But being awakened in the middle of the night by sharp pains was new for Coreano and their family. Rats had begun to bite them in their sleep. Later that morning, they went to their Kensington school and pretended nothing happened.

Chronicling the life of Corem and two other Puerto Rican students from Philadelphia, author Nikhil Goyal presents harrowing accounts of childhood in his latest book . 

Readers see Corem, Ryan Rivera and Giancarlos Rodriguez grow up overpoliced and underfed. By the time they reached high school, the system threatened to close some 37 schools, and only after , shuttered 24. 

In some cases walking an hour one-way to school without transportation after an eviction left them displaced, Corem, Ryan and Giancarlos give low-income children a human face and serve as a cautionary tale. The Census Bureau has revealed the rate of childhood poverty has doubled, and the country will soon see pandemic-era relief for families, schools and come to an end. 

“If we believe that schools should be equitable and humane and child centered, then we’ve got to be willing to fight for an agenda that will end poverty,” said Goyal, who for the last two years served as the senior policy advisor for Senator Bernie Sanders on the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and Budget Committees. 

Their stories illuminate exactly how economic instability and harsh discipline policies impact children’s ability to learn safely, making the case for change, particularly as educators nationwide grapple with how best to support students academically after pandemic disruptions.

Making economic stimuluses like the Child Tax Credit permanent, Goyal added, would mean “the lives of educators and school staff and counselors would be a lot easier.” 

Named one of 2023’s best books by the New Yorker, also illuminates how school policies governing students can disproportionately shape entire futures, particularly for students of color who are more often suspended and expelled than their peers. Zero tolerance discipline policies, for instance, put children like Ryan Rivera in juvenile incarceration and harsh schooling isolated from friends for years, after being pushed to light a trashcan on fire at 12 years old.

In conversation with The 74, Goyal reflects on school closures, community schooling, chronic absenteeism, and what policies stand to make a difference for the nearly living in poverty nationwide.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You frame childhood poverty as a crisis to be — why release this book now? What’s happening?

The Census Bureau released its — child poverty more than doubled. More than 5 million children are plunged into poverty. It was the single largest increase in poverty in recorded history, just an astonishing development in public policy that I think deserves enormous attention as well as a full-throated response from people in Washington and people in power. 

The increase in child poverty coincides with the expiration of the expanded Child Tax Credit, economic stimulus payments, expanded unemployment insurance, and a number of other programs that have enormously benefited children and families, whether in terms of food assistance, or housing assistance, or Medicaid access. 

We’re also at this moment where a lot of districts throughout the country are facing dropping enrollments, facing fiscal cliffs with the end of ESSER funds. People are anticipating a lot more consolidations, and possibly something like what happened in Philadelphia where a school system weighed closing dozens of schools. What are some lessons that school leaders might glean from what happened in Philadelphia? 

In 2013, the school district proposed closing some three dozen. The argument was that the district was bleeding in a major fiscal deficit. In the book I cite a major report by Boston Consulting Group, commissioned by the district to evaluate the fiscal state of schools. One of the recommendations was a mass closure of schools. They also recommended a mass firing of teachers and other school staff and a very market-oriented approach to public education. The key recommendation was taken up by the school district, against the wishes of students and parents and educators and unions, who were an incredibly robust coalition. 

Pew Research and others have found that school closures haven’t actually yielded the balance of savings that the architects originally envisioned. They cause a lot of displacement, educational instability. And, and in many instances, students are not actually necessarily attending so-called “higher performing schools” after their schools shut down. 

I read about Fairhill School, this extraordinary school in the poorest neighborhood of Philadelphia, which had been serving generations upon generations of children of the working class. This was a school that had been deeply underfunded. And in spite of that, they were still able to provide children with a nurse, a safe environment. 

Their test scores weren’t as good as suburban districts, sure. But does that mean that we should necessarily be closing a school like that which has been an anchor of the community? I don’t think so. I think if we provide public schools with equitable resources, and the type of respect that they deserve, so many of the issues that folks might point you to in public education, I don’t think would exist. 

The charter movement has capitalized on this. But if you go back to the history of charter schools, and you go back to Minnesota and some of the earliest charter schools, these were laboratories of progressivism. We’re gonna bring innovation, bring the best, experiment with interesting ideas in pedagogy and curriculum and instruction and the teaching force. See what works and then bring the best ideas into the public system. That is the model that I would prefer, where charter schools work in tandem with public schools, not as competition.

Something I appreciated while reading is that you give these trends and the political events around them a human face, from the war on drugs and no tolerance policies for violence that led to thousands of incarcerated youth. What’s currently underway that you think might be on track to cause more devastation? Particularly for Black and brown children?

I think there’s a dramatic rise in the privatization movement. We’re seeing a dramatic increase in the voucher schemes as well as charter expansion. In Philadelphia alone, nearly 40% of children attend either charter schools or cyber charter schools. There’s cities all over this country where traditional public schools have become dismantled, and we’re seeing a rise of the private sector intervening in public education. There’s obviously some really amazing organizing and efforts by teachers unions and advocacy groups like Journey for Justice fighting back against those policies all over the country.

What’s at stake, if these models are to continue at the scale that they have? What would be the impact for students, based on your research and experience with Philadelphia?

If we continue down this path, where more and more charters replace traditional public schools, where voucher programs siphon even more dollars away from the public system into the private system, particularly the religious sector, then I think that’s one of the most grave and profound threats to American democracy. I think the foundations of American democracy are found in public education. I think it’s one of the areas of our society that has not been fully transformed and taken over by the market.

Look at health care, look at energy, look at housing. By and large, public education has withstood a number of those assaults over generations, but I think public schools are facing their most serious threats. The pandemic didn’t help. We can debate about school closures, the efficacy of that or not, but I think the reality is that they breed a distrust among parents who were rightfully frustrated about making sure that there was a place for their children to be during the day and be educated. 

One exception to this threat you’ve identified to the traditional public system is the expansion of 3K and pre-K programs in many cities. 

The early childhood education space is very fascinating to me. Public dollars might go to both public providers as well as private providers, and you’re seeing that there’s not a sustained level of federal dollars. A lot of those private providers cannot remain open because their margins are so low. 

There is a growing interest from states all over this country as well as cities like Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they have poured an enormous amount of money into public pre-K. We’re talking about an area of great optimism. I am deeply encouraged by efforts by states and cities to expand early childhood education, because it is not only the right thing to do, it is good for our economy and society.

At one point in the book, you say their story is one of survival, where 18th birthdays are not rites of passage, but miracles. That it’s a story of social contract in tatters. In this reality, where so many children grow up in poverty, what are some best practices for school systems?

I think every school should be turned into a community school, where they have wraparound services, social and health supports. Universal free school meals, extended hours, restorative justice, well paid teachers and staff and modernized infrastructure. 

There are incredible examples of community schools all over this country. I will point to Cincinnati as the gold standard for community schooling, because they’ve converted virtually all of their public schools into Community Learning Centers. I am always struck by the fact that they have dentists and mental health professionals and other medical staff and doctors who are literally based in the school itself to provide care to students. 

We have to recognize that the issues and challenges that young people experience in their homes and in their communities don’t get left behind when they go to school every day. It affects their ability to learn. It affects their relationships with their teachers and counselors, and their relationships with their peers. 

We’ve got to really recognize that poverty and economic insecurity is the root cause of many of these educational inequalities. That schools can be places where children can get access to healthcare and all their social support. I’m very encouraged by that trend across the country. And the research shows that community schools have a positive impact on absenteeism, on truancy, on graduation rates, and student engagement. 

It’s the idea of, meet people where they’re at, provide them with the basic, basic building blocks for dignified life and you will see many of the social problems that once existed, either be reduced or eliminated.

were chronically absent by the end of the last school year, and we’re hearing more and more about school avoidance. What does Corem’s story reveal about this trend and its links with mental health, which is what some believe to be a root cause right now? 

It’s a great crisis. I would say that Corem has a harrowing, fascinating story with a lot of lessons. Today Corem uses they/them pronouns. When they were growing up, they lived with their mother who was disabled. They endured consistent housing and food insecurity. They would run out of food. They had to endure evictions. They moved in some years, twice or three times, which meant that they had to constantly switch schools and never really settle into one school. That meant Corem’s academic performance faltered. 

I know they’ve suffered from absenteeism at times, not due to their own failings, but simply because they were deprived of the basic necessities of a decent life. They didn’t have the tools and resources that would allow him to get to school on time every day. There’s one moment in the book where the landlord tells their mother that sorry, we just sold the house and you have to leave immediately. 

That means, in the middle of the school year, they have to walk more than an hour from the new home to the old school. Their mother was able to get them a public transit pass, but it just goes to show homelessness and housing insecurity are huge obstacles to consistent and regular school attendance. 

There’s a lot of research to show that homeless students in particular make up a significant part of the population that is going to be absent. As emergency rental assistance winds down and now we’re more than two years since the end of the national eviction moratorium, our families are really suffering through the housing affordability crisis. And I think we see that play out with children.

For 24/7 mental health support in English or Spanish, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s at 800-662-4357. You can also reach a trained crisis counselor through the by calling or texting 988.

LUFKIN — Georgia DeVries misses sleeping in a car.

“It was safer than any house I’ve been in,” the 17-year-old said.

By her count, she’s lived in at least 13 different places since the sixth grade, including multiple homes with her mom, extended stays with friends and family, and four trips to behavioral health clinics.

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Then last November, after staying with her aunt, she ended up in her now ex-boyfriend’s broken-down Mitsubishi parked on his family’s property.

It wasn’t much, but she felt at peace — most of the time.

This is how many teenagers in rural Texas experience homelessness: a revolving door of sheltered and unsheltered living, friends’ couches, stints with extended family, nights spent outdoors. Homeless shelters are not an option in Lufkin, a town of 34,000, 90 miles south of Tyler, the nearest major city. Shelters here don’t take unaccompanied minors without reports of violent abuse.

A dearth of shelters is just one way homeless teens in rural areas are at a more significant disadvantage than their urban peers, experts say. A lack of good-paying jobs, poverty and drug abuse can be more common.

Poverty rose in between 2018 and 2022; a majority of those counties are considered rural. East Texas had a higher rate of opioid abuse than the rest of the state, according to a regional needs assessment based on data from 2018 to 2020. Texas, as a whole, was one of eight states where rural communities suffered higher drug overdose rates compared to their urban counterparts, according to a 2022 published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

And teens in rural areas are harder to track, making it more difficult for policymakers to design solutions based on quality data.

More than U.S. residents in 2023 were counted as homeless, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. . The statistic is based on an annual census of homeless people on a single night in January.

Rural and nonrural communities have similar rates of youth homelessness, according to a 2021 study by the University of Chicago’s Chapin Hall, a think tank focused on public policy that supports families.

But these annual counts — which Chapin Hall’s research is based on — face criticism across the board as they struggle to measure homelessness accurately, even in urban areas.

Erin Carreon, a researcher at the University of Chicago, said there is likely a significant undercount in rural areas. That’s because rural teens are often “hidden” from counters.

Georgia, for example, was with her then-girlfriend during the 2023 count, escaping the census.

“When we think of homelessness, we might think of people in shelters or we might think of people on a busy street corner that people are walking by,” Carreon said. “In a rural area, young people are more likely to stay on couches, inside vehicles if they are outdoors, and it might be in a more secluded and hidden spot.”

Six years ago, Georgia was living with her grandma and legal guardian, Jan DeVries. That’s when Georgia’s mother asked her to move to Beaumont, a much larger city about 100 miles southeast of Lufkin.

Georgia said she was excited. But after just one week at the new home, she clearly made a mistake. She left to move in with her girlfriend in Lufkin and stayed for two years.

A lack of early, stable relationships and a stubborn independence streak led Georgia to move in and out of homes frequently, DeVries said. In the years following the breakup, Georgia would stay with friends and family, sometimes lasting just one night.

Georgia acknowledges she has played a significant role in contributing to her homelessness. Her mental health is not the best, she said. She is seeking help and meets with a therapist weekly.

While DeVries has been one of the most stable forces in Georgia’s life, they’ve had their own falling out over Georgia’s sexual identity.

DeVries said she tried not to judge Georgia, who first came out as a lesbian when she was about 14 and then bisexual when she was older.

“I just didn’t like the fact that she was going to make her life that much more difficult for herself,” DeVries said.

LGBTQ+ youths were twice as likely to experience homelessness as their peers, according to another by Chapin Hall.

Georgia loved the company of little stray black cats that roamed the area near the broken-down car she called home last November. A stray dog would wander by occasionally, too, she said.

She is stick-thin. And she rocks a short, modern-day punk haircut dyed a mix of red, blue and green. Tattoos she did herself using a gun purchased online cover her body.

Like any teenager, she can be talkative at points or sit pensively, staring into space.

“I could have stayed there forever,” she said.

However, the freedom she felt came with some consequences. It was November, and the East Texas region was experiencing its first cold front. She posted videos on TikTok of her breaking down, crying about how lonely she was.

Her feet hurt from the cold. And once, she slept for nearly 48 hours straight fighting a urinary tract infection. A cousin later dragged her to the doctor’s office for help.

“There wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it,” DeVries said. “You pray real hard: ‘Protect her. Protect her. Protect her.’ Because she was out there and you can’t make her understand about the danger she’s putting herself in. It was misery.”

There wasn’t anywhere else for the teen to go in Angelina County. Local shelters only accept people over 18 unless violent abuse is reported.

Service providers don’t have an incentive to seek out these teens, because they have nothing to offer them. And public schools are supposed to act as a safety net, but students rarely know that, said Carreon, the University of Chicago researcher.

The Lufkin school district has a social worker. However, there’s little help for the kids who . And Georgia doesn’t remember the last time she was in a classroom.

Two adults who have tried to help Georgia are Pam and Yvonne Smith. They started the Kaleidoscope L.Y.F.E. Foundation to provide access to mentorship for at-risk youth.

Before launching the nonprofit, Pam Smith worked in the juvenile justice system and Yvonne worked at another youth advocacy center. For years, they watched the state and local foster care system struggle. Statewide, the system that is supposed to help young Texans find stable homes has faced scrutiny for staff , home placements and placing kids in hotels when foster homes were unavailable.

Local leaders and organizations, the Smiths say, have failed to close the gap.

“These kids are underage and can’t do anything for themselves,” Yvonne Smith said. “They’re stuck in a situation where they’re supposed to be an adult but are not legally able to act as one.”

They don’t receive support from the state, they can’t register themselves for school or GED programs, and they can’t sign a contract for an apartment or utilities, Yvonne Smith said.

Communities can begin to address homelessness by establishing strategies to divert teens from this path, according to Carreon. And she suggested that federal funding be made more broadly accessible to those communities.

Carreon thinks it really starts with schools, giving them the resources to identify these kids and provide them with help.

“Making sure schools have the capacity to fulfill their roles is really key,” she said.

Until that happens, rural teen homelessness will likely remain invisible and abstract.

Georgia had to move out of the car after it was vandalized.

And DeVries insisted Georgia return home before Christmas. She waits up each night for Georgia, who walks home from her job at Little Caesars. Georgia likes the work because she can munch on pizza during her breaks.

She puts aside as much money as she can for a car.

This article originally appeared in at .

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

, the latest in a series of 10 research reports on rural education, shows that roughly 9.5 million students attend public schools in rural areas — more than 1 in 5 nationally. Nearly 1 in 7 of those rural students experience poverty, 1 in 15 lacks health insurance and 1 in 10 has changed residence in the previous 12 months.

Roughly half of all rural students live in just 10 states. Texas has the largest number, followed by North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee, New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Virginia and Michigan. Texas has more rural students than the 18 states with the fewest combined.

In 13 states, at least half of public schools are rural: South Dakota, Montana, Vermont, North Dakota, Maine, Alaska, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Wyoming, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Mississippi and Iowa. In 14 other states, at least one-third of all schools are rural. 

More key findings from this edition of Why Rural Matters:

• More access to psychologists and guidance counselors is needed. In non-rural districts, there are an average of 295 students per guidance counselor or psychologist. In rural districts, the ratio increases to 310:1, with seven states (Minnesota, California, Mississippi, Alaska, Louisiana, Indiana and Michigan) having ratios worse than 400:1. 

• More access to gifted and talented programs is needed for Black and Hispanic students in rural districts. Though 17% of students in rural schools identify as Hispanic, they represent only 9% of participants in these schools’ gifted programs. Similarly, 11% of the rural school population identifies as Black, but only 5% of the gifted student population in rural schools is Black. In contrast, 65% of rural students are white, as are 77% of participants in gifted programs. 

• Rural areas appear to offset some of the impact of poverty on educational outcomes. Overall, students experiencing poverty scored 27 points lower than their peers on the grade 8 NAEP math assessment and 22 points lower in reading; in rural schools, these differences were 22 and 18, respectively. Socioeconomic equity in reading appeared to be highest within rural schools in Arizona, Idaho, Texas and Oklahoma, and most concerning in Illinois, Mississippi and Virginia. For math, the most equitable states were Hawaii, Arizona, West Virginia and Oklahoma; the least equitable states were Colorado and Louisiana.

• Many rural areas continue to lack basic internet access. The pandemic made clear that adequate internet connectivity is essential to equitable education opportunities. However, 13% of rural households lack minimum broadband connection for streaming educational videos or engaging with virtual classrooms. In six states, more than 1 in 6 rural households doesn’t have at least a basic broadband connection: New Mexico (21.4%), Mississippi (20.6%), Alabama (18.9%), West Virginia (17.5%), Arkansas (17.4%) and Louisiana (17.2%). 

• Students in rural districts are more likely to graduate high school than their non-rural counterparts. In the majority of states with enough rural students to make data available, (34 of 46), rural students graduate at rates higher than their non-rural peers. Despite facing a range of spatial inequities, the unique strengths of rural areas —such as smaller schools and close community ties — combined to create graduation advantages of at least 5 percentage points in Nebraska, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island.  

• Many states provide a disproportionately larger share of school funding for rural districts because of the higher relative costs of running rural schools. Fourteen states, however, devote disproportionately less: Nebraska has the greatest disparity, followed by Vermont, Rhode Island, Iowa, Delaware, South Dakota, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Massachusetts and Minnesota. 

• Rural school districts in Delaware, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Nevada are the most racially diverse in the United States. In these states, two students chosen at random from a school in a rural district are more likely than not to be of a different race or ethnicity. 

• Communities surrounding schools in rural districts on average have a household income of nearly three times the poverty line. Rates were lowest in New Mexico (1.85) and highest in Connecticut (5.32).

As post-pandemic recovery continues, states and local districts must reevaluate what it means to provide a public education that meets student and family needs and prepares young people for life beyond pre-K-12 schooling (including college and career readiness and engaged citizenship). These challenges are widespread but are most intense in the Southeast, Southwest and Appalachia. What is needed is the will to address them.

The results published in Why Rural Matters 2023 make clear that policymakers cannot ignore the difficulties faced by rural schools and the students they serve.

Choudhury was hired to lead the Maryland Department of Education in July 2021, after spearheading an audacious and much-admired socioeconomic school integration effort in San Antonio. At a moment when the pandemic had turned longstanding inequities into yawning chasms, Maryland was getting a new superintendent of schools whose innovations had already borne fruit. Choudhury, in turn, appeared to be stepping into a job ready-made for a change agent. 

But recently, Choudhury announced he would not seek a second term when his three-year contract ended in June 2024. In July, with the of its chair, the state Board of Education had until 2028. “Full on,” the head of a key House committee told the Washington Post, “they love him.”

In September, the love affair ended. 

While support for reappointing Choudhury appeared to fall apart quickly, controversy had swirled for weeks. A July cited current and former Education Department employees — many of them speaking anonymously — as saying Choudhury had created a “toxic” environment, berating subordinates. Board of Education leaders told the paper they took the allegations very seriously but ultimately rejected the claims.

Shortly after Choudhury’s announcement, the board asked him to remain until next summer as an adviser and appointed Carey Wright — a Baltimore resident who recently retired from a widely lauded run as state superintendent in Mississippi — as interim chief. 

Wright inherits some bright spots: Released in August, showed that while students’ performance in math still lagged, reading proficiency had . Pushing the state’s 24 districts to implement science-backed reading instruction and to train teachers on the new approaches were at the heart of one of Choudhury’s most popular initiatives, a grant program called Maryland Leads. 

The seeds of his focus on equity were sown early. The son of immigrants from Bangladesh, Choudhury grew up acutely aware of public education’s life-changing potential, and the ways in which many are denied opportunity. His grandfather had built the first school in the family’s ancestral village not reserved for children of elites. As a student in high-poverty schools in Los Angeles, Choudhury lived a variation, singled out for college prep classes while friends languished.

Choudhury started as a classroom teacher but quickly was tapped to help the Los Angeles Unified School District’s turnaround efforts. From there, he went to work in the Dallas Independent School District, where he helped to design a program called Accelerating Campus Excellence, which gave top teachers hefty incentives to work in the schools with the biggest challenges. credits the approach with improving student outcomes.

Choudhury then moved to San Antonio, where he created a mold-breaking method for measuring poverty and used it to integrate schools according to socioeconomic factors and to more fairly distribute resources, including top teaching talent. The district’s rapid academic improvements came to the attention of Texas education officials, who modeled new state policies on it. 

Maryland seemed like a natural next landing spot. After , in 2020 a bipartisan coalition of General Assembly members had passed the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, an ambitious education reform plan that would dramatically boost both school funding and accountability for results. Then-Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, vetoed the measure, objecting that lawmakers had not figured out how to fund the 10-year, $4 billion initiative. 

The assembly overrode the veto. Hogan’s successor, Democrat Wes Moore, has earmarked $500 million to fund the blueprint until 2025. What happens after that is unclear. 

Atypically, Maryland’s constitution mandates that its state education agency be politically independent — at least nominally. Governors appoint the Board of Education’s 14 members, who in turn choose the superintendent. In June, with discussion of Choudhury’s next contract underway, Moore appointed six new board members.

The board is not the only entity the superintendent reports to, however. The blueprint — which has the force of law — is also overseen by a newly created Accountability Implementation Board.

In the exit interview that follows, Choudhury declined to specify what ultimately happened to end his tenure. But he addresses some of the challenges he tried to navigate as well as areas where he wishes he had done things differently. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

When you were tapped to be Maryland’s top education official, it must have seemed like a dream job. The hard work of creating bipartisan agreement about a Marshall Plan had already occurred. The resulting Blueprint for Maryland’s Future has the force of law. You inherited a department that’s independent of an elected executive, and districts that seemed eager for your leadership. Why might that not have been enough?

I still believe the opportunity is there. Over a 10-year period, Maryland will significantly increase its per-pupil dollars across the board, plus the dollars that go directly to historically disadvantaged students. But ultimately, as I always say, the money has to land in the right places, and there have to be the right conditions of support and accountability to pull off the big things. Maryland has created the conditions to do it. 

I came in to do that work and to rebuild a department. Both of those at the same time? It’s the impossible-possible task. I believed coming in, and I believe now that I have transitioned out, that Maryland has the ability to show what is possible. But it’s not enough to just have the resources. It’s not enough to rebuild a department. It’s not enough to have a bold leader. You have to also have political will and capital — you have to stay the course. 

Maryland can show what’s possible if we stay on the right course for kids. However, in between all of that are a lot of different things related to adult interests and politics, resistance to pain, the tension between local control and setting a standard for excellence. You have to ultimately have people give you the cover to go bold. Decisionmakers all across the state have to want it and support it in order to realize the promise.

I have heard other change agents talk about the process of building bipartisan agreement as warming up the water. Something that needs to happen before a leader with a vision can be tapped. Do you think the process of passing the blueprint did that?

The blueprint was adopted with a lot of support, but it did have good old-fashioned drama leading up to that. It was vetoed, and then there was an override vote to pass it.

Investing in the children of Maryland, giving educators the very best support and families the best possible education — there is no debate about that. However, there is tension — and it’s out in the open — around the cost and how that is sustained.

How much is enough? At the end of the day, we know adequacy matters. If you’re not going to solve other aspects of society — from housing and economic mobility to many other structural inequities — and you’re going to tell families education will give you the tools to get there, you’ve got to make sure that student spending in historically disadvantaged communities, such as Baltimore City or Caroline County Public Schools, out on the Eastern Shore, have the resources needed to overcome the vertical inequity. Where the challenge is, where the unresolved tension exists is, how do you sustain the cost long term? But also, how do you ensure that there’s no retrenched backsliding? 

I am of the opinion that the blueprint got much closer to adequate, immediately. It’s not perfect, but it is pushing it forward. But again, it is not enough to just put in the resources. For example, we know that adopting high-quality instructional materials and giving teachers the tools to master them is very powerful. However, there’s tensions with that that don’t get solved with a law. It could, but implementing it is a whole other thing. 

That does require a state department of education to figure that out and navigate it. That does require being able to get creative and strategic in how you do that. There was not unanimous consent on being more open to more standardization [while] understanding that we have to give up just doing our own thing. That’s something I faced as I did this.

Unlike other state education leaders, you reported to two appointed boards.

Yes, the state Board of Education and, new as a result of the blueprint, an Accountability Implementation Board. Two governing entities who had approval authority. As the leader, you have to figure out how to work with one and the other, how to ensure that any tensions are resolved, how to bring people together — how to do all those things. Sometimes that is possible. When it’s not possible, you have to figure out how to make it possible. 

This is your fourth post as a change agent. What can you tell us about commonalities that enable change and stymie change?

Let’s start with the commonalities that enable change. You have to have the policy conditions to do great work, but those conditions don’t have to be apples to apples. For example, Texas has one of the stronger literacy laws for teacher training around the science of reading, whereas Maryland does not. However, Maryland does have policy conditions that allowed my team to enable training for staff, which was absolutely critical as part of our recovery.

You’ve got to have buy-in, you have to have a group of talented folks who enjoy impossible-possible challenges. And you’ve got to be able to invest in them and enable them to succeed. The places I have been, I had that. 

Making student-centered decisions requires the cover of decisionmakers, of community engagement organizations and stakeholders. And sometimes even an individual. You may have it coming in, and you’ve got to sustain it as a leader. Otherwise, you’re going to be on some kind of suicide mission. And you’re not going to be able to get the work done. So that matters, big time. 

Now let’s talk about the things that block change. One is not having that cover. Sometimes you have to build toward it, sometimes you just don’t have it. Not having — or losing — that matters. 

Another thing that blocks change is if you lose the ability to fund and support the thing you started. Resources matter. If people work against that or move away from that, then you’re done. 

We have research around that. For example, in Dallas, our turnaround work — Accelerating Campus Excellence — showed that when we invested more, along with making sure the money is in the right places, it transformed low-performing schools in an extraordinary way. When that money was removed, there was a retrench back. 

Your detractors have depicted you as abrasive and sometimes overconfident. Do you think that’s fair?

I am a passionate leader who wears my emotions on my sleeve. I treat people with a great amount of dignity and respect. If someone asked me, what’s your proof of that? My track record. I’ve built amazing teams. People enjoy working with me to change things in the world.

At the same time, I am passionate about making sure the right things happen. When you come into a place and you are told that the status quo is not working for kids, we are failing children, we are not doing enough, you are going to as a leader rub up against the status quo. You’re going to make some people who have overseen that status quo uncomfortable. 

I am not surprised that I have detractors. We had detractors in this work in Dallas. In this country, when there has been a moment of change, when there have not been detractors? I would love to know. I would love to see polling from the Civil Rights era, on our greatest leaders. Pick your moment in history — do they happen without some noise? 

This work is very personal. I’m 100% the product of Title 1 schools. I helped my [immigrant] family navigate filling out forms and other things. Our child care scholarship program … was taking six weeks to get people scholarships. It was very important to me that I set a new standard of excellent customer service. We put in a fast-track application. It has done wonders. We can get people a scholarship within three to four days. We have increased the number of children who are being served by the child care system by almost 40%. 

Look at the data on the rebuilding of the department. It was a place where people used to go to retire and get rehired. It was the place where people — leaders on the ground, teachers, directors — would not come to work. During my time, that completely changed. I brought the best turnaround principal from Baltimore City to be my chief transformation and school improvement officer. Before, someone like that would never come to the job. I got the principal of the year to head up our community schools department.

The leadership of the department reflects the diversity of the children of Maryland. I cut attrition to historic levels, cut the vacancy rate and increased retention to nearly a decade low. And all of that while still wearing my passion on my sleeve. I am very proud of that. 

About the confidence? In this role, for the first time I have found myself for my passion. In an update that I provided to the General Assembly on how things were going with the department as well as to address some of the false claims that were beginning to surface, I found myself having to do that. 

I am not sorry for the high expectations. I am proud of what we pulled off. But I don’t know why I found myself having to apologize. I have ideas why.

What do you want from your leader other than confidence that something is going to work for children? I don’t mean a sense of hubris that is not rooted in evidence-based practices. I am talking about if we are going to do things in the world for kids —train up our teachers when it comes to how to most effectively teach reading, scale up apprenticeships and do it creatively using federal dollars we’re not going to get back — I have to be confident it’s going to work. Is it a perfect science? No, but I have to be a confident leader. 

Let’s talk about Maryland Leads. You used the state’s share of pandemic recovery aid to fund grants to school systems to kickstart their efforts to comply with the blueprint. 

As a state chief, you can get people to do something by inspiring them. You have the bullhorn, you have the ability to call a press conference, issue guidance. You have the ability to incentivize via grant making — especially during the era of American Rescue Plan and ESSER dollars. Third is a mandate: You shall do this. All three are needed ultimately, to get things right.

Ultimately, if you want the work to last beyond you, you have to utilize the first — inspiration. Getting people to want to ensure effective instructional practices, getting local superintendents, getting local boards, to want to organically move toward the right practices is ultimately going to stick. You can make some things happen faster through a mandate, but when the mandate goes away — or the wind blows a different way and the mandate is taken away — is the change actually going to stick? 

And frankly, people need dollars sometimes to pull off what you’re telling them to do. I recently gave a congressional briefing about Maryland Leads. It’s a drop in the bucket when you think about the recurring dollars that school systems have and what the blueprint puts in. However, we designed that drop in a bucket to shift those recurring dollars into the right evidence-based practices. 

Give us some examples. 

There’s no better example than the science of reading. Maryland is not a state with robust literacy laws. It has some level of law that can be worked with, but it is not ultimately enough to get people to where we need them to be. We used our state set-aside to [incentivize] seven strategies, one of which was the science of reading. Others included reimagining the school day and staff recruitment and retention. It wasn’t necessarily a significant amount of money. But I come back to this idea of a drop of money, designed well, can do extraordinary things. 

Baltimore City Superintendent Sonja Santelises is a very strong academic leader who, prior to me coming in, had a priority of shifting the school system toward evidence-based literacy practices and the use of high-quality curricula. They also started supplementing that curricula to ensure that it reflected the students of Baltimore. 

What Maryland Leads enabled her to do is scale their work around coaching. A Rand Corp. study on the use of high-quality instructional materials shows that it’s not enough just to adopt them. Coaching teachers on how to master their use is where you can truly unlock the power. And they had a significant jump in literacy rates coming out of the pandemic, almost 5 percentage points. That’s incredible. It’s one of the highest gains in terms of proficiency, as well as growth. 

Prince George’s County also scaled up its adoption of high-quality material and its training and support for teachers. Of the top 50 Maryland schools that made the greatest improvements, especially in literacy, more than half were in Prince George’s County. 

I’m always thinking about sustainability. In Texas, I could only dream of the dollars that Maryland is putting into its education system. In Texas, we had to make the dollar really sweat. Maryland Leads was designed to last beyond ESSER. If you have skin in the game, an initiative is more likely to last. So we told districts we would match their dollars.

I also used the force of law around the blueprint. We had to design a template [outlining] districts’ plans for implementing the blueprint and get the Accountability Implementation Board to adopt it. We asked, what is your high-quality instructional material? Where are you with training your teachers? All of that was us trying, essentially, to use Maryland Leads to supercharge the strategy and then use the blueprint to enshrine it. 

Superintendent Santelises wrote that your work on something called Neighborhood Indicators of Poverty is “the strongest work product ever produced by the Maryland State Department of Education.” What is that, and what will it enable?

I do appreciate Dr. Santelises’ comment, because she knows that if schools were more adequately funded, as well as given tools to leverage that money to ensure it lands in the right places, and the political cover to do it — going back to that cover piece, right? — that she could do even more great things.

When I went to work in San Antonio, Superintendent Pedro Martinez, one of my mentors, was already looking at income. I came in and said, to build a better measure of poverty, you can’t just look at income, you’ve got to look at other factors, like family makeup and home ownership. Our measure ultimately got adopted by the state of Texas. It was used to revamp compensatory funding and bring San Antonio more adequate resources. It took our Title 1 dollars from close to $50 million to close to $80 million. 

It also created something called the teacher incentive allotment that essentially tied teacher placement and impact to pay. If you’re not going to disrupt segregation, then you better make sure that [the most impacted] schools are some of the most expensive and that those teachers are compensated like rock stars. 

One thing that got me really excited about the blueprint, that made me put my hat in for the job, is that to see if there’s a better way to measure poverty, it said the department had to by January 2023. I seized that moment. Based on my team’s work in Texas, we were able to show that there is a much better way to fund our schools and give them adequate resources. Especially students living in abject poverty.

Maryland was already putting significant money into concentration of poverty and compensatory funding. But one of the things we did with that report was show that Baltimore City, as well as some of our rural counties, like Caroline County, were not being given what they should be in order to pull off bigger things quickly. 

We put a model bill at the end of the report: Here’s the way you can enshrine it. And by the way, you should use it not just to give more money to systems, along with another layer of accountability, but also to pay teachers who have the toughest assignments in our state in a differentiated manner. This past legislative session it got introduced. 

If you had it to do over again, are there things you would do differently? Do you have any regrets?

I definitely have reflected on this over the last few weeks, given how fresh my transition is. Yes. I’m into implementation, I like hanging out with my team, thinking through, Okay, we’ve got to pull this off, what’s it going to take? And then monitoring progress. However, as a leader — and I looked at case studies of other leaders — you’ve got to spend some time that is not about the work and the strategy and implementing the details. I could spend more time engaging, talking to people who are power brokers, who have more political capital, who have the ability to ultimately be for or against something and can either work against you or for you. 

I know there are moments where I have to say no, this is not the right decision for kids, or no, we can’t change course here. But at the same time, if I could go back, I would maybe take another moment to think through and be like, Hey, maybe it is okay to adapt the strategy here, but not compromise the student-centered focus that I wanted to keep. 

I would have spent more time explaining the changes. Sometimes, I do 20 things at the same time. You have to if you’re going to pull off 20 things. I had a mandate to implement the blueprint, work collaboratively with two governing entities and rebuild the department — while constantly hearing billions of dollars are going into our education system, we’re failing children, we have to recover from the pandemic. I’m used to moving with urgency. Children deserve that. But I think maybe I could have used my brakes or yellow light and done a little more to explain some things.

I had three years. And I blinked and I was already in my contract renewal phase.

When I first met you, you told me a story about you, as a young person of color identified as gifted in an integrated, high-poverty school, realizing not all your classmates got the same opportunities. That Mohammed, who had that moment as a very young man, has his belief set changed?

That’s an important question. I absolutely have not wavered in my beliefs that the world needs to be changed for kids for the better. That’s something that has inspired me ever since I visited the school that my grandfather started in the village [in Bangladesh]. That hasn’t changed. I want to build schools, figuratively and literally, and be on that mission. It gives me purpose. 

However, I did have a moment where I asked myself — especially as I faced the detractors and their attempts to smear my team and my administration, and then ultimately finding myself making the decision to not return — at what cost? Is this worth everything that you have put in? I had that moment. 

Ultimately, my resolve for wanting to stay the course has not changed. However, as someone who sits in the CEO’s seat, you have to be ready to make compromises while still moving forward. Don’t do 10 of something, do five of something. Maybe you have to place an adult interest over students’ interests — but for the greater good of still staying the course on student interest. 

I think the young kid that I was when I first declared that I wanted to be in education had a pure drive. You have to be able to pull this off, because children’s lives matter. Definitely children of color and in poverty — that reflects what happened to me as an individual and what I became. However, if I don’t figure out long term how to better navigate those compromises and still feel like I’m not giving up or selling out, then I should stop. 

I will say it one more time: I believe that I have to learn about the art of compromise. And I can’t tell you what the threshold is. You have to put yourself on that threshold and be like, Yeah, that’s a compromise, but it doesn’t take away from the student-focused goal we have. Or, That’s a compromise that will throw off the work and may potentially also ruin my ability to continue. 

What do you do, Mohammed? I know those moments have to happen throughout a leader’s journey. And I hope that I’m better for what comes next.

Teachers don’t get into their profession for money or power, but a little more of both might help keep them at high-poverty schools, where students are more likely to fall behind grade level and less likely to graduate from high school or attend college.

Across California and the nation, many of these schools struggle , leaving them with fewer experienced educators. Those who stay often battle the : hunger, homelessness and mental health challenges. After only a few years, many end up  in more affluent communities.

California’s elected officials have tried for decades to slow the exodus of veteran teachers from schools with the poorest students. One idea that has been conspicuously absent from the conversation: paying teachers more to work at those schools. The politically powerful California Teachers Association opposes “differentiated pay” policies that would increase salaries for teachers at hard-to-staff schools, rendering that approach a non-starter. 

Now, lawmakers are making  in two ideas that have been around for years. One offers prospective educators a grant if they commit to teaching at a high-poverty school after their training. The other, a model known as community schools, rethinks school governance, giving more power to teachers to shape every aspect of a school.

Since 2019, the state has spent close to $5 billion on these two approaches. Despite the boost in spending, it remains unclear whether the state will see a return. Teacher turnover remains a perennial challenge at schools serving more low-income families. As experienced teachers leave in search of less challenging classrooms, students at high-needs schools are less likely to have educators who can help close achievement gaps — seen in the persistently lower test scores among those students compared to their more affluent peers. The stakes are now higher than ever as educators work to help students recover from the academic losses they suffered during the pandemic and remote learning. 

Staffing is usually overseen by local school districts. But amid the ongoing teacher shortage, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said the California Department of Education has “repurposed” one existing employee to help school districts hire teachers. 

When he first ran for state superintendent in 2018, Thurmond said  for teachers in poorer neighborhoods, disputing evidence that it would help. But in a recent interview with CalMatters, he said he would consider any evidence-based policy, especially since some districts already pay some, such as bilingual teachers, more.

“I support any idea that will support teacher retention,” Thurmond said. “We know the profession is impacted by fatigue.”

A  of teacher experience data from 35 districts — adding up to 1,280 schools — across the state found that the correlation between student poverty and teacher experience is stark, especially in urban regions.

Four years for $20,000

The  gives up to $20,000 in grants to college students earning a teaching credential. In exchange, they work in a high-poverty school for four years within eight years of obtaining their credential. The state committed $500 million over five years to funding the grants, starting in 2021. Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed injecting an additional $6 million into the program this year.

Samantha Fernandez, a 23-year-old single mother from Chula Vista, received $16,000 through the grant program. She said the money covered the entire cost of earning her credential.

“It was a blessing,” she said.

While earning that credential, she worked in two schools in the Cajon Valley Union School District in eastern San Diego County. One had more poorer students while the other was made up predominantly of wealthier ones. The former, Chase Avenue Elementary, serves a large community of immigrants and refugees from Afghanistan, many of whom only spoke Pashto when they arrived. The language barrier was a challenge, but she found the experience to be just as rewarding as working in a more affluent school. 

“I want to help kids achieve their dreams, no matter what struggles they go through,” Fernandez said. “I want to be the person who can be their support outside their home.”

Fernandez never set out to work in a high-poverty school, but she said “everything happens for a reason.” It’s too early to know if she’ll stay beyond her four-year commitment, but she said she’s open to it.

In the fall, she’ll start a master’s program in teaching. She said the grant will allow her to continue her education “with a sense of relief.”

This isn’t the first time that California has tried enticing teachers into working at a high-needs school by subsidizing their education. In 2000, the state launched the Governor’s Teaching Fellowship, which gave prospective teachers up to $20,000 in grants for committing to work in a school where test scores rank in the bottom half of the state’s public schools. 

The program was short-lived. It ran out of money in 2003.  found that about 75% of teachers in the program stayed at high-poverty schools beyond their three-year commitments. 

As a reincarnation, the Golden State Teacher Grant Program is attracting applicants in droves. So far, almost 11,000 prospective teachers have committed to teaching at a high-poverty school. The state handed out more than $132 million in grants in the past two years. 

None of the teachers have yet completed their four-year commitments, but the state plans to track how many stay beyond that time.

Some research suggests the Golden State Teacher Grant Program could lead to less turnover in the long run. The Learning Policy Institute, an education research group, found that reducing the cost of teacher training can . Tara Kini, the chief of policy and program at the Learning Policy Institute, said the program will help relieve a financial burden on teachers amid the academic fallout from the pandemic. 

“The past couple of years have been pretty challenging,” Kini said. “It points to a need for greater incentives for teachers.”

The California Student Aid Commission, the state agency that oversees the Golden State Teacher Grant Program, expects to give out over $157 million by the end of this school year. That puts the state on track to use up the entire $500 million before the 2025 deadline.

Kini said she expects the program to have an added benefit of encouraging more teachers of color — who are already more likely to work in high-poverty schools and carry more student debt — to enter the workforce.

While experience is just one factor, research shows that students do better with teachers who have at least  of experience. This is where a second statewide initiative, community schools, might help get teachers to stay.

Giving teachers power

Community schools partner with local health or social service organizations to become a one-stop shop for students and their families. Schools tailor the partnerships to what their families need. 

The community schools model has been around for decades, but in the past three years, Gov. Newsom and the Legislature poured an unprecedented $4.1 billion into the program.

The state’s investment might not end up in teachers’ pockets, but the money could give teachers at those schools more of a voice at their campuses. Both teachers and experts say that giving educators the power to design lessons and decide how to use a school’s money to help students could be as effective as pay raises  in challenging work environments.

The community schools model requires:

• Shared governance — Teachers, parents, students and administrators all have a say in every aspect of a school’s operation, from curriculum to after-school activities;
• Autonomy — School communities can make decisions on their own without interference from district bureaucracies;
• “Integrated student supports” — Schools can partner with local organizations to provide health or social services based on the unique needs of their students;
• A community school coordinator — One full-time employee handles administration.

For some educators, the model is an obvious solution to teacher turnover at high-poverty schools. 

“A lot of teachers feel disempowered and not part of democratic decision-making,” said David Goldberg, vice president of the California Teachers Association. “They feel like their needs are not being met at schools.”

Giving educators more authority at their workplace makes them feel like respected professionals, said Richard Ingersoll, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied community schools for decades.

“We’re not making automobiles here. You can’t have one-size-fits-all,” he said. “Those closest to the kids need to be given a lot of discretion.”

Kyle Weinberg, president of the teachers union at San Diego Unified, said making sure teachers have a say in how schools serve the most vulnerable students will help keep them on the payroll.

“We know that when we increase educator voices in school decisions, that educators are more committed,” he said. “They’re more committed to working on strengthening what we’re doing as a school, and they’re more likely to stay at that school when they know they have that voice.”

While districts have a lot of autonomy in designing community schools, implementation can be bumpy.

At Sacramento City Unified, the teachers’ union claims that the district has shut them out of the community schools process. According to teachers union President David Fisher, the district applied for the state grant and received some money, but teachers had no say in which schools were selected.

At Twin Rivers Unified, north of Sacramento, teachers union President Rebecca LeDoux said the district is excluding teachers from decision-making, undermining the key tenet of the community schools model. She said the district chose which schools to turn into community schools without any teacher input.

“My problem isn’t with which schools were chosen, my problem is with how it was chosen,” LeDoux said. “It can’t be through the vision of administrators who sit in the ivory tower, farthest from our students.”

Thurmond said he wasn’t aware of these issues at local districts and said his team would investigate further. Steve Zimmer, a deputy superintendent overseeing community schools grants for the department, said the agency would first try to resolve these issues and only resort to taking away money if there’s a clear unwillingness from administrators to get input from teachers.

“I’m not looking to go to this place… but of course we could take adverse action,” Zimmer said. “I feel confident we’re prepared to make course corrections as necessary.”

There are also success stories. At San Diego Unified, the teachers union and district leaders are clearing the same hurdles materializing at other districts. In April, they signed a contract that codifies the principles of community schools into the  at the 15 schools that received state grants. 

At the Anaheim Union High School District in Orange County, the community schools model has been implemented at 13 schools. At one school, Sycamore Junior High, which serves a large immigrant population, the district used community schools funding to connect parents to immigration legal services and created a social science curriculum focused on immigration policy in the United States. The school also uses community schools grants to host a farmers market once a month on campus.

Throughout the year, teachers assigned “soapbox speeches,” asking students to give a presentation on any social issue affecting students at the school. Topics ranged from immigration and mental health to pet adoption and food waste. 

Nicholas Cordova, a seventh grade history teacher at Sycamore and an Anaheim native, said it’s rewarding to see schools tackling the issues facing students. During the last week of school in May, some of his students presented their speeches. Students stood at their desks as Cordova flipped through their slideshows. His students are soft-spoken and clearly not comfortable with public speaking. Awkward silences punctuated their presentations, but for Cordova, they’re opportunities to encourage his students.

“This is as close to home as we can get,” Cordova said as one student started her speech about mental health. 

He said Sycamore has a reputation as an under-performing school, but becoming a community school allows teachers to counter that. 

“That’s something we’re always fighting against,” Cordova said. “If people actually took the time to come and talk to the teachers and students, they would see what we’re doing to make the school a better place.” 

The community schools model also gives students a voice. Yvonne Walker, a Black seventh grade student at Sycamore, asked staff members to convene a restorative justice session with the eighth grade student council to discuss the rampant use of racial slurs on campus. The session was held on the last Monday of the school year in a portable classroom at the edge of campus. 

Restorative justice is an approach to student discipline and campus culture that emphasizes open communication over punishment. A school that embraces restorative justice might have a staff member oversee a discussion with students who just got into a fight instead of suspending or expelling them. A restorative justice approach in Yvonne’s case meant students sat in a circle and shared their experiences with racial slurs.

Yvonne is one of the few Black students at Sycamore, where 93% of students are Latino. As the discussion started, it was clear that some of the eighth-graders were unsympathetic. Several were having hushed side conversations. When Yvonne shared how hurtful it is to hear the n-word around campus, the eighth-graders got defensive. “What do you want us to do?” one quietly mouthed. Others talked about how Latino students use slurs with each other as terms of endearment. 

At the end of the session, Yvonne, who also identifies as Latino because her mother is from El Salvador, said she was “disappointed by her community.” She said she was hoping at least one of the eighth-graders could empathize.

“I was thinking that there’s probably someone out there who has the same feelings as me,” she said. “I didn’t want to be a part of the silence.”

But staff members did hear her. Brenda Chavez, director of restorative justice at Sycamore, also sits on the community schools steering team.

The steering team represents the shared-governance component of the community schools model. It’s made up of teachers, parents, staff members and the principal of Sycamore Junior High. They meet once a month. 

During their final meeting of the school year just hours after the restorative justice session, Chavez mentioned the discussion led by Yvonne. She says that next fall, the steering team will discuss ways to better teach about the history of racism to reduce the use of racial slurs on campus. 

The steering team meeting blends the professionalism and formality of a school board meeting with the warmth of a family gathering. The meeting starts when two student members walk into the room with three boxes of pizza. 

The teachers, students and parents on the team spend most of the meeting analyzing survey results. The survey asked teachers, students and parents about the school’s strengths and challenges. More than 1,000 responded. Teachers called for more staff and smaller class sizes. Parents wanted more security on campus. Students said they just want to be heard.

At the end of the meeting, some parents and teachers suggest that the steering team should meet more often. Most of the other members nod in agreement.

Grant Schuster, the president of Anaheim Union’s teachers union, said this type of outreach will keep teachers in the district. He’s optimistic that the voice teachers have on the steering committee will keep them at high-poverty schools.

“This isn’t just another statewide program,” Schuster said. “It’s a systemic change to how you run a school. I think it’s going to bring results.”

A simpler solution?

As for the idea California won’t consider — paying teachers more to teach in schools in poorer neighborhoods — Wisconsin’s experience is instructive. Under a Republican legislature and governor, that state gave school districts full power to determine teacher pay. That meant collective bargaining was no longer required by state law.

Yale University economist Barbara Biasi, who studied the results, found that districts offering higher salaries got better teachers and saw higher test scores. But high-poverty schools in districts that kept collective bargaining struggled more than ever to recruit quality, experienced teachers.

“I’m not sure why we make salaries so rigid and so low for the profession that has so much impact,” Biasi said. But, she added, you can’t have higher salaries across the board, strict salary schedules and tenure rules.

“You can’t have a job where people cannot get fired and also have everyone paid a lot of money,” she said. “You can’t have everything. It’s not what other professions do.”

Al Muratsuchi, a Democratic state Assembly member from Torrance and the chair of the Assembly’s Education Committee, this session authored ambitious  that would increase teacher salaries by 50%. The bill passed the Assembly floor on June 1 with a 77-0 vote. 

Muratsuchi said he would also consider proposals for higher salaries for teachers working in high-poverty schools. 

“I think it only makes sense that teachers are an important part of any education policy being considered,” Muratsuchi said. “At the same time, we want to make sure that no special interest is obstructing any necessary reforms.”

Currently, the California Department of Education doesn’t have a team focused on statewide teacher staffing. The agency doesn’t track teacher salaries, vacancies or turnover rates, and it’s unlikely to do so anytime soon considering that the state budget isn’t providing the department with additional funding. Thurmond said he’ll commit the few resources he has to “cobbling together” a variety of sources — from teacher pension data to teacher polls — to better understand the staffing needs across the state. 

“We’ll look for ways to gather information to help us define the shortage,” he said. “I just have to be honest, we have to work on it in a modest way.”

They asked the school to look into the 2021 incident and requested a new paraeducator for their child. The classroom aide hadn’t mentioned the injury, despite messaging them throughout the day, the parents said, erasing their trust in her.

But the family’s search for answers and solutions brought them head-on into a problem they hadn’t anticipated: The school pointed the finger back at the Diaz parents, alleging neglect and inadequate supervision of their child. Soon, a caseworker with the Administration for Children’s Sevices, known as ACS, the New York City agency responsible for investigating suspected child abuse, showed up at their door.

“We were just trying to advocate for our son and find out what happened like any parent would,” Michelle Diaz said. “This is where the retaliation started.”

The school’s response reveals a startling pattern: Across the nation’s largest district, parents of students with disabilities who speak up on behalf of their children say they are being charged with allegations of child abuse or neglect — a tactic advocates say schools use to intimidate parents and coerce them into dropping their concerns.

Though it’s not clear how many reports may be retaliatory, New York City educators have made more than 3,500 calls alleging suspected abuse or neglect of children with disabilities over the past two school years, according to data obtained by The 74 through public records requests. Each one triggers an intrusive process that, at its most dire, can lead to the removal of a child from parents’ custody. Yet caseworkers found evidence of parental wrongdoing in only 16% of cases, and fewer still go on to withstand judges’ scrutiny.

In more than a dozen interviews, parents, advocates and researchers recounted what they described as a common practice of threats leveraged against families of some of the most vulnerable students in the city’s school system.

“Those are intimidation tactics that they do to parents,” said Rima Izquierdo, a Bronx parent leader who supports families of special needs children across the borough.

“This is a trend. … All the stories sound the same.”

Neither the Department of Education nor ACS responded to parents’ claims of retaliation when asked in an email. DOE spokesperson Nicole Brownstein expressed her agency’s commitment to “the safety and wellbeing of our students.” 

“We are actively working closely with our partners at ACS to retrain staff and ensure that every possible step is taken to provide support for our families in instances that do not meet the level of making a report to the [state hotline],” she said in an email.

A pattern of coercion

Tension between special education parents and their children’s schools is common in New York City, a school system for failing to meet the needs of students with disabilities. In 2021, the city had a backlog of roughly as parents escalated worries that their children with disabilities weren’t receiving mandated services such as physical therapy or counseling. In 2020-21, of New York City’s roughly 1 million schoolchildren received special education services, compared to a national average of 15%. 

Advocating for individuals with disabilities is a federally protected right. Still, special education parents nationwide recount instances of being punished for speaking up on behalf of their children.

In 2022, the federal Office of Civil Rights received from families of students with disabilities. describe anecdotal cases where schools have used child protective services reports or truancy charges to punish families advocating for their special education children. And the American Bar Association published a on the legal rights of parents of special education students who find themselves facing these allegations.

Previous reporting has revealed cases where schools against parents who aggravate educators or administrators. But families of special education students say they are at particular risk for the unlawful treatment.

It’s “a very common occurrence,” said Anna Arons, a New York University law professor, that when families have “substantial back-and-forth with the school about the appropriate services for their child” it can result in educators calling the state child abuse hotline.

School staff are one of several professions legally obligated to report suspected child abuse and neglect. But in New York City and nationwide, educators make a higher share of unsubstantiated calls than any other mandatory reporter category — meaning families often become needlessly ensnared in a process they describe as invasive and traumatic. 

From September 2022 through February 2023, NYC school staff made over 6,500 calls to ACS encompassing all students, including youth in special education, according to data the agency provided. Some 15% of those investigations revealed evidence of abuse or neglect.

New York City’s child protective services system disproportionately involves parents of color. Citywide, some of children named in ACS investigations are Black or Hispanic, while, together, those racial groups make up just 60% of NYC young people. Even among neighborhoods with similar poverty rates, those with greater shares of Black and Hispanic residents face higher rates of investigations, shows.

State data, on paper, show that students with disabilities get reported to child protective services by educators at roughly the same rate as their peers. They make up 21% of the total enrollment and 22% of educators’ calls to the child abuse hotline. But the latter figure is likely missing some students with disabilities. Allegations against special education parents are only flagged as such if the educator making the call mentions at intake that the student has a disability, an ACS spokesperson explained. 

In other words, some reports regarding special education students might never get recorded that way due to human error.

“It’s probably a pretty serious undercount,” Arons said. Educators calling in reports could easily neglect to mention a student’s disability, she said.

Paullette Healy has two children with disabilities and often assists other parents in meetings with their school to design Individualized Education Plans, known as IEPs, for their special needs children. The IEPs are legally mandated and Healy has joined well over 100 such conferences across all five boroughs over the past decade, she estimates. They can get contentious when schools hesitate to provide services students are entitled to, she said.

“There’ll be pushback. It’s like, ‘We’re understaffed. The particular therapist we have now, their caseload is way more than they can handle,’ ” she said.

When parents don’t back down, that’s when schools may begin to send threatening signals, Healy said.

“Not too long after those meetings, behavior letters will come home,” she explained. “[The school will allege] there’s not proper documentation for absences. And then eventually, a knock on the door from ACS. That pattern has already been established. We’ve seen it way too often.”

Healy herself was the subject of an unsubstantiated investigation in the fall of 2020. A school staff member reported the mother for educational neglect for keeping her children home out of fear of COVID. 

An ACS spokesperson said in an email that the agency is working with educators and school leadership to reduce the number of families coming into unnecessary contact with the child welfare system, training educators to instead connect struggling families with resources like food or rent support. The agency runs several community centers across the city that offer free resources to families, such as clothing, food and diapers.

“We will continue to work with stakeholders, like NYC Public Schools, to help reduce unnecessary reports so that we can better focus our child protection resources on those who really need it,” the spokesperson said.

A series of unexplained injuries at school

The Diaz parents recounted a process of escalation similar to what Healy said she’s witnessed.

The family shared numerous documents with The 74 including medical records, photos of their son’s injuries, the results of the school’s investigation into possible corporal punishment and official letters from ACS.

In November 2021, Luis and Michelle Diaz had been seeking answers about Tristan’s injuries for months, worried educators might have harmed their son. But the school’s internal investigation found no evidence of mistreatment. Through a Freedom of Information Law request, the parents learned one special education teacher on the second day of school had conducted “joint compressions and massaging strategies” after Tristan had become agitated in class. The school did not conclude the action amounted to corporal punishment. But, to the Diazes, it was evidence an educator had laid hands on their son.

Over the next several months, Tristan kept coming home with new injuries, his parents said: scratches, bruises, a bite mark. School staff maintained the nonverbal child’s markings were self-inflicted, but the Diaz family took Tristan to doctors who disagreed. Eventually in mid-March, the parents reported the injuries to the police, explaining they were concerned their son could be experiencing physical abuse at school.

Tristan missed the next two days of school after getting bitten by mosquitos, which aggravated a tic he had of scratching himself with his fingernails. The Diaz parents said they called to excuse the absences. But still, the school sent home a March 19 attendance letter warning of possible child protective services involvement if the absences continued. Their son returned to the classroom.

Less than a week later came the ACS caseworker’s knock at the door, the parents said.

The ensuing investigation shook the family to its core.

The Diazes said their son Tristan suffered his first seizure in two years, which they believe was brought on by his stress and anxiety from the case.

Meanwhile, Luis Diaz said he faced stark consequences at work. After spending 18 years in the military, he is now employed by the Administration for Children’s Services as a child welfare specialist. When he and his wife were reported for alleged neglect, he got locked out of certain workspaces and sensed that his colleagues, who were all notified of the investigation, began to look at him differently. 

When the case closed two months later with no evidence of maltreatment, the family’s fear and frustration lingered. How could their school wield so much power to upend their lives, they wondered?

“An allegation can be just like that: 1, 2, 3. And then you ruin 60 days of a family. I could lose my job,” Luis Diaz said. 

‘They bully me’

Like the Diaz family, Elouise Cromwell-Evans was also reported to ACS by her school after a dispute surrounding her autistic son’s schooling.

In 2022, Cromwell-Evans said educators sent her and her 13-year-old child in an ambulance to the hospital for a psychological evaluation after the boy said at school that he wanted to kill himself. The doctor concluded the statement wasn’t worrisome, but rather an attention-seeking response after weeks of being called names by a class bully, the mother said.

But she said the school continued to struggle with her son’s behavior, which included spitting on the classmate who was taunting him. In early 2023, educators called another ambulance for a second psych evaluation, she said, telling Cromwell-Evans that if she didn’t show up at school and accompany her son, they would have to report it to ACS as medical neglect.

She complied, but once in the ambulance, said she took the recommendation of a paramedic who thought the hospital visit was unnecessary because he saw her son’s behavior as normal for a boy going through puberty. So she signed release forms and the family left.

Shortly after, the school reported the Bronx mother to ACS, she said.

“They intimidate me. They bully me,” Cromwell-Evans said. “If I don’t do what they say, then I’m neglectful.”

She suspects her race and class have played into educators’ perceptions of her parenting.

“We’re a Black family in a poor neighborhood and we were homeless for five years,” she said. “They’re definitely placing us in a box.”

Child welfare experts say living in poverty does not necessarily mean parents are neglecting their children. Provided there is no intentional mistreatment, struggling families need support — like food or rental assistance — rather than child protective services involvement, University of Chicago professor Darcey Merritt told The 74 in October, then at NYU. Recent advocacy and media attention have prompted possible changes to mandatory reporting laws in New York City and . And ACS itself has worked in recent years to provide support to families, where possible, and reduce unnecessary abuse and neglect reports.

Ericka Brewington narrowly avoided a child protective services investigation at the beginning of the 2022-23 school year, she said. She kept her special needs son Amir home from class for several weeks because the school didn’t arrange for a paraprofessional to ride on the bus with him, as his education plan stipulated.

She remembers the school calling and telling her, “we’re supposed to call this in” to child protective services. 

But, in response, the mother, who also serves as a board member on the family advocacy nonprofit , provided email documentation, which she also shared with The 74, showing the school had promised a staff member on the bus weeks ago and never followed through.

Brewington believes her savvy staved off a possible ACS report. But for parents less educated about their rights, “this would have scared the living daylights out of them,” she said. The threat of being separated from their children, in those cases, can be enough to make parents drop any demands they’re making for educational services, she said.

“You throw that in any parent’s face,” Brewington said, “they’re going to give in.”

It’s a threat so potent that many families completely avoid asking for the services their IEPs entitle them to, said Shalonda Curtis-Hackett, a parent advocate in Brooklyn.

A former PTA president, Curtis-Hackett said families often confessed to her during the early stages of the pandemic that their special education students weren’t getting the help they needed. But parents asked her not to relay the complaints to the school because they were worried about potential repercussions.

“I don’t want to be retaliated against,” the Brooklyn mother said they told her. 

It’s a calculus likely familiar to parents across the city. A class action lawsuit filed in November 2020 claims early in the pandemic. As of June 2022, city data show were fully receiving the help stipulated by their education plans, up slightly from a year prior.

Curtis-Hackett endured her own unsubstantiated ACS investigation in 2021 and now works as an outreach coordinator with the , which provides community-based legal defense services. 

“When parents are trying to get services for their kids and they’re not just letting the school give them the bare basics of an IEP, … ACS is definitely used as a retaliatory weapon,” she said.

To Michelle Diaz, the irony is rich. She was alleged to be neglectful while taking every step she knew of to advocate for her child, she pointed out.

“In a million years, did we think we were gonna have an ACS case?” she said. “We go above and beyond for our son.”

Concerned, Pierce took down the classmate’s name and passed it on to the Kingdom East School District’s homeless liaison, Lori Robinson, who said the family “absolutely” qualified for services like transportation help and nutritional assistance. 

It’s a scenario Superintendent Jennifer Botzojorns has seen play out repeatedly. Her bus drivers, many of whom have been in their roles for over a decade, frequently function as the eyes and ears of the rural district, helping schools support students who may otherwise slip through the cracks.

“They really know their routes and they know the kids, so they can see if suddenly kids [are missing] a winter coat when they had one in the past … or there’s no car in the driveway,” Botzojorns said. “It’s this hidden relationship that’s really important.”

As the only adults in the school system who actually see students’ homes each day, bus drivers have a unique vantage point on housing instabilities, advocates and practitioners say. 

For Pierce, who’s shared several tips with Robinson, helping students begins with getting to know them.

“Now you’re part of our family,” he tells students when they start riding his bus, part of a specialty transportation service the district contracts with to transport students experiencing homelessness. 

He and his wife purchase gifts for students on their birthdays. Before the holiday, they bought grocery cards and 12-pound hams for each family, he said. Over time, many of the young people have come to lean on him, which he attributes to being a caring adult who is less of an “authority figure” than their teachers.

The students Pierce drives are already dealing with homelessness, but they are also the ones who are most likely to know other students facing the same hardship.

“The students tell us a lot,” Pierce said. “If you want to know who’s homeless and who’s not, you need to talk to the students, you’ve got to get a good rapport with them.”

U.S. schools identified over a million students — 2.2% of all learners — as homeless in 2020-21, the most recent school year for which data are available, according to a . But even those figures undercount the issue as , a telltale sign they are failing to identify youth in need of help.

Students experiencing homelessness have lower overall attendance, standardized test scores and high school graduation rates than any other peer group. The limited data that exist suggest roughly the same share of youth in rural areas like Vermont experience homelessness as in urban areas, but with .

Vermont has the second-highest per capita rate of homelessness in the nation, lower only than California’s, according to a . At the same time, the Green Mountain state provides temporary shelter to a higher share of its residents without homes than any other state, with 98% safely indoors on a point-in-time count from last year.

“We’ve got a brutal [housing] affordability crisis in Vermont right now,” U.S. Sen. Peter Welch told The 74 in an email. The legislator said he is proud of his state’s efforts to shelter homeless families, but hopes school staff can also be part of longer-term solutions.

Once the Kingdom East school district knows a student is experiencing homelessness, its transportation staff continues to play a key role in supporting the child. If they’re living at a shelter or motel, the busing director alters the routes so that the student is the first pickup and last dropoff to avoid outing them as homeless to their peers. At the end of the day, district guidance counselors hand off backpacks full of clothes and food to bus drivers who discreetly give them to children in need when they step off.

“They’re backpacks and people don’t think anything of it,” transportation manager Darlene Jewell said.

Kara Lufkin, the homeless liaison for the St. Johnsbury school system, which neighbors Kingdom East, uses , a Michigan-based company that trains school staff on how to spot the signs of homelessness. The company provided training videos to her district’s transportation fleet.

“It’s really just an awareness of what are some things to look for … that could potentially mean a student was homeless,” she said.

Federal law requires all school staff who serve homeless youth to be trained in the possible signs of homelessness. The policy does not explicitly name bus drivers, or any other role, “but since bus drivers would serve students experiencing homelessness, we’d expect those drivers to be included in the professional development sessions,” said Jan Moore, director of technical assistance at the National Center for Homeless Education. 

However, oversight is lax and many transportation staff never receive the training — meaning their schools miss a key opportunity to support their most vulnerable students.

“There are disparities across the board in how, if or when training is occurring,” said Karen Roy, an advisor for MV Learning. “We want to make sure everybody is trained in recognizing what some of those red flags might be so that kids are identified. Because if we don’t identify them, we can’t begin to serve them.”

Roy said the drivers who do receive training come out of her sessions often connecting the dots retrospectively on past interactions they’ve had with students. One bus driver in a rural district in northern Michigan, for example, saw two children leave for school directly from a barn in the morning, she said.

“He didn’t really think about it until he had the training. And then he said, ‘Hey, these kids are likely homeless, they’re not living in a safe place.’ So he referred them to the liaison.”

Schools are required under the to make sure students experiencing homelessness have “equal access” to education — which often means providing them with food, clothing, transportation and more.

Lexi Higgins runs a program called that trains bus drivers on how to recognize and report human trafficking, an issue she said is “incredibly linked” to homelessness because most youth victims of trafficking are housing insecure when they’re recruited. Her company has trained drivers from over 2,000 districts.

“[Bus drivers] are sometimes forgotten when we’re talking about education professionals because they’re not on the school campus,” Higgins said. “But they really are playing an incredibly important role … and have some unique skills based on their job to be able to flag threats to the safety of the students that they’re seeing every day.”

Pierce, the East Kingdom driver, suspects such training sessions will prove to be a fruitful strategy.

“The drivers are the centerpoint for a lot of this,” he said. “I’ll bet we’ll find a lot more people who need help.”

Lufkin and Robinson, the homeless liaisons from the neighboring Vermont districts, recently tag-teamed to help a student after a bus driver sounded the alarm. Robinson had lost touch with a family on her caseload, but learned through transportation staff that the student was getting on and off the bus at different locations each day. When she got back in contact, she found out they were fleeing a domestic abuse situation. When the family found an apartment a town over, she connected them to Lufkin. 

The bus driver’s tip, Robinson said, “was the first hint that I had that anything was wrong.”

Between August 2019 and January 2022, only 24% of investigations prompted by calls from school staff found evidence of abuse or neglect compared to a citywide rate of in 2020 — meaning K-12 workers make allegations that do not get substantiated far more often than most other professions.

Teachers, with whom children spend most of their day, misreport more than any other school staff: Two thirds of their calls to the state hotline are unfounded, according to data obtained by The 74 through a public records request.

Meanwhile, families say the investigations plunge their lives into deep uncertainty and inflict lasting traumas on their kids. Parents describe children with recurring nightmares, fearing every knock on the door may be a caseworker looking to snatch them from their home.

Darcey Merritt, associate professor of social work at New York University, regularly engages with families impacted by the child welfare system in her work and research. She also serves on the Child Maltreatment Prevention Committee of the .

Over the years, Merritt has come to see the system as overly punitive toward poor families who love their children but may struggle to meet their basic needs due to lack of resources. 

The expert believes it’s time to reimagine child welfare to better support those families: “We need to start the whole thing over,” she said.

The 74 spoke to Merritt to learn what issues she sees in child protective services — and what can be done.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

The 74: What should people who work in schools understand about the child welfare system?

Darcey Merritt: We can’t disentangle neglect from poverty, it’s inappropriate to do so. 

On any given day, 76% of the children and families that are exposed to child welfare are there because of some form of neglect. And neglect is tethered to poverty: supervisory neglect, physical neglect, which refers to people not having appropriate food, clothing and housing. 

A lot of these issues related to neglect are structural issues that are outside the control of parents. Yet [child protective services] is blaming parents for their unfortunate, involuntary socio-economic statuses. So that’s a problem. 

Teachers are mandated to report out of an abundance of caution if they feel like a child is unsafe for whatever reason. But there’s got to be a way where mandated reporters first figure out how to be more useful in addressing the actual problem. If a child has dirty clothes consistently every day, let’s figure out what to do about that without getting CPS involved. 

I think there needs to be changes in state mandating laws, so [reporters] are encouraged, maybe even required, to first figure out how to address the problem. If they don’t have enough child care, well, then let’s find child care. If they don’t have enough food, let’s find food. Laundry machine is broken and they can’t go to the landlord because they’re behind on their rent? Let’s figure that out. These are all things that are happening. 

What might those changes look like?

We need to start the whole thing over and reserve child protective services for those kids who have been physically and sexually abused. We need to have a separate institution, a separate agency or organization, working with communities and neighborhoods to provide support for all the other kids so that the go-to response isn’t to report a child who’s poor. It all comes down to money and what our society is willing to do to make sure that people have a standard level of resources and support to be able to raise their families.

We need to really have more respect for these parents because they love their children and they are victims of an inequitable society.

To make sure I’m understanding correctly, are you saying child protective services should not be the ones responding to neglect charges?

I do not think they should be handling neglect charges. I think that some other agency that’s not connected to the stigma of having a CPS case should respond. Whatever support we put in place, it needs to be untethered from the institution of child protective services.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t help these families. I’m saying the child protective services is not the agency to handle neglect cases that have to do with poverty.

New York State law, as of 2021, requires implicit bias training for mandatory reporters. Does that rule go far enough to mitigate some of these problems?

I don’t think it goes far enough. You can’t just do a training and call it a day. You have to have something in place so that when people are making decisions, you can check whether or not this decision was made because of some unseen bias. For example, ‘Oh, this child’s parent has been involved with the carceral system. Go ahead and report this one.’ That’s how people continue to cycle in between these harmful punitive systems. 

We have our own Western idea of what safety and family well-being means and it’s all from a deficit lens. Rarely do we look at family dynamics and functioning from a strength-based perspective. I interview a lot of moms for my research and all of them say, ‘We love our children, but we needed help.’ 

It’s a really serious problem and the racial disproportionality is going to continue (because impoverished parents have no choice but to rely on the government for welfare). Black children are highly disproportionately involved with the child welfare system and before Black children, Native kids have the highest disproportionality of involvement. People don’t even pay attention to that.

Interesting. I didn’t know that.

The highest is Native American children, then Black children, then Latino children. White children are not overly represented in the system.

Some parents have told me they can’t help but know about child protective services, or, in New York City, the Administration for Children’s Services, because either they’re personally impacted or they know someone who is. Meanwhile, other families are completely oblivious. Have you seen that difference between communities?

It’s true. Once you’re involved, you know what that looks like. Parents’ language is even institutionalized. Have you heard people who are involved with the carceral system say, ‘Oh, somebody caught a case.’ These ACS-impacted moms literally say, ‘Well, I caught an ACS case.’ That language is a thing. 

And another group doesn’t have any idea what ACS is.

What are the harms of overreporting and what are the harms of underreporting [to child protective services]? 

The obvious harm of underreporting is that we may miss children who are in actual danger from parents that abuse their children. 

This whole issue of, ‘out of an abundance of caution, we need to report anything that we suspect might be problematic,’ that’s where the rub lies. We have to figure out how to pull out those issues that are related to poverty. 

The harm of overreporting is that when CPS comes knocking at your door, you are immediately traumatized. The very minute a child is taken from your home for any amount of time, you are immediately traumatized. They then have workers coming in on a regular basis, they’re being mandated to do certain groups and therapy, all kinds of things that don’t relate to the fact that maybe they need some money.

I personally renamed CPS the ‘child poverty surveillance.’ That’s my own little term I’ve made up for them.

You have to be subjective when you’re making a decision about whether or not a child is in danger. And one needs to be really, really reflective about their implicit biases, because [the worry is] a poor Black child will be treated differently than a poor white child. 

You live and work in New York City. Do mandated reporters, like school staff, lean more toward over or underreporting? 

They lean more towards overreporting. 

What messages are those people receiving when they get trained? Is it ‘When in doubt, report?’ Is it, ‘Take every precaution before you do?’ What are folks hearing?

I think they’re hearing, ‘When in doubt, report.’ I think that’s what they’re hearing. 

For the most part, folks are afraid because if you don’t report something and the child ends up really harmed, then the liability is on the mandated reporter. I think they’re being given a double message: ‘When in doubt, report,’ but on the back end, ‘Be careful, because there might not be a need for CPS to be involved.’ 

In schools, especially those that are under-resourced, they don’t have the means to help a family with their basic needs and their financial needs. [Instead], teachers are by law required to report to child protective services. It just makes no sense. The solution does not match the problem. And it causes harm in the meanwhile.

Given the system as it stands, if you are a mandated reporter in a school setting, how do you respond in a way that both protects a child in real danger, but also won’t jeopardize a family for no reason? How do you weigh that judgment call?

It’s hard. 

I had this conversation with my partner who teaches in Philadelphia. He’s not a social worker. I’m a social worker. But he [has to play the role of] a social worker, because he has to do social work as a teacher. 

When something’s going on with a child, my recommendation is to find out what’s happening from the family first. I recommend taking more caution before making a phone call [to the state hotline]. See if you can come up with a solution first. 

That puts a greater burden on teachers because then they end up being social workers as well. So it’s a very fine line, finding out what resources one has at the school, if the nurses or the climate officers or whoever the people are at the school [can help]. 

I’m only speaking about cases where neglect is related to poverty. Now, there are other cases of neglect where a parent intentionally left the child with a child abuser. All the neglect I’m talking about is unintentional. 

Child protective services should not be the go-to for cases of unintentional neglect related to poverty. That phone call should not be made to CPS but to another agency that we just don’t have yet. 

When child protective services investigated Shalonda Curtis-Hackett’s family for neglect in 2021, the Brooklyn mom could measure the personal toll in pounds lost: 20. 

She tried to fight the clawing thoughts that her caseworker “could try and snatch my kids,” a vision she says she still can’t escape in her nightmares.

Though the agency eventually found no evidence her children were malnourished — her husband is a professional chef — the process of having a welfare worker inspect their Bushwick apartment, check the fridge for food and ask prying questions deeply disturbed her children, who are now 8, 10 and 15.

“My children are happy-go-lucky kids and I’ve had to adultify them and tell them about the world much faster than I wanted to,” Curtis-Hackett said. 

The mother, who was also PTA president at her younger children’s school at the time, believes the report came from a K-12 staffer who said her kids’ bones were sticking out, an observation made while the children were attending class via Zoom at the time.

If so, the family is among the thousands of New York City households — disproportionately Black, Hispanic and low income — subjected to unfounded investigations into abuse or neglect initiated by calls from their children’s school. 

In fact, between August 2019 and January 2022, city school employees made over 13,750 false alarm reports to the state child abuse hotline, according to data obtained by The 74 through a public records request to the Office of Children and Family Services. 

Over that time span, the vast majority of school-based reports were ultimately unfounded, including at least 58% of calls from guidance counselors, 59% of calls from principals and 67% of calls from teachers. Less than 1 in 3 teacher reports led to any evidence of wrongdoing.

“Teachers, out of fear that they’re going to get in trouble, will report even if they’re just like, ‘Well, it could be abuse.’ It could be. It also could be 10 million other things,” said Jessica Beck, a middle school English teacher in the Bronx.

Those reports spur investigations that, at their most dire, can lead children to be separated from their parents — a trauma associated with elevated risks of . Even when closed and dropped, investigations can stay on parents’ records for years afterward and erase job prospects in youth-serving fields.

Kamaria Excell is a social worker who has helped dozens of parents recover from the damaging process. She led a 12-week healing program with the community-based organization . The vast majority of participating parents — 95%, she estimates — had investigations that were ultimately dismissed. But the shame, anger and eroded trust did not fade.

“Families deal with the repercussions of careless [child welfare] investigations for years after,” she said.

When a case gets closed, Curtis-Hackett, the Brooklyn mom, added, “it doesn’t stop the PTSD.”

‘When in doubt, report’

In total, only 24% of investigations prompted by calls from school staff found evidence of abuse or neglect compared to a citywide rate of in 2020 — meaning K-12 workers, teachers especially, make allegations that do not get substantiated far more often than most other professions. (Another 16% of K-12 calls led to an alternate response for children determined not to be in imminent harm and 59% were dropped outright.) Even that rate likely overstates the true level of maltreatment, family law attorney David Shalleck-Klein said, because it’s a metric the agency determines “unilaterally” and includes cases that may ultimately be dismissed in court.

The issue extends beyond Gotham, with similar rates of unsubstantiated reports from school staff nationwide. Among mandated reporters, K-12 workers are the most likely to report abuse or neglect and the least likely to have their allegations find evidence of wrongdoing, show.

Like most states, New York requires educators, child care providers, law enforcement officers, health care professionals and social workers to call a hotline if they believe a young person may be experiencing abuse or neglect. But, in practice, that decision is always a judgment call, said Beck, the Bronx middle school teacher. And in NYC schools, it’s a call made by teachers who are mostly white about students who are mostly Black and Hispanic.

“What looks like neglect to a teacher who has privilege might actually be poverty,” said Beck, who is white.

For example, educators are trained that poor hygiene can be a sign of neglect. But if a kid in her class smells, the teacher will speak with the parents rather than immediately calling in a report, she said. Some colleagues in the same situation, though, may call the state hotline, plunging that family’s life into the havoc of a neglect investigation.

The ethos is “when in doubt, report,” said Darcey Merritt, an associate professor of social work at New York University.

“Instead of immediately reporting a suspected neglect situation, find out how to address that need that’s being unmet first,” she suggests.

That is not what a social worker at a Bronx transfer high school — small schools designed to re-engage students who have dropped out or fallen behind — sees on the ground, unfortunately. She asked not to be identified for fear of getting into trouble at work.

“It’s totally C-Y-A, cover your ass. If you’re unsure, just call,” she said.

“They never provide information on what happens after the call,” she continued. “Mandated reporters don’t know that, many times after making a call, 24 hours [later] someone’s going to show up to this person’s house … and start conducting an investigation: a search of their home, checking counters, checking their cabinets, strip searching their young children to check for any bruises or marks, depending on the allegation.”

Instead, the training sessions she has attended have begun by projecting the names and pictures of young people who have died by parental abuse, the social worker said, a tactic she considers “fear mongering.”

The Department of Education said it cares deeply about the well-being of students and is committed to providing support and care at the earliest opportunity.

“While every NYC Public School member is a mandated reporter, we are focused on connecting with children and families who may be in need, providing them access to the vital interventions, supports and services they need to stay safe,” DOE spokesperson Suzan Sumer said in an emailed statement.

The Administration for Children’s Services, the city agency that investigates suspected abuse and neglect, said it is working to cut down on unneeded reports. Overall, school and child care-based reports fell 17% from spring 2019 to spring 2022, it said.

As per a , mandated reporters are required to undergo implicit bias training. And this fall, ACS will hold a series of five-hour trainings in collaboration with the NYC Department of Education to help school staff better understand the citywide resources they can refer families to rather than calling the child abuse hotline, the agency said. Only one representative from each school, however, is required to attend.

“We take our mandate of protecting children and supporting families seriously, while simultaneously being committed to reducing unnecessary child protection involvement with families, particularly families of color,” a spokesperson wrote in an email.

Of in 2020, 36% found evidence of abuse or neglect and 86 children died, according to the . The large majority of those deaths “​​were unrelated to abuse or neglect,” the agency wrote. However, when a child is killed as a result of being beaten or neglected by a family member, the agency frequently for failing to investigate or properly follow through on earlier reports of abuse.

‘School-to-ACS pipeline’

In New York City and across the nation, involvement with child protective services breaks decisively along racial lines.

Citywide, some of children named in ACS investigations are Black or Hispanic, while, together, those racial groups make up 60% of NYC young people. Even among neighborhoods with similar poverty rates, those with greater shares of Black and Hispanic residents face higher rates of investigations, shows.

Child protective services involvement becomes so normalized in many low-income communities, Merritt has noticed, it changes people’s vernacular.

“These ACS-impacted moms literally say, ‘Well, I caught an ACS case,’” as if they’re referring to the criminal justice system, the social work professor said.

Meanwhile, more privileged communities are often unaware of the disastrous effects that system can have, said her NYU colleague Anna Arons, assistant professor of law.

“It is really easy to be a person with money in this country, … particularly white, and not have any sense of child welfare services as anything more than people who are genuinely helping children,” she said. “You might never know there are 50,000 investigations every year in New York City, which is really an astronomical number.”

Curtis-Hackett, for her part, has taken the situation into her own hands. After being reported to child protective services, she no longer wants her family to participate in a system she calls the “school-to-ACS pipeline.”

Last year, she pulled her kids from the public school system. Now, they homeschool.

“I don’t trust the [Department of Education],” she said. “I will not allow my children to be collateral damage.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated national figures for the number of children in 2020 who had died, suffered abuse or neglect, and been reported to CPS by any source, not just educators. Those contextual data have been corrected to reflect New York City’s rates.

The $1.75 trillion Build Back Better plan, which the House passed in November, has been stalled in the Senate largely due to opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate West Virginia Democrat, to some proposals, including extending a beefed-up version of the credit. The monthly payments, up to $300 per month for young children, ended in December. shows most families have used the money for rent, groceries and school-related expenses.

“The expanded [Child Tax Credit] is a signature domestic policy achievement of this administration, and has been an overwhelming success,” Sens. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Rev. Ralph Warnock of Georgia and Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote in . “After historic progress, it is unacceptable to return to a status quo in which children are America’s poorest residents and child poverty costs our nation more than $1 trillion per year.”

The senators’ letter comes a week after Biden cast doubt on his ability to reach a deal with Manchin that includes the expanded credit. In a Jan. 19 press conference, he said he cares “a great deal” about the credit and said he would keep trying to get it passed. The senators also highlighted showing such policies can have positive impacts on babies’ brain development. With the Senate soon expected to return to over Build Back Better, the question is whether the study could influence Manchin’s position.

Supporters of cash support for low-income families are “quite enthusiastic” about the findings, said Greg Duncan, an education professor at the University of California, Irvine, and a lead researcher on the $17 million project. He’s working with advocacy groups in West Virginia to schedule a briefing for Manchin, and added that the researchers have “tried to connect with all sorts of people on the political spectrum.”

The first U.S. evaluation of a “direct poverty reduction” focused on early childhood, according to the press release, the study randomly assigned 1,000 low-income, mostly Black and Hispanic mothers in four cities to receive debit cards with monthly payments of either $333 or a nominal $20. After one year, infants in households that received the assistance were more likely than those in the control group to show brain activity associated with thinking and learning.

The researchers suggest that the cash support can reduce stress on mothers and in turn improve home environments for young children. The study began before the pandemic, but by researchers at the University of Oregon have shown that lockdowns, family isolation and financial stress related to COVID-19 have led to greater anxiety among parents and irritability among children.

While researchers can’t predict if children in the families receiving the payments will continue to have an advantage, they didn’t expect to see such quick results.

“It surprised most of us that after only one year of [cash] transfers that this would actually show up as clearly as it did in the data,” Duncan said. “We always take the long view and thought it would take several years before the stress levels would be reduced.”

A second paper focusing on whether mothers spent the money on drugs or alcohol is expected this spring, followed by a third looking at whether the financial support is associated with mothers pulling out of the workforce. Critics, including Manchin, argue such programs should have a work requirement.

Duncan said that the findings add to a body of evidence that suggests “income has a causal effect on child well-being, particularly in early childhood and when poverty is quite persistent.”

Katharine Stevens, founder and CEO of the Center on Child and Family Policy, called the study an “unusually rigorous attempt to begin identifying the most effective, policy-relevant drivers of child well-being.” But she rejected the suggestion that the money was a direct cause of the brain growth in children. 

Babies “do not eat, breathe or interact with money,” she said, adding that more research is needed to determine the “mechanisms that matter most” in young children’s development. 

Texas families who relied on the Pandemic EBT card, which previously provided a one-time benefit of $285 for students receiving free and reduced-price meals, can apply for another round of food aid for the 2021-22 school year.

The federal benefit helps provide for the approximately 3.7 million eligible, low-income children in Texas who lost access to free and reduced-cost meals when schools first shut down during the pandemic. This time, the benefit could provide up to $1,200 per student, depending on the number of days most students at their school received remote instruction during the past school year.

Gov. announced May 20 that the Texas Health and Human Services Commission would allocate more than $2.5 billion in food benefits to all eligible families, an increase from the $1 billion in food benefits distributed last year.

“Thank you to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for approving this second round of pandemic food benefits for Texas families,” Abbott said in a statement. “These additional benefits will continue to help Texans provide food for their families.”

Families who received the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program before 2021 were set to automatically receive benefits on their P-EBT cards by May 28. Those who started relying on SNAP after May 2021 and have children born before Aug. 1, 2014, will need to apply.

The P-EBT card can be used at all places that accept SNAP payments, including grocery stores and supermarkets.

School districts will notify eligible families with the application by June 2, and applications will remain open until Aug. 13.

The process is more complex this year because the amount of money allocated will depend on the days a school had remote instruction, said Rachel Cooper, a senior policy analyst with Every Texan. She said families may have to go through an extra process if their children attended school remotely while their districts still had in-person instruction, and this could act as barrier to access.

“That’s what we’re worried about, and that’s why we we’re trying to educate families as well,” Cooper said. “We’ll be working really hard with our nonprofit partners across the state, food banks and others to get info to families and help them if they need help to understand that, yes, if your child was virtual, more than the mount your school qualifies for, you can go online and you can appeal,” Cooper said.

Some low-income families live in multi-generational households, which motivated many children to learn remotely when possible to avoid spreading COVID-19 to their older relatives, said Jeremy Everett, the executive director of the Baylor University Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty. Because of this, the number of students who may have to go through this additional process may be high.

“They’re disproportionately people of color, and they were disproportionately affected by COVID at a more extreme rate than higher-income households,” Everett said.

Last year, Abbott extended the deadline for food aid because many eligible families still hadn’t applied. By late July, more than 20% of the eligible Texas schoolchildren had . Cooper said she is hopeful that this won’t happen again.

“P-EBT will be a huge help to families,” Cooper said. “We’re very pleased that it’s finally getting off the ground. We know all the families who have struggled in this last year to put food on the table, to keep life together — this is going to be a huge help to those families. And we just want to make sure that they get what they actually are entitled to.”

Neelam Bohra is a reporting fellow , the only member-supported, digital-first, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Disclosure: Baylor University and Every Texan have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .