En las décadas de 1970 y 80, grupos que consistían mayormente de cristianos fundamentalistas de la raza blanca estuvieron al frente de un aumento en el número de familias en el país que educaban en casa. A la vez que sacaban a sus hijos de las escuelas públicas, trabajaban para desmantelar las medidas reguladoras a nivel local y estatal que obligaban a los niños a estar presentes físicamente en las escuelas. Para el año 1994, 90 por ciento de las familias que educaban en casa eran de la raza blanca.

Durante la pandemia del Covid-19, ha habido otro aumento en el número de familias que están educando en casa, pero esta vez, las familias que están impulsando el movimiento son decididamente más diversas. Una encuesta por La Oficina de Censos de Estados Unidos indica que los índices de educación en casa se duplicaron entre el inicio de la pandemia en marzo del 2020 y el otoño de ese año. Esta vez, el aumento más grande en educación en casa fue entre familias de la raza negra, que se quintuplicó, pero todos los grupos raciales han visto aumentos. Para octubre del 2020, casi 20 por ciento de los adultos que reportaron que educaban sus hijos en casa eran de la raza negra, 24 por ciento eran hispanos o latinos y 48 por ciento eran de la raza blanca, según datos del Household Pulse Survey. La misma encuesta halló que apenas 19 por ciento de esos adultos tienen título de universidad y un 53 por ciento reportó ingresos por debajo de $50,000 al año.

Relacionado: Escasean los fondos y la capacitación cuando quienes cuidan a tus hijos son amigos y vecinos

Según datos del Censo, el número de familias hispanas educando en casa se duplicó en los primeros meses de la pandemia. Ese aumento lo han sentido los líderes en el terreno, incluyendo aquellos que operan grupos de educación en casa o comunidades virtuales de enseñanza en casa para familias hispanas y latinas.

Gisela Quiñones de Indiana viene educando a sus hijos en el hogar durante dos años y maneja un grupo de Facebook para familias latinas que educan en casa. En el transcurso de la pandemia, “el grupo básicamente estalló a nivel nacional”, dijo Quiñones, madre de dos niños de 10 y 12 años.

En octubre del 2020, 19 por ciento de las familias educando a sus hijos en casa era de la raza negra.

“Algunos padres están preocupados por el Covid y que sus hijos se enfermen, pero uno de los motivos principales es la cultura. Queremos que nuestros hijos aprendan ciertas cosas ahora”, dijo Quiñones. “Queremos que sepan más acerca de su cultura”.

La encuesta del Censo no extrajo datos sobre los nativo americanos, y tampoco exploró la participación en la educación en casa por religiones. Pero líderes musulmanes y nativo americanos dicen que creen que los índices en sus comunidades también han aumentado, luego de que la pandemia les diera a las familias tiempo y espacio para ponderar si las escuelas tradicionales en realidad estaban saciando sus necesidades.

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

Aunque escasean los datos concretos, la participación en los grupos de educación en casa musulmanes ha aumentado. La organización sin fines de lucro Muslim Homeschool Network ahora tiene miles de seguidores y reacciones en su página de Facebook. El grupo conecta a educadores en casa musulmanes en el sur de California organizando eventos y proveyendo recursos, como libros y currículos. Fatima Siddiqui, miembra de MHN, dice que el grupo también tiene un grupo en WhatsApp que cuenta con 150 miembros. 

Muslim Homeschool and Education, un grupo de Facebook privado, ahora cuenta con más de 22,000 miembros, mientras que, a más de 13,000 personas les gusta a la página Successful Muslim Homeschooling.

Desde el 2015, Kelly Tudor, de Texas, ha manejado un grupo de Facebook para familias indígenas que educan en casa. En el último año y medio, ese número ha crecido de manera exponencial: Ahora hay más de 1,000 padres de familia en el grupo.

“Tuve muchos problemas y se nos enseñaba mucha información incorrecta y estereotipos” dijo Tudor acerca de la manera en que los maestros abordaban temas sobre los nativos americanos en la escuela. “Cuando tratábamos de informar al maestro, nos insultaban”.

Las tres familias que describimos a continuación se inclinaron por la educación en casa por diferentes motivos, pero cada una expresó decepción con el sistema escolar público y un deseo de fundamentar a sus hijos firmemente en la identidad y los valores de la familia.

Los Gaddie

Antes de que empezara la pandemia, Helene Gaddie nunca había considerado la educación en casa. Pero desde que los niños de 6 y 9 años que cría fueron enviados a casa de su escuela privada gratis en la Reservación Pine Ridge en Dakota del Sur donde vive la familia, ella y su esposo han sido los instructores principales. La familia ha elegido un modelo de educación en casa híbrido – medio día de aprendizaje a distancia con la escuela local y medio día de actividades y lecciones organizadas en casa.

“Pensé que estaban reprobando, pero las calificaciones de los niños están bien”, dijo Gaddie, 42, quien es miembro de la Nación Oglala Lakota. “Son del promedio”.

Cuando la escuela de los niños reabrió para la enseñanza en persona más pronto de lo que Gaddie consideró prudente, los matriculó en una escuela pública manejada por la tribu a la que ella había asistido cuando era una niña. La escuela sigue ofreciendo una opción de aprendizaje a distancia – tres horas de instrucción al día de una maestra de nivel de grado – y Gaddie y su esposo se encargan del resto.

“Para nuestro recreo salen y practican el tiro con arco”, dijo. “Pueden curtir las pieles que hacen, hacer tambores, trabajar directo en el jardín y estar presentes”.

Eso también les hace más fácil participar en eventos del calendario estacional indígena, como el faenado anual de búfalo o visitas a lugares sagrados, que anteriormente hubiesen involucrado sacar a los niños de la escuela.

Los niños, a quienes se refiere como sus nietos, o “takoja” en el idioma lakota, son los hijos biológicos de su sobrino. Ella ve su crianza, llena ahora en las tradiciones y el idioma de su gente, como un camino garantizado que les permitirá convertirse en personas fuertes.  “Si conoces tu cultura, y sabes de donde vienes, eres más fuerte”, dijo. “Eres de mente fuerte. Aprendes mejor”.

Gaddie ha pensado mucho sobre la educación de los jóvenes de su tribu. En el 2013, ella, su esposo y una prima crearon una organización sin fines de lucro llamada Generations Indigenous Ways que ofrece programas de ciencia extraescolares y campamentos de ciencia de temporada al aire libre.

“Lo que estamos tratando de hacer es revivir nuestra cultura”, dijo. “Así que igual es muy difícil tenerlos en la escuela, porque se diluye más nuestra cultura. Estas [escuelas] están en nuestras tierras, nuestros terrenos Lakota aquí. Pero no se pone énfasis en el lenguaje y la familia”. 

No es fácil mantener empleos, motivar a los niños  – “No me importa lo que nadie diga, las calcomanías funcionan” – y sobrevivir. Los niños reciben almuerzos escolares gratis en casa, pero la familia no recibe ningún otro tipo de apoyo económico. Ella y su esposo son artistas y Gaddie recibe un salario modesto de su organización sin fines de lucro. En realidad no es suficiente, dijo Gaddie, pero “hacemos que funcione”.

Gaddie no está segura si continuará con la educación en casa una vez que considere que sea seguro que los niños regresen a la escuela en persona. Cree que permitirá que su hijo de 9 años tome su propia decisión.

“Es un niño lakota como cualquier otro,” dijo, con una sonrisa en su voz. “Se adapta a lo que sea”.

Los Hidalgo

Cuando empezó la pandemia, Olga Hidalgo había sido voluntaria en la escuela de sus hijos por muchos años. La madre de dos hijos que vive en la Florida y maneja un negocio ambulante de aseo de mascotas con su esposo, pensó que la mejor manera de jugar un papel activo en la educación de sus hijos era como voluntaria.

“Noté que los niños no respetaban a los adultos”, dijo Hidalgo, oriunda del Perú. (Hidalgo hablaba en español mediante un intérprete. Para esta versión del artículo, el inglés de la intérprete ha sido traducido de nuevo al español.) “A muchas maestras no les motivaba el enseñar a los jóvenes, y sentían que los estudiantes le faltaban al respeto”.

Aun antes de la pandemia, la hija de Hidalgo pidió que la sacaran de la escuela secundaria. Y una vez que hizo la transición a la instrucción virtual, demostró más interés en aprender en casa.

Simplemente me dio a pensar que mis hijos tenían otra opción de aprender en casa sin ese ambiente hostil”.

Olga Hidalgo, educadora en casa

Por otro lado, al hijo de Hidalgo se le hizo difícil completar tareas virtuales sin un celular ni una laptop. Una vez que tuvo la tecnología indicada, Hidalgo dice que el niño estuvo expuesto a fotos inapropiadas en Instagram compartidas por otros estudiantes. Hidalgo sentía que la maestra no tenía control sobre lo que estaba sucediendo.

“Tenía una amiga que ya estaba educando en casa”, dijo Hidalgo, “y cuando la visité, vi como hacía trabajos escolares con sus hijos. Simplemente me dio a pensar que mis hijos tenían otra opción de aprender en casa sin ese ambiente hostil”.

A principios del otoño del 2020, Hidalgo y su esposo buscaron currículos y planificaciones de clases en el internet que podían usar en casa para enseñar a sus hijos. A los cuatro miembros de la familia Hidalgo les fascina la historia estadounidense, y un curso de inscripción doble le permitió a su hija de 17 años recibir créditos universitarios mientras compartía el contenido de la clase con su hermano y sus padres. El hijo de 14 años de los Hidalgo también aprovechó la oportunidad para obtener créditos universitarios tempranos, y se inscribió en cursos de comunicaciones y redacción. 

Relacionado: Lo que los estudiantes de inglés necesitan es enamorarse de la escuela otra vez

Los Hidalgo se unieron a un grupo de educación en casa que ofrece su iglesia, donde sus hijos tocan los tambores y el piano en una banda.

“Ahora tienen más amistades – relaciones más estrechas y significativas – que las que tenían en la escuela”, dijo Hidalgo.

Aunque no quiso hablar por los miles de padres de familia hispanos y latinos que deciden educar en casa, Hidalgo dice que su cultura se concentra mucho en la familia.

“Nos gusta que nuestros hijos tengan lazos con sus padres y sus abuelos y parientes”, dijo. “La educación en casa es atractiva porque puedes compartir más en familia”.

Los Siddiqui

Fatima Siddiqui siempre supo que quería educar a sus hijos en casa.

Ella quedó fascinada con el concepto mientras estudiaba para sus títulos en educación de infancia, psicología y educación de matemáticas. Pensó que la idea “encajaba muy bien … con el lazo natural entre padre e hijo”.

Siddiqui, que en Nueva York fue maestra y directora auxiliar de escuela privada, comenzó a educar a sus hijos en casa luego de mudarse a Diamond Bar, California. Ella representa un número creciente de familias musulmanas que están renunciando al sistema escolar público. 

A diferencia del pasado, muchos de los padres musulmanes que están optando por esta ruta ahora son más jóvenes, nacidos y criados en Estado Unidos, graduados de escuelas públicas, con mucha educación, y más diversos. La falta de atención personalizada para los estudiantes en un ambiente de escuela pública, la posibilidad de toparse con acoso o islamofobia y una perspectiva sobre la sexualidad humana y el género que muchos padres consideran demasiado liberal, estuvieron entre las razones que Siddiqui y otras personas que conoce en la comunidad musulmana señalan por elegir la educación en casa. La opción de estructurar el día escolar para incluir las cinco oraciones diarias del islam e incorporar conocimientos islámicos y el estudio del Corán, el libro sagrado islámico, a materias seglares como lectura, escritura, matemática, ciencia e historia también fue atractivo para los educadores en casa musulmanes que hablaron con Hechinger.

“Sentía que podía brindarle más del mundo a mis hijos”.

Fatima Siddiqui, educadora en casa

Siddiqui dice que ha podido darles a sus hijos “una identidad musulmana más fuerte” porque leen sobre personajes musulmanes. También los puede ayudar a aplicar el pensamiento islámico, y puede introducir valores y conceptos del islam en todas las materias. Por ejemplo, cuando enseña una unidad sobre leer la hora, Siddiqui dijo que incorporaba versos del Corán que hablan sobre el tiempo.

Para muchos padres de familia, incluyendo Siddiqui, la religión no es la única fuerza impulsora. 

“Sentía que podía brindarle más del mundo a mis hijos”, dijo Siddiqui. “Basándome en sus intereses, en sus habilidades y ayudarlos a convertirse en individuos más completos exponiéndolos a muchas cosas distintas a su nivel, a su paso”.

La madre de cinco ha educado a cuatro de sus hijos en casa hasta la fecha. Sus estudiantes de secundaria ahora aprenden de manera independiente. Una de sus hijas está inscrita en una universidad comunitaria y un programa de seminario al mismo tiempo. Siddiqui es la principal educadora en casa de sus dos hijos más pequeños.

Siddiqui dijo que la educación en casa les permite a sus hijos “meterse profundamente en las materias”. Cuando fue momento de aprender sobre el mar, por ejemplo, fueron a la playa. De esa manera, dijo Siddiqui, “estamos aprendiendo acerca del mar, no a través de un libro, sino junto al mar, aprendiendo. Estamos en las pozas de marea … estamos haciendo que el aprendizaje no sea teórico, sino práctico”.

Relacionado: En una casa, dos hermanos con discapacidad tuvieron experiencias pandémicas opuestas.

A la vez, Siddiqui dijo que puede establecer lazos más fuertes con sus hijos aprendiendo junto a ellos.

“Puedes tener conversaciones más profundas, entrar con más profundidad en una materia”, dijo Siddiqui. “Si hay que repetir una lección de matemática, no hay problema. Tuvimos que repetir un año entero de matemática, y todo estuvo bien. Podemos pasar un año entero en un tema y explorarlo a fondo”.

Antes de la pandemia, e incluso durante su primer año, Siddiqui dijo que muchos padres de familia se comunicaron con ella para preguntarle por dónde empezar. Sin embargo, este año, ha notado que algunas familias que comenzaron a educar a sus hijos en casa en el 2020, y hasta algunos educadores en casa que ya son veteranos, inscribieron a sus hijos en escuelas públicas, citando problemas asociados con la salud mental.

“La pandemia verdaderamente dejó secuelas en los niños, mayormente en los de escuela intermedia y secundaria”, dijo Siddiqui. “Fue difícil para los padres. Fue difícil para los niños”.

Pero pese a que algunas familias han dado marcha atrás, Siddiqui dice que espera que los números de educadores en casa vuelvan a aumentar dentro de un año o dos.

Este artículo acerca del aumento en la educación en casa 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 Los nuevos educadores en casa: Más diversos, muy entregados appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

In the 1970s and 80s, groups of primarily white, Christian fundamentalists drove a surge in the number of home-schooling families around the country. As they pulled their children out of public schools, they also worked to dismantle state and local regulatory hurdles that kept kids in brick-and-mortar institutions. By 1994, over 90 percent of families who home-schooled were white.

During Covid-19, there’s been another increase in the number of families that are home-schooling, only this time, the families leading the charge are decidedly more diverse. Census data shows that rates of home-schooling doubled between the start of the pandemic in March 2020 and the fall of that year. This time, the largest growth in home schooling was among Black families, with a fivefold increase, but all racial groups tracked have seen increases. By October 2020, nearly 20 percent of adults who reported home schooling their children were Black, 24 percent were Hispanic or Latino and 48 percent were white, according to data from the Household Pulse Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau. The same survey found that only 19 percent of those adults have a bachelor’s degree or higher and 53 percent report their income to be less than $50,000 a year.

Related: As schools reopen, will Black and Asian families return?

According to Census data, the number of Hispanic families home-schooling doubled over the first several months of the pandemic. This increase has been felt by leaders on the ground, including those who run home-school groups or online home-school communities for Hispanic and Latino families.

Gisela Quiñones in Indiana has been home-schooling her two children for years and runs a Facebook group for Latino families who home-school. Over the course of the pandemic, “the group pretty much exploded nationally,” said Quiñones, mother of a 10- and a 12-year-old.

“Some parents are really worried about Covid and their child getting sick, but one of the main reasons is about culture. We want our children to learn certain things now,” said Quiñones. “We want them to know a lot about their culture.”

The Census survey didn’t separate out data for Native Americans, nor did it explore home-school participation by religion. But Native American and Muslim leaders say they believe rates have increased in their communities as well, after the pandemic gave families the time and space to reflect on whether traditional schools were really serving their needs

Related: Schools provide stability for refugees. Covid-19 upended that

While hard data is scarce, participation in Muslim home-schooling groups has gone up. The nonprofit Muslim Homeschool Network now has several thousand likes and follows on its Facebook page. The group connects Muslim home-schoolers in Southern California by hosting events and providing resources, such as books and curriculum. Fatima Siddiqui, an MHN member, said the group also has a WhatsApp group that is now up to 150 members.

Muslim Homeschool and Education, a private Facebook group, now has more than 22,000 members, while another, Successful Muslim Homeschooling, has been followed and liked more than 13,000 times.

Since 2015, Kelly Tudor, in Texas, has run a Facebook group for Indigenous home-school families. In the past year and a half, that number has ballooned; there are now over 1,000 parents in the group.

“I had a lot of issues and there was a lot of incorrect information and stereotypes taught to us,” said Tudor of how her teachers taught Native American issues in school. “When we would try to inform the teacher, we would get called names.”

The three families profiled below came to home schooling for different reasons, but all expressed disappointment with the public system and a desire to ground their children more firmly in their family’s identity and values.

The Gaddies

Before 2020, Helene Gaddie had never really considered homeschooling. But ever since the 6- and 9-year-old she’s raising were sent home at the start of the pandemic, she and her husband have been their primary teachers. The family, who lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, has chosen a hybrid home school model – half a day of distance learning with the local school and half a day of activities and lessons arranged at home.

“I thought we were failing, but the boys’ grades are OK,” said Gaddie, 42, who is a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation. “They’re average.”

When the boys’ no-fee private school reopened to in-person learning more quickly than Gaddie thought was safe, she enrolled them in the tribally controlled public school she’d gone to as a child. The school continues to offer a distance learning option – three hours a day of instruction from a grade level teacher – and Gaddie and her husband take care of the rest.

“For our recess they get to go outside and practice archery,” she said. “They get to tan the hides that they make, make drums, work directly in the garden and be present.”

It’s also easier to participate in events on the seasonal Indigenous calendar, like the annual buffalo harvest or sacred site visits, that previously would have meant pulling the children from school.

The boys, who she refers to as her grandsons, or “takoja” in Lakota, are her nephew’s biological children. She sees their upbringing, steeped now in the traditions and language of their people, as a sure path to making them stronger individuals. “If you know your culture, if you know where you come from, you’re stronger,” she said. “You’re stronger minded. You learn better.”

Gaddie has thought deeply about the education of the youth of her tribe. In 2013, she, her husband and her cousin founded a nonprofit called Generations Indigenous Waysthat offers after-school science programs and seasonal outdoor science camps. 

“What we’re trying to do is revive our culture,” she said. “So it’s really hard having them in school anyway, because our culture is more diluted. These [schools] are in our homelands, our Lakota homelands here. But there’s no enforcement of language or kinship.”

“If you know your culture, if you know where you come from, you’re stronger.”

Helene Gaddie, hybrid home schooler

It’s not easy maintaining jobs, motivating the boys – “I don’t care about what anybody says, stickers work” – and making ends meet. They get free school lunches delivered, but the family receives no other outside financial support. She and her husband are both artists and Gaddie earns a modest stipend from their nonprofit. It’s not really enough, Gaddie said, but “we make it work.”

She’s not sure if she’ll continue homeschooling once she feels it’s safe for the children to return to school in person. She thinks she’ll let her 9-year-old make his own choice. 

“He’s a normal wild Lakota boy,” she said, a smile in her voice. “He’ll adjust to anything.”

The Hidalgos

Olga Hidalgo had been volunteering at her children’s schools for years by the time the pandemic hit. The mother of two, who lives in Florida and runs a mobile pet grooming business with her husband, considered volunteering to be the best way to play an active role in her kids’ education.

“I noticed the kids were not respecting authority,” Hidalgo, who is originally from Peru, said in Spanish, through an interpreter. “Many teachers were not motivated to teach the young people, and they felt like the students were not being respectful toward them.”

Even before the pandemic, her daughter asked to be pulled from high school. And once she transitioned to virtual instruction, Hidalgo’s daughter grew more interested in learning at home.

“It just made think my children had another option to learn at home without that hostile environment.”

Olga Hidalgo, home-schooler

Hidalgo’s son, meanwhile, struggled to complete virtual class assignments without a cell phone or laptop. Once he had the right technology, Hidalgo said he was exposed to inappropriate pictures on Instagram shared by other students.

“I had a friend who already did home-school,” Hidalgo said, “and when I went to visit, I saw how she was doing the schoolwork with her children. It just made me think my children had another option to learn at home without that hostile environment.”

Early in fall 2020, Hidalgo and her husband scoured the internet for curriculum and lesson plans that they could use at home to teach their kids. All four Early in fall 2020, Hidalgo and her husband scoured the internet for curriculum and lesson plans that they could use at home to teach their kids. All four Hidalgos love American history, and a dual-enrollment course allowed their 17-year-old daughter to earn college credit while sharing the class content with her brother and parents. The Hidalgo’s 14-year-old son also jumped at the opportunity to earn college credit early, and enrolled in communications and composition courses.

Related: A silver lining: Rural students thrive in virtual college prep

The Hidalgos joined a home-schooling group at their church, where her children play the drums and piano in the band.

“Now they have even more friends — closer and more meaningful relationships — than they had at school,” Hidalgo said.

Although she hesitated to speak for the thousands of Hispanic and Latino parents who choose to home-school, Hidalgo said her culture is very family-oriented.

“We like our children to have a connection with parents and grandparents and extended family,” she said. “Home school is attractive because you get to spend more time as a family.”

The Siddiquis

Fatima Siddiqui always knew she wanted to home-school her kids.

She became fascinated with the idea while studying for her degrees in childhood education, psychology and math education. She thought the idea “just went so well … with that natural bond between a parent and child.”

A former private school teacher and assistant principal in New York, Siddiqui began home-schooling her kids six years ago after moving to Diamond Bar, California. She represents a growing number of Muslim families who are forgoing the public school system.

Many of the Muslim parents who are now choosing to go this route, unlike those in the past, are younger, born and raised in America, public school graduates, highly educated, and more diverse. The lack of personal attention students receive in a public school setting, the possibility of encountering bullying or Islamophobia and a take on human sexuality and gender that many parents find too liberal, were among the reasons Siddiqui and others she knows in the Muslim community cite for choosing to home-school. The ability to structure a school day to include the five daily prayers and to incorporate Islamic knowledge and study of the Qur’an, the Islamic holy book, side by side with secular subjects like reading, writing, math, science and history were also appealing to Muslim home-schoolers who spoke with Hechinger.

“I felt like I would be able to give more of the world to my kids.”

Fatima Siddiqui, homeschooler

Siddiqui said she’s able to provide her kids with a “stronger Muslim identity” because they’re reading about Muslim characters. She can also help them apply Islamic thinking, and is able to introduce principles and concepts of Islam into all subjects. For example, when teaching a unit on telling time, Siddiqui said she would incorporate verses from the Qur’an that talk about time.

For many parents, including Siddiqui, religion isn’t the only driving force.

“I felt like I would be able to give more of the world to my kids,” Siddiqui said. “Based on their interests, on their skill sets and help them become more well-rounded individuals by exposing them to a lot of different things at their level, at their pace.”

The mother of five has home-schooled four of her kids so far. Her high schoolers are now independent learners. One daughter is a dual-enrolled student at a community college and in a seminary program. Siddiqui is the primary home educator for her two younger children.

She said home schooling allows her to give her kids opportunities to “go really deep into topics.” When it was time to learn about the ocean, for example, they went to the beach. That way, Siddiqui said, “we’re learning about the ocean, not through a book, but we’re at the ocean, learning. We’re at the tide pools … we’re making learning not just theoretical, but practical.”

Related: A rigorous virtual field trip that’s part of regular class

At the same time, she said she is able to develop a stronger bond with her children by learning alongside them.

“You’re able to have deeper conversations, go deeper into a subject,” said Siddiqui. “If there’s a math lesson that needs to be repeated, it’s fine. We had to repeat a whole year of math and it was OK. We could spend the whole year on a topic and get really deep into it.”

Prior to the pandemic, and even during its first year, Siddiqui said many parents reached out to her, asking how to get started. However, this school year she’s noticed that some families who started to home-school in 2020, and even some veteran home-schoolers, put their kids back in public schools, citing issues related to mental health.

“The pandemic really took a toll on kids, mostly middle school and high school,” said Siddiqui. “It was difficult on parents. It was difficult on the kids.”

But despite that reversal by some families, Siddiqui said she expects home-schooling numbers to rise again in a year or two.

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

The post The new homeschoolers: More diverse, very committed appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

When education became a focal point in gubernatorial elections this November, it was no surprise to Keri Rodrigues, president and co-founder of the National Parents Union. Rodrigues had been traveling the country for weeks, meeting with parent advocacy groups in city after city, and working with them to get their grievances heard and addressed by local school boards. The parents she worked with were angry, frustrated and energized.

But these parents, in both their concerns and backgrounds, differed from those to whom politicians seemed to be pandering. While pundits seized upon issues like critical race theory as a driving force in recent election results, Rodrigues talked to parents who just wanted to make sure their kids had a competent bus driver and got a hot school meal. She didn’t see parents angry about culture war issues, but parents who were worried about their kids learning in a safe and inclusive classroom.

“I feel confident when I say the critical race theory stuff is flashy and sexy because people are losing their minds on microphones in meetings, but it’s not what we’re seeing across the country,” said Rodrigues. “We can say with fidelity it’s the transportation crisis, and lack of social-emotional learning.”

Rodrigues’ organization, the National Parents Union (NPU), launched in January 2020, just before the pandemic upended schools and learning. At the time, the group’s stated mission was to make education a more prominent issue in the upcoming presidential election. Now, nearly two years later, NPU is in a far different position — working to channel all the frustration, anger and motivation of parents from Covid-19-related crises into tangible district-level change.

The organization has emerged as a notable force in the education world, attracting both skepticism and praise. Some education experts point to some of the group’s pro-school-choice foundation backers and worry that Rodrigues is channeling parents’ anger to push those backers’ agenda and undermine teachers. At the same time, she has gained traction as a national spokeswoman for the concerns of parents, especially those from lower-income backgrounds, regularly appearing in national media and meeting with the Biden/Harris transition team. 

The group’s aim is lofty and clear: to carry the torch of underrepresented parents around the country, acting at times as a counterweight to powerful teachers unions, which Rodrigues says don’t speak for families and represent their own separate interests. What’s less clear is what this sky-high goal means in practice, and whether such an aim — which would entail reflecting the interests of millions of diverse parents across regions and political ideologies — is even possible.

What success would look like for the National Parents Union is hard to define. But it’s obvious to Rodrigues that what’s happening now in education — on both the local and federal levels — isn’t working. Even as the issues receive renewed attention on cable news and from politicians and pundits, Rodrigues sees the sorts of parents she partners with left out of the conversation. The organization’s polling has found that three-quarters of parents support the idea of changing K-12 U.S. history curriculums to include more diverse figures and perspectives; yet those who oppose such initiatives continue to receive the biggest microphones, despite being in the minority. (Notably, the group’s polling doesn’t specifically mention the term “critical race theory.”)

“It’s tough getting folks to understand the difference between what’s really happening on the ground and some of the stuff that’s flashier,” said Rodrigues, a Massachusetts native. For parents, “it’s much more the bread-and-butter stuff.”

 Related: Do fraught school board meetings offer a view of the future?

Rodrigues knows firsthand what it’s like to grow up in an education system that doesn’t value your voice. She came from a family dealing with addiction and violence, and was expelled from high school after bringing a weapon to school before earning her GED diploma.

Now she has five kids of her own, including two stepkids. Her oldest son — now in eighth grade — has autism and ADHD. As soon as he started school, he was regularly suspended, beginning in kindergarten, she said. Rodrigues was shocked at the amount of time, resources and knowledge it took to get him the services he needed. Even now as she connects with policymakers to bring change at the federal level, she said she’s “on the phone a couple times a week making sure he’s getting the services he’s supposed to get.”

Rodrigues started her career as a journalist and radio host before pivoting to working in organizing and communications for the Service Employees International Union — a fact she highlights to contrast perceptions of her group’s strained relationship with teachers unions. She became a political consultant and eventually zeroed in on issues of education aftertaking stock of the challenges she was facing in her own family and getting connected with the political action group Democrats for Education Reform. Later, she went to work for Families for Excellent Schools, a group that was working to raise the cap on the number of charter schools in Massachusetts.

Through her work in Massachusetts, Rodrigues met leaders at the Walton Family Foundation —  created by Walmart’s founders and a driving force behind charter school expansion and other education reform efforts — which is now a major funder of NPU. She also started Massachusetts Parents United, but in that work, saw a leadership vacuum at the national level that was keeping local groups from getting advice and resources. From there, she was inspired to start NPU with a co-founder, Alma Marquez, who has since left the group and did not respond to requests for comment.

“I was worried about my own kid. I was failed as a kid and I was worried about my kid being failed,” said Rodrigues. “A crisis point brought me into this work, and now I think we’ve all collectively been through a crisis point.”

Upon launch, Rodrigues had plans to travel the country and connect with parents groups all over. Then the pandemic hit, throwing America’s education system and the group’s priorities into disarray. She had intended to build the organization slowly and deliberately, but kicking its work into high gear suddenly felt urgent.

“It’s very bizarre, the relationship parents and families have with schools — it’s almost as if we’re not full-grown adults that can understand or comprehend.”

Keri Rodrigues, National Parents Union president

After schools closed, NPU handed out $700,000 worth of Walton-funded grants to families and education groups across the country to support them in their efforts to home-school during the pandemic. The idea was for lower-income families to come together to navigate remote learning through the same arrangements that affluent parents were organizing. NPU partnered with polling organizations to fill a gap in data regarding parents’ views on how schools were handling the pandemic. Its leaders met with the Biden/Harris transition team to advise them on education issues. The group became a mainstay in the pages of major media outlets, including The New York Times. And it launched a campaign to hold schools accountable for how they’re choosing to spend federal aid.

NPU’s thesis is simple: that school districts often treat parents — especially those from underrepresented communities — like children, leaving them out of important conversations, as if they weren’t a district’s most important stakeholders. The pandemic, in some ways,  served as a proof of concept.

“It’s very bizarre, the relationship parents and families have with schools — it’s almost as if we’re not full-grown adults that can understand or comprehend,” said Rodrigues, who has three sons in public school and two who switched to in-person Catholic schools during the pandemic after struggling during school closures.

To combat this tendency, the group has partnered with community parents organizations around the country to provide support and resources for their on-the-ground battles. In recent weeks, Rodrigues traveled to 10 cities to work with local organizations on the issues parents say they’re most upset about: bus driver shortages that make it difficult for their kids to get to school on time; an outbreak of violence at schools among kids who have been traumatized by the last 20 months; lack of clear communication from districts on Covid-19 safety protocols.

Rather than lamenting big-picture culture war issues, these parents are concerned about the day-to-day processes of teaching and learning, Rodrigues says.

NPU has built out a system of 18 parent delegates from around the country, who receive stipends and whose job it is to steer the parents union’s work and advocacy. Some delegate seats are reserved for those representingIndigenous, foster and LGBTQIA families, and families dealing with incarceration. The idea is that these highly mobilized individuals will organize in their communities while receiving mentorship from parents union leaders on speaking at school board meetings and lobbying policymakers.

Rodrigues says that in her ideal world, every school would have a parents council working with school leaders on issues of transportation, hiring more substitute teachers and making sure administrators were acting as responsible stewards of new federal funds designed to support schools after Covid-related upheavals. These councils would differ from PTAs and PTOs, which Rodrigues believes often focus more on fundraising than challenging the status quo.

Related: What the research says about the best ways to engage parents

But beyond this day-to-day advocacy, critics see an organization with larger aims of discrediting teachers unions and public education. They worry that Rodrigues is harnessing the voices of parents to sow dissatisfaction with traditional public schools, rather than to improve them.

An early draft of a concept paper sent to other organizations for feedback before the group’s launch presents it as an adversary to teachers unions, stating that unions “currently have no countervailing force.”

“I feel confident when I say the critical race theory stuff is flashy and sexy because people are losing their minds on microphones in meetings, but it’s not what we’re seeing across the country.”

Keri Rodrigues, National Parents Union president

“We envision the National Parents Union as being able to take on the unions in the national and regional media, and eventually on the ground in advocacy fights,” the paper said.

NPU continues to receive major donations from the Walton Family Foundation, though Rodrigues says the foundation is not its biggest funder. Other major funders include the City Fund, another pro-charter group; and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. (The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is one of the many funders of The Hechinger Report, which produced this story.) NPU now has a budget of $1.7 million, after being stretched so thin during the first few months after launch that the organization’s leaders didn’t get paid.

But the group’s connection to foundations like Walton that favor charter schools, vouchers and what critics see as other efforts to privatize education have only enhanced the perception that its aims are to undermine traditional public school systems.

“There’s no evidence whatsoever that they represent parents in any way, shape or form. They represent their funders,” said Maurice Cunningham, a retired associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston, who studies the influence of dark money on politics. “At the end of the day, it all leads to undermining public education and teachers unions.”

In response, Rodrigues notes that little of the group’s advocacy is centered around school choice. “We really view ourselves as being in service of the folks we work with,” she said.

“I think some parents are starting to question what the system looks like and how it works. I think there’s a lot of pressure to go back to normal — whatever that used to be — but was that working? Was that healthy?”

Yvonne Ballesteros, co-founder and staff member, Cihuapactli Collective

But even the group’s allies understand why it has faced its fair share of skepticism. Gwen Samuel is founder and president of the Connecticut Parents Union, a state organization that preceded NPU and has been partnering with it since its inception.

Organizers like Samuel have benefited from the group’s help and resources, particularly in connection with basic information technology issues after organizing went digital during Covid-19. But she takes a measured view of both the promise and limitations of the new organization.

“I don’t think there are any similarly situated groups … that have their money,” said Samuel. She describes hearing fears from others that NPU “cater[s] to the highest bidder — if you give a grant to them, they will fulfill your agenda.”

Samuel has also heard complaints from fellow advocates that the national, well-moneyed organization is stomping on the turf of local groups; or that NPU is primarily meant to advocate for Latino families. Once the latter issue was brought to the attention of the group’s leadership, “I think they addressed it accordingly,” said Samuel. (Rodrigues, for her part, said NPU tries not to show up in places where its help isn’t being sought: “We’re very intentional about trusting parents.”)

And despite the criticism the group has generated, Samuel said, she’s been impressed by what it has accomplished in just a short time. When NPU gave out grants to help families jump-start home-schooling pods, she was heartened by the lack of strings attached, especially for families who might not have had the resources or savvy to navigate complicated red tape. The group’s research, too, has been invaluable during the pandemic, reflecting an ability to get good information into the hands of the masses.

“They are most definitely meeting the needs of someof the many parent groups across this country that people don’t even know exist,” said Samuel.

Related: When parents got involved in schools, kids did no better

One of the groups is the Cihuapactli Collective. The Arizona organization, which supports Indigenous mothers and families, has been working with Rodrigues to advise her, helping to build NPU while amplifying the sentiments of parents in its community to the group. One of its founders is on the NPU board of directors.

Increasingly, those sentiments include anger and frustration — not over mask mandates and Covid-19 protocols per se, but over structural racism in schools, the inadequacy of remote learning and the failure to serve students’ varying learning styles. Yvonne Ballesteros, a staff member and co-founder of the group — who hasn’t worked with NPU — said that more families are getting involved with advocating for their families’ needs and reconsidering the value of a 9-to-5, brick-and-mortar school structure. She has also reassessed what works best for her family during this time, pulling two of her three school-aged children out of private schools they were attending in favor of home-schooling, while hearing from neighbors and friends in her community who are suddenly interested in home-schooling as well.

“There’s no evidence whatsoever that they represent parents in any way, shape or form. They represent their funders.”

Maurice Cunningham, a retired associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston

“I think some parents are starting to question what the system looks like and how it works,” said Ballesteros. “I think there’s a lot of pressure to go back to normal — whatever that used to be — but was that working? Was that healthy?”

Rodrigues says schools need to get serious about the depths of parental frustration. Many parents have seen their children fall behind academically and socially before their eyes, while receiving little communication from districts about what they were going to do to help make up for it. They don’t feel heard.

“The dream,” says Rodrigues, “is having folks most impacted be able to speak truth to power.”

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The post The other angry parents: What a new ‘parents union’ is demanding (it has nothing to do with CRT) appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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School principal Gregg Wieczorek in Hartland, Wisconsin, was prepared to see a sharp increase in cyberbullying when his students migrated to online learning during spring 2020. He held conversations with employees about how to deal with a potential spike. He and his team had started strategizing how they would discipline students for their virtual behavior.

They were relieved when, in fact, the opposite happened.

“We have a school of 2,100 kids, and usually three or four cyberbullying incidents a year are serious ones,” said Wieczorek. “I don’t know if we had any last year.”

Since the beginning of Covid-19, Wieczorek said the school he leads, Arrowhead Union High School, has seen a notable downturn in all forms of serious bullying, including cyber. This downturn started as kids migrated fully online in March 2020, and continued even as many elected to return to school in the winter and spring of 2021.

Wieczorek’s school may not be an anomaly — the limited research on the topic so far tends to reflect his experiences.

A quartet of Boston University researchers mined Google Trends to understand the terms people were searching for during the pandemic, and found that far fewer were researching all types of bullying than before. In the past, online searches have proven a useful data point when understanding how often bullying is occurring, according to the researchers who conducted the study.

Starting in March 2020, continuing through the fall and into the winter, ending at the close of February 2021, searches for terms related to bullying and cyberbullying dropped 30 to 40 percent. This trend started reversing once in-person learning began resuming in many communities.

“I was not so surprised overall bullying decreased as school shifted from in-person learning, however I was, and I think all of us probably were, surprised to see dramatic declines in cyber bullying as well,” said Andrew Bacher-Hicks, an assistant professor of education at Boston University, who worked on the study.

In Canada, a University of Ottawa study that surveyed students in grades 4 through 12 found that rates of cyberbullying dropped slightly — although rates of other types of bullying decreased dramatically. Before the pandemic, nearly 60 percent of students said they experienced some type of bullying, compared to roughly 40 percent who reported being bullied during the pandemic.

Online harassment also dipped: 13.8 percent of students reported experiencing “cyber victimization” prior to the pandemic, compared to 11.5 percent who reported the same during Covid. A separate Canadian UNICEF report cited by the researchers also found a 17 percent drop in cyberbullying during the pandemic.

“Although students are online more now than before the pandemic, this has not translated to higher rates of cyber bullying involvement. In fact, our results support the opposite conclusion,” the authors of the study reported, noting that this reduction might be in-part due to the hypervigilance of teachers and parents who closely monitored the issue.

Related: Early evidence of a ‘Trump effect’ on bullying in schools

Justin Patchin, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center and professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, has seen a similar trend play out. He received an initial flurry of emails at the beginning of the pandemic from families concerned about what their children were experiencing online. But as the months went by, fewer families seemed to need help dealing with serious cases of cyber-harassment.

Though Patchin believes the jury is still out on how exactly virtual schooling impacted cyber bullying, he wonders if run-of-the-mill teasing has remained, but is less likely to intensify into the harmful, repetitive behavior we define as bullying. While teasing can be a prelude to bullying, it can also be a one-off, and often lacks the same type of harmful relentlessness.

“Things can escalate online, but if kids don’t see each other the next day maybe it will be forgotten about,” said Patchin. “The problem is we just don’t have good data.”

“I was not so surprised overall bullying decreased as school shifted from in-person learning, however I was, and I think all of us probably were, surprised to see dramatic declines in cyber bullying as well.”

Andrew Bacher-Hicks, Boston University

The downward trend in bullying belies early hand-wringing that virtual learning could cause an epidemic of cyberbullying. Pre-pandemic research found a correlation between cyberbullying and time spent online and non-academic research picked up by media outlets suggested there had been an increase in cyber-harassment last year. Some experts warned of dire consequences from increased time spent online.

Researchers and school administrators have a few hypotheses about why these predictions were wrong. For one, cyberbullying is often compounded by an in-person component, and without face-to-face interaction, these incidents might have decreased in scale and strength. Online taunting and name-calling may be more easily forgotten when victims do not have to confront their tormentors in person in hallways and cafeterias.

Wieczorek believes that, within his school, there has been an increase in cyber teasing, or gentle prodding, about other kids’ academic performance or appearance. But this teasing, he believes, has remained just that, and serious incidents have become less common.

“When there’s cyberbullying going on it takes place in cyberspace but it manifests itself at school, where kids start teasing and multiple students are saying stuff to them. That’s when it has gotten serious and bad,” he said.

And in Wieczorek’s school, even when in-person class resumed last year for most students, the number of these types of incidents still trended lower than usual. Kids wore masks most of the day and social distancing was required in classrooms, changing how kids seemed to be relating to each other. Kids perhaps weren’t forming the types of social connections that facilitates both healthy and harmful interactions, he said.

That is, less school bullying might have had a cost: Fewer negative relationships can mean fewer positive ones, as well. Indeed, a 2020 survey from the American Psychological Association found that 81 percent of teenage students said they have been negatively impacted by school closures.

“Kids were burned out last year. It was a rough year and a half. Maybe they just decided it wasn’t worth it,” said Wieczorek. “The types of normal social connections taking place were not as prevalent.”

The downward trend in online bullying hasn’t held everywhere. In Mississippi, teacher Cathy Gonzalez describes the worst of all worlds, with in-person students attacking kids attending school virtually.

The pandemic forced the alternative school where she teaches to quickly integrate technology into teaching — a big change at a school where cellphones are typically confiscated. Even though the school open for in-person classes since fall 2020, some kids, forced to quarantine at home for a time, are still learning on line. Those learning at home get the classes broadcast into their homes, live.

Gonzalez said she has witnessed in-person students make snide remarks about their peers at home, loudly enough to be heard through the computer, while their victims sit defenseless in their living rooms. Using chat boxes, kids sometimes insult each other’s appearance. Although many students spend more time online, they still regularly have to face in-person tormentors.

“Bullying has increased,” says Gonzalez, whose school is specifically for children who had trouble learning and behaving in the traditional public-school environment.

And in instances when bullying occurs, she watches as the “engagement of the virtual student just stops … As a teacher, all you can do is tell them to stop.”

Patchin, of the Cyberbullying Research Center, warned that even in places where cyberbullying has decreased, educators and families should remain vigilant as the nation heads into another year of disrupted education. Victims of cyberbullying may be less likely to receive the support they need, when separated from in-person counselors or friends who can help.

“Maybe bullying is happening less, maybe even cyber bullying is happening less, but is it impacting kids in a different way because they don’t have access to support that they might otherwise have?” said Patchin.

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

The post While learning online, many students received a surprising pandemic respite from cyberbullying appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

The New Jersey governor’s recent decision that all public schools would return this fall to in-person classes – without a virtual option – sent parent Tatiana Martin scrambling.

Martin, of Jersey City, first went to her boss: Could she continue to work remotely next year, if she was somehow able to cobble together a virtual arrangement for her 10-year-old son, Theo?

Then she took to Google, researching the virtual homeschool options in her state, trying to suss out the rules and regulations with which she would have to comply.

Martin’s concerns about in-person schooling are three-fold. Based on his age, her son is not eligible to receive a vaccine, and without one, she is skeptical that schools are capable of keeping him safe from Covid-19. Then there’s the fact that her son’s school building is run-down, old, poorly ventilated and in constant need of repairs. Jersey City Public Schools, which only opened for in-person learning at the end of April, long after many other districts, seemed unsafe for learning even before the pandemic.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, virtual learning has worked for her son, who has autism and ADHD.

“My kid did better than he had before,” said Martin, who works as a data entry specialist at a company that manufactures glass. “Most of the school year he’s been on honor roll. He hasn’t had that before.”

Martin is one of the many parents and teachers around the country who don’t want their kids to return to the classroom this fall, whether for academic or medical reasons. But in states like New Jersey, one of at least nine states around the country that have mandated in-person learning for the 2021-22 school year, parents and teachers who were hoping to continue on the distance-learning track are on their own.

Now, parents like Martin say they’re starting to reconsider their expectations of schools after a year and a half at home. These parents said they feel newly empowered to fight against the failures they once accepted as inevitable. Virtual learning gave them a sense of options outside the traditional public school model. They are using Gov. Phil Murphy’s decision, and the inevitability of in-person schooling, to mobilize against the poor conditions in some of the state’s lower-income schools.

“It’s stuff that we’ve known has needed to be changed for a while,” said Martin. “I feel like now a lot more parents are more involved, especially as the year went on.”

A national survey of parents in May found that 12 percent were hesitant to send their child back to school in person, though that proportion may have since dropped. Families of color have been particularly hesitant, as Black, Latino and Asian communities were often hardest hit by the pandemic and may have already been less trustful of school leadership after decades of seeing their needs disregarded. (The population of Jersey City is 21 percent Black and 29 percent Latino.)

“We know that we can get back fully in-person, safely, with the right protocols in place,” Gov. Murphy said during his May announcement. In response to an inquiry from The Hechinger Report, the New Jersey Department of Education said it has not conducted any surveys to see how many families would be interested in continuing virtually. A spokesperson also noted that “state law would need to be amended to allow for all-day/schoolwide remote instruction,” outside of limited circumstances.

Related: Rundown schools forced more students to go remote

Teachers’ union leaders have said they have received increased community support for some of the battles they have long fought.

“People now are really fed up. When you’re away from something from that long, and you’re thrust back into it when you’re not specifically ready yet, I think folks are looking at it in a whole different light,” said John McEntee, president of the Paterson Education Association, a teachers’ union local that is currently fighting its district to get further repairs for run-down school buildings.

Martin has spoken up about her concerns during virtual school board meetings and in the comments section of the school district’s Facebook page. This type of involvement is new for her — previously, her work schedule didn’t allow her to make in-person school board meetings. She knows she’s not alone in her efforts: A school board member recently told her that she has heard from several parents in Martin’s position and Martin has seen other parents speaking up with similar concerns. But she worries that the loud voices supporting in-person school will drown out the whispers of opposition.

“I’ve been on some message boards where some parents have said, you know, it took some adjusting, but my kid flourished. I feel like the voices of those parents haven’t been heard as much as the parents who were fighting and throwing fits to have schools reopen,” she said.

For her son, who is sensitive to loud noises — a common symptom of autism — virtual schooling has been a lifeline. During virtual school, teachers have been able to mute students who are being noisy or disruptive, allowing him to better focus. Learning virtually has been a comfort for a child who struggles with transitions: He’s no longer forced to rush out the door in the morning or travel to class in rowdy hallways.

His experience has been uncommon. Many other students with disabilities have struggled throughout the pandemic after being thrust from their routine and cut off from necessary support services. But for Martin, it’s been thrilling to see her son’s new success.

She’s also found remote learning less logistically challenging. Her grandmother, who previously helped her with child care, died a few months ago. For three years, she had watched Martin’s son Theo after school — he had been removed from the free extended day program at his school because staff didn’t know how to manage his disability. If Theo went back to in-person school, Martin would have to pay for a private provider to fill the gap, taking a chunk she can’t afford to lose out of her paycheck.

The Jersey City Public Schools did not respond to requests for comment.

About 20 miles away in Paterson, teachers and parents are arguing that school buildings are unsafe to return to next year — and had been unsafe, even before Covid-19.

“He was always getting sick. But as soon as he got out of school, he stopped getting sick.”

Jillian Farrad, a mother of two

These teachers returned for in-person school in early June with a small group of students, despite a protracted legal battle with the district administration over safety precautions. Teachers say they returned to find buildings without the updates that district leadership had promised — HVAC systems were installed incorrectly; windows were stuck shut.

Since then, the union and individual teachers have been sharing photos and videos on social media of dead rats, empty soap dispensers, rodent droppings and faucets leaking brown water. The teachers haven’t argued for a return to remote learning, but are demanding that the district take care of these issues before students return in the fall.

“A lot of other districts opened quicker because they were better prepared and their schools were in better condition,” said Lakresha Hodge, a fourth grade teacher who has taught in Paterson for 21 years. “Our district has had many years of having schools in dire need of repair.”

District spokesperson Paul Brubaker disputes these characterizations. With the help of nearly $20 million in federal funds, the district has outfitted classrooms with partitions to separate kids from classmates, air purifiers, air scrubbers and disinfectant sprays. Universal masking and social distancing are required, and staff are asked to keep a window in their classroom open to increase airflow.

In an email, Brubaker denied the union’s assertions that the district’s buildings are not equipped to prevent Covid-19 infections, and chastised the union for its approach to addressing problems. “The PEA leadership does not notify the district of its concerns but instead puts photos in social media and in press releases to the media.”

“I feel like now a lot more parents are more involved, especially as the year went on.”

Tatiana Martin, a Jersey City parent

Some parents, discovering that their children’s respiratory issues cleared up when they stayed home during the pandemic, have joined the PEA’s calls for further repairs. Jillian Farrad, a mother of two, is desperately searching for other options so her kids don’t have to return to the buildings. She opted to keep them home at the end of the year, even though her two children, who have autism, are in urgent need of in-person speech therapy.

“My son has a weakened immune system,” said Farrad, who is a stay-at-home mom and secretary at a nonprofit she runs with her husband. “He was always getting sick. But as soon as he got out of school, he stopped getting sick. I knew then there was an issue with circulation and ventilation in his school — that combined with Covid is going to make it worse.”

Brubaker encourages Farrad and similarly situated parents to “contact their school principal to make sure all necessary accommodations are provided to ensure her child is afforded a safe learning environment.”

Related: America’s schools are crumbling. Fixing them could save lives (and the planet)

But Farrad doesn’t trust the district. She already has too much evidence that the school her 7-year-old son attended was bad for him. He regularly had to use a nebulizer and suffered from bronchial problems such as seasonal allergies and asthma. He once came home with bedbugs. During warm months, he would leave school beet red, his face flushed as if he had just gone for a run, and sweating. Not anymore.

“[My kids] not being in school led me to want better things for my children,” said Farrad. “I think a lot of parents are feeling the same way I am.”

Farrad’s family doesn’t want to move, so she’s looking into programs that allow families to enroll in public schools outside their district. She’s also exploring private schools. If given the option, she would definitely keep her kids in virtual classes, though managing their remote learning the last 16 months has been “a nightmare.”

Because her kids have disabilities, they qualify for the district’s summer school, and Farrad has been weighing whether or not to send them.

“I feel bad depriving them from what they need,” she said. “I never in my life have dealt with this kind of confusion.”

She’s eyeing a run for school board, and has been in close contact with the leaders of the local teachers’ union, who said that, like the kids, they are suddenly much healthier after time spent away from the classroom.

Related: Climate change threatens America’s ragged school infrastructure

Indeed, after just one day in her classroom, Hodge came home with a sore throat. There’s no air conditioning in her building, and windows only open a few inches — the heat and dust make it hard to breathe.

“Covid uncovered a lot of systemic issues,” said Hodge. “Just because our students have a particular zip code doesn’t mean they don’t deserve healthy schools.”

In mid-June, the Paterson Education Association took a no-confidence vote against the district’s superintendent, mostly over concerns about her handling of safety issues. (Brubaker said the vote “has absolutely no bearing on the leadership and the policies set by the Board of Education,” and noted that Board of Education members had spoken in defense of the superintendent.)

Nearby, in Jersey City, Martin is now bracing for the time that she’ll be forced to send her child back to in-person school, for lack of other realistic options.

The virtual programs she’s found focus too much on self-directed learning, which isn’t appropriate for her child, and the private programs are unaffordable.

“As of right now, it looks like we’re not going to have much of a choice,” she said.

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

The post These parents want more virtual learning. New Jersey says they’re on their own appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Hayden, 12, had been having panic attacks about school even before a letter arrived at his home last month, threatening legal action for his alleged absences from distance learning. 

The sixth grader has been attending online class from his home outside Austin, Texas, since August, and having difficulties adjusting. When his grades dropped, he started having intense bouts of anxiety, working himself up until he cried so hard he could barely catch his breath. He wailed that he hated himself and wished he could do better in school.

When the letter arrived from Round Rock School District in November, saying that legal charges punishable by fines or court action could be brought against his mother for his absences, Hayden spiraled into a dayslong episode, says his mother Holly Barentine. He started crying even before they finished reading the letter, disclosing fears about worst-case scenarios that he would fail his classes. When he went to stay the night at his dad’s house, the crying continued. His father emailed Barentine, expressing concern for their son’s well-being.

Hayden, a sixth-grader, hadn’t actually been missing online school. However, his school district only counts kids present in some classes if they both show up and submit their homework for the day. Some of Hayden’s homework hadn’t been reaching his teachers due to apparent technological glitches on the school’s online platform, or in some cases because he hadn’t handed it in ― an oversight he didn’t expect to be met with potential legal action. 

Around the country, school districts are subject to state truancy laws and regulations. However, as the coronavirus pandemic has turned schools upside down and put most learning online, some of these rules are bumping against new realities involving technology gaps or a lack of parental supervision. Amid a global health crisis, threats like the one Round Rock sent to Barentine strike her as particularly archaic. 

Barentine immediately emailed her son’s school upon receiving the letter. 

“I have received a truancy notification for my son, who has been having extreme technical issues,” she wrote to administrators. “I have met with his teachers and gone over this, and I think it’s highly inappropriate to be sending out these notices to anyone during a pandemic, when we’re all doing the best we can.”

In recent years, truancy policies have started shifting away from punitive measures to providing more support for students who are chronically absent. Most states have some sort of truancy laws on the books, but only about half still have policies punishing truancy with potential penal measures, according to the national policy group Education Commission of the States.

“Threatening families with court isn’t what allows you to unpack what’s going on or come up with solutions, and I think this was true before the pandemic, and the pandemic, as with many situations, has made it even more clear”

Hedy Chang, Attendance Works

Where Barentine lives in Texas, the law changed several years ago so kids would no longer face potential criminal sanctions for truancy, instead putting in place school-level prevention programs. Students who are 12 and older may still get referred to truancy court, and parents found to have contributed to nonattendance can face fines and charges. In other states, like Alabama, parents who contribute to a child’s truancy “may also be sentenced to hard labor for the county for not more than 90 days.” 

During a pandemic, when there’s no uniform way of counting attendance, Hedy Chang, director of the advocacy group Attendance Works, has seen districts rethinking some of these rules, with their ability to do so varying on state flexibility.  

“Threatening families with court isn’t what allows you to unpack what’s going on or come up with solutions, and I think this was true before the pandemic, and the pandemic, as with many situations, has made it even more clear,” said Chang.

Round Rock spokesperson Jenny LaCoste-Caputo acknowledged the difficulties of following these policies during remote learning, noting that technological problems can sometimes erroneously show when an assignment was turned in. She said the district is closely following guidance issued by the Texas Education Agency, which says that teachers leading asynchronous classes can use the completion of daily assignments as a measure of attendance. In synchronous classes, it is enough for a student to be present. 

The letter Barentine received from her son’s school said that he had 10 unexcused absences and that it may be necessary to proceed with legal action against her and to refer her son to truancy court. 

“If you, with criminal negligence, fail to require the child to attend school as required by law, legal charges can be brought against YOU for Parent Contributing to Nonattendance,” says the letter, noting that “conviction of this offense is a Misdemeanor punishable by fines ranging from $100.00 for first offense up to $500.00 for each additional offense.” 

After HuffPost contacted the district, LaCoste-Caputo said it would reword the automatically generated truancy letters to be more “solution and intervention-oriented.” 

“We do understand that the current wording of the warning letter is in need of updating given our current climate,” LaCoste-Caputo wrote. “This environment presents a very real challenge on all sides, but we also must identify students who are not engaging in school virtually so we can do all we can to support them and bring them back.”

Barentine is now considering pulling Hayden and his older brother, an eighth-grader, out of school to enroll in a virtual program. She figures it would come with some of the same challenges, but with fewer technology issues and fewer legal threats. She’s still exploring this option ― she emailed the kids’ school for information on the withdrawal process, but they’re first going to finish the semester and then evaluate their options later this month.  

Hayden, typically an A or B student, has had difficulty making the transition from elementary school to middle school online. He was never a frequent user of computers, instead playing video games on a handheld device, and has found adjusting to the school’s online learning platform challenging. It sometimes takes him hours to type assignments. 

There have been more than a handful of instances, too, when technology simply failed him. Barentine recalls sitting next to him, watching him submit homework via the Schoology learning management platform used by the district, that the teacher never received. (Hayden has started directly emailing some of his assignments to teachers out of frustration.)

Barentine’s older son, more fluent in technology, has had an easier time making the adjustment, though sometimes his completed assignments don’t reach teachers, either. 

“There have definitely been issues to work through with the platform but we are happy with the support Schoology has provided,” said LaCoste-Caputo. 

Barentine, a single mother, hasn’t been around as much as she would like to help to coach Hayden through his difficulties. Her job as an escrow officer for a title company requires her to go into the office in person, leaving her two sons to work independently during most of the day. The office is only about 10 minutes away from their home, and she regularly drops in unannounced.

She’s been surprised at how well her children seem to be handling their new independence. They load the dishwasher and take out the trash before she gets home. Her eldest has started occasionally making his own lunch. They seem to be staying focused, even without supervision, she said. 

“It’s sad to see your kid passing with flying colors to failing everything. He’s already trying his best and not doing well because of everything. Then to hear you might have to fail or get kicked out or go to court.” 

Holly Barentine, parent 

Still, staying on top of her kids’ learning this year feels like a full-time job in itself, more work than previous stints on the school PTA. She’s started checking in every day with all her sons’ teachers. They all individually send weekly updates ― 14 different emails, all containing potentially vital information. 

There’s also the issue of her son’s well-being. Hayden has always had anxiety and has been seeing a therapist about it. But in the past his anxiety was rarely focused around school, where he did well. Now he calls his mom in a panic after their internet cuts out and he gets bumped from class, afraid he will get marked absent. 

“It’s sad to see your kid passing with flying colors to failing everything,” says Barentine. “He’s already trying his best and not doing well because of everything. Then to hear you might have to fail or get kicked out or go to court.” 

The district has referred 22 truancy cases to court this school year, a number LaCoste-Caputo says is significantly down from the 65 referrals during the fall semester last year. Staff members in the large district with over 50,000 students have been following up with families to ensure they are “true truancy cases” before making these referrals, she said. 

In Chicago, Kishonna Gray decided to pull her children out of public school after receiving a similar letter. Gray, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, had been working remotely, supervising her kids’ learning, when one of them received a truancy notice in October. 

There was the time she took her kids, in second and fourth grade, with her to a doctor’s appointment so they wouldn’t be left without supervision. Another time, she took them with her when she went to get her car fixed, an activity that took hours. While Gray’s husband is working remotely, his job is less flexible and he’s usually unable to pull himself away from the computer to watch the kids. 

Gray allowed her youngest child to turn his camera off during class, which caused him to be marked as absent at his charter school, she says. Her child prefers to sit on a bouncy ball during class to help him focus, but his teacher told him it was distracting and asked him to stop. Gray gave him permission to turn off his camera to prevent him from distracting others if the ball would help him learn. 

A few weeks later, she received a truancy letter, explaining that her youngest had missed five unexcused days of school. It warned that if the pattern continued, they could be subject to the “chronic truant adjudication hearing procedures.” 

“Should your child be found to be a chronic truant and should you, your child, or both, fail to comply with any sanctions imposed by the hearing officer, the Department of Chronic Truant Adjudication may refer the matter to the Office of Cook County State’s Attorney for prosecution,” read the letter. 

April Shaw, Namaste Charter School’s executive director, said parents had been told cameras should be on during live instruction. They were encouraged to reach out if they had concerns or needed accommodations, and a number have been granted. The truancy letters, required by Chicago Public Schools, are automatically generated, Shaw wrote in an email. 

But Gray had already been having issues with her sons’ school. Remote learning had given her a look into their classrooms, and she didn’t like what she saw. 

Her older child’s teacher would rally kids back to class after breaks by sounding a police siren ― a noise Gray, who is Black, found inappropriate, given the context of protests against law enforcement and the optics of a white teacher exercising control in that way over a majority Black and brown classroom. 

Her younger child’s classroom was constantly being divided for activities based on gender, a pattern Gray found frustrating ― he is transgender. (Once she reached out to the school complaining about these issues, they made adjustments, Gray said.)  

But at a time where teachers had the opportunity to reimagine the architecture of learning, Gray says she witnessed an emphasis on compliance and authority as opposed to curiosity and ideas. The truancy allegation seemed emblematic of these larger issues.  

“I realized this space was going to do more harm to my kids at such an early age because they have the rest of their lives to be disappointed by the world,” Gray says. “At this time I would like them to be connected to advocates and people who support them.” 

When Gray received the truancy letter, she sat her kids down and explained the situation to them ― that their mom could get in legal trouble for taking them to the doctors or allowing her youngest to turn off his camera. They didn’t understand. They equated courts and punishment with crimes like murder and stealing ― mommy had only tried to help them. She asked them how they felt about home schooling instead. 

Now, Gray spends her day teaching her kids about the tenants of physics through at-home basketball games, and about kinesiology through dance and movement. She gives her kids Mondays off so she can work, while at-home school is in session Tuesday through Friday. As a professor, her classes are asynchronous this semester, making her schedule mostly flexible. A sample home school schedule shared by Gray in mid-October shows her teaching her children about decimals and plants and poetry. When and if she puts her kids back in school, she says she’ll be looking for another one. 

“I measure success by their mental well-being, they’re happier kids,” says Gray, noting that her fourth-grader almost immediately stopped wetting the bed when she took him out of school. She hadn’t known that school had become such a stressor. 

Shaw takes issue with Gray’s characterizations, noting that the school took steps to address her complaints, and emphasized its commitment to diversity, parent connectivity and a personal approach to learning. 

“When the parent reached out with the concern, we immediately responded with ways to support the students,” including options to have the camera off and an alternative schedule, wrote Shaw. “We can confidently say that Namaste’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, along with parent and community communication and support were in place throughout the student’s time at Namaste.”

“They are trying to have an attendance policy like they are in person, but they are not in person”

Megan Jackson, teacher, Chicago

Gray worries about other students in Chicago Public Schools with fewer resources, who may be getting marked absent because of technological issues, or because their parents are working outside the home all day and aren’t able to supervise. 

Chicago educator Megan Jackson, who teaches special education at a Chicago elementary school that serves predominantly low-income students, has seen these issues play out in her classroom. Many of her families work in retail, restaurants, and essential services and lack reliable child care, making it especially difficult to ensure that their young kids will log on and stay logged on. 

One of Jackson’s first graders has missed some 20 days of school this fall because of various challenges, she says. His mother works at a chain food store and couldn’t stay home to care for him, so she often left him with relatives, where he had trouble accessing Wi-Fi. Then the student’s school-provided computer broke. 

Jackson says she picked up the computer from the student’s home and took it to school to be repaired. While it was being fixed, the mom received a letter from the school marking her son as truant. 

She says the district’s attendance policies don’t take into account the realities of parents’ lives and the obstacles to keeping young children engaged online. “They are trying to have an attendance policy like they are in person, but they are not in person,” Jackson says.

Chicago Public Schools spokesperson James Gherardi told HuffPost the district has told teachers “to exercise discretion, allowing for flexibility in determining attendance in the event of unforeseen circumstances and in adjustment to the remote learning environment,” including scheduling, connecting and logging in.*

Hayden is not the only student in his district to receive truancy letters during the pandemic because of missed assignments. 

An eighth grader named Cooper received one in October, baffling his mother, Kandis Seaver, who is home with him all day and hasn’t been working during the health crisis. 

Cooper, like Hayden, has been mostly attending class ― though his mother admits he may have occasionally been tempted by computer games. His absences snowballed, however, over a failure to do homework. Cooper has always struggled with homework, something his mother tried not to interfere with in an effort to let him learn his own lessons. 

He’s also been plagued by technological glitches in which completed assignments have failed to make their way to his teachers. His parents have had trouble sorting out which absences were a result of him not logging on for class and which were for not doing homework. 

Cooper’s teachers, some of whom taught him in previous years, say he doesn’t participate like he used to. At one point this semester, he was failing all but one class, and the situation has only barely improved since. 

Seaver and her husband have opted to keep Cooper home for safety reasons, even after in-person classes resumed. Now they wonder if they should enroll him in the district’s hybrid option. They wonder if the consequences of remote learning ― the poor grades, the legal threats ― make it worth the tradeoff, even though going back would make her son incredibly anxious over potential exposure to COVID-19. 

“Combined with being stuck home all day and never seeing his friends except occasionally on FaceTime, I could imagine how it all feels altogether overwhelming,” says Seaver. “It feels like they made this policy and then we weren’t given any additional resources or anything.”

Local news reports say grades in the district have fallen this semester, as in districts around the country. (Seaver notes her appreciation for a recently rolled out virtual tutoring program.)

LaCoste-Caputo says Round Rock’s decline in student grades has been in line with peer districts and “most of the issues were not from low grades on assignments but from missing assignments as students were getting accustomed to this brand new and unfamiliar way of learning.” 

Barentine worries about how this year will impact her son’s long-term relationship with school and his view of himself as a student.

“It’s hurting his self esteem,” says Barentine, who spoke with her son’s counselor and learned that most other students are struggling with the same issues. 

Hayden still feels nervous that the family could be upended with legal consequences for truancy, no matter how hard he tries in school.

“I don’t think he really believes that nothing is going to happen,” says Barentine. “I just tell him that we have to do the best we can, and if you feel like you’re going to have a panic attack, tell the teacher you need a few minutes and give me a call.”

*This story has been updated with a comment from a spokesperson from Chicago Public Schools.

Caroline Preston contributed reporting.

This story about truancy was produced as part of an ongoing series on school discipline in the pandemic, reported by HuffPost and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter here.

The post They didn’t turn in their work for remote school. Their parents were threatened with courts and fines appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

By April, Odalys Garate, 18, was supposed to have made it through the hard part. She, her mother and her two older sisters ― everyone she lives with ― had all recovered from Covid-19. She had made it through the fevers, coughing fits and the night she had so much trouble breathing that her mom, in a panic, sobbed by her side. But in many ways, Garate still felt debilitatingly sick. 

The sirens she heard traversing her neighborhood of Corona, Queens, at all hours of the night made her feel ill. She lost her appetite watching a long line of hungry people waiting outside for hours to get food from a pop-up food pantry. Seeing ambulances stop outside her building, wondering which one of her neighbors it might be coming for, gave her stomachaches. Five family friends died, one after the other.

Overwhelmed and depressed, Garate stayed underneath her covers for nearly three weeks straight.

“I just wanted to be in bed all day. And I’m not one to be in bed all day,” said Garate, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment with her two older sisters and mother. “I felt like I had insomnia. I didn’t even have energy to sleep.”

Garate has not just been a teen living through a pandemic. She has been a teen living through a pandemic in one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods in the hardest-hit city in the country.

Staff members at her school ― the Renaissance Charter School in the neighborhood of Jackson Heights ― say she is one of many traumatized students whose families have been deeply impacted by Covid-19. HuffPost spoke to seven students, parents and staff members from Renaissance, a K-12 school of about 600 kids, about their experiences over these past few months.  

In Corona, 1 in 274 people have died from Covid-19; in Jackson Heights, 1 in 263 people have. Each neighborhood has had thousands of cases, according to the latest data. For weeks, overwhelmed hospitals were overflowing with patients.

The brunt of the pandemic has passed in the area for now, but school social worker Alison Rosow said the trauma lingers. She estimates that at one point, about 80 percent of the students in her caseload were sick or had sick family members. A handful of students lost grandparents, and several recent graduates lost parents. A school survey from May found that about 40 percent of responding families had had someone laid off or furloughed. Most of the school’s families are Hispanic, and many are immigrants. 

For those three weeks in April, Garate retreated inwards. She stopped answering texts and FaceTimes from her friends. She couldn’t focus on the schoolwork she normally cared about. Her grades fell, but she felt numb to it. She turned on the TV and flipped through channels mindlessly, zombie-like, to pass the time. She stayed awake all night, anxious and sad and scared, and couldn’t get out of bed when the sun rose. 

Her peers were in similar situations. 

Tiffany Palaguachi, another senior at Renaissance, spent a month taking care of both of her parents and worrying desperately after her mother spent a week in the hospital, barely breathing. Junior Juliza Lema didn’t have any sick family members, but her family became so desperate for money that they started making diapers for her little sister at home. As she took on more chores and became increasingly anxious, her grades dropped drastically. One of Lema’s friends lost their mom. 

All the while, classes continued. Kids attended school via video and sat for remote exams. A drive-in graduation ceremony took place for the seniors earlier this week. 

“These kids are expected to do remote learning, but they were taking care of their parents. They’re depressed,” said Rosow, the only social worker in the school.

Rosow said she counseled several kids over text as they debated whether a parent should go to the hospital. In May, a majority of the students Rosow talked to were unable to sleep, even the ones who are typically diligent about routine. 

She described counseling kids who were sick themselves. “I’m on the phone with them, they’re still coughing, still having issues breathing,” Rosow said in May. As of late June, some still had lingering illness. 

The school’s principal, Stacey Gauthier, is worried that kids will face a whole host of new issues when they go back to school in the fall ― if they do. 

“We have our share of families in temporary housing, 75% are free or reduced-price lunch. I’m worried we’re going to have a whole lot more,” said Gauthier, who has been the school’s principal since 2007. “The reality is we need more people. I need more social workers.”

The word the students use the most to describe the past few months is “scary.”

Tiffany Palaguachi, 18, used the words “scared,” “scary” or “terrified” 16 times over the course of one conversation.  

Palaguachi spent late March and April taking care of her parents and younger sister, who all got Covid-19 while she remained healthy. For nearly four weeks, Palaguachi cooked them all breakfast, lunch and dinner, delivering each meal to their respective rooms. When she wasn’t cooking, she kept track of their medications, disinfected the bathrooms and updated relatives. She stayed up until 4 a.m. completing the homework she did not have time to do during the day, and then set her alarm to go off twice in the night so she could check on her parents and make sure they were still breathing. 

Her mom’s condition grew worse over the course of a few weeks, then she ended up in the hospital. When they spoke on the phone, Palaguachi’s mom could hardly speak. Every conversation felt like it might be their last.  

Palaguachi is still traumatized by the idea of her parents getting sick again, a month after recovery. She’s scared when her dad, a construction worker who just recently started getting hours again, leaves to go to work. She begs her mom, a teacher, to stay inside. Every time her mom mentions going to get something from the store, Palaguachi volunteers to go instead. 

Even while ill, her mom couldn’t stop mothering. She would check to make sure Palaguachi was doing homework in the middle of the night under the guise of going to the bathroom. She would pester the teen ― who had lost her appetite ― to make sure she was eating enough. “She’s very loving and sweet, I know she’ll do anything for me,” Palaguachi, who sat in front of wallpaper that read “live, laugh,” said over video chat with a bashful smile and twinkling eyes.

She maintained her high 90s grade average throughout ― “there’s always a way to do something,” she said softly. Next year she plans to study biology on the premed track in college. She had planned to venture to Long Island for college, but with the pandemic, her parents wanted her to stay close. Part of Palaguachi wanted to stay close, too. 

“Circumstances changed. I learned to accept that,” she said, resigned but matter-of-fact. “I’m more worried about my parents than I was before. I’m gonna be thinking about my parents for a while.”

In the early weeks of Covid-19, Rosow never knew what she was going to get when she spoke to a student.

There was the one who mentioned watching someone’s dead body being carried out of their building. Another who had several people close to them die. There were the students she would text every day to see if their parents were still alive. 

“I’m more worried about my parents than I was before.”

Tiffany Palaguachi, 18

Rosow video chatted with kids, sometimes from their cramped bathrooms so their family couldn’t hear the conversations. It was hard to tell who was going hungry. Some of her students and their families were so scared that, as of mid-May, they hadn’t gone outside since March. 

Students who lived close to Elmhurst Hospital told Rosow about the constant sounds of sirens and helicopters. They described hearing the sound of dead bodies getting crunched into refrigerated trucks. 

The worst was when a kid stopped answering her messages. She couldn’t go to their classroom and bring them to her office, so her imagination went to dark places. She’d never had anxiety before, but started getting anxiety-related chest pains. 

Garate, the 18-year-old student, was cooped up and anxious inside, but she didn’t want to look outside either. She had seen the cops disperse a group of people who had been waiting for hours, sweaty and hot, hoping to get food from a local pantry. The police said they had violated social distancing rules. It was painful to watch. So was the news, given the suffering everywhere. 

“It was too much,” Garate said via video chat, while sitting on the bottom bunk of the bedroom she shares with her sisters, who are 22 and 25. “Seeing everyone kind of feeling the same way. It was so overwhelming. I kind of didn’t want to know about the world at that point.”

“These kids are expected to do remote learning, but they were taking care of their parents. They’re depressed.”

Social worker Alison Rosow

Garate spent her time going between the bedroom and the living room, where her mom, a domestic worker, sleeps on the couch. Her mother spent April watching the news, mourning lost friends and lost work. 

“When something affects my mom, it affects us all,” said Garate, who plans to study nursing next year at Lehman College. Her mom only recently started hearing from clients who want her to come clean their spaces. “She’s been happy that they remember her, I guess.” 

Garate, who is asthmatic, feels lucky that no one in her immediate family got seriously ill from Covid-19. The experience of the virus, though, was terrifying. One night, at the peak of her sickness, she woke up panicked and struggled to breath. She could feel her asthma medicine, her nebulizer, not working. She sobbed in alarm. She wanted her mom to remain calm, to tell her everything would be OK, but instead her mom cried, too. Their panic grew and grew, until eventually, when they were all cried out, it passed.

“I never want to feel that again,” Garate said. “It’s so scary.”  

Garate emerged from her fog of depression after her sisters became concerned and started prodding her to exercise with them, to bake with them, to do anything. She texted her friends to make amends — she had to explain why she had ignored their calls and disappeared. 

After she explained, though, she says they understood. They had been going through it, too.

This story about Corona, Queens was produced as part of the series Critical Condition: The Students the Pandemic Hit Hardest, reported by HuffPost and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

The post A semester of trauma, sickness and death at a New York school appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Samantha Honani’s son hasn’t completed a school assignment in months. After his high school on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona shut down in March, he finished about three weeks of distance learning via his family’s computer. Then, in April, he stopped hearing from his teachers. Caught up in the tumult of Covid-19 and the struggles of sharing one computer with subpar internet, academics faded to an afterthought, Honani said. 

“There was a breakdown in communication in the school and the students,” said Honani, who works as a program manager for The Hopi Foundation. “There was no follow-up.”

Initially, Honani put some blame on herself as a mother, chiding herself for failing to stay on top of her son’s teachers and deprioritizing traditional schooling during a hectic time. But while Honani was internalizing the schools’ shortcomings as her own, decisions far away in Washington, D.C., were also having an impact on her child’s education. 

Honani’s son attends Hopi Junior Senior High School, which is funded and partially overseen by the Bureau of Indian Education, an agency within the Department of the Interior that manages nearly 200 tribal K-12 schools throughout the country. Implementing distance learning for schools like Hopi High would have been difficult even under the best of circumstances — the school is located on a vast reservation where families often lack access to internet and computers. But evidence suggests that some of the blame for the struggles of BIE schools during Covid-19 lies on the shoulders of the federal government, which consistently bungled its role in helping schools adapt to remote learning and ensure that kids continued to receive an education.

After schools started closing in mid-March, the bureau provided only limited guidance to schools on how they should handle distance learning at a time when other systems had already fully implemented detailed contingency plans. In some cases, nonessential school employees were asked to show up to school after these closures, putting them and their families at increased risk for Covid-19. And later in March, federal lawmakers awarded $200 million to help BIE and tribal schools get students connected to online lessons, but by late June, only a fraction of that cash had been distributed.  

For BIE students, the costs of not getting that support are particularly high. While the vast majority of Native American and Alaska Native students attend traditional public schools — the BIE educates less than 10 percent of Native students — BIE students score significantly lower than their public school counterparts on standardized exams, and overall post some of the lowest scores of any student group. At the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic has hit some Native communities particularly hard. If the Navajo Nation were a state, it would have the highest death rate from Covid-19 in the country. The Hopi reservation has also seen a recent surge in cases.

Related: How one Minnesota university more than doubled its native student graduation rate

Not all BIE schools necessarily fell short. But many scrambled to provide students with basic services.

Honani, for one, says she doesn’t know who should be held accountable for her school’s shortcomings and she is sympathetic to the hurdles they faced. 

“Teachers are trying to manage the education of hundreds of children, within a setup that lacks internet access and technology access,” said Honani, a member of the school’s parent advisory committee. “If I were a teacher, would I know how to shift to teaching online?”

The school’s superintendent also acknowledged the myriad difficulties staff faced. Many of the school’s educators had difficulty keeping in touch with students because they, like many students, lack a stable internet connection at home. Teachers were required to submit weekly lesson plans, and though distance learning “started strong … there were breakdowns,” acting Superintendent Alban Naha said in an interview. “We’re going to have to find alternative ways.” 

“Not all households have phones or transportation out here,” he added. “We don’t have running water or electricity in some of the villages we service.”

Leaders of BIE, which oversees schools across 23 states, weren’t much help either, Naha said. “There was a lack of the direction we needed.” 

Indeed, some say the blame for some of these issues lay squarely with the BIE. As the agency stalled, some local education officials who work on reservations say they were forced to turn to their counterparts in Arizona and New Mexico for assistance in helping students.

“BIE has had the same amount of time as all the other education systems in the country,” said Alexis DeLaCruz, staff attorney with the Native American Disability Law Center. “We understand these are unprecedented times and school systems are literally reinventing how education is happening but the states have done it … The BIE is not doing that for its 183 schools.” 

By press time, officials from the BIE had not responded to repeated requests for comment on the agency’s handling of school closures, distance learning or delays in disbursing the funds to its schools.

Schools Slow To Close

From the start of the pandemic, BIE school officials waited for guidance from leaders in Washington. About 50 BIE schools are directly operated by the BIE. The rest of the schools, including Hopi Junior Senior High School, are tribally operated, with the agency providing funding and general oversight. 

On March 14, BIE started temporarily closing the schools it operates on a case-by-case basis, and by March 17, all of the agency’s schools had closed or were on spring break, according to an archived version of the agency’s website. That was after 33 states and the District of Columbia had already made the same move.

However, in at least one case, school staff were still asked to show up. In a March 16 memo, the principal of Kaibeto Boarding School in Arizona, a bureau-operated school, asked staff to report to work from March 23 to April 3 while the school was closed, according to a document reviewed by HuffPost. 

At least two other schools — including Keams Canyon Elementary on the Hopi Reservation and Rocky Ridge Boarding School on the Navajo Nation — also had students or staff report to school after March 16. Some students and staff at Rocky Ridge later reported symptoms consistent with Covid-19, according to ProPublica.

On March 30, members of the Kaibeto Boarding School’s board started raising alarm bells in an email to school and BIE leaders.

“Many community members [are] stating our school, along with other BIE schools around the Navajo Nation, are currently fully staffed. If this were to be true, I feel as if the BIE is not abiding by the Public Health Orders and Executive Orders issued by our Federal, State and Tribal Leaders,” wrote Dellard Curley, a member of the school board, in the email. 

The directive contributed to the spread of Covid-19 within the community, school board members say. 

“The majority of our school has the virus. It was passed around because they were having employees report,” said school board member Bahozhoi Kinsel in an interview in May.

The school’s principal did not respond to a request for comment.

Related: How one Navajo Nation high school is helping students see a future that includes college

The initial confusion was a harbinger of what was to come. 

March 30 guidance provided by the BIE on how to implement distance learning was only two pages long and provided mostly generic, boilerplate advice. 

One bullet point item in the memo, written by Tamarah Pfieffer, the agency’s chief academic officer, reminds leaders to “teach content.” Another says to “plan for student learning.” 

For some school leaders, the message the memo sent was clear: They were on their own. 

Meanwhile, some of the school staff members who had continued to report to work in March were getting severely ill, and in some rare cases, dying. 

A spokesperson for the BIE did not respond to questions about how many staff members had gotten sick or died. But as of April, The Navajo Times reported that two employees from separate schools died. Curley and Kinsel also said a teacher from their school had died. The Kaibeto principal did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this matter. 

Kinsel says she believes the BIE was knowingly negligent in handling the situation. 

Meager Guidance

As time went on, tribal leaders continued to prod the BIE for help.

However, when they reached out with specific questions, they were sometimes ignored.

In early April, Darrick Franklin, an education program manager with the Navajo Nation Department of Diné Education, noticed the Arizona and New Mexico departments of education were providing their schools with far more detailed guidance than the two pages the BIE had provided Navajo schools. 

The New Mexico Public Education Department had designed a 31-page plan to hold schools accountable for providing services during the last months of school. The guide included tips for online teaching, a five-day training for school staff, clarity on rules for special education and more. That was in stark contrast to the March BIE memo and its platitudes about engaging families.  

Franklin wrote to the BIE inquiring about these differences, asking if BIE schools should plan to submit any specific plans to the agency about how they intended to serve students during the shutdown. 

His questions were never directly answered. In an email response, Pfieffer, of the BIE, said only that the agency expected all students to be provided with learning opportunities.

“This is going to look different for each student, family and school,” Pfieffer wrote in the email, which Franklin shared with HuffPost/The Hechinger Report. 

Because of the BIE’s meager guidance, Franklin turned instead to leaders in New Mexico and Arizona for help and resources. They’ve been far more helpful, he said.

Arizona State Superintendent Kathy Hoffman has met with tribal leaders and representatives from their education departments to get their feedback on distance learning and reopening schools, according to a department spokesperson. In late April, the New Mexico Public Education Department released guidance specifically for tribal schools struggling with internet connectivity, offering immediate solutions for the final weeks of the 2019-20 school year and long-term fixes looking to the fall and beyond.

“It’s like pulling teeth to get [the BIE] to do something,” Franklin said.

Related: OPINION: How juvenile justice schools harm one group in particular: Native American youth

An April survey from the National Indian Education Association, a nonprofit that advocates for Indigenous students, found that students in BIE schools have been given far fewer resources to complete distance learning than their public school counterparts. 

Nearly 70 percent of public schools serving Native students were conducting digital learning, according to the survey. By comparison, only around 30 percent of BIE schools were doing the same.

At the same time, only 4 percent of public schools serving Native students closed for the academic year after the emergence of Covid-19, ending all services. That compares with more than 20 percent of BIE schools.

Families like Honani’s were caught up in the confusion. While the school had continued to communicate with families on Facebook and its website, it tried to avoid snail mail for fear of spreading Covid-19, the school’s superintendent, Naha said. After Hopi Junior Senior High School closed in mid-March, Honani said she had only received one letter from the school detailing what to expect.  

Honani’s son worked on their family computer for one or two hours a day when his school rolled out distance learning in late March, completing classwork. Her family is lucky to have a computer. Many of her neighbors do not. 

Hopi Junior Senior High School handed out Chromebooks and hotspots for students who needed them, but that hardly constituted a cure-all. The reservation’s infrastructure couldn’t handle so many people logging on at once, and there was a “vast slowdown,” said Naha.

“It’s been a challenge to deal with some of the things we face that [non-rural schools] don’t,” he said. “We are on an unlevel playing field. It did catch us to an extent to be unprepared.” 

On the Navajo Nation, which surrounds Hopi, less than 4 percent of the population has access to even the most basic wireline broadband, according to federal data. 

Stalled Aid

To keep kids learning, BIE and tribal schools needed more resources, fast. When Congress approved $200 million for those schools as part of the CARES Act in late March, it was a welcome development. However, schools have yet to receive most of this money.

As states including Arizona and New Mexico rushed to distribute their share of the federal relief money for schools, the Department of the Interior in April released a two-page information sheet describing how BIE and tribal schools could use $46 million of the emergency aid. The cash could cover the cost of closing schools, transporting students home and providing technology and Wi-Fi for online learning. The department also said its “initial thinking” around how to spend the additional $154 million, which was to be funneled through the U.S. Department of Education, would be to fund the creation of “system wide online learning capabilities and local Wi-Fi connectivity.”

“That’s what we’re seeing — no consistency, no communication, no plan in place, and no learning”

Alexis DeLaCruz, staff attorney with the Native American Disability Law Center

On April 28, the agencies co-hosted a listening session to gather tribal feedback on BIE plans to spend the relief money. But technical glitches hampered the call, frustrating tribal college and school leaders. A rescheduled session, on April 30, seemed to end abruptly, after the platform disconnected attendees.

“We all have lots to do and this attempt is burning daylight,” one school administrator wrote in the webinar’s comments section.

“This is painful,” another added.

Rose Marie McGuire, Indian education manager for Denver Public Schools and an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, joined the second session and said the technological meltdown did not surprise her.

“It was crazy, but that seems typical for them,” she said, referring to the BIE. 

By May 20 — nearly two months after President Donald Trump signed the CARES Act into law — the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, National Congress of American Indians, National Indian Education Association and United South and Eastern Tribes, which represent tribal governments and schools, grew so frustrated that they wrote a joint letter to the secretaries of education and the interior asking why neither agency had announced how the emergency aid would be released to schools and urging immediate distribution of the funds.

Two days later, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), chair of the House natural resources committee, issued a press release criticizing the delay.

“Tribal nations are disproportionately suffering from high rates of coronavirus and the Trump administration continues to do nothing for them,” the release reads. “BIE and the Department of Education should release the critical tribal educational funding we included in the CARES Act — yesterday.”

By late June, Hopi Junior Senior High School finally received its portion of the $46 million, but the superintendent said it was only enough for cleaning supplies and personal protective equipment, or PPE. None of it went toward instructional needs.

“It’s been a challenge to deal with some of the things we face that [non-rural schools] don’t. We are on an unlevel playing field. It did catch us to an extent to be unprepared.”

Acting Superintendent Alban Naha, Hopi Junior Senior High School

“It is not covering all expenses,” Naha said. “In particular our elementary schools were really hard hit, [and] it’s not even covering their PPE.”

And it wasn’t until June 12 — almost three months since the passage of the CARES Act — that the federal departments signed an internal agreement on how to transfer the $154 million between agencies. The agreement “encouraged” the BIE to get the funding to schools by mid-September.

“It is clear that our education system will conclude the 2019-2020 school year without the emergency relief intended by Congress during the Covid-19 pandemic,” the tribal advocacy groups wrote in another letter, dated June 12. “This continued inaction exacerbates the educational disparities our communities face, in violation of federal trust and treaty obligations.”

“Our students represent the future of our Tribal Nations,” the groups added. “It is truly unconscionable to deny them the resources they need to continue their education amidst a public health crisis.”

After HuffPost/The Hechinger Report asked the BIE to explain its continued delay in funding, a spokesperson said the agency began distributing some of the $154 million to schools on June 26.

“We expect all funds to be allocated over the next week,” the spokesperson said in an email late Friday. As for the $46 million, the spokesperson said the money had been distributed to schools but the “BIE is waiting on paperwork from some schools … before they can pull down funding for expenditure.”

The spokesperson did not provide an explanation for the nearly three-month delay in distributing the money. But in an email, an official with the U.S. Department of Education said its goal was for all states, and the BIE, to get CARES Act funding to schools as quickly as possible. 

“However, we know that an SEA [state educational agency], including BIE, will need to put in place needed safeguards and guidance to support local decisions on how to use these funds,” the official said. “Thus, we encourage BIE — and all SEAs — to make every effort to distribute the funds within 90 days, but we know that different schools and Tribal communities may have very different needs and may require additional time to consult their stakeholders in order to maximize the use of the funds.”

Students With Disabilities

Honani, who previously taught elementary school, found it hard to focus on education amid all the chaos happening outside her window. Then, she saw an opportunity.  

Her son, a ninth grader, had been educated in Western institutions his entire life. The time off gave her an opportunity to teach him about Hopi values.

“We do have issues around behavior and substance abuse and suicide rates. Those are the silent battles we’re fighting here, in our reservation communities,” said Honani. “This is a time for us to really mold and nurture and guide the kids, rather than having it being done in a school setting, a very Western, non-Hopi setting.”

“It’s like pulling teeth to get [the BIE] to do something.”

Darrick Franklin, an education program manager with the Navajo Nation Department of Diné Education

While Honani works full time on Covid-19 relief efforts through her job at the Hopi Foundation, her son has been planting a garden. He is growing traditional Hopi corn and beans, squash, melons and potatoes. Out of this activity comes respect for history, science, land and the weather, she said.  

She doesn’t think about what her son has lost these past few months ― instead she tries to focus on what he can gain.

But not all children have that same opportunity. For vulnerable students, including those with disabilities, the lack of formal schooling these months could have a devastating impact.  

As an attorney, Alexis DeLaCruz represents Native students with disabilities. She is currently working with clients from five different BIE schools. Her clients, who rely on an array of special services at school, are especially vulnerable to learning loss during distance learning. But their schools have all but abandoned trying to educate them, she said. 

DeLaCruz said some students haven’t received hardly any services since their schools closed. When parents have called school leaders and teachers, they’ve just found full voice mailboxes, and when they’ve written, they’ve received no response, she said. Some families received early bits of communication, but follow-up faded as the months went on. She speculates that teachers are communicating with children on a case-by-case basis, without clear guidance or support from their schools.

“That’s what we’re seeing — no consistency, no communication, no plan in place, and no learning,” she said. 

DeLaCruz started prodding the BIE with questions in the context of her individual cases on April 7. Later in the month, her organization and nearly 50 other disability rights and civil rights groups wrote the agency asking it to ensure students with disabilities were provided with critical services. Her concerns grew every day that she saw her clients falling further and further behind.  

To date, the BIE has not responded to DeLaCruz or her organization. 

“Right now things are very dire here in our community, but that doesn’t mean families don’t want their kids to continue to have access to education,” she said. “The Bureau of Indian Education is just leagues behind their states’ counterparts and there’s no justifiable reason why.”

A spokesperson for the Bureau of Indian Education did not respond to requests for comment on this matter. 

Now, as the death toll on the Hopi Reservation continues to rise, it is unclear when students will return to school. 

This week, the BIE sent a notice on its intention to consult with tribes on a school reopening plan. But once again, it already feels like too little, too late. 

“A lot of states have already developed reopening plans, and we’re still holding consultation sessions,” said Naha. “We’re sometimes a step or two behind and it can be frustrating for us.”

Honani said she would support school closures extending into next year, out of concern for the safety of the community. But she has a difficult time imagining what many more months of distance learning might look like.

“With the schools not opening we’re going to have to step up as parents and families to play a role in our kids’ education,” said Honani. “I’m gonna be OK. I have the ability. I have the equipment. But I can’t speak for everybody else.”

This story about education in tribal schools was produced as part of the series Critical Condition: The Students the Pandemic Hit Hardest, reported by HuffPost and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

The post As coronavirus ravaged Indian Country, the federal government failed its schools appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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

The teens of Duck Hill, Mississippi, aren’t the teens you see on television protesting the impact of climate change. They’re not missing school to rally in the streets. But they know better than most how climate change is affecting the world.

Their tiny, rural town of just over 1,000 people suffers from severe flooding, made worse by climate change. The Black side of town hasn’t had a proper drainage system for decades, either, leaving up to 15 inches of rainwater to linger on street corners for days after storms. 

Or, at least, it never had an adequate system until recently, when the teens helped work on one. 

Since 2018, a group of Duck Hill teens and community leaders have been tackling the climate-related problems that their state and local government neglect or haven’t had the capacity to fix. In the process, they have worked to change how their tiny town views climate change.

The group is called the ASEEDS Creek Rangers program ― ASEEDS stands for Achieving Sustainability Through Education and Economic Development Solutions ― and it includes about 20 kids between the ages of 12 in 18, led by local leaders and funded through grant money. Its goal is to build a more sustainable future in the area. But it has also managed to foster a new generation of climate experts in a state where politicians continue to push climate change denialism and where science education on the topic is decidedly light.  

The issue feels especially urgent now. 

Flooding in the area periodically causes schools to cancel classes. If the flooding in the Delta region continues apace, students will only miss more and more days of school. At the same time, the COVID-19 crisis has revealed how utterly unprepared the community is for remote learning. A survey of the group’s students found that nearly 90% didn’t have reliable internet access or devices. 

“There are issues small communities face, and a lot of it is rooted in structural racism,” says Romona Williams, volunteer executive director of Montgomery Citizens United for Prosperity, the umbrella group that developed the Creek Rangers program. “They don’t receive the funding that other areas receive.”

When Climate Disasters Are A Fact Of Life

Until joining Creek Rangers, many of the group’s members had accepted the floods and other extreme weather events, like tornadoes, as a fact of life. They didn’t see them as part of a larger, systemic crisis. Clawing to survive amid weather-related disasters had become normal. 

They learned, through Creek Rangers, that it didn’t have to be.

“They don’t talk about that kind of stuff in school,” says 15-year-old Keyunna McCaskill, a member of the group.  

Adult leaders associated with the group first designed a system to fix the town’s drainage system, consulting with local experts like professors. A build-up of water would sit on street corners after storms, causing mosquito infestations. It would seep through the floorboards of homes, attracting snakes and mildew.

They designed a way to revamp the town’s antiquated drainage system, mitigating the effects of floods, in part through green infrastructure. A group of local men helped build the plan into action. Duck Hill is a poor, rural town, primarily composed of African American residents. The group tackled some of the issues that had long challenged political decision-makers. The youth got involved later on, helping to build out a green space on the town’s most problematic street corner. 

“Mississippi is a climate-denying state. It’s a Trump state. There’s not a policy infrastructure in place, so we have to look at how we can empower small communities and the residents who live in those communities in order to build power,” says Williams. 

When Williams first started working with students, she says they relayed feeling detached from the idea of climate change, which was mentioned as an aside in earth science or biology class. It was taught abstractly, as a scientific phenomenon that is happening — but not to people. 

The students said they didn’t realize they could already see the consequences of climate change right outside their windows. 

“Before I was in Creek Rangers, climate change was the last thing on my mind,” said 16-year-old Mersie Watkins. “I never thought about it. I knew about it. But I never thought about it on a personal level and what it was doing to me.”

The idea is for students to see climate change as not just an environmental issue, but also one of economic and racial justice. Group leaders are under no impression that policymakers will save them from the devastation of climate change. They are trying to prepare students to save their communities themselves.

Indeed, Taylor notes that “more affluent communities have been working toward sustainability for decades.”

Through their participation in Creek Rangers, students travel to civil rights museums and conferences in between working on local sustainability projects and tackling a bespoke science and technology curriculum. Some participants participate in a larger youth leadership training institute. They’ve attended a National Geographic photo camp focused on how climate change affects Indigenous coastal communities. 

“There is also a life-threatening aspect to this,” says Williams. “We’re being hit with tornadoes, the flooding is just unbelievable, and there’s no task force. There’s no action around why is this happening?” 

“I feel like some people don’t think it affects them.”

While COVID-19 has confined students around the country to their homes, some Mississippi kids would have likely stayed home in the last few months even without the pandemic. The area has recently faced an onslaught of flooding. 

Watkins had long accepted the flooding as an inevitable part of her community. It had happened her whole life, making it so her family couldn’t leave the house after storms to go to the store.

Watkins joined Creek Rangers in 2018 through her grandmother, a local organizer and alderwoman. She says it was eye-opening.

In school, she says, teachers broadly tell students that climate change is “affecting people” all over the globe. But it didn’t feel real, “because those people have nothing to do with you,” says Watkins. 

“Once you look at it from a perspective that it’s around you, and people you care about, and people you love … it makes you want to build something to make it better.”

But since joining the program, Watkins has run into community members who don’t share her view. When she’s out in the community working on gardening projects, she’s been questioned about her interest in the group and the realities of climate change.

That started to shift once the group successfully built a system to stem the flooding. The Creek Rangers started to receive more respect after that, she said. 

Now, Watkins is working with the group to expand its impact on the community. The Creek Rangers have held workshops with local pastors about the realities of climate change. Residents are starting to realize that some of the respiratory issues they face may be related to the mildew infesting their homes, a result of the constant flooding. But it still doesn’t feel like enough. 

“When it began, people didn’t really care what we was doing ― they always questioned it. When we would try to tell them, they didn’t really care, because for one, they didn’t know what climate change was,” says Watkins. “I feel like some people don’t think it affects them.”

Building Hope

The group’s floodwater mitigation project took two years in all. 

The first time it stormed after leaders had finished the project’s initial portion, they didn’t know if it would work. The rain pounded down with enormous force. They waited with bated breath to see if their efforts were in vain. They watched as the town’s main street turned into a river.

Then, within a half-hour, the water receded. The system had worked.

“It was relief. It was gratification. We were thankful. And the community, they just … they just felt hope,” says Williams. “They knew that something had happened and something was different in their community now. Now, when it rains, they’re not all panicked.” 

But the group’s work has just begun. Adult leaders in ASEEDS have developed a long-term climate resiliency plan for the town. They expect the plan to pass, and they hope it will be a model for small, rural towns across the country.

Before, the town’s residents knew things were happening to them; they just didn’t know why. 

“But now our children know why it’s happening,” says Williams. “This is their future.”

This story about Mississippi climate change 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 How some Mississippi teens are saving their town from climate change appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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

When Rebecca Brewer started teaching high school biology 20 years ago, it seemed like everyone trusted science. Teaching topics like the science of vaccinations elicited little controversy. But in the past few years, she’s seen a shift. Now, every year, she reliably has a few students who push back against the topic. 

“Their parents’ opinions make their way into the classroom,” said Brewer, who teaches in Troy, Michigan. “Of course some students will bring up the idea they’ve heard that there’s a connection between vaccinations and autism.”

The issue, teachers said, feels not only especially urgent now, but also comes with increasingly high stakes: In a recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll, nearly 20 percent of respondents said they wouldn’t get a coronavirus vaccine if and when it becomes available. It’s an attitude that some teachers said is reflected in their classrooms, passed down to students from their parents at early ages.

“A lot of time they haven’t thought in-depth, they’re teenagers, it’s more so their parents’ decisions … there’s still time we can intervene as science teachers and let them see the evidence and come to their own conclusion,” said Brewer.

Science teachers often receive little guidance on teaching the science of vaccines — the topic is not mentioned in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), the national science teaching standards that have been adopted in 20 states and influenced the standards in 24 others. At the same time, in recent years, confidence in the science of vaccinations has been trending downward — one recent survey shows that the percentage of American adults reporting it is “very important” to have their children vaccinated dropped 11 points between 2008 and 2018. 

When discussing vaccines, some teachers report having to steer through murky waters. They report having to seek out their own teaching resources on the issue while navigating the uncomfortable space of presenting facts that their students’ families may deeply disagree with. 

In a recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll, nearly 20 percent of respondents said they wouldn’t get a coronavirus vaccine if and when it becomes available.

Brewer uses case studies to teach the science of vaccines; last year she used the example of a 2015 measles outbreak linked to Disneyland. While the NGSS doesn’t specifically say teachers should teach about vaccines, it’s an issue her district has decided to emphasize.

The NGSS was released in 2013. Prior to that, states followed their own unique standards, sometimes causing substantial differences between curriculum across state lines. The new standards emphasize scientific inquiry and critical thinking over recitation of facts. While many educators say they prefer that approach to older methods of science instruction, use of the standards sometimes means that teachers cover fewer topics as they delve more deeply into those that are discussed.

Heidi Schweingruber, who co-directed the study that resulted in the framework on which NGSS was based, said it offers educators guidance on the big ideas in science. Viruses and vaccines “in terms of grain size” did not necessarily rise as something to highlight at that level. But she said the standards and framework are “living documents” and that viruses and vaccines might be part of discussions on revising the standards. 

Brewer hopes that after the coronavirus pandemic subsides, there might be a shift in thinking on the topic. She wondered if, maybe then, the standards will be revised in a way that signal “of course this is something the general public needs to understand well.”

Coronavirus as a teachable moment

While viruses and vaccines aren’t mentioned explicitly in the NGSS, educators said the subjects are a natural fit for the overarching approach called for in the standards: investigating the world through scientific questions and evidence. And topics that are listed in the standards, like DNA, lend themselves to teaching about vaccines, said Mike Fumagalli, principal at Glenn Westlake Middle School in Illinois and a former high school biology teacher.  

Kristin Rademaker, an instructional facilitator at the middle school and a science consultant, said that over the years she has heard kids speculate on the safety of vaccines and even debate each other on the topic. In her district, she recommends that teachers focus on how vaccines work in the context of animals, instead of humans, pointing to such examples as how vaccinating cattle afflicted with a disease called Rinderpest helped save not only the lives of the cattle, but also thousands of the wildebeest and buffalo of the Serengeti, who suffered the disease as a “spillover species.” Distancing the science of vaccination from its use in people helps even skeptical students understand the science.

Other teachers tackle the controversy head-on. Lin Andrews, who taught biology for 18 years in Kansas public and private schools, said she would cite the (now-retracted) paper suggesting a link between autism and the MMR vaccine in order to show students how bias and poor data can creep into the scientific process. “By putting the conversation in this context I rarely encountered pushback from parents or students,” said Andrews, who now serves as director of teacher support at the nonprofit National Center for Science Education. She said timely and even controversial topics can help ignite students’ interest, and she’s currently developing a lesson plan on the “nature of science” that will use the coronavirus as the main theme. 

Some teachers rely on resources from the Vaccine Makers Project, a program out of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The nonprofit project provides materials for teachers to use free of charge. Charlotte Moser, assistant director of the Vaccine Education Center, said staff at the center created the project about five years ago, after seeing a need in the classroom for additional tools. While vaccines are not covered in the NGSS, Moser said she sees a lot of educators — especially those involved in biology and Advanced Placement courses — teaching about them.

The current pandemic provides a special teachable moment for students and educators.

“A lot of time they haven’t thought in-depth, they’re teenagers, it’s more so their parents’ decisions … there’s still time we can intervene as science teachers and let them see the evidence and come to their own conclusion.” Rebecca Brewer, science teacher, Troy, Michigan

Kate Cilluffo teaches biology in Edison, New Jersey, and relies in-part on the Vaccine Makers Project for materials, in addition to making her own and using resources from the CDC. Prior to joining the district, she pursued a PhD in immunology. She’s currently teaching students about the mutation of viruses and how that relates to vaccines. She surveyed her students on whether they would want to learn right now about the coronavirus or the flu; 75 percent of students voted for the coronavirus. Now, she’s teaching most of her students about vaccines over video through the lens of the pandemic.

The students are overflowing with questions about when society will reopen, what happens if the virus mutates and what’s going to happen next year. Cilluffo works to update her lessons in real time as new information comes out. She has brought in experts and epidemiologists to chat with her students over video conferences.

She knows some teachers are trying to stay away from coronavirus-related topics right now, for fear it could overwhelm students. But she’s seen a real hunger for information in her classroom.

“I tell them that’s how real science works — so much is unknown. When you’re teaching something and you know the answer, it’s not as fun. When you’re teaching something and you don’t know the end result, it feels like real science,” said Cilluffo. “They get to act like scientists and ask the questions.”

The perils of parental pushback

All 50 states require that students receive vaccinations before starting school. However, 45 states and Washington, D.C., allow for exemptions based on religious beliefs. Fifteen states go a step further, allowing for philosophical exemptions, which means families can forgo immunizations based on moral or personal beliefs. 

Minnesota, where 10th grade biology teacher Alison Wood works, is a philosophical exemption state.* Some parents in her district have been open about their skepticism to her lessons. Some have explicitly told her about their decision not to vaccinate their children. 

During parent-teacher conferences, she recalled, one parent recommended that Wood watch the movie “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe.” (In 2019, Amazon removed the film from its offerings following criticism from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Ca.) that it pushes misleading science linking vaccines to autism.) 

“Usually kids are just repeating what they hear at home; I very rarely hear a kid have their own unique objection.”

Alison Wood, science teacher, Duluth, Minnesota

Wood, who has taken a graduate-level course on the science of virology, watched the movie. She has sought to understand parents’ fears, and why they may be so quick to dismiss the science of vaccinations. The research has helped her understand their decisions and also provided her with a framework of how she can work to change minds. 

“They really believe they’re in the right and they’re protecting their kid, and I have to believe they’re smart people they’re not making this up to be a pain,” said Wood, who teaches in the city of Duluth. 

Wood teaches about vaccines, with an emphasis on community health, during units on the immune system and basic cell biology. The Minnesota state science standards specifically call out “vaccines” as one way to teach about immunity, she said. In class, she conducts a simulation to show the impact of community spread — a topic that feels particularly relevant now. She then pushes her students to go home and find out if they’ve been vaccinated — some students say they have no idea what their parents decided for them. 

She also lets students know that they can get hepatitis B vaccines if they want, regardless of their parents’ beliefs. In Minnesota, minors can get the vaccination without parental consent. 

“Usually kids are just repeating what they hear at home; I very rarely hear a kid have their own unique objection,” said Wood. A classroom teacher for almost 20 years, Wood said vaccination skepticism in her classroom usually comes in waves, depending on what’s been in the news of late. “I do bring this up to kids a lot: This is your choice at this point, you can help out if you are able to.”

*Correction: This version of the story has been updated with the correct spelling of Alison Wood’s first name.

The post How the science of vaccination is taught (or not) in US schools appeared first on The Hechinger Report.