 en el 2021.

El distrito escolar de Puerto Rico, el sexto más grande en los Estados Unidos, suele ser ignorado en conversaciones sobre la educación en el país. Sin embargo, los expertos dicen que se trata de un aviso temprano del cual otros distritos podrían aprender a medida que luchan con los efectos del cambio climático en el aprendizaje, la salud y la infraestructura.

“¿Cómo compensamos el impacto de esas interrupciones de escuela y cómo hacemos que las escuelas sean más resistentes?” dijo John King, ex secretario de educación de EE.UU. que es co-presidente de This is Planet Ed, una iniciativa del Instituto Aspen que trabaja en soluciones climáticas a través del sector educativo. “Es un problema agudo para Puerto Rico hoy en día, pero es un problema que estamos viendo en otras partes del país que va a seguir creciendo”.

La población estudiantil de Puerto Rico se ha reducido por casi la mitad en 15 años, de aproximadamente 550,000 en el 2006 a 276,413 en el 2021, una disminución causada por los desastres, la mala administración y la emigración.

Miguel Cardona, el secretario de educación bajo el Presidente Biden, prometió “un nuevo día” para Puerto Rico. Entre los últimos dos años, ha aprobado más de $6 mil millones en fondos federales para el sistema escolar de la isla. Casi mil millones de ese financiamiento se hicieron posibles revirtiendo una decisión de la administración Trump de restringir asistencia por la pandemia a Puerto Rico por lo que ha sido caracterizado como “problemas de largo tiempo” con la mala administración de fondos federales en la isla. El gobernador de Puerto Rico, Pedro Pierluisi, prometió implementar “una mayor rendición de cuentas” y contratar a un tercer partido independiente para administrar los fondos.

Hasta ahora, el dinero se ha utilizado para costear aumentos temporales en los salarios de los maestros, contratar a cientos de profesionales de salud mental escolares y financiar programas de tutoría. Pero, pese a la Ley de Reforma Educativa de Puerto Rico del 2018 que permite más control local, el departamento de educación de Puerto Rico sigue estando fuertemente centralizado, lo que impide que se reparta el dinero rápidamente.

Chris Soto, asesor senior de Cardona que encabeza el esfuerzo federal por mejorar las escuelas de Puerto Rico, dijo que es importante abordar no solamente las necesidades del sistema a corto plazo, sino también alguno de sus problemas sistémicos, como una burocracia sofocante y la infraestructura deteriorada, que han plagado al departamento durante décadas.

“De esa manera no estaremos hablando de lo mismo en 20 años”, dijo.

“Antes teníamos tiempo para recuperarnos, ahora no hemos tenido para recuperarnos. Entonces crees que estás saliendo adelante y pasa otra cosa. Es una crisis”.

Yadira Sánchez, psicóloga escolar y directora de Lectores para el Futuro

Puerto Rico, que ha estado bajo control de Estados Unidos desde que terminó la guerra hispano-estadounidense en 1898, por largo tiempo ha ocupado una posición nebulosa como un “territorio no incorporado”. Sus residentes son ciudadanos estadounidenses, pero no pueden votar por el presidente y no tienen representación en el Congreso. Las políticas federales aún ponen en desventaja a la isla, el resultado de una “relación cuasi-colonial”, dijo King.

La porción federal del financiamiento del Medicaid, por ejemplo, tiene un límite de 55 por ciento (si Puerto Rico fuese un estado, podría recibir 83 por ciento), a los residentes se les niega ciertos beneficios por discapacidad y se restringe el acceso a otros fundos, como el crédito tributario por hijos. La pobreza infantil es extensa: En los 50 estados, 17 por ciento de los niños viven debajo del umbral de pobreza; en Puerto Rico, esa cifra es de 55 por ciento y aún más alta en áreas rurales.

Los resultados académicos en Puerto Rico son bajos y han ido disminuyendo a un paso constante desde el huracán María. En un examen de matemáticas que toman niños en todo Estados Unidos (la Evaluación Nacional de Progreso Educativo, comúnmente conocida como la Libreta de Calificaciones de la Nación), aproximadamente a un tercio de los estudiantes de cuarto grado y a un cuarto de los estudiantes de octavo grado en Estados Unidos continental se les consideraba “aptos” en el 2022. En comparación, tan pocos estudiantes estuvieron a la altura de los estándares en Puerto Rico en cualquiera de los dos grados ese año que el porcentaje se redondea a cero.

“¿Cómo compensamos el impacto de esas interrupciones de escuela y cómo hacemos que las escuelas sean más resistentes? Es un problema agudo para Puerto Rico hoy en día, pero es un problema que estamos viendo en otras partes del país que va a seguir creciendo”.

John King, ex secretario de educación de EE.UU. y co-presidente de This is Planet Ed

Entre el 2017 y el 2022, el porcentaje de niños con un rendimiento considerado a nivel de grado en español, matemática, inglés y ciencia disminuyó por al menos 10 puntos porcentuales en cada materia, como lo mide la evaluación local, META-PR. En el 2021, funcionarios escolares revelaron que 13,000 estudiantes habían reprobado todas sus materias.

El aprendizaje virtual se le hizo particularmente difícil a los estudiantes puertorriqueños. Aun en el 2017, antes del huracán María, aproximadamente un cuarto de los niños de la isla carecían de acceso al internet y la mitad no tenían computadoras en el hogar. A los que cuentan con esos recursos hoy en día los entorpece un servicio eléctrico intermitente.

Relacionado: ¿Como se hace bien el aprendizaje virtual? Un distrito en California ofrece algunas respuestas

A los estudiantes les costó encaminarse cuando se reanudó el aprendizaje en persona: Más de la mitad de todos los estudiantes estaban “desinteresados” entre febrero y mayo del año pasado, según un cálculo en un reporte del Departamento de Educación de Estados Unidos. En El Coquí, la escuela de Deishangelxa, el director Jorge Luis Colón González dijo que un tercio de sus estudiantes tienen dificultades ahora, pese a que reciben algo de ayuda adicional.

Fondos federales le pagaron a una compañía privada para operar un programa de recuperación académica extraescolar en El Coquí durante el presente año escolar. Más de 75 niños, incluyendo Deishangelxa, se quedan después de la jornada escolar todos los días para recibir dos horas de tutoría adicional en español, inglés, matemática y ciencia. Colón dijo que espera que este apoyo adicional les permita a sus estudiantes ponerse al día. “Me preocupa mucho su aprendizaje”, dijo.

Yiria Muñiz, maestra en una escuela católica para niñas, Academia María Reina, en San Juan, dijo que los estudiantes de Puerto Rico han tenido cinco años completos de aprendizaje interrumpido, y que se nota. Muñiz dice que antes les enseñaba el sistema métrico decimal a sus estudiantes en una semana; ahora, le toma más de dos meses.

“Los niños del 2017 y del 2022 no son iguales. Si piensas en mis estudiantes de séptimo grado ahora mismo, han estado pasando por algo desde el segundo grado. Entonces, han perdido muchas, muchas oportunidades para desarrollar destrezas sociales, académicas, de conducta y emocionales”, dijo.

Muñiz se ve obligada a cambiar su currículo constantemente para acomodar a sus estudiantes. “Todo lo que había hecho anteriormente ya no sirve”, dijo.

Maestros en todo Puerto Rico dicen que han recibido poca asistencia para satisfacer las necesidades cambiantes de sus estudiantes. El desarrollo profesional suele ser irregular, opcional u organizado apresuradamente, y muchos maestros no han recibido ese tipo de apoyo en años, dijo Víctor Manuel Bonilla Sánchez, presidente de la Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico, un sindicato que representa a los maestros.

Algunas organizaciones sin fines de lucro han intervenido para llenar la brecha. Por ejemplo, una coalición de organizaciones enfocadas en la alfabetización, encabezada por la organización de fines de lucro Flamboyan Foundation, realiza talleres para entrenar los maestros sobre cómo enseñar la lectura, llena las bibliotecas escolares con libros culturalmente adecuados y educa a la comunidad general sobre la importancia de la lectura. Yadira Sánchez, una psicóloga escolar que también encabeza la organización sin fines de lucro Lectores para el Futuro, dijo que los maestros están “hambrientos” por este apoyo; una reciente sesión de capacitación que ayudó a organizar estuvo atestada. Ahora, la coalición está luchando por expandir su alcance a más maestros gracias a una esperada infusión de nuevos fondos federales.

Quizás aún más preocupante que las interrupciones académicas es la crisis de salud mental entre los niños de la isla. En una evaluación reciente, el Programa de Trabajadores Sociales del Departamento de Educación de Puerto Rico determinó que más de 500 niños habían perdido a un familiar durante el año académico del 2020-21 y que aproximadamente 68,000 niños, casi un tercio de todos los estudiantes, fueron identificados como necesitados de ayuda debido a una situación emocional, mental o de comportamiento.

El trauma compuesto por el torrente de desastres perdura. Los maestros cuentan de niños que se echan a llorar cuando un camión que pasa hace vibrar el suelo, porque les recuerda un terremoto. Algunos niños se distraen en clase al más leve sonido de gotas de lluvia, mientras que otros esconden comida en sus bolsillos y sus medias.

El plan de Puerto Rico incluía el uso de los $6 miles de millones proporcionados por el departamento de educación federal para fortalecer los equipos escolares de salud mental, en parte con la contratación de más de 420 enfermeras y 110 psicólogos escolares para abordar la severa escasez de empleados entre el personal de salud escolar. El dinero también ayudará a pagar cientos de facturas atrasadas por evaluaciones y terapias que ya se les realizaron a niños en programas de educación especial.

Dinelys Rodriguez, de 14 años, estudia en la Escuela Delia Dávila de Cabán en Toa Baja, aproximadamente a 25 minutos de San Juan. Recuerda haber hecho fila con su madre por más de tres horas simplemente para entrar a un supermercado después del huracán María. Ahora, cada vez que hay una tormenta, se preocupa por no tener suficiente para comer. Fueron tiempos difíciles, pero ella y su hermano, Jadniel, de 11 años, también recuerdan que jugaron a las cartas en familia después de los huracanes y se bañaron en la lluvia, recuerdos que los hacen sonreír.

Pero a medida que han ido creciendo, se han empezado a preocupar por perder tantos días de escuela. Dinelys quiere ser abogada. “Quiero ser alguien en la vida”, dijo. “¿Cómo voy a aprobar mis exámenes y graduarme si no puedo ir a la escuela?” Jadniel también se preocupa. “Es difícil estudiar cuando los adultos a mi alrededor siempre están preocupados”, dijo. “Siempre estoy en alerta”.

Ambos niños participan en un programa de salud mental que se ha ofrecido por mucho tiempo en su escuela, que es administrado por la organización sin fines de lucro Instituto Nueva Escuela. Luz Rivera Ocasio, una trabajadora social que pertenece al programa, dijo que apoya a las familias, sea que necesiten consejería o ayuda práctica como dinero para alimentos o ropa. Pero el programa, Casa Familiar, solamente está disponible en 13 escuelas, brindándole ayuda a sólo una pequeña fracción de quienes la necesitan.

Rivera describe su función como “el pañuelo que seca todas las lágrimas”. Los niños entran y salen de su salón para darle — y recibir — un abrazo caluroso y acogedor. Entre huracanes, la pandemia y todo lo que ha pasado, “le ha afectado emocionalmente”, dijo. “O sea, esto han seguido rastrando, poco a poco.”

El Coquí emplea a una trabajadora social escolar; hace dos años, sumó a una psicóloga escolar. Colón, el director, dice que los estudiantes aún se están recuperando emocionalmente del aislamiento del aprendizaje virtual. Y las maestras también. No podían dar con los estudiantes que no tenían internet, o que estaban haciendo cuidado a sus familias, y fue difícil. “La ansiedad fue una de los factores que afectó a nuestros maestros”. No solamente anima a los maestros a que hablen con la psicóloga de la escuela, sino que a veces él mismo se desahoga con ella.

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Sánchez, la psicóloga escolar que encabeza Lectores para el Futuro, dijo que la gente de la isla se enorgullece de su fortaleza, pero que los implacables desastres naturales han hecho imposible sostener esa actitud. Aconseja a maestros que se culpan por no estar con familiares que se están muriendo, que se sienten muy mal por haberles gritado a los estudiantes en un momento de frustración, y hasta a los que han dejado la profesión.

“Antes teníamos tiempo para recuperarnos, ahora no hemos tenido para recuperarnos. Entonces crees que estás saliendo adelante y pasa otra cosa”, dijo. “Es una crisis”.

“Los niños del 2017 y del 2022 no son iguales. Si piensas en mis estudiantes de séptimo grado ahora mismo, han estado pasando por algo desde el segundo grado. Entonces, han perdido muchas, muchas oportunidades para desarrollar destrezas sociales, académicas, de conducta y emocionales”.

Yiria Muñiz, maestra, Academia María Reina, en San Juan

Aunque las escuelas públicas de la isla habían visto una disminución constante en las matrículas durante casi dos décadas, en el año escolar inmediatamente después del huracán María hubo un bajón abrupto de más de 42,000 niños. Los funcionarios escolares ya habían cerrado 167 escuelas el año anterior y decidieron seguir consolidando otras 260 escuelas locales. Los maestros fueron reasignados, los viajes diarios de los niños se hicieron más largos y los edificios escolares quedaron vacantes. Desde entonces, la matrícula ha seguido disminuyendo, cayendo por otros 16,878 desde el 2021.

Ana Díaz, maestra de tercer grado en la Escuela Delia Dávila de Cabán en Toa Baja, ha presenciado el desplome en la matrícula de primera mano. Hace cinco años, antes del huracán María, tenía 28 alumnos en su aula. Comenzó el presente año escolar con apenas 14.

Díaz dijo que muchos estudiantes se han ido a Estados Unidos continental, usualmente a la Florida a hospedarse con familiares. Pero no es un camino fácil — no solamente deben acostumbrarse a un nuevo lugar, nuevas amistades y un nuevo idioma, sino que el currículo no está alineado con el de Puerto Rico, y los niños suelen tener problemas académicos, dijo. A veces regresan a la isla, y se les dificulta reajustarse y ponerse al día con lo que se han perdido.

“Es bien frustrante porque yo veo el potencial que ellos tienen”, dijo Díaz. Esta transmigración también podría tener consecuencias para el empleo de Díaz. Si se van más estudiantes, es posible que sea trasladada a otra escuela.

Los educadores también se han visto afectados por medidas de austeridad. Una junta de supervisión establecida por el gobierno federal para reestructurar la deuda masiva de Puerto Rico anunció en enero del 2022 que los educadores ya no recibirán una pensión garantizada, que sus beneficios serían reducidos y que ya no serían elegibles para recibir beneficios de retiro antes de los 63 años. Fue un golpe para los maestros de la isla a los que ya se les pagaba poco: El sueldo promedio en el 2018 fue de $27.000; los maestros en Estados Unidos tuvieron un sueldo promedio de $61.730.

La insuficiencia del pago de los maestros se manifestó de forma severa a principios del 2022, cuando un maestro falleció en un accidente automovilístico luego de quedarse dormido mientras conducía a casa de su empleo nocturno como guardia de seguridad, uno de dos trabajos adicionales que necesitaba para hacer alcanzar el dinero. En respuesta a la tragedia y otros sucesos, los educadores llevaron a cabo huelgas masivas, incitando al gobierno a aprobar un aumento temporal de $1.000 mensuales para todos los educadores y bonificaciones para algunos maestros, pagados con fondos federales.

Pero no está claro qué sucederá una vez que se agote el dinero. Dijo que nunca va a poder jubilarse.

“Nunca me voy a rendir. Siempre voy a estar buscando estrategias. Las que no funcionan, las cambiamos.”

Jorge Luis Colón González, director de la escuela El Coquí en Salinas

Bonilla, del sindicato de maestros, dijo que la máxima prioridad del grupo es mayor apoyo para la salud mental de los maestros. El departamento de educación de Puerto Rico recientemente firmó un acuerdo con una universidad local para brindarles terapia virtual a los educadores, pero Bonilla dice que debe hacer mucho más, por la escala del problema.

El secretario de educación de Puerto Rico, Eliezer Ramos Parés, quien está comenzado su segundo año en el cargo, reconoce que les espera un camino difícil. Pero se siente optimista de que el dinero federal ayudará y que el gobierno estadounidense, las organizaciones sin fines de lucro y el departamento de educación local encontrarán la manera de trabajar en conjunto. Ramos Parés dijo que su departamento ya ha hecho algunos cambios — por ejemplo, están usando más récords electrónicos, en lugar de papeles; recopilando más datos y documentando sus actividades.

“La confianza es importante y para que haya confianza, tiene que haber transparencia”, dijo. “Puerto Rico no lo puede lograr solo; tenemos que ser un equipo”.

Afuera de El Coquí — la escuela lleva el nombre de la pequeña especie de rana con voz grande que es tan querida en la isla — miles de mariposas amarillas y blancas aletean como confeti. Pero a pesar de la belleza que los rodea, los residentes del área exudan una ansiedad palpable, temerosos del próximo desastre natural. Los residentes locales están en estado de alerta por señales de advertencia: Aquí en el sur de Puerto Rico, si de pronto aparecen ciertas aves marinas en el interior, la gente cree que viene otro desastre, dijo Colón.

La ansiedad podría ser un factor en el reciente aumento en los casos de asma entre los estudiantes de El Coquí, dijo la trabajadora social de la escuela. También ha aumentado el número de estudiantes en El Coquí con problemas de la piel. Los padecimientos podrían ser consecuencia del molo al que los niños estuvieron expuestos en sus hogares después de las inundaciones, o de la contaminación ambiental que ha sido una preocupación en esta área durante años, agregó.

Algunos de los fondos federales se utilizarán para remover moho, asbestos y plomo de los edificios y proveerles a los estudiantes pupitres que estén libres de moho u óxido. También hay planes para reemplazar sistemas de aire acondicionado anticuados.

El ingreso por cápita en esa región costera de Salinas es menos de $10.000 al año; apenas un poco más de un tercio de las personas de edad para trabajar forman parte de la fuerza laboral. Colón, quien se crio pobre en un pueblo cercano, dice que la educación fue su salida. Es un camino que anhela con fervor para sus estudiantes.

“Es la única herramienta que tienen para salir de la pobreza”, dijo. “Puede cambiar vidas”. Es por eso que, pese a los desafíos de los últimos años, Colón dijo estar más decidido que nunca a seguir trabajando en el ámbito de la educación.

“Nunca me voy a rendir”, dijo. “Siempre voy a estar buscando estrategias. Las que no funcionan, las cambiamos”.

Este artículo acerca del sistema escolar de Puerto Rico fue producido por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente sin fines de lucro enfocada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación. Lea sus otros artículos en español.

The post ¿Son las dificultades de las escuelas en Puerto Rico un avance de lo que enfrentarán otros distritos? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

SALINAS, Puerto Rico — There was little her family could salvage. Just a few plastic chairs, some photos, her school uniform.

The flooding last fall that devastated the home of Deishangelxa Nuez Galarza, a fifth grader in this coastal area of southern Puerto Rico, also closed her elementary school, El Coquí, for three days while staff cleaned out a foot of muddy water from every first floor room. Deishangelxa missed two weeks of classes, which upset her.

“School is very important to me because I want to keep studying,” she said. “I want to become a nurse.”

It was just the latest interruption in schooling that’s been characterized by near constant disruption. Deishangelxa started kindergarten at Ana Hernandez Usera elementary school in 2017, the year Hurricane Maria struck the island. Schools across Puerto Rico were closed for an average of four months.

Ana Hernandez Usera never reopened. Like more than 260 other schools across Puerto Rico with low enrollment, it was closed permanently as part of wider cost cutting measures. Deishangelxa transferred to El Coquí, but the island would not get a break from natural disasters. She was 8 in January 2020, when earthquakes rocked the island, closing her school for three months while engineers inspected its physical structures to make sure they were safe for students to return.

When classes finally resumed, it wasn’t for long. A few weeks later schools closed again because of Covid-19. Deishangelxa, 9 years old at the time, struggled with virtual learning and fell far behind. In August 2021, after successive waves of infection saw schools open and close, in-person schooling finally resumed for students on the island, but not for long. Just a year later, Hurricane Fiona unleashed a furious attack on the island, causing widespread flooding and infrastructure damage. Deishangelxa was 10 when schools shut again in September 2022 — this time for two weeks.

The troubles Deishangelxa has faced are mirrored across Puerto Rico. Since 2017, natural disasters have pounded the island — decimating homes, crippling the power grid and gutting infrastructure. That repeated trauma, what one resident called “collective island PTSD,” has been compounded by widespread poverty and bureaucratic challenges.

Puerto Rico’s school system is both uniquely vulnerable to natural disasters that are becoming more common across the U.S. because of climate change, and unusually ill-equipped to help children recover from the learning setbacks that come with them. The island has faced corruption and mismanagement in local government, billions of dollars in debt and mass emigration that has caused a critical loss of professionals and essentially halved the island’s student population in 15 years, from almost 550,000 in 2006 to 276,413 in 2021.

The Puerto Rican school district, the sixth largest in the U.S., is often ignored in conversations about U.S. education. Yet experts say it is the canary in the coal mine that other districts could learn from as they grapple with the effects of climate change on learning, health and infrastructure.

“How do we make up for the impact of those disruptions of school and how do we make schools more resilient?” said John King, a former U.S. secretary of education who is co-chair of This is Planet Ed, an initiative of the Aspen Institute that works on climate solutions through the education sector. “That’s an acute problem in Puerto Rico today, but it’s a problem we’re already seeing in other parts of the country that’s going to grow.”

Miguel Cardona, the secretary of education under President Biden, promised “a new day” for Puerto Rico. Over the past two years, he has signed off on almost $6 billion in federal dollars for the island’s school system. Almost a billion of that funding was made possible by reversing a Trump administration decision to restrict pandemic aid to the island because of what had been called “longstanding challenges” with the island’s mismanagement of federal funds. The Puerto Rican governor, Pedro Pierluisi, promised to implement “greater accountability” and enlist an independent third party to administer the funds.

“We’ve never seen such a need in the history of Puerto Rico. We are making a clarion call for help.”

Victor Manuel Bonilla Sánchez, president of the Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico

The money has so far been used to pay for temporary teacher salary increases, hire hundreds of school mental health professionals and fund tutoring programs. But, despite a 2018 education reform law that allows for more local control, the Puerto Rico department of education is still heavily centralized, making it difficult to get the money out the door quickly.

Chris Soto, a senior advisor to Cardona who heads the federal effort to improve Puerto Rican schools, said it’s important to tackle not only the system’s short-term needs, but also some of its systemic issues, such as the stifling bureaucracy and crumbling infrastructure that have plagued the department for decades.

“That way we’re not having the same conversation in 20 years,” he said.

Related: In Puerto Rico, the odds are against high school grads who want to go to college

Puerto Rico, which has been under U.S. control since the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898, has long occupied a nebulous position as an “unincorporated territory.” Its residents are U.S. citizens but lack a presidential vote and representation in Congress. Federal policies still disadvantage the island, the result of a “quasi-colonial relationship,” said King.

The federal share of Medicaid funding, for example, is capped at 55 percent (if Puerto Rico were a state, it could receive 83 percent), residents are denied certain disability benefits and there are restrictions on access to other funding, such as the child tax credit. Child poverty is widespread: In the 50 U.S. states, 17 percent of children live below the poverty line; in Puerto Rico, that figure is 55 percent and even higher in rural areas.

Puerto Rico’s student population has dropped by almost half in 15 years, from almost 550,000 in 2006 to 276,413 in 2021, a decline caused by disasters, mismanagement and migration.

Academic outcomes in Puerto Rico are poor and have been on a steady decline since Hurricane Maria. On the math test that children all over the U.S. take (the National Assessment for Educational Progress, commonly called the Nation’s Report Card), about a third of fourth graders and a quarter of eighth graders on the mainland were considered “proficient” in 2022. By comparison, so few students made the cut in Puerto Rico in either grade that year that the percentages rounded to zero.

Between 2017 and 2022, the percentage of children considered on grade level in Spanish, math, English and science decreased by at least 10 percentage points in each subject, as measured by the local assessment, META-PR. In 2021, school officials announced that 13,000 students had failed all their classes.

Online learning was particularly challenging for Puerto Rican students. Even in 2017, before Hurricane Maria, about a quarter of the island’s children lacked internet access and half lacked computers at home. Those who do have them now often struggle with intermittent power.

Students struggled to get back on track after in-person learning resumed: More than half of all students were “disengaged” between February and May last year, according to an estimate in a 2021 U.S. Department of Education report. At El Coquí, Deishangelxa’s school, principal Jorge Luis Colón Gonzalez said a third of his students are now struggling, despite some extra help.

Federal funds paid for a private company to run an afterschool academic recovery program at El Coquí this school year. More than 75 children, including Deishangelxa, stay behind after school every day for two hours of extra tutoring in Spanish, English, math and science. Colón said he hopes this additional support can help his students catch up. “I’m very worried about their learning,” he said.

Yiria Muñiz, a teacher at a Catholic girls’ school, Academia María Reina, in San Juan, said Puerto Rico’s students have experienced a full five years of disrupted learning, and it shows. Muñiz said she used to teach her students the metric system in a week; now, it takes more than two months.

“2017 and 2022 children are not the same. If you think about my seventh graders right now, they’ve been going through something ever since second grade. So, they have missed on many, many opportunities to develop social, academic, behavioral, emotional skills,” she said.

Muñiz is constantly having to change her curriculum to accommodate her students. “Everything I’ve done before is no good anymore,” she said.

Teachers across Puerto Rico say they have received little assistance in meeting their students’ changing needs. Professional development is often spotty, optional or hastily put together, and many teachers have not received any such support for years, said Victor Manuel Bonilla Sánchez, the president of the Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico, a union that represents teachers.

Some nonprofits have stepped in to fill the gap. For example, a coalition of organizations focused on literacy, headed by the nonprofit Flamboyan Foundation, holds workshops to train teachers in how to teach reading, stocks school libraries with culturally appropriate books and educates the broader community on the importance of reading. Yadira Sánchez, a school psychologist who also heads a nonprofit Lectores para el Futuro (Readers for the Future), said teachers are “hungry” for this support; a recent training session she helped organize was packed. Now, the coalition is working to expand its outreach to more teachers thanks to an expected infusion of new federal funds.

Related: Climate change is sabotaging education for America’s students — and it’s only going to get worse

Even more worrying than the academic disruptions, perhaps, is the mental health crisis among the island’s children. In one recent assessment, the Puerto Rican Department of Education’s Social Worker Program found that more than 500 children had lost a family member during the 2020-21 academic year and approximately 68,000 kids, almost a third of all students, were identified as needing help because of an emotional, mental or behavioral situation.

Compounded trauma from the barrage of disasters lingers. Teachers speak of children crying when a passing truck makes the ground vibrate, because it reminds them of an earthquake. Some kids become distracted in class at the slightest sound of rain drops, while others hide food in their pockets and socks.

Puerto Rico’s plan included using the $6 billion recovery money provided by the federal education department to beef up existing school mental health teams, in part by hiring more than 420 school nurses and 110 school psychologists to address severe staff shortages among school health personnel. The money will also help pay for hundreds of overdue invoices for evaluations and therapy already conducted for children in special education programs.

Dinelys Rodriguez, 14, studies at Delia Dávila de Cabán School in Toa Baja, about 25 minutes from San Juan. She remembers waiting in line with her mother for more than three hours just to enter a supermarket after Hurricane Maria. Now, every time there’s a storm, she worries she won’t have enough to eat. That time was challenging, but she and her brother, Jadniel, 11, also remember playing cards with family in the aftermath of the hurricanes and taking showers in the rain, memories that make them smile.

But as they’ve grown, they’ve started to worry about missing so much school. Dinelys wants to be a lawyer. “I want to be someone in life,” she said. “How will I pass my school exams and graduate if I can’t go to school?” Jadniel worries as well. “It is difficult to study when all the adults around me are always worried,” he said. “I am always on alert.”

Both children participate in a longstanding mental health program in their school, run by the nonprofit Instituto Nueva Escuela. Luz Rivera Ocasio, a social worker with the program, said she supports families whether they need counseling or practical help such as money for food or clothes. But the program, Casa Familiar, is only in 13 schools, reaching just a tiny fraction of those who need help.

Rivera described her role as “the cloth that absorbs all the tears.” Children come in and out of her room to give — and get — a warm, enveloping hug. Everyone is “holding, carrying or covering up” their emotions, she said. “And it’s accumulating.”

El Coquí employs a school social worker; two years ago, it added a school psychologist.  Colón, the principal, said students and teachers are still recovering emotionally from the isolation of virtual learning. “Anxiety is the biggest issue,” Colón said. Not only does he encourage teachers to speak to the school psychologist, he sometimes confides in her as well.

Sánchez, the school psychologist who leads Lectores para el Futuro, said people on the island pride themselves on being resilient, but the unrelenting natural disasters have made that attitude impossible to sustain. She counsels teachers who blame themselves for not being with dying family members, who feel terrible for having yelled at students in frustration, and even those who have left the profession.

“Before we had time to recover, now we haven’t had time to recover. So, you think you’re getting out of it and something else happens,” she said. “It’s a crisis.”

Related: When the children leave: What’s left after a mass exodus of young people from Puerto Rico?

While public schools on the island had seen a steady decline in enrollment for almost two decades, the academic year immediately after Hurricane Maria saw a precipitous drop of more than 42,000 children. School officials had already closed 167 schools the year before and decided to further consolidate by closing more than 260 additional neighborhood schools. Teachers were reassigned, children had longer commutes and school buildings were left vacant. Since then, enrollment has continued to decline, falling by another 16,878 since 2021.

Ana Díaz, who teaches third graders at Delia Dávila de Cabán School in Toa Baja, has experienced the plummeting enrollment first hand. Five years ago, before Hurricane Maria, she had 28 students in her class. This school year she started off with just 14. 

Díaz said many students have gone to the mainland, usually to Florida to stay with relatives. But that’s not an easy path — not only must they get accustomed to a new place, new friends and new language, but the curriculum isn’t aligned with that in Puerto Rico, and kids often struggle academically, she said. Sometimes they return to the island, and it’s often hard for them to readjust and catch up with what they’ve missed.

“The poor outcomes are super frustrating,” said Díaz. “Because I see the potential in a lot of them.” This migration has implications for Díaz’s job as well. If more students leave, she could be transferred to a different school.  

Educators have also been affected by austerity measures. An oversight board established by the federal government to restructure Puerto Rico’s massive debt announced in January 2022 that educators would no longer receive a guaranteed pension, their benefits would be cut and they would no longer be eligible for retirement benefits before age 63. This was a blow to teachers on the island who are already poorly paid: The average pay in 2018 was $27,000; teachers in U.S. states averaged $61,730.

The inadequacy of teacher pay was harshly illustrated in early 2022, when a teacher died in a car crash after he fell asleep while driving home from night work as a security guard, one of two moonlighting jobs he needed to make ends meet. In response to the tragedy and other events, educators staged massive walk outs, prompting the government to approve a temporary $1,000-a-month bump for all educators, and bonuses for some teachers, paid for with federal relief funds.

But it isn’t clear what will happen once the money runs out. “I may never be able to retire at this rate,” Díaz said.

Bonilla, of the teachers’ union, said the group’s top priority this year is better mental health support for teachers. Puerto Rico’s education department recently signed an agreement with a local university to provide virtual therapy for educators, but Bonilla said it needs to do much more. “We’ve never seen such a need in the history of Puerto Rico,” he said. “We are making a clarion call for help.”

Related: Communities hit hardest by the pandemic, already struggling, could face a dropout cliff

Puerto Rico’s secretary of education, Eliezer Ramos Parés, who is beginning his second year on the job, acknowledges the tough road ahead. But he is optimistic that the federal money will help and that the U.S. government, nonprofits and the local education department will find ways to work together. Ramos Parés said his department has already made some changes — for example, using more electronic records, rather than paper; collecting more data and documenting its actions.

“Trust is important and for trust, there needs to be transparency,” he said. “Puerto Rico can’t do it alone; we need to be a team.”

Outside El Coquí — the school was named after a tiny species of frog with an outsized voice that is beloved on the island — thousands of yellow and white butterflies flutter around like confetti. But despite the beauty around them, the area’s residents exude a palpable sense of anxiety, fearing the next natural disaster. Locals are always on the alert for warning signs: Here in southern Puerto Rico, if certain ocean birds are suddenly found inland, people believe another disaster is coming, Colón said.

Anxiety could be a factor in a recent increase in the cases of asthma among the students at El Coquí, the school’s social worker said. The number of students at El Coquí with skin conditions has also risen. The maladies could result from the children’s exposure to mold in their homes after the floods, or from environmental contamination that has been a concern in this area for years, she added.

Some of the federal funds will be used to remove mold, asbestos and lead in buildings and provide students with desks that are free of mold or rust. There are also plans to buy or replace outdated air-conditioning systems.

The per capita income in this coastal region of Salinas is less than $10,000 a year; just over a third of working-age residents are in the workforce. Colon, who grew up poor in a nearby town, said education was his way out. It’s a path he fervently wants for his students.

“It’s the only tool they have to rise above poverty,” he said. “It can change their lives.” Because of that, even with the challenges of the past few years, Colon said his resolve to keep working in education is stronger than ever.

“When something isn’t working, we change strategies,” he said. “But we will never give up.”

This story on schools in Puerto Rico 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 Are the challenges of Puerto Rico’s schools a taste of what other districts will face? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

LaTavia BigBack was 17, a high school junior, when she and her friends were in a car crash. In the hospital, the doctor asked if she minded her friends being in the room — he had some news for her. BigBack said no; she thought maybe she had a concussion. But the doctor told her she was pregnant. Years later, she still cries when she remembers her friends’ expressions. “I felt embarrassed and terrified, because me and my friends were so young.”

She considered an abortion, but her 23-year-old boyfriend disappeared and she didn’t have any money. “It’s expensive to get the procedure, and he just kept flaking on the appointments,” she said. “So I had kind of no choice but to go along with the pregnancy.” 

As word of her pregnancy spread at her school in Colorado, so did the unkind comments and judgmental attitudes. Except for one friend, even those who had been in the accident with her pulled away. When her classes were assigned group projects, no one wanted her in their group. Her teachers never acknowledged her growing belly, and the school counselor had no suggestions for outside resources.

Never a good student, she started falling even further behind. Finally, at four and a half months, she confided in her dad. BigBack’s mom guessed several weeks later when she developed a craving for strawberries. BigBack found herself growing more and more isolated at school and dropped out in her junior year.

“If there was anyone who encouraged me, who gave me support, I would have stayed,” she said. Instead, at seven and a half months, with swollen feet and an anxious heart, BigBack began working two part-time jobs — as a server in a restaurant and a cashier at Walmart. She bounced between her divorced parents’ houses and felt hopeless. “I honestly felt like my life was over.”

BigBack’s story is disturbingly common.

Related: How are college campuses preparing for a post-Roe world?

Fifty years have passed since Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 went into effect.  While the law is perhaps best known for requiring schools to provide women with equal opportunities in sports, it was intended to prohibit discrimination based on sex in any educational programs and activities — including academic, athletic and extracurricular — that receive federal funds. The law guarantees the right to an education for pregnant and parenting students.

But the federal civil rights law is often ignored, misunderstood or blatantly violated in public schools. A charter school in Louisiana required students to take a pregnancy test and then forced them out if they refused or tested positive. Administrators at a school in New Mexico forced a middle schooler to stand in front of her classmates at an assembly while they announced that she was pregnant. Two teens in Michigan were told they couldn’t show their baby bumps in their school yearbook photos.

While these incidents got a lot of attention, most pregnant students, like BigBack, talk of more subtle “pushouts” that make them discontinue their education: a guidance counselor suggesting they transfer to an online program that is less rigorous; a teacher removing them from an honors course or extracurricular activity; a principal ignoring reports of harassment. All are illegal, yet commonplace. Some educators still believe that having pregnant or parenting teens in school or providing services like nurseries will encourage other students to get pregnant.

Partly as a result, educational outcomes for these students are bleak. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only about half of teen mothers receive a high school diploma by age 22, compared with approximately 90 percent of their peers who do not give birth. Fewer than 2 percent of mothers under 18 complete college by age 30, according to a 2006 report published by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy (now Power to Decide).

Schools already fail this population of students. And recently, the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the longstanding constitutional right to abortion, leaving it up to states to decide. About half of states are expected to ban abortion or allow other restrictions on the procedure to go into effect, and advocates worry the number of pregnant and parenting students will increase.

Wendy Luttrell, a professor of urban education at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the book “Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds: Gender, Race and the Schooling of Pregnant Teens,” said an increase in pregnant and parenting teens is a “commonsense prediction.” But she warned that schools are just as unprepared to support these students as when she wrote the book, two decades ago.

“It is alarming, because if we haven’t been able to do that in 20 years, what’s in place for us to be able to even address an uptick?” she said. “Even though there is data that shows how pregnant teens can be supported and can be definitely on an educational trajectory of success.”

Related: How parents of young kids make it through college

In 1995, during his State of the Union speech, President Bill Clinton called teen pregnancy “our most serious social problem.” In the decades since, the number of teens becoming mothers  has fallen dramatically. In 1991, there were 61.8 births for every 1,000 women ages 15 to 19 in the United States, compared with 15.4 per 1,000 in 2020. That’s a 75 percent drop.

Some of the reasons for the decrease include teens waiting longer to have sex, increased access to contraception and popular reality TV shows such as “16 and Pregnant,” which depicted the struggles of young moms.

But advocates say the declining rate of teen pregnancy has been a double-edged sword; while a welcome development, it also means the issue has been getting less attention and fewer resources. For example, the Pregnancy Assistance Fund, a $25 million federal grant program that supported services for young parents so they could finish school, ended in 2020.

Programs that helped prevent pregnancy in the first place have also come under fire. For example, the Title X Family Planning Program funds clinics that provide contraception and other care (except abortion) to millions of low-income and uninsured women. In 2019, the Trump administration prohibited providers in the program from referring patients for abortion except in rare cases, leading almost 1,000 clinics to leave the program. Although the Biden administration reversed the rule last year, it’s unclear how many clinics have returned.

“[Those clinics] were a major place where young people go to get care,” said Rachel Fey, vice president of policy and strategic partnerships at Power to Decide. “So damage to the Title X program has had a real reverberating effect for young people.”

Only about a third of states mandate that schools provide students with sex education that is medically accurate. As Jennifer Driver, senior director of reproductive rights for the State Innovation Exchange, a nonprofit that works with state legislators, put it: “This country has repeatedly failed young people and their access to comprehensive sex education. Most receive an abstinence-only education, if they receive sex education at all.” But these same students who don’t have access to medically accurate, up-to-date information have to live with the consequences.

Related: Teen pregnancy is still a problem — school districts just stopped paying attention

And despite the decrease in the U.S. teen pregnancy rate, it is still one of the highest in the developed world. There were almost 160,000  births to 15- to 19-year-olds in 2020.

Now, educators and nonprofit staff who work with pregnant and parenting teens are expecting an uptick in the number of young mothers they serve.And even those in states that aren’t restricting abortion are making plans to expand.

Shauna Edwards is the founder of Lumen High School in Spokane, Washington, which serves pregnant and parenting teens. She’s preparing for “quite a few more students” from neighboring Idaho, a state where providing an abortion will soon be a felony in most cases. Edwards said not enough thought has been given to how this ruling would affect young mothers.

“No matter where you stand on the side of pro-choice or pro-life, if we are going to have access to abortion peeled back, states need to be prepared and provide more services,” she said. “Pro-life has to mean someone’s whole life, and that would mean increases to state support systems and your schooling options.”

The school offers classes five days a week to about 60 students and provides full-day child care on site, a full-time social worker, medical and mental health care and clothing and resource banks. 

Lisa Steven, who founded and runs Hope House Colorado, which has a residential program and other supports for teenage mothers, is also preparing for an influx of applicants, even though Colorado just passed a law allowing abortions in the state. “Teenage moms don’t have access to that type of information,” she said, “and they believe everything they read or hear on social media. So if social media is blowing up with ‘You’re no longer going to be able to get an abortion,’ they’re just going to believe that.”

Steven is in the process of opening a Hope House affiliate in Nashville and said because of Tennessee’s much stricter abortion laws, she expects to see a higher number of teen pregnancies there as well.

Hope House offers all kinds of wraparound services, from parenting classes and counseling to education and financial programs. Steven, a former teen mom, said her staff has helped several mothers buy their first house. They also offer free legal support, as many of the women have custody and child support issues with their children’s fathers. The teens learn how to apply for their birth certificates and get a driver’s license or social security card. Many struggled in the classroom setting, so at Hope House they work with tutors, one on one.

Steven said educators don’t understand the Title IX requirements and offer almost no accommodations for students who may not be sleeping through the night because of their newborn, or experiencing postpartum depression, or trying to get to class on time carrying a backpack as well as a baby carrier and a stroller. Most of the teens she works with drop out in ninth grade. “School is not made to feel like a safe place for them,” she said.

Like other advocates, she said poor outcomes for students don’t have to be the norm, if only schools would recognize these students’ strengths. “Teenage moms are incredibly motivated by their children — we call it ‘mommy motivation,’ ” said Steven. “They have grit; they’re problem solvers; they’re extremely flexible. And they will do just about anything to create a better life for their child than what they had. But they can’t do it without assistance.”

Sometimes those obstacles are transportation, child care or health issues. But often the problem is the school environment itself.

A 2015 report by the American Civil Liberties Union of California found that teen moms felt “pushed out” of their schools by educators’ shaming behavior. Another study, by the National Women’s Law Center, found that more than half of pregnant and parenting girls said they felt that other students didn’t want them at school, and almost 40 percent said they felt that way about their teachers. And they said they often faced harassment in school, which made them feel school was unsafe for them.

Analidis Ochoa, now a doctoral candidate in social work and sociology at the University of Michigan, was formerly a tutor at an alternative school for pregnant and parenting girls in Florida’s Miami-Dade school district. She said a negative cultural judgment prevailed there, even in a school specifically for these students. Ochoa, who was often called in to translate for Spanish-speaking parents, recalled a mother saying that the school had phoned repeatedly about her absent daughter. The mother explained that her daughter had just had a miscarriage and wasn’t doing well, and the response she got was: “ ‘Well, tell her this, then she can’t come back. Because if she doesn’t have a baby, she can’t come back to the school.’ ”

As a former teen parent herself, Ochoa knows how hard it is to stay in school, so she was determined to help her students get into college. But Ochoa said she was shocked by the staff’s low expectations for the young mothers academically; there was no expectation that they would pursue any sort of further education. She couldn’t understand why. “I always thought, you’re not just improving the mother’s life, you’re improving the child’s life as well,” she said. “And so it’s a way of kind of intervening to mitigate intergenerational poverty.”

Wendy Luttrell, the CUNY professor of urban education, said there is still a bias against these students. “There continues to be a way of thinking about being pregnant, as being at odds with being intellectually engaged,” she said. She said that programs designed specifically for pregnant and parenting teens, in either alternative schools or separate classes, rarely offer access to the same curriculum. “When you don’t get access to all the same kinds of coursework, then your future is limited to the kind of coursework that you do have access to,” she said.  

The social and economic implications for these teenagers when they drop out are profound. Those without a high school diploma have lower lifetime earnings, higher unemployment and greater reliance on social service programs. And perhaps even more worrisome are the outcomes for the children of teenage mothers, who score lower than children of older parents in health, intellectual and behavior assessments. Research finds babies of teen mothers are more likely to have a low birth weight and higher rates of abuse and neglect; they are less likely to complete high school and more likely to become teen parents themselves.

But with proper supports, teen moms can thrive. BigBack heard about Hope House and took parenting classes there. When she got pregnant again, she moved into the Hope House residential program, where she now lives. She decided to complete her high school diploma online. “Because it’s not about me anymore. It’s really about them and their future,” she said. “Another thing that was super huge for me is I don’t want them to have any excuse to not finish. Like I had two kids and I was able to finish high school. I think both of them should be able to finish.”

Today BigBack is 21, with a 3-year-old daughter and an 8-week-old son. Her eyes shone as she proudly held up her son, dressed in a Mickey Mouse onesie, during a Zoom interview. She has met with the career and college coordinator and filled out applications to colleges. In July, she learned that she was accepted to the Metropolitan State University of Denver, where she plans to enroll this fall.

Without all the extra supports, BigBack said her life would be very different. The biggest change is that she thinks she would have lost custody of her beloved children. “I honestly wouldn’t have had them with me,” she said.

Related: Child care, car seats and other simple ways to keep teen parents in school

As the Biden administration reviews Title IX this year, advocates say this is an opportunity to strengthen existing protections for pregnant and parenting students. In a 2012 survey of state laws and policies by the National Women’s Law Center, almost half the states had no statewide program, grant or support designed specifically for pregnant and parenting students, and fewer than half the states explicitly made homebound or hospitalized instruction services available to pregnant and parenting students.

“How are we going to educate all these young parents? I feel that that’s not in the dialogue,” said Janet Max, the president and CEO of the nonprofit Healthy Teen Network. She said anti-abortion advocates who pushed to overturn Roe aren’t talking about supporting these young parents or their babies. “There does not seem to be any plan about the implications of this beyond just ending Roe and ending access to abortion.”

Laura Echevarria, the communications director for the National Right to Life organization, agrees there should be more supports for young mothers. “These programs that should have existed, many of them never got the opportunity to get off the ground,” she said. “But this can change now. The mantra needs to change. Instead of saying, ‘Get an abortion,’ it needs to be, ‘What can we do for you?’ ”

She said a lot of work is being done now that the Supreme Court decision has overturned Roe. Echevarria calls it “a halfway mark” where the group’s more than 3,000 chapters in the U.S. are gearing up to grow programs and services for these young mothers. “This gives them the opportunity now to say, ‘How can we help now that we don’t have our hands tied with restrictions based on Roe?’”

Echevarria said some states are already responding to the anticipated increase in pregnancies in ways that will help teen mothers. For example, South Dakota launched a new website for women facing an unexpected pregnancy with information on parenting, adoption and financial assistance. West Virginia recently passed legislation  connecting parents who know their child will be born with a disability like Down syndrome with resources in the community, as part of a ban on abortions based on a diagnosis of such a disability. Georgia passed a law making it easier for nonprofits to operate group homes for pregnant and parenting women. Some states are looking at ways to expand and fund pregnancy centers that offer prenatal care and education, using tax dollars. Echevarria soon expects more legislation across the country that’s “protective of unborn babies.”

Related: The Biden presidency could finally mean more help for student parents

 The U.S. Department of Education has released proposed changes to Title IX, which it recently opened to public comments. Several advocates, including Cassandra Mensah, a counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, called the proposed protections “overall, a really positive and necessary step” that could significantly help pregnant and parenting students stay in school.

For example, the current regulations are silent on lactation rooms, but Mensah said the proposed rules require schools to provide support for breastfeeding students, including a clean, private space in school that is not a bathroom.

Also, Mensah said currently schools have to give students time off for pregnancy and childbirth but sometimes don’t take into consideration other related issues that might affect their attendance. “Their grades can go down, they can be found truant if they miss a certain number of days, even if their kid’s child care fell through, the kid has a doctor’s appointment, they have their own doctor appointment,” said Mensah.

Under the proposed rules, schools will have to give teens time off for pregnancy for as long as a health care provider, not just a physician, deems necessary. And while current Title IX rules don’t explicitly mention a school’s role when pregnant or parenting students are harassed, the proposed changes make clear any pregnancy-related harassment is prohibited under Title IX and that schools would be required to investigate complaints in a “prompt and equitable manner.”

Some advocates want additional regulations they say will help, such as better data collection; currently, there is no requirement that schools collect even basic information on this population. “A lot of districts actually don’t know how many of their students are pregnant or parenting — that’s part of the problem,” said Lisette Orellana Engel, a vice president at National Crittenton, a nonprofit that supports teen parents. That makes it hard to track how many teen moms are graduating or dropping out and determine what services they need.

Others, like Lisa Steven, of Hope House, said it’s vitally important that schools also designate an advocate for teen parents, a trusted adult in whom they can confide. Steven said teen moms just want to belong. “They’re looking for a place where they don’t feel judged, where they feel welcome and loved, and it feels warm and accepting,” she said.

And finally, advocates would like to see more accountability and consequences for schools that don’t follow Title IX. They said the law needs to mandate and enforce tougher penalties for school staff who ignore the rules. 

Related: Why Black student parents are at the epicenter of the student debt crisis

There was no adult in any of Lanitta Berry’s schools who intervened to help her get out of a challenging home situation. She was 10 when her mom died. Overnight, she took on the adult responsibilities of keeping house. She went from being an honors student to fighting in school. All the while, Berry said, no one at her schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, asked her what was going on. And she would have been too scared to say anything, even if they had.

When she became a teenager, she had a crush on a 15-year-old boy in her apartment building, and was thrilled when he showed an interest in her. Berry said whatever she knew about sex was from school and church, which focused heavily on abstinence. “Like, you shouldn’t have sex. It’s wrong. It’s bad. But I wish they would have told me why. Why shouldn’t I have sex before marriage? Why?”

She didn’t have an adult to speak to about sex, and her middle school classmates assured her she couldn’t get pregnant if her boyfriend pulled out. Berry became pregnant at 13. When she and her sister tried to find a doctor, no one would treat her because she was so young, Berry recalled. So she went into the foster care system, which connected her with treatment.

School was hard — not because of classes, which she found easy, but because of her classmates’ parents. When she began to show, Berry said, they were mean to her. “They gave me side eye and dirty looks. I remember hearing one parent say, ‘if I ever see my child get pregnant, I’ll beat her A-S-S.’ ”

She also saw a double standard in the whispered conversations at middle school. “There were white children that got pregnant, it’s just that their parents had enough money to get them abortions so no one will find out about it,” she said. “But you have less fortunate children that get pregnant, it’s always, ‘Oh, look at them. They’re too fast.’ “ When she got to high school, she changed foster homes and went to a school across town so none of her teachers even knew she had a child.

Berry said being a foster child paradoxically helped her, because the state paid for her food, shelter and a voucher for day care. She received a state-funded scholarship to attend the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, from which she graduated this spring with a degree in business administration and finance. Berry said she’s the only teen parent she knows who finished college; the others dropped out to get full-time jobs to provide for their children. But they tell her that when there’s an opportunity to get a promotion or a raise, they find they need more schooling. She said many feel stuck.

“Young parents are one of the most hardworking groups of people I know, because they know that not just their lives, but their children’s lives, depend on their next few moves,” she said. “And I tell people all the time, the worst pain that a parent can experience is knowing that you are unable to give your child a great life. That is the most heart-wrenching pain.”

Berry always dreamed her daughter would have a very different life from her. That’s why she named her Violet. “I landed on Violet because purple is the color of royalty,” she said. “And I just wanted to be symbolic.”

With support, students like Berry can be the norm. Steven, of Hope House, said they should be. “If we want to reduce the number of abortions, then we should not just reduce the number of abortions, but also see the trajectory of those children’s lives that were not aborted be safe and stable,” she said. “Then we have to, as a society, provide the support that the mom needs in order to raise a child in a safe and stable environment.” 

“I would say, ‘Put your money where your mouth is.’ ”

Neal Morton and Caroline Preston contributed to this story.

This story about pregnant students 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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WASHINGTON — May helped care for her elderly aunt for years. When her aunt died, May, who is 41, decided to leave her part-time job as a telemarketer and become a full-time home health aide.

She said the thought of making other people like her aunt more comfortable felt like a calling. “Just the joy of helping,” May said.

In the 11 years she worked as a home health aide, May estimates she looked after 100 elderly clients in their homes. Some just needed a light meal prepared, but others required much more help. “They couldn’t move at all. I had to change them, feed them, bathe them, everything.” 

Tens of millions of older Americans want to age at home. But the critical shortage of people to take care of them will require more than the Biden administration’s proposed billions of federal dollars for home-based long-term health care. It will take a complete and substantial change in the training system, career pipeline, pay and work conditions of home health aides, experts and advocates say.

If those things aren’t fixed, the suffering will be felt not only by the “millions and millions of people [who] work very hard at very difficult and important jobs and get poverty wages,” said Paul Osterman, a professor of human resources and management at MIT and author of the book  “Who Will Care for Us?” It will affect everyone who wants to age at home or has a loved one who does, he said. The burden of caregiving will fall on unpaid relatives, affecting their financial and mental health.

“It’s a real problem for society,” Osterman said.

The need for home health aides is projected to grow by 34 percent between 2019 and 2029

It’s also an example of how job training in the United States is not well ordered, lacks incentives for people to take on critical work and often leaves consumers to fend for themselves and spend more money on their educations than is justified by what they’ll earn.

There are about 54 million Americans over 65, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That number is expected to rise to 95 million by 2060. Older adults have shown a clear preference for remaining in their homes, for the independence but also the comfort and community connections.

Aging in place is typically more cost effective than moving into long-term nursing facilities and proved a far safer option during the Covid-19 pandemic, when more than 184,000 residents and staff died in nursing homes and assisted living.

Related: When nurses are needed most, nursing programs aren’t keeping up with demand

Key to enabling more older adults to remain at home is expanding the number of home health aides, workers usually seen as being on the lowest rung of the health-care ladder. These aides provide day-to-day support such as feeding and dressing as well as doing shopping and laundry, and a much-needed respite for overwhelmed or absent relatives.

There is already a shortage of health aides, and demand is skyrocketing; one study estimated that 70 percent of adults over 65 are expected to need some form of basic assistance. But attracting and retaining home health aides is challenging; it’s exhausting work, with low pay, often no benefits and little respect and is overwhelmingly done by women of color and a dwindling number of immigrants.

President Joe Biden wants to increase the supply through an infusion of $400 billion into home- and community-based care for the elderly and people with disabilities over the next eight years, close to doubling what’s being spent now.

The president’s goal of “creating new and better jobs” will mean overhauling the current system of training, which is disorganized and overpriced and blocks home health aides from advancing to the next level, according to Matt Sigelman, CEO of Emsi Burning Glass, a labor analytics firm. He said training programs are often run by for-profit players that charge far more than is merited by what the jobs pay.

Most of the time, May loved working with her clients. They talked to her about trips abroad and gave her relationship advice. One taught her to sew, another how to make deviled eggs. “They had so much wisdom. They taught me a lot about life,” she said.

But it was hard to make a living. May started at $7 an hour and eventually got up to $12, but with no benefits. She and other home health aides asked that their last names not be used for fear of retaliation at work or in case they applied for new jobs.

When the pandemic hit, she wasn’t offered “hazard pay,” even though she was a designated essential worker. Then schools shut down and she decided to stay home with her children. Now she isn’t sure if she’ll return to her old job because it doesn’t cover her bills. “I can’t live on my salary,” she said.

In a Zoom class at a nonprofit training center for adults, instructor John McIntyre was giving his 17 students a verbal quiz. The class, at the Opportunities Industrialization Center of D.C., or OIC-DC, trains people to be home health aides. It’s 15 weeks long and is held at 6 p.m. because many of the students have jobs or need to look after their children during the day.

“When you’re helping a client who has a stroke, on which side should the home health aide stand ­— the stronger side or the weaker side?” McIntyre asked.

Twenty-four-year-old Dashia raised her hand. “The stronger side?”

“Hmm. Think about it for a minute.” Dashia did, and changed her answer.

“That’s good! That’s good!” said McIntyre. “We always assist on the weaker side.”

McIntyre praises his students often. He knows they have overcome obstacles to be here. The minimum requirement is that they test at the eighth grade reading level and seventh grade math. Some students who apply need extra tutoring before they can enroll.

Related: Biden’s infrastructure plan would create plenty of jobs, but who will do them?

Dashia was laid off from two restaurant jobs during the pandemic. She’s now working as a teacher’s aide while taking classes in the evenings to be a home health aide.

“There is such a shortage,” she said. “So I thought, why not take a course?”

Dashia called all seven District of Columbia-approved home health aide training programs for information. They cost between $1,500 to $2,100, she said. Dashia would also have to pay for transportation, her home health aide certification ($105), first aid and CPR certification ($85) and a background check ($25). “I definitely don’t have that money,” she said.

She ultimately got into the one free program in the district, OIC-DC, which is subsidized by the district government and private funds. Otherwise, she said, she wouldn’t have been able to enroll. “My credit is bad so I can’t get a loan, and my family doesn’t have money, either,” she said. “Everyone is struggling.” 

The cost of training can be prohibitively expensive for students who are among the most vulnerable and poorly paid workers.

“It wouldn’t even be something they consider, because it’s just out of their range.,” said DyAnne Little, director of training at OIC-DC.

Even though her program is free,  Little said, some of the students have to save for months to be able to afford their scrubs, white Crocs and watches with a second hand. Advocates say having these students take out loans or borrow from family members is unjust, unfair and exploitative,  because it’s unlikely they will be able to pay back that money even after they start working.

Home health aide is the fifth lowest-paying among the 25 lowest-paid jobs held disproportionately by people of color, according to a 2020 study of workforce equity in the United States. Other jobs near the bottom include dining room attendant and dishwasher.

The median wage for a home health aide is $24,000 a year, said Sigelman — about $500 more than for a fast-food cook. “So the notion of taking out a loan and going into debt to get into a job that pays you the same as you would make in a fast-food restaurant is pretty hard to swallow.”

Communities across the country are realizing it’s essential to increase the numbers of home health aides. In Washington alone, 16,700 people 65 and over are unable to live independently without support, a study found. Those numbers are expected to rise by at least 10 percent every five years, according to the D.C. Coalition on  Long Term Care, which conducted that study.

“It’s a full-fledged crisis,” said Neil Richardson, who works on aging issues for DC Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, a nonprofit in Washington.

This shortage of direct care workers mirrors the national demand, said Johan Uvin, who was acting assistant secretary for the Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education under President Barack Obama. That demand has increased “exponentially” because of Covid, he said. “It’s exacerbated the shortage that already existed.”

And the need is expected to grow, up by 34 percent between 2019 and 2029, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, far outpacing the less than 4 percent projected growth, on average, for other jobs.

For years the U.S. relied on immigrants to fill the roles of long-term care workers, said Gail Kohn, coordinator of Age-Friendly DC, a government program. But “what we’re seeing recently, at least in the last four years, is the reduction in the number of people who immigrate to this country, which has made it almost impossible to get people into the field.”

Almost 40 percent of home health aides are immigrants, according to the Migration Policy Institute, many of them from the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Jamaica.

Related: How a decline in community college students is a big problem for the economy

Being a home health aide can be physically exhausting. Some clients need to be turned every two hours to prevent bedsores; others have to be lifted out of their beds to be bathed. Not all private homes are equipped with devices such as lifts and slings that can help with these tasks.

Thalia, who worked for five years as a home health aide before she stopped because of Covid, said she hurt her foot lifting a client but didn’t have health insurance to pay for physical therapy. She had to stop working for months. “You don’t work, you don’t get paid,” she said.

But Thalia considers herself lucky because, with rest, her foot healed. Her neighbor, also a home health aide, injured her back on the job and had to stop working because her agency refused to pay for treatment and she had no insurance.

“The notion of taking out a loan and going into debt to get into a job that pays you the same as you would make in a fast-food restaurant is pretty hard to swallow.”

Matt Sigelman, CEO, Emsi Burning Glass

Aides also have to deal with the irascible nature of some elderly clients. Many have dementia or are frustrated that they need assistance. Others, as May put it, “for whatever reason, just don’t like you. They cuss at you and call you names.” One home health aide said a client accused her of stealing her glasses and didn’t apologize when she later found them on a bedside table. Another, an immigrant from Nigeria, said clients would complain her “food smelled” when she was eating lunch. Yet another said a client mocked her accent. Then there is the emotional impact on aides who become close to clients who eventually have to be taken away and institutionalized or die.

Home health aides also feel disrespected by other medical workers. Some say they are routinely ignored by nurses when they give updates on their clients’ health and aren’t seen as part of the health care team. In general, these positions are “poorly trained, poorly compensated, disrespected and restricted in their duties,” MIT’s Osterman said.

Osterman argues for expanding the duties of home health aides. In many states they cannot give a client medication or change a bandage.  Expanding the scope of their jobs would help clients with chronic illnesses stay healthier and stay out of hospitals. “That would also save money, by taking over some of the work from much higher-paid nurses.” Osterman said those savings could go toward better salaries.

Aides are also at the mercy of their staffing agencies for assignments. Thalia said she has seen family members of clients doing drugs and has felt unsafe in some houses, but has never reported anything because she needed the work hours. Working conditions can be harsh, she said.

“Sometimes,” Thalia said of one client’s home, “the kitchen would be a disaster, and in order for me to get her meals prepared, I would have to clean up the mess that was left by family members.” Clients’ families have also asked her to do their laundry and clean their rooms. Thalia said she did whatever she was told, for fear the families would ask her agency to send someone else.

Related: ‘Millions upon millions’ in employer-funded education benefits go unused

The disrespect affected May’s decision to quit. “No one believes this is a real job,” May said. She’d like the title “home health aide” to be “changed to something with ‘medical’ in it,” in the hope of getting more respect. “We do a lot of work, and we’re not recognized for it.”

When she graduates from her home health aide class, Dashia said, she wants to continue studying and move up in the health care field. She hopes she can one day earn a degree. “I want to do something that’s not just for the moment,” she said.

Experts say showing students such as Dashia a clear career path is one way to increase the supply of home health aides and make the profession more desirable. But that doesn’t happen often.

One study Emsi Burning Glass conducted with the nonprofit JFF looked at health care jobs that didn’t require a college degree and put them in three buckets. Two allowed people to move up the career ladder. The third, Sigelman said, were usually “dead-end jobs.“ Home health aides, he said, fall “squarely in that category.”

Sigelman said home health aides are just a few training courses away from gaining additional skills to move up and into jobs that pay a living wage with benefits, such as certified nursing assistant ($31,000), medical assistant ($36,000), health information technician ($44,000) or licensed practical nurse ($49,000). None of these professions requires a college degree. But he said upward mobility doesn’t happen by accident. “It requires that we help people make that jump. And unfortunately, that doesn’t happen too often.”

Johan Uvin said if there isn’t this “supported progression” for home health aides, they may move out of health care altogether and look for different occupations. In some cities, “you can get a job cleaning rooms at a hotel for $22 an hour.”

Uvin said there are encouraging signs of innovation. Some training institutions offer clear pathways from, say, home health aide to certified nursing assistant to licensed practical nurse to registered nurse. “It’s a very worker-centered way of thinking about it,” he said.

Uvin said this moment presents an opportunity to change things not just at the grass roots, but also at the policy level.

For example, students could be given access to federal financial aid such as Pell grants for short-term career training programs. Other inducements for training programs could create more comprehensive pathways for their home health aide students. “There’s a lot we can do with incentives through policy,” Uvin said.

He said the current system, requiring home health aides to go through a training program and get certified in order to get a job that doesn’t even pay “survival” wages, will just “magnify the inequities that already exist.”

“And that’s just unjust.” 

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

This story was supported by the Higher Education Media Fellowship at the Institute for Citizens & Scholars. The Fellowship supports new reporting into issues related to postsecondary career and technical education.

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