But new studies bolster the evidence that done well, virtual models can be just as effective at moving students forward as face-to-face instruction.

In Massachusetts, first graders who spent 15 minutes a day online with a tutor from stayed on track a year later without additional tutoring, according to exclusively with The 74. Students gained, on average, at least five additional months of learning over their expected growth. 

Another virtual program, , produced positive results for the lowest-performing students in the Kansas City, Missouri, schools. Students who received one-on-one tutoring from certified teachers made greater progress than those who didn’t receive the extra help, .��

“Virtual models are getting stronger,” said Amanda Neitzel, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of the Ignite Reading study. “If you go back just a few years, we had no examples of evidence-proven models and now we are getting them.”

In addition to following Ignite Reading for two years, she recently published a study showing that elementary school students in Texas and Louisiana who received virtual tutoring from , outperformed their peers and gained nearly three additional months of learning.

Results like those have broadened the conversation about how to bring students who are missing critical reading skills up to speed. 

“Tutoring can work in many ways and in different settings,” Kevin Huffman, CEO of Accelerate, said earlier this month at the nonprofit’s annual conference. 

When the organization began funding tutoring research four years ago, there were doubts, he said, about whether virtual programs could compete with in-person models. There’s more confidence in online versions now, but as with tutoring in general, progress depends on whether providers feature the components of a high-dosage program — meaning they were offered for roughly 90 minutes a week, during the school day with a trained tutor. Ensuring kids get all the tutoring hours a program is designed to deliver is also key.

“We obsess over student attendance,” said Jessica Reid Sliwerski, Ignite Reading’s founder. Now in 24 states, the program focuses on building phonics skills and reading fluency.

In the Johns Hopkins Ignite Reading study, which focused on 13 Massachusetts school districts, 85% of students who mastered foundational reading skills “during the crucial first grade window” were still keeping up at the end of second grade, Neitzel wrote. But if students didn’t meet expectations on time, they couldn’t catch up. Some were just too far behind.

“Many kids start our program still not knowing basic kindergarten skills, like letter names and sounds,” Sliwerski said. That means tutors have two years of content to get through.

To Sliwerski, the findings demonstrate that third grade, when many states decide whether students are strong enough readers to advance, is too late to intervene. If kids struggle to decode unfamiliar words, they won’t be able to comprehend more complex reading assignments. 

“We are so caught up in ‘reading by grade three’ that we aren’t honoring that kids are actually supposed to have fully cracked the code and be able to fluently read grade-level text at the end of first grade,” she said. “We act like kids have all the time in the world, when they don’t.” 

The 5,700-student Chelsea Public Schools was among the Massachusetts districts using Ignite Reading as part of a project funded by One8, a nonprofit that helped schools get high-dosage tutoring off the ground. The state the program.  

At first, “our teachers were a little skeptical,” said Superintendent Almi Abeyta, a former kindergarten and first grade teacher. “They were like, ‘We just got off of remote learning. Why are we going to put kids on a computer again?’ ” 

Then they saw the data. Students made similar gains on DIBELS, a widely used early literacy assessment, whether they were Black, Hispanic, English learners or had a disability, the study found.

‘A great opportunity’

Results like those are why the Fallbrook Union Elementary School District, near San Diego, California, is now spreading the program to all of its elementary schools as part of its First Grade Promise initiative. 

In a pilot, Fallbrook STEM Academy, which serves a high-poverty population, enrolled 20 second graders in the program. Many of the students speak Spanish at home, didn’t attend preschool and lack access to books, flash cards and other early reading materials, said Principal Ana Arias. She called each parent to ask that they get their children to school a little early so they could meet with a tutor.

“I phrased it as an opportunity — a great opportunity — but I needed their commitment,” Arias said. “We have so many kids in the classroom and there’s so much need. It’s very rare to have a teacher meet one-on-one with a student every single day.” 

At the beginning of this school year, the 20 students were reading at a kindergarten level. By November, 19 had advanced to a first grade level, and she’s hoping they’ll be on par with their peers by the end of the school year. 

‘Transcend time zones’ 

The latest findings build on those that Harvard University and City University of New York researchers published last year. Whether tutoring is remote or in-person, , matters less than whether the tutor is well qualified and students attend sessions regularly.

Virtual models even have some advantages over in-person programs, experts say. Schools have to pay an in-person tutor whether or not the student is present. But virtual programs “transcend time zones,” Sliwerski said, and can redeploy a tutor to meet with another student.  

If the tutor is absent, “we have a substitute ready to go,” she said. “The technology underpinning the program ensures the child receives the exact lesson they were supposed to get.”

In Kansas City, consistency was key to the strong results. Students in first through fourth grade across 14 schools met with their tutors for 30-minute sessions at least three times a week for 20 weeks during the 2024-25 school year. The more sessions completed, the stronger the growth. Some students gained more than two months of additional learning and were less likely to be placed in special education. 

On average, the students who participated in the Hoot program and those in the comparison group began the school year two grade levels behind. While many are still struggling readers, their progress was significant, said Carly Robinson, a senior researcher at Stanford University and a co-author of the study.

“This wasn’t a boutique pilot,” she said. “It’s tutoring operating inside a district system that is messy, and it still proved to be effective.”

The district had to contend with technical glitches and unexpected snow days that forced students to miss some sessions.

Not all virtual programs have been able to overcome disruptions. 

In a large suburban district in Texas, some students meeting with virtual tutors during the 2021-22 school year did worse in reading than their peers who didn’t receive the intervention. Scheduling conflicts, like school assemblies, and tutor turnover, contributed to the disappointing results.

‘A higher bar’

Those challenges grow even more complex in the middle grades with electives and block schedules where students don’t have the same classes every day. But Rahul Kalita, co-founder of Tutored by Teachers, said maintaining relationships between tutors and students is essential. 

He hopes to contribute to the research base on virtual tutoring by participating in a randomized controlled study, funded by Accelerate and focused on math in two large Indianapolis middle schools. 

“It felt like the right opportunity to test our model under a higher bar of rigor,” he said.

On top of virtual programs refining their practices, districts, he said, “have also become more sophisticated buyers of tutoring.” Multiple districts across the country pay providers higher rates if students make measurable progress or pass state tests. 

In addition, there’s growing agreement that literacy tutoring, whether virtual or not, is more effective if it’s part of a strong early reading program that includes a curriculum based on the science of reading and screening students for dyslexia or other learning difficulties. 

“You can’t throw tutoring at the problem,” Sliwerski said at the Accelerate conference. “It has to be part of a very intentional system.”

Since then, schools across the state have wanted to offer pre-K, but many lack the facility space to add classrooms or the expertise to hire and manage pre-K teachers. At the same time, child care centers in their communities often lacked the training and resources needed to get students ready for kindergarten.

So in Kansas City, the education nonprofit created the KC Pre-K Cooperative in 2019 to connect traditional public schools and charters with early childhood centers. This systems-level, approach has expanded local access to high-quality early learning, currently collaborating with 28 partners serving approximately 700 students a year. 

In addition to adding pre-K seats, our goal has been to improve kindergarten readiness as measured by a tool known as the , which was developed by a regional council serving Missouri and Kansas. Readiness is not about mastering every skill before school begins. It’s about being prepared to learn, connect and thrive in a classroom setting. The observation form or PKOF identifies five areas of development that help determine if a child is ready for kindergarten: language and literacy development, cognitive development, social and emotional development; physical development and health and approaches to learning, also known as self-regulation.

SchoolSmart KC leads the pre-K co-op, uniting schools and early childhood providers to expand access to high-quality pre-K education and align funding across the system. We support partners by offering them resources they wouldn’t otherwise have. This includes professional development and instructional coaching, grants to help “mom-and-pop” centers raise standards, and technical support to help centers become accredited with the state.

We then connect these early childhood care providers with schools. Together, they coordinate enrollment and instruction through ongoing, combined professional development with pre-K and kindergarten teachers. The goal is preparing students for kindergarten and ensuring a smooth transition into our local school system.

An example of the co-op’s success is Kids in Christ Academy, founded and directed by Christina Puckett. The child care center serves children from 6 weeks old to age 5, and has distinguished itself by providing expanded hours to support working families and offering specialized care for children on the autism spectrum. Puckett’s dedication to early childhood education and her collaborative approach have helped the academy serve a diverse community and grow, recently opening a location that offers a larger space and more seats. SchoolSmart KC helped her gain accreditation for her site, as well as funding for the process. The staff received training.

The co-op has had an impact across the city. At the beginning of last school year, 23% of Kansas City’s pre-K students were kindergarten-ready. By the end of the year, that number had skyrocketed to 74%. Our goal is to achieve 90% kindergartner readiness citywide by 2027.

To achieve that goal, we recently launched a pilot to gauge the impact of providing early intervention services to pre-K students who need additional resources such as speech or occupational therapy. So far, we’ve seen a noticeable difference in students’ behavior, as well as their cognitive and academic abilities.

All of these students receive hearing, vision and developmental screenings. If any flags arise, their pre-K provider can institute a response to intervention before the student reaches kindergarten. We look forward to learning more from the data to strengthen our support for students with learning challenges.

The co-op has created shared success in a city where families seek more affordable pre-K options, child care providers have both capacity and expertise, and schools want students ready for kindergarten. SchoolSmart KC was an early champion of this collaborative model to expand pre-K access, and our approach can serve as a blueprint for other communities. It begins by connecting schools and early childhood providers, then aligning their strengths to deliver high-quality pre-K through joint enrollment and coordinated instruction.

As an in longstanding partnership with public schools and the of a nonprofit organization focused specifically on attendance, we’re hearing questions from educators, district leaders, families and policymakers about whether the old standards for attendance are still reasonable. Do students still need to go to school every day? Is it fair to ask educators to work on improving attendance when so many barriers exist outside of school? 

Given what we know from research and from schools across the country, backing away from a strong focus on chronic absence places children’s well-being in jeopardy, because attendance matters as much now as ever.

Early evidence from a UChicago Consortium on School Research study that is underway shows that the relationships among attendance and grades, test scores and test gains remain as strong as before COVID-19. This suggests that, despite all the extra supports that have been put into schools since the pandemic, chronic absence is a key factor in poor performance on exams across the country. This is for every age and demographic group.

These findings affirm decades of research showing that school attendance matters for students’ academic success, holistic development and well-being. Children in pre-K-2 who were chronically absent for several years by grade 3. Attendance also is important in the elementary and middle grades for students’ eventual , ability to pass their classes and graduate. And it’s not just the absent students who are affected; the content and pace of the classroom and even how adults and resources across the school are deployed can be detrimental to those who do show up.

Beyond academics, school is a key space for young people’s development — building social connections and skills with peers and adults, exploring their interests through classes and extracurriculars, and accessing resources, whether directly in school or through referrals from teachers. Students who are absent frequently miss out. 

Attendance rises when schools focus on fostering students’ development. Those with strong — where young people feel safe and supported and teachers collaborate with one another and with families — have higher attendance rates than other schools. No wonder boosting students’ is seen as a to chronic absence. When students and see their school as a place of community, stability, safety and support, they are more likely to come consistently, even when there are challenges. Teachers and school staff get a clearer sense of what families need, and how to help. They are more likely to seek assistance when they need it and work with to find solutions that work for them. In turn, school leaders and staff get a clearer sense of what families need, and how to help.

Addressing chronic absence can feel like an overwhelming, or even an impossible, problem because it is affected by many aspects of a young person’s life. Yet, we’ve seen schools make substantial progress when they focus on key data and supports. Chicago moved ninth grade attendance rates from 80% to 91% from 2008 to 2018 after showed absenteeism in the first year of high school was the driving factor behind low graduation rates. The district provided schools with real-time data on ninth graders’ attendance and grades, and principals and teachers were held accountable for a metric they could actually move, while being helped with by organizations like the Network for College Success. 

Nathaniel Green Middle School in Providence reduced its chronic absence rate from in three years after Principal Jackson Reilly organized students into cohorts taught by teams of teachers so they could build in time for relationships among students, teachers, and students and their teachers. This created a sense of community that brought back joy into the classroom. They then used data on who was missing 10% or more of school to identify which students needed extra outreach and support.

At Compass Berclair Charter School in Memphis, absenteeism dropped from 28% to 2% between 2021-22 and 2023-24. Principal Camie Cowan used morning meetings with all students and monthly family check-ins to strengthen relationships. Like Nathaniel Green, it also used chronic absence data to identify and offer assistance to students still struggling with attendance barriers.   

Kansas City Kansas Public Schools have reduced chronic absence districtwide from over 50%  in 2021-22 to less than 35%, and leaders anticipate further reductions in the coming school year. The district has moved away from taking a punitive approach to absences; a key component of its success has been a focus on relationship building. Every school has a team that reviews data as well as develops and implements a year-long plan of action that emphasizes universal strategies (morning meetings or restorative circles) along with targeted supports (positive phone calls and mentoring).

These examples demonstrate that schools can have a big impact on students’ attendance rates. The key is building relationships with young people and their families — asking students and families what motivates them to show up even when it isn’t easy. Are the barriers an unsafe path to school or a lack of access to health care? Is the student struggling academically or being bullied? Schools can use these answers to partner with students and families to find solutions. 

What educators in schools do matters — a lot. Progress is not just possible for improving attendance rates in schools; it’s critical. Children’s current and future well-being depend on it.  

“This isn’t school,” Robinson, a business owner, told the teenagers at the early June launch of the ProX internship program. “This is a summer internship. You all have employers.”

You can’t just skip a day or come in late, said Robinson. If something happens that gets in the way, you need to call your employer. You can’t be on your phones all day. Each employer will have a cell phone policy to learn, along with dress codes. And work hours must be entered online.

It’s a lot for some of the 660 new interns from across the Kansas City area, some as young as 15 and whose internships are their first job ever. Many have never had a boss or a work schedule before, so working alongside adults can be intimidating, said Robinson and program head Solissa Franco-McKay.

ProX, short for “professional experience,” has created one of the strongest and most structured support systems for interns in the country, hoping to solve a challenge that regularly scares away employers and trips up high school interns anywhere — student and business expectations not matching up. 

Each student has a coach hired by the program they meet weekly, as well as a mentor who is an employee at the business. ProX also sets aside every Monday of the internship as “professional development” to work on so-called “soft skills,” such as punctuality, teamwork and communication, which many teens lack and employers want.

“This is a starting point of a journey for you,” Franco-McKay told the students. “This is about growing your network, growing your skills, and just doing a little exploration…You have your coaches who help, guide and support you along the way.”

“If you mess up, that’s alright. That’s what it’s about, right?” she stressed. ”And we’re going to be doing it together.”

Providing all the training and support for students and companies has one big drawback, however: It limits how many students the program can serve. 

ProX had 3,000 students apply for spots this summer, so the majority had to be turned away. The program’s budget has already grown from $1 million at its start to $4 million today. More coaches and other staff would need to be hired to accommodate every student.

The ProX program, launched in 2021 by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, is a rare opportunity for high school students with paid summer internships for five weeks each summer that let them test drive a career they may want to pursue.

Though internships are common for college students, there are few for high schoolers. Only about five percent of high school students have a chance at an internship or a more advanced apprenticeship, either in summers or during the school year. 

That’s partly because U.S, companies, unlike those in Europe where internships and apprenticeships are common, don’t always trust high school students with business tasks.

A 2024 survey by American Student Assistance, a nonprofit that promotes career opportunities for students, found companies listed the work needed to select good interns and manage them were among the biggest barriers to hiring high schoolers.

It’s left to outside agencies like ProX to manage internships for many companies, finding interns, teaching them soft skills and verifying they can handle the workplace. The more those agencies take on for the companies, the easier it is for a business to hire students for the summer.

“When we were first created, it was really about making this as plug-and-play for the employer as possible,” said Franco-McKay. “We want the employer to kind of see us as a common front door.”

“If you’re wanting to engage with students here in Kansas City, you can come to the ProX program and we’ll handle all the paperwork,” she added. “We hire the interns. We pay them the stipend. We track their hours. The employer really just has to focus on providing a quality experience and mentoring them.”

ProX isn’t the only agency, often known as “intermediaries,” taking on training and hiring interns to help companies. The nonprofit Boston Public Industry Council manages that city’s extensive summer jobs program for the city and school district. Though many students are taught basic soft skills at school there, Executive Director Neil Sullivan said employers rely on PIC staff to meet with students and vouch for them being ready to handle work.

The Genesys Works high school internship program in eight cities including Houston, Chicago, New York City and Washington, D.C., is another. It also makes teaching soft skills as much a priority as ProX. Students spend the summer before their internships learning several skills — communication, time and project management, work ethic, problem solving, collaboration, and initiative — and are rated on each one. They are placed in internships only if they score well.

“It’s meant to be broad, so that students go into their internship on day one with the baseline skills that they need,” said Mandy Hildrenbrand, chief services officer for Genesys Works. “The internship then can train them in more specific skills to their internship “

The ProX internship program has made training an integral part of the internships since it was started by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, named for the pharmaceutical magnate best known as the former owner of the Kansas City Royals baseball team.

The internship isn’t a full-time job. It pays a stipend of $1,250 for 25 hours a week for five weeks, less than some fast food and retail jobs pay per hour. But the internships aim to give students a taste of potential careers and practice navigating the job application and hiring process, rather than just be a way to earn money during summer break.

ProX also prioritizes bringing in students from low-income neighborhoods, so it offers students money to buy work uniforms if needed or rides to work through zTrip, a local rideshare company.

“Our program is really focused on breaking down any barriers that may exist to student participation,” said Franco-McKay.

That’s a big reason why ProX invests heavily in coaches and training. Each Monday, interns spend a half day at the Ewing Marion Kauffman School in the city to learn about a different skill each week — critical thinking, communication, collaboration, leadership and understanding one’s own thinking process.

In addition, while each of the 95 companies in the program assigns an employee mentor to each intern, ProX hires educators like Kristi Larison, a teacher at Liberty North High School in a neighboring suburb, to be a coach and liaison between interns and companies. Larison has 19 students to follow this summer, visiting them at their companies once a week and discussing their goals for each week and the summer.

“We know kids and we know job sites, so we’re going to kind of pull them through,” she said. “I had a lot of students last year that relied heavily on me with questions, because maybe they didn’t quite have skills to communicate with the employer yet, or they were too timid. I really was a bridge to kind of help them learn how to do that on their own. I think that’s critical.”

Don Simon, another coach who teaches at suburban Smithville High School, said he believes the coaching helps students who may have never had a job before. Having coaches also reassures employers that they are not alone in supporting students.

“A lot of our employers have experience with college internship programs, but not really high school,” Simon said. “For the kids to have a coach with them, that really sort of seals the deal for a lot of employers. They’re like, ‘Okay, let’s do this’.”

Some students, like Bradley Epps, an incoming senior at Park Hill High School, are so directed in their goals they’d rather just work on Mondays instead of having workplace training. An aspiring architect, he’s still excited, though, to intern at the architecture and urban planning-focused Kansas City Design Center.

“I think it will give me some experience,” he said. “And, if I had any doubts, it will give me a chance to see for myself.”

Others appreciate both the instruction and a chance to test out a career. 

Trisha Rastogi just graduated from Blue Valley High School south of the city and hopes to be a cancer researcher. She said a chance at real work experience at Children’s Mercy Hospital, even in the public health department, is a great opportunity for her.

“I want to become a physician, which is healthcare at a more individual level,” she said. “But I also like that I’m doing this internship because it gives me exposure to healthcare at a community level too.”

Henry Dunbar’s parents say he has a gift for learning by doing — making a fantastic omelet, helping his dad in the garage or driving any vehicle that a third grader is allowed to pilot. He works hard and is motivated to make them happy.

So they were at first baffled when Henry, their middle child of five and their oldest boy, didn’t take to academics.

Henry and his siblings were homeschooled in part so they could spend more time with their father, Aaron Dunbar, an air traffic controller with an irregular schedule.

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The setup worked well for his two older sisters. Even his younger sister, then a toddler, started picking up knowledge by osmosis. But concepts like letter sounds or days of the week didn’t stick in Henry’s brain.

“When he was very little, it was almost like he was messing with you,” said his mother, Abbey Dunbar, the family’s primary educator. “Because it was like, gone, truly gone. As if we’d never done it.”

The family tried postponing kindergarten for a year, joining a homeschooling co-op and sending Henry to an Olathe public school for special education services.

The services helped, but didn’t seem like enough. Henry, normally a happy, energetic kid, would come home drained and discouraged from spending part of the day in a loud room with classmates who teased him.

Finally, the family turned to , a private school in Roeland Park that enrolls students who have dyslexia and similar disabilities. Henry is formally diagnosed with a severe auditory processing disorder and appears to have dyslexia based on testing at school.

Dyslexia is common. An often-cited figure is that 20% of people have symptoms, though some estimates are lower. But parents around the metro area told The Beacon .

Horizon serves as a small-scale — and pricey — example of what it looks like to orient education around helping dyslexic students succeed.

Henry, who recently turned 10, has started to thrive in an environment that’s geared toward his needs, with highly trained staff, minimal distractions and tiny classes grouped by skill level.

“It’s less tiring and my brain doesn’t have to worry about all that stuff,” Henry said. “I’m on the same pace as everybody else.”

Providing enough resources��

A pediatric occupational therapist and mother of three, Kelly Reardon noticed her oldest child, Lily, was slow to catch on to early reading skills.

At first, teachers at her Catholic school in Johnson County weren’t worried.

“I didn’t want to be that hypochondriac parent,” Reardon said. “I would always lean on her teachers to fact check my own perceptions.”

As Lily entered kindergarten, Reardon’s worries grew. Teachers still said Lily was doing great.

“She’d come home and fall apart,” Reardon said. “I know what that means. ‘We’re not actually doing great. We’re just holding it together, barely getting by.’”

In first grade, a teacher validated Reardon’s concerns, prompting her to seek dyslexia testing.

Reardon saw Lily’s diagnosis as a way to explain to others — and to her smart, perfectionist daughter — why it was harder for her to learn certain things and what support she needed.

She also knew she needed more resources. So she enrolled Lily in Horizon Academy’s summer program.

“Lily had come home from camp and said, ‘Mom, can I go to school here next year?’” Reardon said.�� “For a first grader to ask to make a change to a new school, that’s a big decision.”

Reardon doesn’t blame Lily’s original school for not having all the support she needs.

”What was more challenging for me was the amount of pressure on me to be that advocate for her and convince myself and convince others that she needed that,” she said. “It makes me sad to think about the other families that have no idea.”

Though families’ first instinct is often to trust that schools will alert them to dyslexia and provide appropriate services, some find to notice the problem, seek testing, advocate for services and search for the most effective school or private tutoring.

Horizon encourages parents to be involved and educates them about dyslexia, but some say the school’s expertise lifts the burden of feeling it’s all on them to figure out a solution.

“Before we found Horizon, we had a lot of fear, because we were kind of carrying it all,” said Abbey Dunbar. “To walk into a place where they’re not afraid at all of these challenges and they see it every day and they know exactly how to help … It’s just kind of that relief.”

How Horizon works

A walk down the hallways gives a sense of what Horizon Academy is all about.

One section showcases stickers students earn for using vocabulary words in context. Another uses colorful ribbons to illustrate the components of skilled reading. Yet another features photos and descriptions of famous people with dyslexia or other learning disabilities.

“We just want our kids to be aware that it’s only one part of you,” Head of School Vicki Asher said. “We’re going to teach you how to read, but look at all these other gifts that you can develop and nurture.”

The Dunbars are struck by the focus on Henry’s strengths, something the family also leaned into when they realized he struggled with academics. When he spoke with The Beacon, Henry was still excited about getting chosen to drive a robot that day in school.

They also appreciate the school’s attention to detail — such as not scheduling lawn mowing at distracting times — and the high capacity for tailoring instruction to Henry’s needs.

During the fall of 2024, Asher said Horizon had 117 students and 46 faculty members, less than a 3-to-1 student to teacher ratio.

Although students might meet in groups of 12 or more for homeroom, specials and certain subjects, they study key topics like reading and math in tiny groups with similar skill levels.

The average reading group includes about three students, Asher said, but some receive one-on-one attention.

Reardon said since switching to Horizon, Lily is making progress, experiencing successes and having less emotional difficulty after school because she’s not overwhelmed.

“They’re matching her with kids that have similar missing skills, and then the instruction is taught specifically targeting those skills,” Reardon said.

Faculty members are trained in Orton-Gillingham, a method designed specifically for people with dyslexia.

Gabi Guillory Welsh, Horizon’s director of therapeutic language and literacy, said most of the school’s teachers hold an associate level certification that requires a 60-hour course and 100-hour practicum.

The high proportion of highly trained faculty comes with a high price tag.

Asher said the school raises funds to provide scholarships for 35 to 40% of students. In the past, scholarships have been about $8,000 on average and up to about $17,000. Tuition was nearly $30,000 for the 2024-25 school year and will be nearly $31,000 for 2025-26.

As a business owner, Reardon understands the price tag.

“They’re paying people. They’re providing this expensive training to each staff member that works there to provide the best service to these kiddos,” she said. “Of course it costs an arm and a leg.”

But she worries about families who can’t afford Horizon.

“The worst thing would be ‘I know my child needs to go there, but I just can’t afford that,’” she said.

Horizon is open to students from kindergarten through ninth grade.

The school is looking for students it thinks it can serve well based on its expertise, Guillory Welsh said, often meaning that their primary diagnosis is dyslexia.

Horizon who are primarily diagnosed with behavioral or emotional issues, though it finds receiving proper instruction can help with some of those concerns, such as reducing school anxiety.

Students arrive at various ages, often a few years into elementary school.

“Our goal is to bring them in, remediate, rebuild them and then return them to their traditional school,” said Asher.��

For most children, that could mean attending for two to five years.

When The Beacon visited in fall 2024, Horizon had two kindergarten students for the first time and only a few first graders. Meanwhile, there were two whole homeroom classes of fourth graders and two more classes that were mixes of fourth and fifth graders.

Guillory Welsh said that pattern represents a paradox: The best time to intervene is in the early years, but it’s rare to get a diagnosis that early.

“Students have kind of missed that window (for early intervention) by the time they start failing,” she said. “They could have been learning differently.”

How dyslexic kids learn

After years of struggling to get proper services for her son, also named Henry, Annie Watson knew he needed a way to catch up on his reading skills.

Full-time tuition at Horizon Academy wasn’t an option.

“We couldn’t afford that,” she said. “But we could afford the tutoring — barely.”

So Henry started to attend twice-weekly sessions after school, followed by a summer intensive program, both through Horizon. He progressed so well that his regular teachers were confused why he had a special education plan.

Henry’s tutor “saved his life,” Watson said. “That one person, and the fact that we made it work financially.”

Watson thinks one of the keys to Henry’s progress was the Orton-Gillingham method.

Teaching methods that don’t focus on phonemic awareness (the ability to recognize and play with speech sounds) and phonics (the relationship between letters and sounds) make it harder for many students to learn to read — something some state governments are .

For dyslexic students, proper reading instruction is especially crucial and they might need more repetition and multisensory teaching methods for the information to click.

Full-time and tutoring students at Horizon learn little-known rules of the English language, like why “forgotten” has two Ts but “traveling” only has one L. (It has to do with which syllable of the root word is accented.)

Recently, Watson said, she and her daughter disagreed about how to pronounce a word. Henry told them they were both wrong, citing a rule so elaborate she wondered if he was pranking them. But when she looked it up, Henry was right about the pronunciation and the obscure rule.

Henry Dunbar, the full-time Horizon student, is at an earlier point in his education. But his parents said they were already struck by his progress.

“It feels so good to be on this side of things, as things are starting to work and things are clicking,” Aaron Dunbar said.

Henry has “been working diligently here. He’s been fitting in so well. He’s made great friends. He’s doing excellent with the teachers, and he’s now reading, which before he wasn’t doing,” he said. “Like he’s actually — he knows how to read.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Tuesday Willaredt knew her older daughter, Vivienne, struggled to read.

She tentatively accepted teachers’ reassurances and the obvious explanations: Remote learning during the COVID pandemic was disruptive. Returning to school was chaotic. All students were behind.

Annie Watson was concerned about her son Henry’s performance in kindergarten and first grade.

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But his teachers weren’t. There was a pandemic, they said. He was a boy. Henry wasn’t really lagging behind his classmates.

So Willaredt and Watson kept asking questions. So did Tricia McGhee, Abbey and Aaron Dunbar, Lisa Salazar Tingey, Kelly Reardon and T.C. — all parents who spoke to The Beacon about getting support for their kids’ reading struggles. (The Beacon is identifying T.C. by her initials because she works for a school district.)

After schools gave reassurances or rationalizations or denied services, the parents kept raising concerns, seeking advice from teachers and fellow parents and pursuing formal evaluations.

Eventually, they all reached the same conclusion. Their children had dyslexia, a disability that makes it more difficult to learn to read and write well.

They also realized something else. Schools — whether private, public, charter or homeschool — aren’t always equipped to immediately catch the problem and provide enough support, even though some estimates suggest .

Instead, the parents took matters into their own hands, seeking diagnoses, advocating for extra help and accommodations, moving to another district or paying for tutoring or private school.

“You get a diagnosis from a medical professional,” Salazar Tingey said. “Then you go to the school and you’re like, ‘This is what they say is best practice for this diagnosis.’ And they’re like, ‘That’s not our policy.’”

Recognizing dyslexia

It wasn’t until Vivienne, now 12, was in sixth grade and struggling to keep up at Lincoln College Preparatory Academy Middle School that a teacher said the word “dyslexic” to Willaredt.

After the Kansas City Public Schools teacher mentioned dyslexia, Willaredt made an appointment at Children’s Mercy Hospital, waited months for an opening and ultimately confirmed that Vivienne had dyslexia. Her younger daughter Harlow, age 9, was diagnosed even more recently.

Willaredt now wonders if any of Vivienne’s other teachers suspected the truth. A reading specialist at Vivienne’s former charter school had said her primary problem was focus.

“There’s this whole bureaucracy within the school,” she said. “They don’t want to call it what it is, necessarily, because then the school’s on the hook” to provide services.

Missouri law requires that students in grades K-3 be , said Shain Bergan, public relations coordinator for Kansas City Public Schools. If they’re flagged, the school notifies their parents and makes a reading success plan.

Schools don’t formally diagnose students, though. That’s something families can pursue — and pay for — on their own by consulting a health professional.

“Missouri teachers, by and large, aren’t specially trained to identify or address dyslexia in particular,” Bergan wrote in an email. “They identify and address specific reading issues students are having, whether it’s because the student has a specific condition or not.”

Bergan later added that KCPS early elementary and reading-specific teachers complete state-mandated dyslexia training through LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling), an intensive teacher education program that emphasizes scientific research about how students learn to read.

Missouri is in LETRS.

In an emailed statement, the North Kansas City School District said staff members “receive training on dyslexia and classroom strategies,” and the district uses a screening “to help identify students who may need additional reading support.”

Kansas has also worked to update teacher training. But the state recently and to its Blueprint for Literacy.

Public school students with dyslexia or another disability , or IEP, a formal plan for providing special education services which comes with federal civil rights protections.

But a diagnosis isn’t enough to prove eligibility, and developing an IEP can be a lengthy process that requires . Students who don’t qualify might be eligible for accommodations through a .

A spokesperson for Olathe Public Schools said in an email that the district’s teachers participate in state-mandated dyslexia training but don’t diagnose dyslexia.

The district takes outside diagnoses into consideration, but “if a student is making progress in the general education curriculum and able to access it, then the diagnosis alone would not necessarily demonstrate the need for support and services.”

Why dyslexia gets missed

Some families find that teachers dismiss valid concerns, delaying diagnoses that parents see as key to getting proper support.

Salazar Tingey alerted teachers that her son, Cal, was struggling with reading compared to his older siblings. Each year, starting in an Iowa preschool and continuing after the family moved to the North Kansas City School District, she heard his issues were common and unconcerning.

She felt validated when a Sunday school teacher suggested dyslexia and recommended talking to a pediatrician.

After Cal was diagnosed, Salazar Tingey asked his second grade teacher about the methods she used to teach dyslexic kids. She didn’t expect to hear, “That’s not really my specialty.”

“I guess I thought that if you’re a K-3 teacher, that would be pretty standard,” she said. “I don’t think (dyslexia is) that uncommon.”

Louise Spear-Swerling, a professor emerita in the Department of Special Education at Southern Connecticut State University, said estimates of the prevalence of dyslexia range from as high as 20% to as low as 3 to 5%. She thinks 5 to 10% is reasonable.

“That means that the typical general education teacher, if you have a class of, say, 20 students, will see at least one child with dyslexia every year — year after year after year,” she said.

Early intervention is key, Spear-Swerling said, but it doesn’t always happen.

To receive services for dyslexia under federal special education guidelines, students must have difficulty reading that isn’t primarily caused by something like poor instruction, another disability, economic disadvantage or being an English language learner, she said. And schools sometimes misidentify the primary cause.

Tricia McGhee, director of communications at Revolucion Educativa, a nonprofit that offers advocacy and support for Latinx families, has had that experience.

She said her daughter’s charter school flagged her issues with reading but said it was “typical that all bilingual or bicultural children were behind,” McGhee said. That didn’t sound right because her older child was grade levels ahead in reading.

“The first thing they told me is, ‘You just need to make sure to be reading to her every night,’” McGhee said. “I was like, ‘Thanks. I’ve done that every day since she was born.’”

McGhee is now a member of the KCPS school board. But she spoke to The Beacon before being elected, in her capacity as a parent and RevEd staff member.

Dyslexia also may not stand out among classmates who are struggling for various reasons.

Annie Watson, whose professional expertise is in early childhood education planning, strategy and advocacy, said some of Henry’s peers lacked access to high-quality early education and weren’t prepared for kindergarten.

“His handwriting is so poor,” she remembers telling his teacher.

The teacher assured her that Henry’s handwriting was among the best in the class.

“Let’s not compare against his peers,” Watson said. “Let’s compare against grade level standards.”

Receiving services for dyslexia��

Watson cried during a Park Hill parent teacher conference when a reading interventionist said she was certified in Orton-Gillingham, an instruction method designed for students with dyslexia.

In an ideal world, Watson said, the mere mention of a teaching approach wouldn’t be so fraught.

“I would love to know less about this,” she said. “My goal is to read books with my kids every night, right? I would love for that to just be my role, and that hasn’t been it.”

By that point, Watson’s family had spent tens of thousands of dollars on Orton-Gillingham tutoring for Henry through Horizon Academy, a private school focused on students with dyslexia and similar disabilities.

They had ultimately moved to the Park Hill district, not convinced that charter schools or KCPS had enough resources to provide support.

“I felt so guilty in his charter school,” Watson said. “There were so many kids who needed so many things, and so it was hard to advocate for my kid who was writing better than a lot of the kids.”

So the idea that Henry’s little sister — who doesn’t have dyslexia — could get a bit of expert attention seamlessly, during the school day and without any special advocacy, made Watson emotional.

“Henry will never get that,” she said.

While Watson wonders if public schools in Park Hill could have been enough for Henry had he started there earlier, some families sought help outside of the public school system entirely.

The Reardon and Dunbar families, who eventually received some services from their respective schools, each enrolled a child full-time in Horizon Academy after deciding the services weren’t enough.

Kelly Reardon said her daughter originally went to a private Catholic school.

“With one teacher and 26 kids, there’s just no way that she would have gotten the individualized intervention that she needed,” she said.

The Dunbars’ son, Henry, had been homeschooled and attended an Olathe public school part-time.

Abbey Dunbar said Henry didn’t qualify for services from the Olathe district in kindergarten, but did when the family asked again in second grade. Henry has a diagnosed severe auditory processing disorder, and his family considers him to have dyslexia based on testing at school.

She said the school accommodated the family’s part-time schedule and the special education services they gave to Henry genuinely helped.

“​​I never want to undercut what they gave and what they did for him, because we did see progress,” Dunbar said. “But we need eight hours a day (of support), and I don’t think that’s something they could even begin to give in public school. There’s so many kids.”

T.C., whose daughters attended KCPS when they were diagnosed, also decided she couldn’t rely on services provided by the school alone. One daughter didn’t qualify for an IEP because the school said she was already achieving as expected for her IQ level.

In the end, T.C. said, her daughters did get the support they needed “because I paid for it.”

She found a tutor who was relatively inexpensive because she was finishing her degree. But at $55 per child, per session once or twice a week, tutoring still ate into the family’s budget and her children’s free time.

“If they were learning what they needed to learn at school… we wouldn’t have had that financial burden,” she said. Tutoring also meant “our kids couldn’t participate in other activities outside of school.”

Support and accommodations

Tuesday Willaredt is still figuring out exactly what support Vivienne needs.

Options include a KCPS neighborhood school, a charter school that extends through eighth grade or moving to another district. Outside tutoring will likely be part of the picture regardless.

Willaredt is worried that her kids aren’t being set up to love learning.

“That’s where I get frustrated,” she said. “If interventions were put in earlier — meaning the tutoring that I would have had to seek — these frustrations and sadness that is their experience around learning wouldn’t have happened.”

When Lisa Salazar Tingey brought Cal’s dyslexia diagnosis to his school, he didn’t qualify for an IEP. But his classroom teacher offered extra support that seemed to catch him up.

In following years, though, Salazar Tingey has worried about Cal’s performance stagnating and considered formalizing his accommodations through a 504 plan.

She wants Cal, now 10, to be able to use things like voice to text or audiobooks if his dyslexia is limiting his intellectual exploration.

Before his diagnosis, she and her husband noticed that every school writing assignment Cal brought home was about volcanoes, even though “it wasn’t like he was a kid who was always talking about volcanoes.”

When he was diagnosed, they learned that sticking to familiar topics can be a side effect of dyslexia.

“He knows how to spell magma and lava and volcano, and so that’s all he ever wrote about,” Salazar Tingey said. “That’s sad to me. I want him to feel that the world is wide open, that he can read about anything.”

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KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Marialexa Sanoja publicly quit her job as a Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools police officer over concerns with the district’s handling of student safety needs and founded a nonprofit to help kids escape the challenges in Wyandotte County.

In the three-and-a-half months Sanoja was stationed at Wyandotte High School, the district’s largest school with 1900 students, Sanoja said she filed 140 incident reports and that in most instances the district failed to take action. The district, through its YouTube channel, disputed her figures and asserted it handled concerns responsibly.

“It didn’t take long for me to find out that the students were not in the best interest of anybody,” Sanoja said. “When the police officer becomes a safe space for students, there is something wrong with that.”

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After her resignation in December 2023, Sanoja founded Missión Despegue, translated to “mission takeoff,” a nonprofit that helps parents and students document their grievances with the school district to hold the district accountable for its handling of safety issues.

Sanoja saw the district’s response to a sexual assault case and its communication as inadequate, and experts echo her concerns. Now, Sanoja works with current and former students to get their GED certificates, drivers licenses, mental health care and prevent substance abuse.

Sanoja’s concerns

Sanoja said much of the Latino community, which makes up , is afraid to complain or make a scene because many of them are new to the country. She aims to empower them, and help them achieve the “American dream.”

One reason Sanoja resigned — and a former student dropped out — was because of the district’s response to the former student’s experience of being sexually assaulted at school. Kansas Reflector doesn’t identify minors who have been sexually assaulted.

According to an incident report filed by Sanoja, the former student was a freshman and alone in the Wyandotte High School stairwell when a group of older boys groped her and made sexual remarks. She began recording the boys with her phone, which prompted them to leave, the report said.

Sanoja was off duty that day. The former student asked the on-duty officer to file a report, which Sanoja says she never saw. The day after, Sanoja and the former student said they filed an incident, criminal, and Title IX report. The former student wanted to press charges.

“After that, I just stopped going to school, because I didn’t feel safe,” the former student said in an interview with Kansas Reflector.

Sanoja said security camera footage and the former student’s video showed the boys’ faces. The former student said the district told her that because the boys never returned to school, it could not suspend them. However, the former student said she continued to see the boys on campus.

“Ultimately, the district didn’t do anything about it. We were asking, at least, for suspension. That didn’t happen,” Sanoja said.

A spokesperson from the district told Kansas Reflector it was unable to provide comment on the former student’s case, or the district’s responsibility to handle reports of sexual assault.

Sanoja with a letter that accused the district of failing to communicate with parents. She wrote that she was worried about instances where students brought guns to school property and all parents weren’t notified.

In a to Sanoja’s resignation, district superintendent Anna Stubblefield said “those incidents are not always relayed to all families. Not because we’re hiding anything, but because the impact is low and to protect the privacy of our students.”

A district spokesperson told Kansas Reflector the “administration is required to contact parents regarding student issues — such as absences, drug-related concerns, or fights — in accordance with the Student Code of Conduct.”

Expert opinions

Ken Trump, an expert in school safety communications who is not related to the president, said parental anxiety over school safety is rising nationwide.

“It’s very easy to get caught up if you’ve got a couple thousand kids in a school, dealing with incidents and other things. But you need to take a tactical pause in this, and go back to looking at the communications,” Trump said. “You can’t go back to the old-school mindset of if someone finds out about it we’ll talk. That doesn’t work anymore.”

Sanoja said that after a student overdosed at school and she contacted the parents directly, the high school principal told Sanoja to route all communication with parents through administration.

Sanoja said that she continues to receive videos of physical fights in the schools, totaling in the hundreds, since her resignation.

Michael Dorn, a school safety expert who assists schools after major acts of violence, said�� Sanoja’s allegations were concerning. He said he would have responded to her concerns differently than the school district did.

“I was a school district police chief for 10 years,” Dorn said. “If an officer in my department wrote that kind of resignation letter, I would request a state police investigation. I would ask for a polygraph test, and I would ask that she be polygraphed. I wouldn’t do anything like that, but if someone alleged that I did and I didn’t do it, I would request that to clear my name.”

Sanoja worked as a police officer in Lenexa before transitioning to the school district and said Wyandotte High School presented the most significant challenges she’s seen. She believes the problems are “within the culture” of the school.

“Everybody’s tired of the way the district is handling things,” Sanoja said. “They’ve been failing these kids for years.”

Fixing root causes

Through her nonprofit, Sanoja helps students who leave the district, like the former student who was sexually assaulted, earn their GED certificate.

When they’re out of the school environment, Sanoja said, they thrive.

Sanoja said most of the families she works with are immigrants, and the parents do not speak English.

“We face the daunting task of ending the stigma, shame and judgement that come with our culture,” Sanoja said.

Missión Despegue seeks to fix the root causes of the problems seen in school — like substance abuse, violence, bullying, and mental health issues. Sanoja said she sees these problems reflected in things like the graduation rate of the district. For the , which is 11.4 percentage points .

Through donations, Sanoja covers the cost of mental health appointments, DMV license and GED class registrations, and laptop purchases for students pursuing their GED certificate without one. In February, she began converting first-time offenders’ court fees, in hopes of reducing recidivism.

With the help of more than 100 volunteers, Sanoja has hosted events where she provides Narcan and educates parents about the dangers of substance abuse. She also guides volunteers to further training, like drug prevention and compassion fatigue workshops.

Sanoja said she doesn’t get paid for her work with Missión Despegue. She said she needs an assistant, because she has “a long list of people that need help.”

“I see something in them. I know they’re going to be successful,” Sanoja said. “I want that opportunity for every kid I have.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.

TOPEKA — It doesn’t take a lightning-quick internet connection to theorize income, education and geographic disparities underly Kansas’ digital divide.

But the nonprofit and nonpartisan Kansas Health Institute’s latest research demonstrated with online county-by-county maps that broadband deficits and computer ownership gaps plaguing Kansas were intertwined with social and demographic influences.

Thirty-one percent of low-income Kansas households making less than $20,000 annually didn’t have high-speed connections, KHI said. However, 4.5% of Kansas households earning more than $75,000 were in the same predicament in terms of broadband access.

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Kaci Cink, an analyst with KHI, said Kansas families able to tie into reliable broadband were able to more efficiently download, browse and stream contents of the internet. KHI said the rise of a global digital economy and the lack of high-speed communication options continued to undermine Kansans relative to employment, education and health care.

“Kansans use broadband to engage with health care providers and access health-related information, so not having connectivity can create barriers to health,” Cink said. “And we are seeing this among populations that may need health care services the most.”

KHI said one in 20 or 5.8% of Kansas households didn’t have a computer, smartphone or tablet. But Kansans with a bachelor’s degree in college where eight times more likely to have a computer than Kansans who didn’t earn a high school diploma.

Of Kansans age 65 or older, one in 10 or 11.8% didn’t have a computer to access the web. KHI said one in 10 Kansas households, or 12%, lacked broadband service.

KHI developed an to provide an overview of computer ownership and broadband availability in each of the state’s 105 counties. The dashboard, based on 2022 information from the U.S. Census Bureau, provided breakdowns by age, race, ethnicity, employment, education and income.

For example, it revealed gaps among counties in terms of the percentage of households without a computer. A sample: Riley, 2.4%; Johnson, 2.8%; Sedgwick, 4.9%; Shawnee, 7.6%; as well as Jewell, 15.7%; Lincoln, 14.3%; Marshall and Neosho, 12%; Gove, 10.2%; and Wallace, 10%.

The dashboard chronicled county-by-county differences in broadband availability. The percentage without high-speed internet: Johnson, 5%; Riley, 9.5%; Sedgwick, 10.7%; Shawnee, 17.2%; as well as Lincoln, 26.2%; Gove, 24.2%; Jewell, 22.8%; Neosho, 19.6%; Marshall, 16.9%; and Wallace, 11.8%.

The challenge of responding to the state’s technological divide has been more difficult in rural communities due to insufficient infrastructure that elevated the cost of adding high-speed internet service.

Senate President Ty Masterson, R-Andover, said delivering broadband to rural communities was “critically important for those communities to thrive.”

To work toward closing the gap, the federal Affordable Connectivity Program operated from Dec. 31, 2021, to June 1. That program reduced the nation’s internet connectivity deficit by providing 23 million households with discounts on broadband services and computer purchases. An attempt to extend the federal initiative has been introduced in Congress, but not passed.

In 2023, Gov. Laura Kelly said Kansas received $452 million that would be dedicated to the program to expand broadband infrastructure in Kansas.

It followed the state’s 2020 commitment to provide $85 million over 10 years to the Broadband Acceleration Grant for benefit of Kansas communities, especially in economically distressed regions.

In July, Kelly said acceleration grants of $10 million were awarded to a dozen internet providers, and that investment would be paired with $12.7 million in matching funds, for benefit of 14 rural Kansas counties.

“Broadband drives innovation, unlocks potential and ensures everyone can participate in services essential for economic, educational and industrial growth,” Kelly said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.

Ten years ago, Camden Prep became one of the first schools in New Jersey’s to attempt to resuscitate a chronically poor-performing elementary school.

That same year, Maurquay Moody started fourth grade at Camden Prep, in a classroom dubbed “The College of New Jersey.” Uncommon Schools, the nonprofit charter operator tasked with turning around Maurquay’s neighborhood school, names each classroom after a college in an effort to raise postsecondary expectations.

The state had recently taken control of K-12 schools in Camden, a city then-Gov. Chris Christie had called “a human catastrophe.” Barely 20% of students could read at grade level, and fewer than half graduated high school. Twenty-three of the city’s 26 schools were among the lowest-achieving in the state. 

Over the next few years, like many other urban districts beset by plummeting property values and spiking rates of poverty and crime, Camden welcomed several new public charter schools and turned over its most chronically failing schools to education nonprofits, which rebranded them as renaissance schools. 

Today, Camden is considered one of the country’s most innovative districts. More than two-thirds of students attend public charter or renaissance schools, enrollment is climbing and the city is steadily, if incrementally, closing performance gaps among low-income kids.

To be sure, the school system has a long way to go: The majority of students still don’t read on grade level, chronic absenteeism is on the rise and budget constraints present a serious challenge. 

But shows that low-income kids in Camden boosted their proficiency on state standardized exams by 21 points between the 2010-11 and 2022-23 school years. And in doing so, they closed a longstanding performance gap with peers statewide by 42%. 

Maurquay was among those who benefited from this evolution. And in a full-circle testament to just how far the city has come, in August he stepped onto The College of New Jersey’s real-life campus as a freshman – a first-generation college student with a full scholarship. 

Camden isn’t the only low-income city where students in charter or renaissance-like schools are closing learning gaps with their more affluent peers. 

A from the Progressive Policy Institute finds that over the last decade, low-income students in large districts that aggressively expanded public school choices have started to catch up to their peers statewide — and performance levels are rising in both charter and district-led schools. In fact, in the 10 districts with the highest percentage of students enrolled in charter schools, low-income students citywide closed the gap with statewide test score averages by 25% to 40%. (The analysis doesn’t include New Orleans, where 100% of district students attend charter schools.)

“We just wanted to … see if the impact was spilling over,” says Tressa Pankovits, co-director of PPI’s Reinventing Public Schools project. “We were really surprised by the amount of gap closure between students citywide and the statewide averages. It wasn’t just single digits. It was well into double digits.” 

The analysis examined data from cities across the country where a majority of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and where at least a third of kids attend a public charter or charter-like school. The researchers used average standardized test scores from third through eighth grade. 

The researchers underscored that the one-third proportion is not a guaranteed or proven tipping point, but that in nearly every case where those schools reached or exceeded that enrollment level, academic growth rose across the city for all low-income students.

“There has been slow but steady progress in Camden,”says Giana Campbell, executive director of the Camden Education Fund. “Sure, there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done, but when we look at where the city was 10 years ago, we’re really, really encouraged by the progress that we’re seeing across the city.”

“We knew a time in Camden where we didn’t have this diversity of school types and progress wasn’t what it is today. The proficiency scores in Camden in 2010 were just criminal. There wasn’t much lower we could go,” she says. “And so I don’t think it’s a coincidence that being one of the most innovative school systems, with all these different school types, that we’ve been able to see the progress that we have today.”

New Jersey is home to another standout in PPI’s report: Newark, where 35% of students are enrolled in public charter schools and the performance gap closed by 45% across the same 12-year period.

Missouri boasts two school systems making similar progress. In Kansas City, where 46% of students are enrolled in public charter schools, the performance gap between low-income students and all students closed by 31% between the 2010-11 school year and 2022-23. And in St. Louis, where 39% of students are enrolled in public charter schools, the performance gap closed by 30%.

Hannah Lofthus, founder and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman School, says the report’s findings reflect what she has experienced over the last 15 years in Kansas City, which offers enrollment in neighborhood schools; charter schools; “signature” schools, which focus on college preparation; and career and technical schools. Kauffman consists of two charter middle schools and a charter high school.

“We said, ‘How can we figure out what works for kids and then replicate that,’” she explains. The daughter of two public school teachers, she says collaboration among the various types of schools in the city has been key to the big gains posted by low-income students. “We have kids coming to us in fifth grade 15% proficient in reading and math, and they leave somewhere around 70% proficient.”

Pankovits cautions that the analysis shows correlation, not causation. And while the increases demonstrate significant academic growth, proficiency is still low for the majority of students in these districts. 

But Pankovits also says the report refutes that charters drain district schools of the best students and resources, to the detriment of those left behind. Instead, she argues, the increasing enrollment in charter schools creates “a positive competitive dynamic,” and that the report’s findings should bolster policymakers’ confidence in the potential for fixing underperforming schools for all students in low-income communities. 

Effectively, a rising tide lifts all boats: When looking only at traditional district schools in Camden, for example, low-income students closed 35% of the proficiency gap during the same decade-long window, versus 42% for the district overall.

Like Camden, Indianapolis has traditional district schools, charters and so-called innovation schools that it uses to drive its academic turnaround. The report found that in the city, where 58% of students are enrolled in public charter schools or innovation schools, the performance gap between low-income students and all kids statewide closed by 23% between the 2010-11 and 2022-23 school years.

“The report confirms what we’ve seen in Indianapolis for a long time,” says Brandon Brown, CEO of the , a nonprofit that supports the city’s charter and innovation schools. “And a lot of the evidence shows that the growth of high-quality charter schools does not come at the expense of the school district. It really tends to lift many of the outcomes for schools of all types.”

“I think we’ve shown in Indianapolis that it’s hard and it’s not a straight line and we don’t always agree, but when these systems work together, the chances that kids are going to benefit will go way up,” he says. “And I think we’ve seen that here very clearly.”

The report comes as America’s schools are still trying to chart a recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, which set students back academically and decreased enrollment. A from National Alliance for Public Charter Schools finds that over the past five years, charter schools gained nearly 400,000 students, while district schools lost 1.75 million. Hispanic and Black families are increasingly choosing charters, the report shows, with Hispanic enrollment growing 18 times faster in charters than in district schools. 

In Indianapolis, enrollment is on the rise, and at the highest point in more than a decade — a fact Brown credits to the public school choices that families have. For the first time, he says, parents from adjacent school districts are opting into the city system. 

“Large urban districts across the country that are facing massive enrollment declines should look at Indianapolis and see the collaboration to create high-quality options for families, and see it as a way to mitigate negative impacts on enrollment,” Brown says. “When system leaders can work together, it tends to grow enrollment, and that stands in stark contrast to a lot of school districts across the country.”

Correction: The former Camden Prep student’s name is Maurquay Moody.

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to The 74.

Bridget Bolder sent her daughter, Mia, to kindergarten at a neighborhood public school. After all, it seemed the “normal, regular thing to do.”

But Bolder started to worry that some of her daughter’s classmates were exposing her to inappropriate topics. Early in the school year, Mia had to tell a teacher about a boy groping some of the other girls.

“I’m like, she’s a baby,” Bolder said. “Bring her home a little while longer before I throw her to the wolves.”

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Brian Wilson and his wife homeschooled three of their children last year. They struggled to juggle home life, both parents’ jobs and teaching the kids.

The family briefly switched to in-person school, but Wilson said it only validated the parents’ theory that the individual attention the kids got at home had been working.

“They seemed like head and shoulders above all the other kids when it comes to learning,” he said. “My son, Aaron — he’s the youngest — he was actually helping kids in his class.”

Both families have turned to the new Brookside Virtual Academy so they could keep their kids at home and still rely on professional teachers to lead their schooling.

The academy is attached to Brookside Charter School and bills itself as Kansas City’s only virtual program where teaching happens on live, interactive video calls.

Online school isn’t widely popular. It’s been blamed for some of the learning loss that set kids back during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kansas City Public Schools closed its virtual academy for kindergarten through fifth grade this year because of shrinking enrollment, district spokesperson Shain Bergan said in an email.

But for a girl with severe social anxiety? A boy with leukemia? A young athlete with a rigorous training and travel schedule?

Leslie Correa, who helped design the KCPS program, said certain students and families need the option. So she found a home for the program at Brookside, where she’s now the virtual academy principal.

“The students that virtual works for, it works really well for,” she said. “We cannot close the door to them for having a great education.”

Who succeeds in virtual education?

For some students, the computer screen provides a layer of distance that makes them braver, Correa said. Learning from home can also reduce distracting for some kids with autism.

For example, loud or persistent background noise, visually busy environments or other students bumping into them could overwhelm some children.

Other students might need virtual school for logistical reasons.

That could include students who are barred from in-person school for disciplinary issues, traveling athletes, kids going through intensive medical treatment like dialysis or chemotherapy, or parents who struggle with transportation.

Some families identify as homeschoolers but want professional help teaching reading and math, Correa said. Since virtual school is more concise, it leaves more flexibility in the day.

Parents’ fears can also push them toward keeping kids at home.

“Anytime that there has been a violent occurrence in one of our schools in Kansas City, I get a big uptick in enrollment,” Correa said. “They feel scared and they’re looking for an alternative.”

When virtual learning doesn’t work

To figure out if it’s a good fit, Correa starts by asking parents why they’re interested in virtual school.

“If it’s, you know, ‘I don’t have day care and I need my 12-year-old to be home to watch my kid,’ it’s kind of an alarm,” she said. “I’m not the one to judge what their decision is, but I am the one to help arm them with information.”

The virtual academy serves students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Because Kansas City-area charter schools can only operate within the boundaries of KCPS, its students have to be from that area.

The virtual academy doesn’t turn students away based on their reason to enroll, Correa said, but it monitors their progress. If a student isn’t thriving, she meets with a parent to make a plan, like tutoring or switching the child to in-person school.

Schools can deny virtual education if they document that it’s not in the student’s best interest.

“My goal before getting to that point is always to have the parent make that decision for themselves through very hard conversation,” Correa said. “But it does happen.”

Problems can arise when the virtual school doesn’t think it can fulfill an individualized education program, or IEP, often used to support students with disabilities.

“The parent has the option to return to in-person learning or waive the IEP, and then their student does not get that support,” Correa said. “They almost never waive the IEP.”

Students can also get removed from virtual school, and referred for truancy, if they stop signing in or engaging at all for too many days.

Correa said she’s also attentive to offering ways for virtual students to get more comfortable with in-person interaction.

Virtual school students can attend optional in-person events and participate in Brookside clubs and sports.

“If they want to kind of test the water, the opportunity is there,” she said. “If a student is saying to me, ‘I am ready to go in a building,’ then OK. But then also, if a student is saying to me, ‘I need out of the building,’ OK, I’m here. I just don’t want to disrupt their education.”

How virtual learning works 

Right before the school year started, Brookside Charter School’s STEAM lab was set up for virtual academy orientation.

Teachers and school leaders passed out laptops, hot spots for internet access and school supplies.

The supply bags include books, basics like pencils and glue, whiteboards and dry erase markers (extra for younger kids, who tend to leave the caps off), and individually packaged science kits for lessons on the solar system, geology or density.

But first, families settled in for a presentation to learn the basics.

Brookside Virtual Academy starts at 9 a.m. with a lesson on leadership.

Most days, students then launch into reading class, followed by math. Wednesdays are for science.

Students spend about two and a half hours in live virtual lessons each day, and another 90 minutes online working through a task list that includes social studies and science.

Live classes use video calls and technology that lets teachers monitor what students are looking at and control their screens.

Parents aren’t responsible for teaching their kids, but they’re expected to keep in touch and generally make sure the students are online and on task.

Connecting with families

For some parents, being extra involved in part of the draw.

Wilson, the parent of three kids in the program, said he appreciates that it cuts the school day down to essentials, allowing parents to be more strategic about where they put time into their kids’ education.

Bolder, the parent of a first grader, said she’s looking forward to more easily monitoring what her daughter is learning so she can help supplement that.

Virtual education makes it easier to connect with families, said Tina Duvall, a reading and math interventionist for kindergarten through fourth grade.

“I get to be in their home with them. It takes away a whole lot of anxiety for kids,” she said. “I thought in my years past teaching that I knew — really, really knew — my students’ families, but not like this.”

Duvall will be working with breakout groups of students, grouped by grade or ability level.

With about 100 students as of Aug. 20, two or three grades are combined under each of four virtual academy teachers. But staggered schedules and help from interventionists like Duvall will allow each grade to learn separately.

The biggest challenge, Duvall said, is not being able to sit by a student to point things out or hand them what they need.

“You just want to reach through the screen and help,” she said.

Bolder and Wilson said they have their kids in in-person activities so they can socialize. But they’re not sure if they’ll ever go to in-person school.

“There shouldn’t be such a thing as a bad school,” Wilson said. “But because there is, until we’re able to put our kids in a good school … then we feel like we’re more suited to teach our kids at home.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

If you drop into an elementary reading lesson, you might see kids learning about the long U sound, building their vocabulary or practicing how to read aloud without sounding like robots.

And if you visit Kansas City Public Schools this fall, you should see all students in the same grade learning the same thing.

After all, a push is underway in KCPS to standardize reading lessons and anchor them in evidence about how students learn best.

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Around the state, schools are retraining thousands of teachers, replacing outdated reading lessons and identifying students who need extra help.

Missouri is the latest in a string of states to put money and the force of law behind an effort to teach more kids to read.

The strategy hinges on the idea that some teaching methods weren’t working very well. Kids struggled to , though they were capable of learning. Research — often known as the “science of reading” — pointed to a better way, but wasn’t always heeded.

“Teachers that are coming into the profession just don’t have that science of reading background from universities,” said Connie Moore, director of elementary curriculum at KCPS.��

Evidence-based teacher training is “assisting those brand new teachers, even veteran teachers, that have students come with reading deficiencies or specific needs around reading,” she said. “We’re getting students to read on grade level, because that’s the ultimate goal.”

Missouri law changes

A Missouri adopted in 2022 requires that all public school elementary students get reading instruction that has proved “highly likely to be effective.”

That means the teaching techniques must have been studied by looking at the outcome for large numbers of students, and that they include five key components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

Previously, science of reading proponents say, many students weren’t getting enough phonics instruction. Most kids need to be explicitly taught about sounds, how they relate to letters and how to use that knowledge to decode words.

Meanwhile, students that many now see as damaging — things like using pictures and context to guess words rather than sounding them out.

What a student learned in class could be the luck of the draw, said Megan Mitchell, a K-5 English language arts curriculum coordinator at KCPS.

One teacher might spend most of their time on foundational phonics skills while another might focus on comprehension, she said. But students need systematic instruction in all five areas.

Teachers also need to know how to work with students who need extra help.

“Before, I may have heard the (student’s) error, but just didn’t really have a concrete way to understand where that was coming from,” Moore said. “What’s going on that is causing this student to make this error, and how can I work with them to correct it?”

The law is meant to push schools toward proven strategies.

include standards for . The law also gives the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education power to recommend curriculum, offer more teacher training and closely track how well young students can read.

Students who don’t score well on reading tests are supposed to receive intensive help.

But putting new education laws into action can be harder than getting them passed, said Torree Pederson, the president and CEO of Aligned, a nonprofit coalition of business leaders pushing for education reform.

“You’re handing it off to an agency that’s already stretched and asking them to do more,” she said. “It’s not an easy task to retrain all the teachers in Missouri.”

Implementing the law

The state doesn’t have the power to mandate curriculum or teacher training, but it is nudging districts in a certain direction.

With $25 million in state dollars and $35 million in federal relief money, the state education department is willing to pay for specific intensive reading training for at least 15,000 teachers.

The , called LETRS and pronounced “letters,” emphasizes the science of reading and the five reading components Missouri law supports. It can take up to 168 hours over the course of at least two years.

The state also offers grants to replace old curriculum with evidence-based materials. Schools that don’t qualify for the grants can use the state’s as a guide.

About 11,000 teachers have at least started the training under the . Heather Knight, the state’s literacy coordinator, said several thousand more have been trained since 2021 through other state or local programs.

The state originally targeted K-3 and preschool teachers, but opened the training up to fourth and fifth grade teachers as well.

More than 480 of the roughly 550 school districts and charter schools in Missouri are participating. But even districts that appreciate LETRS training aren’t embracing it at the same pace.

KCPS has required the training for early elementary teachers, reading specialists and others, seeing it as a way to comply with the law on evidence-based instruction, Moore said. Practically all teachers in those groups have at least started the training.

North Kansas City Public Schools took a slower, more cautious approach, said instructional coordinator Lisa Friesen.

The training is now encouraged but not required for most teachers, Friesen said. About a third of elementary teachers have registered.

Some of the lessons from LETRS have made their way into the district’s reading curriculum, which is designed in-house and updated yearly.

Momentum to change

Mitchell, the KCPS curriculum coordinator, thinks it was about four years ago when she started to hear about the science of reading.

The news came through research for her job, but also from a science of reading Facebook group and from American Public Media podcast “,” which has helped and inform a wider audience about reading research.

Although much of the research on reading there’s new momentum behind evidence-based teaching. But Missouri is far from the first to try it.

A 2013 law gets credit for the “Mississippi miracle,” where that state’s reading scores dramatically increased. All school districts saw improvement, though . Several other states have seen notable gains as well. And Florida, whose 2002 reading legislation inspired Mississippi’s, has among the best reading scores.

In early 2024, reported that 37 states and the District of Columbia had passed reading legislation in the past decade, most within the past five years, and 17 of them within 2023 alone.

A January 2024 from ExcelInEd, a nonprofit founded by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, shows nearly all states have adopted some reading policies. Missouri now checks most of the think tank’s boxes.

Those lists don’t include which Gov. Laura Kelly signed in April.

New curriculum

Companies that produce curriculum and other classroom resources are taking note.

Education company Learning A-Z knew schools would be looking for materials based on the science of reading, in part because of state law changes, President Aaron Ingold said.

So the company, which had focused on supplemental resources, recently got into creating a comprehensive curriculum called Foundations A-Z. It’s on Missouri’s�� list of recommended resources.

Learning A-Z has changed some of its thinking, Ingold said. It no longer includes “cueing,” an out-of-favor strategy that encourages children to look at context such as pictures and sentence structure to figure out words rather than sounding them out.

Instead, the program includes more phonics instruction and books known as “decodables” that contain words and spelling patterns students have learned.

Moore said the science of reading is an example of how research doesn’t always “trickle down to us in a timely manner.”

But with training and curriculum companies on board, and the expectation that teachers will see gains in the classroom, she thinks it’s more than a passing fad.

“I don’t think it’s something that’s going to come and go in education,” she said.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Facetime calls. Blaring music. Video games.

“You name it, it was happening” during class at DeLaSalle High School, said Breona Ward, director of college and career progressions.

Students’ cellphone use got in the way of learning at the Kansas City charter school.

The difference Ward saw in her English classroom was “night and day” after a crackdown on cellphones midway through the 2022-23 school year. With students’ phones locked up, she saw fewer power struggles, disruptions and social media-fueled conflicts.

Even students’ downtime was different, Ward said. Instead of having their heads bowed, eyes fixed on phones, they talked with one another and played board games.

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“It’s beautiful,” she said. “You see kids who normally aren’t talking to each other, they’re not in the same friend group, but they are growing bonds, and they’re actually communicating.”

But 18 months after introducing a stricter cellphone policy, the Kansas City charter school is pondering how to ease up without reverting to the same old problems.

Students are advocating to use their phones in some circumstances, such as outside of class. Executive director Sean Stalling wants to encourage their initiative.

“While I might not agree 100% with every change” students have proposed, Stalling said, “I will agree 100% that having the policy that’s co-created with students and school … will be easier to enforce and easier to implement.”

How the policy worked

DeLaSalle in early 2023.

The school — which specializes in working with students who were behind on credits or otherwise struggled at other high schools — urgently needed to get more out of classroom time. After all, they were still catching up from the pandemic.

Some research shows negative impacts on academic performance, mental health and exercise when students use cellphones in school.

Three-quarters of public schools nationally during the 2020-21 school year, but enforcement of those bans is wildly uneven. A of about 200 children ages 11 to 17 found 97% of them used cellphones in school.

Rather than just putting a cellphone ban in writing, DeLaSalle used magnetically sealed pouches made by and marketed for schools, events and workplaces. Students can carry the pouches with them, but they only open with a special unlocking station.

At least, that’s how it was supposed to work.

Students quickly discovered that the pouches are fallible, Principal Erin Wilmore said.

A Google search brings up advice on breaching the lock, sometimes without tell-tale damage.

Students’ attempts to skirt the policy have required the school to devote time to enforcement rather than relying on Yondr alone, Wilmore said.

As part of the morning routine, students go through bag checks and Wilmore or a vice principal examines every Yondr pouch. When they find a damaged pouch, they toss it.

In class, teachers who catch students using phones call administrators.

Students who violate the policy can have their phones confiscated during school, sometimes for days or weeks. Other than those consequences, the policy isn’t meant to be punitive.

“We do not want to suspend kids, restrict them and do things to them that could lead to them not being in school,” Stalling said.

Students also got around the policy by bringing tablets — too big to fit in Yondr pouches — or Apple watches, Ward said. But in general, those devices have been less disruptive than phones. For example, it’s easier to see at a glance how a student is using a tablet.

Reactions and impact

Stalling said the policy left more time for teaching.

Students beat the scores of their Kansas City Public Schools neighborhood high school peers, on average, when they took their 2023 state English exams. DeLaSalle records also show they narrowed the gap on math scores. Final scores for 2024 aren’t available yet.

Stalling said it’s notable because many DeLaSalle students previously struggled in those neighborhood schools. It’s not clear how much of the improvement is a result of the cellphone policy.

Teachers generally supported launching the cellphone policy, Stalling said, with the exception of one who already had a policy that was working well.

Wilmore, the principal, said teachers generally appreciate the clarity and the attempt to reclaim instruction time. But they also say enforcement — hailing an administrator when a kid gets busted for using a phone — can pose its own distraction.

About 95% of parents also support the policy, Stalling said. Some even help enforce it.

“We have had parents call us to say, ‘Hey, my son just called me from the bathroom, and I know he’s not supposed to have his phone,’” he said.

Some parents say they worry about safety and how they’d reach their child during a shooting or some other crisis, Ward said.

The school made exceptions for special circumstances such as students using phones to monitor medical conditions, expecting an important phone call from court or going through a family tragedy.

Students who go off campus for internships or college classes are generally allowed to keep their phones with them for safety reasons, Ward said.

She thinks phones pose their own risks. Social media drama “spills over into real life here in the building,” she said. “Behavioral incidents have (gone) down significantly because they have less access to their phones.”

Phone restrictions also prevent real-life teasing or conflict from being recorded, going viral and becoming a schoolwide incident, Stalling said.

Students, generally, aren’t so hot on the policy.

Administrators and students are negotiating potential changes, Stalling said. DeLaSalle will still keep phones out of class but could retire Yondr pouches — unless a student breaks the rules.

“Instructional time will still be sacred,” Stalling said. But “students have lunch, students have passing periods, students have out-of-the-building programs. And so there are times that the students would like to have access to their phone.”

Ideas about tweaking the policy are worth listening to, Wilmore said. But she also likes what the strict version of the cellphone ban has done.

Students now understand, she said, “that we’re not going to let phones take away from the culture of learning. … It showed them an extremity. Now, it’s putting the ball back in their court if we revise the policy.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

This spring, the state of Missouri owed Kimberly Luong Nichols $5,000 in backlogged payments for children at her Kansas City daycare who were part of a state subsidy program.

For four years, she’s operated a licensed daycare inside her home, where she currently serves 10 children. Luong Nichols stopped drawing a salary last summer to pay for improvements to her center and two new hires, expecting to draw down a salary again this year.

When the full subsidy she was owed stopped arriving, she laid off those staff.

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And as they’ve done for the past year, her family of six relies solely on her husband’s $53,000 salary.

They’ve given up little luxuries like going out to dinner and buying fancier shampoo. And they’ve given up bigger luxuries, like vacations.

When bill collectors started calling, her husband considered getting a second job. On several occasions, she considered doing away with the daycare entirely. But she didn’t, not wanting to leave the families — many of whom have children with developmental disabilities, or who are in the foster care system — with the stress of searching for a new day care.

Luong Nichols is among thousands of child care providers across Missouri who rely on a state child care subsidy program to keep their daycares afloat.

The subsidy, part of a federal block grant program that is state-administered, helps cover the cost of serving low-income and foster children.

But since late last year, a series of changes created a major headache for many providers and families, as parents were unable to register their children and providers in the most dire circumstances were left without money to pay their staff.

The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, which oversees the program, has largely blamed a contracted vendor for the months-long backlogs. The system, which launched in December, is still not fully operational.

“ … There have been a number of unforeseen challenges during the transition, which involves loading family and provider data from the existing state systems into the new (Child Care Data System),” Mallory McGowin, a spokesperson with the department of education said in a statement Wednesday. “The (Office of Childhood) is working hard to mitigate these issues and sincerely apologizes to the child care providers and families affected.”

But similar backlogs plagued the system three years ago, as parents struggled to enroll children and providers had to make serious budget cuts.

The latest problems have forced some daycares to close. Others have shifted from serving vulnerable children who qualify for the state subsidy to only admitting families who can afford to pay on their own.

Many providers, like Luong Nichols, have weeks where they’re barely hanging on.

Payment backlogs not new

In Missouri, child care providers can be registered to get a government stipend for every child on subsidy, meaning they receive a partial amount of tuition directly from families, and then the government covers the rest after care has been provided.

The child care subsidy is a federal program administered by states through the Child Care and Development Block Grant. Families apply for the state to directly pay a child care provider for part of the cost of care.

Only very low-income families along with foster kids and children with special needs. The maximum income a family can make to qualify is 150% of the federal poverty line, or

The average cost of full-time, center-based care for an infant in Missouri was as of 2022, according to

There were about as of November, the last publicly available state data. The program shifted from being administered by Missouri’s Department of Social Services to the education department in December. McGowin said the current number is closer to 23,000 children.

Roughly 1,800 of Missouri’s 2,800 licensed and license-exempt providers, including school districts, are contracted to take children on subsidy, Pam Thomas, assistant commissioner for Missouri’s Office of Childhood, said at a State Board of Education meeting last month.

“We do continue to struggle a bit with our vendor and meeting what our expectations are for an efficient and effective system and making clear what’s needed,” Thomas told the board. “And quite frankly the vendor is not delivering on those results to what I would say are our expectations as a department.”

The vendor contracted to develop and implement the new system for the subsidy program is World Wide Technology, McGowin said, a large technology services provider headquartered in St. Louis.

Board members expressed concerns with how to move forward as Thomas reassured them that her department was working “around the clock” to urge the vendor to fix the bugs in the system, which spans about nine steps between a family’s application for subsidy and payment to the provider.

“We have to be cautious about how many more changes we add into the system right now,” she said. “ … We can bend it, but we certainly can’t break it, and I think we’re on the verge of that right now.”

Yet this isn’t the first time the state’s handling of the subsidy program has caused widespread problems for providers and families.

In 2021, the state blamed the COVID-19 pandemic and the rollout of a new system used to track attendance, called KinderConnect, for a

In spring 2023, to be approved for the state assistance, leaving them struggling to juggle work and child care.

State Sen. Lauren Arthur, a Democrat from Kansas City, said she was notified of the current spate of issues a few months ago by legislative staff who’d started hearing concerns from constituents.

“It feels like way too much time has passed,” Arthur said. “I suspect that child care providers across the state have already closed as a result of these mistakes and it’s totally unacceptable when already providers are struggling. There are already not enough seats available for children who need them.”

Asked last month if she was looking at alternative vendors ahead of the current multi-million dollar contract running out in December, Thomas, with the education department, said she wasn’t opposed.

However, on Wednesday, McGowin, said the department is not currently planning on finding a new vendor. The subsidy payment issues – 60% of which came from technical issues, according to the state – are expected to be resolved by the end of July.

Missouri pays providers for services after they’re performed, rather than in advance. This, coupled with the fact that providers are paid based on attendance rather than enrollment for children in the subsidy program, makes budgeting nearly impossible for providers who take low-income and foster children.

“We’re really relying on the state and DESE to really prioritize solving these system challenges so providers can be paid quickly,” said Casey Hanson, director of outreach and engagement at the child advocacy nonprofit Kids Win Missouri.

Hanson has spent hundreds of hours with child care providers over the past several years. She knows what’s at stake.

“They’re some of the most resilient people,” she said. “They care about children, they care about the future of our state more than almost anyone.”

‘Our own personal pandemic’

Tina Mosley was among the providers who made the difficult decision to stop taking children on subsidy.

For 28 years, she has owned and operated Our Daycare and Learning Center in St. Louis, which is licensed for 10 children. It sits in the Normandy school district where the median household income is less than $39,000, and more than 56% of students in public school have SNAP benefits, according to 2021 data from the

Every other provider she knows in the area accepts children on subsidy. And they’re all in the same predicament.

“Every one of my colleagues and friends, the state is behind on paying them,” Mosley said. “To the right of me, to the left of me, across the street from me, behind me.”

By only taking private paying families, and by ceasing to collect a salary, Mosley said she’s been able to continue employing her two staff, both of whom are young mothers. And while they no longer take children on subsidy, they still service lower income families, she said.

As a result, she’s not left waiting on payments from the state. A handful of home and center-based providers she knows in the St. Louis area already closed because of the lag.

Several months ago, when most of her children were from the subsidy program, she was helping parents sign up for state benefits as the system transitioned over. She recalls parents sharing screenshots of hold times on the phone with the state surpassing an hour before they had to hang up and return to work, unable to get the immediate help they needed.

“Early child care right now, we feel like we’re in our own personal pandemic,” Mosley said.

But unlike during the COVID-19 pandemic, when government bodies and communities showed up in stride to keep child care providers in business, Mosley said it feels like most people have now turned their backs.

Luong Nichols, in Kansas City, has considered doing what Mosley has done: stop opening her services to families on subsidy.

In an April email to a staffer in Arthur’s office, she lamented her situation. The system had two of her kids on subsidy listed as private pay. A glitch wouldn’t let her submit attendance. She hadn’t heard back on her help ticket.

“I am due to renew child care subsidy next month and really considering not doing it,” she wrote in an email she shared with The Independent. “Payments are still not correct, they owe me all of February and past corrections. Now we are about to end March and that will be added.”

After sending this email, Luong Nichols went on to interview at a local school district. She ultimately turned down the job offer, unable to part with the children in her care, including foster children, kids with behavioral difficulties and low-income children.

“I have single moms and foster children that have been kicked out of other daycares or gone through many placements before they landed on my door. And the kids that I take care of, they’re like family.”

Instead she continued to spend hours on the phone during nap time begging anyone to make her business whole again. She called the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the governor’s office. She even called the White House.

“I’ve had to take on an extra load of work just to fight for something that I’m entitled to,” she said.

As of Wednesday, she said her payments were caught up through May. She credited her persistence, and assistance from Arthur’s staff, for speeding up the payment.

At the same time, Luong Nichols has seen three area centers and four private daycares shutter. She directs most of the blame at the department of education.

“DESE has pushed the industry to the point of no return right now,” she said. ”We’re not going to have enough child care providers in the state of Missouri by the end of this year to take care of subsidy children.” She said it will move to private paying families only.

Hanson, with Kids Win Missouri, said there isn’t currently enough data to know the reality of the child care landscape.

In response to a Sunshine request submitted by The Independent last month, the education agency said they do not currently track the number of backlogged payment resolution requests.

“The reality is, yeah, there are providers that will close,” Hanson said. “That’s why we continue to advocate that we need more state level funding in this space to really maintain a supply.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on and .

Cindy Lane takes it personally that Kansas needed a Kansas Blueprint for Literacy initiative to improve preparation of educators to teach reading and funnel more literate students into colleges and the workplace.

Lane, retired special education teacher and former superintendent of Kansas City, Kansas, schools, will soon step down from the Kansas Board of Regents to become administrative director of Blueprint for Literacy. The Kansas Legislature adopted and Gov. Laura Kelly signed into law a bill mandating the state’s education system engrain in current and future teachers evidence-based reading science strategies.

A bipartisan coalition of state legislators earmarked $10 million to implement the blueprint and work to change the lives of 40% of Kansas public school students not proficient at reading.

“Frankly, this is personal,” Lane said. “I was a kid who my favorite subject was recess. It really was. The way that reading was approached at that time didn’t connect with how I think and grow and I really didn’t learn to read until I was in junior high. And, I can’t imagine being a person who never had a teacher that figured out what’s the code for that kid to be able to learn to read. I can’t imagine what their life must be like today.”

Lane, who plans to resign from the state Board of Regents on June 24, will collaborate with universities and school districts to reform instruction of college students studying to become teachers and to provide existing teachers with new literacy tools. The law also required creation of an oversight commission, the establishment of university centers of excellence and regular accountability reports to the Legislature.

“There is an imperative here to make sure that all of our students are highly literate,” Lane said on the Kansas Reflector podcast. “They have to be able to read and write well to be successful today. So, for me, this is dream making. You have a dream. I want to help you get there.”

‘Get off the sidelines’

Blake Flanders, president of the Kansas Board of Regents, said the law could be viewed as the largest workforce development project in state history in terms of targeted training and retraining within the education field.

The Board of Regents, which has jurisdiction over the six state universities, will have a prominent role due to the number of school of education students in the pipeline who must enroll in a pair of three-credit-hour courses offering hands-on experience in teaching reading to children.

Under Senate Bill 438, the state universities must begin offering the two new literacy courses this fall or be sanctioned. Kansas State University and the two other larger universities would lose $1 million if they procrastinated, while Fort Hays State University and the two other regional universities would lose $500,000 if they balked.

“We don’t have enough students reading at grade level,” said Flanders, who argued 40% proficiency among students should be viewed as a crisis. “We’ve got to get off the sidelines. We’re the ones charged with educating the educators. Right? So we’re stepping into the arena to not say we have all the answers, but to open open the tent to everybody.”

The Kansas State Board of Education will be part of the mix given the plan to retrain thousands of licensed Kansas educators in reading instruction, Flanders said. Both boards will be expected to collaborate with the new Literacy Advisory Committee.

Sen. Molly Baumgardner, a Louisburg Republican and chair of the Senate Education Committee, worked on creating the framework for an inclusive approach to elevating reading instruction with higher education institution, education advocates, school districts and parents. It will add to the state’s deliberate work to improve early literacy success of young children.

“For many years,” she said, “the Kansas Legislature has recognized the solid science behind early literacy success in children. It requires early screening of children, solid teacher training and classroom materials that support evidence-base practices.”

Advisory panel key

The advisory committee established by the law must be in place by Jan. 1 with representatives from universities, community colleges, technical colleges, the state Board of Education, the state Board of Regents and the Legislature.

“This group is essential,” Lane said. “We need all the minds at the table. It’s a big tent kind of mentality. My role is almost like the general manager of a baseball team. And, this advisory committee is on the field in the positions and they will be called on based on their individual knowledge at times, but they also may be called on to go somewhere else on the field and perform.”

Likewise, the advisory panel would develop a plan by Jan. 1 to establish the centers of excellence in reading that would provide assessment and diagnosis of reading difficulties, train educators in simulation labs and support other professional learning opportunities. The intent of the law would be for all elementary school teachers in Kansas to earn a reading instruction credential by 2030.

The law set goals for student achievement. Half of students in third to eighth grades would be expected to achieve Level 3 in standardized testing in reading by 2033, which would mean they understood skills and knowledge needed to be college or career ready. Also, the 2033 target would be for 90% of these 3rd to 8th grade students would read at Level 2, which is viewed as equal to their grade level in school.

Flanders said one estimate indicated the state’s economy would create 56,000 new jobs by 2030. Eighty percent of those would require a baccalaureate degree and the current rate of achievement in reading in Kansas public schools wouldn’t fill that workforce gap, he said.

The state university system would be “committing malpractice” to acknowledge students and teachers were struggling with reading instruction but choose not to be part of the solution, Lane said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on and .

This vision encompasses the knowledge and skills needed for success in school and the dispositions that students must have for success beyond the classroom. But despite decades of education reform efforts stemming from the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk, numerous factors have impeded widespread innovation in schools. Striving to create meaningful learning experiences for all students, Liberty Public Schools, home to approximately 12,500 students from Liberty and Kansas City, Missouri, has taken significant steps in designing a learner-centered ecosystem. This work has evolved through local, regional and state-level collaboration, ensuring that the ideas of students, educators, policymakers and the business community are incorporated.

Strategic planning efforts have defined what it means to be learner-centered so that all children can thrive. These approaches focus on the unique abilities and interests of each student, compared with the traditional, one-size-fits-all model. Through significant community engagement and professional development across all 19 schools in the pre-K-12 system, the district developed a Graduate Profile and Vivid Vision. For over a decade, the district has been working to offer various learning experiences, such as elementary- and secondary-level microschools and the UnSchool Challenge.

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These are rooted in Missouri’s educational standards but designed with students at the center. EPIC elementary — EPIC stands for “Every Person Inspired to Create” — was established in 2014 as an incubator for experimenting with such innovative practices as project-based learning and then implementing them across the district. It is a school of choice — meaning a lottery-based educational option outside their traditional neighborhood elementary school that a student’s family can opt into. At the secondary level, North Nation by Design and EDGE are microschools within traditional high schools that focus on collaboration with peers and professionals, student voice and choice, content-specific seminars, problem-based learning and real-world experiences. The UnSchool Challenge, developed in an effort to rethink alternative education, incorporates reverse internships in which business and community partners mentor students both on projects they are passionate about and areas they desire to pursue beyond high school, whether in the workplace, college or the armed services.

With the support of the community and in collaboration with other innovative districts, Liberty Public Schools has created a learning network that extends beyond its boundaries, allowing for exchanging ideas and best practices. Organizations like Education Reimagined reaffirmed our aim to transition from traditional approaches. Acceptance into Digital Promise’s League of Innovative Schools expanded our partnership with like-minded leaders in innovative districts nationwide to learn from one another. The district’s shift in culture and a growing desire to collaborate across the region resulted in a Business to Education (B2E) partnership with area Chambers of Commerce, civic organizations, philanthropic foundations and higher-education partners to expand real-world learning experiences for all students.

One of its key partnerships has been with area districts that are part of the Kansas City area Real World Learning (RWL) initiative. The network is a collaboration of area Missouri and Kansas school districts that connects students with business, industry and higher education to provide experiences that prepare them for success beyond graduation. Through internships, dual-credit classes, industry-recognized credentials, client-connected projects and entrepreneurial experiences, students develop the knowledge and skills needed to excel in college or the workplace.

In Missouri, the State Board of Education and Department of Elementary and Secondary Education are working to redesign traditional approaches to assessment and accreditation. Creating the Success Ready Students Network and establishing Innovation Zones has laid the groundwork for personalized learning that aligns with the Aurora Institute’s definition of competency-based education. By emphasizing the importance of ensuring that students graduate with at least one market-value asset, Missouri is designing a more personalized and effective approach to education.

As the state faces changes in leadership and governance, it must remain committed to innovation and personalized learning experiences for students. By building upon the successes of the past and embracing new approaches to assessment and accreditation, Missouri can create the learning ecosystems that students need and deserve.

The Liberty Public Schools’s learning ecosystem exemplifies what is possible when educators, policymakers and the community unite to prioritize student success and create a learner-centered approach to education. By continuing to innovate and collaborate, districts in Missouri and across the country can work to scale innovation that truly meets the needs of all learners.

One day he was chatting with an 8th-grade student, who he described as a “superstar,” and asked if she had studied for that day’s exam. He was shocked to hear she hadn’t.

“Well Mr. Guskey,” he remembers her saying, a quizzical look on her face, “I worked it out. I only need a 50.2 to get an A [in the class]. I don’t need to study for a 50.2.”

This was a moment of realization for him. “This 8th grader had worked it out to the tenth decimal place what she needed to do to get an A in my class,” he said. “And she was surprised I didn’t get it. And I thought, ‘Wow. What have I done?’” 

For this student — and so many others — school was not about learning. It was about getting a good grade. And with flawed traditional grading systems, those two outcomes didn’t always coincide.

Every time Guskey tells this story to other teachers, he said they shake their heads and share similar anecdotes of their own. Other experts in the field echo these sentiments, noting that schools have spent far too long grading students based on whether or not they turned in a pile of work or showed up to class on time, rather than focusing on if a student has learned academic content. This can ultimately lead to final grades that inaccurately reflect and communicate what kids actually know. 

Today, as schools combat post-pandemic learning gaps, it’s become even clearer that traditional grades are not precise communicators of learning. In some cases, this leads parents to believe their kids are performing at grade level, when in reality they’re falling behind. 

As educators push for more clarity and transparency, a number of schools and districts are turning to what’s known as standards-based grading, a system and communication tool that separates academic mastery from behavioral factors. When done correctly, it should more accurately reflect what students know and correct for both inflating — and deflating — grades. 

But a misunderstanding of standards-based grading’s true principles, a lack of proper training for educators and a rush to quickly adopt a complex new system often leads to messy implementation, various experts told The 74. And, they warn, districts looking for support are turning to grading consultants, a number of whom aren’t qualified in the field.

“So many districts are getting into this and they’re failing miserably,” said Guskey, the grading and assessment expert and professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky College of Education. “Schools are jumping into this without a clear notion of what they’re doing and what the prerequisites are to being standards based,” he continued. “And then when problems arise, they have no recourse except to abandon [it] completely.”

As schools look for an effective fix to learning gaps, “standards-based grading is one that seems like it can be a quickly adopted effort. But it could backfire and does backfire very easily,” said Laura Link, associate professor of teaching and leadership at the University of North Dakota.

In a she and Guskey wrote, “although many schools today are initiating SBG reforms, there’s little consensus on what ‘standards-based grading’ actually means. As a result, SBG implementation is widely inconsistent.” This creates uncertainty, confusion, frustration — and resistance, which can ultimately lead to it being tossed aside, the authors said.

The many meanings of a “C”

Standards-based grading is not new. While it’s challenging to pin down just how many schools are currently using it, post-pandemic interest in a system that’s seen as more accurate and equitable appears to be growing. 

Link is now working with the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania school district on implementation. It can also be found in at least one school district in the San Francisco Bay Area and is particularly prevalent in schools in Wyoming, New Hampshire, Maine and Wisconsin, with more cropping up in Connecticut, New Mexico, and Oregon, in November.

Another expert, Cathy Vatterott, who wrote Rethinking Grading: Meaningful Assessment for Standards-Based Learning and is professor emeritus of education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, said: “After we got through COVID, all of a sudden I started getting offers to come and speak to people about standards-based grading.” 

Regardless of what model teachers practice, they typically grade using three different criteria: what academic skills students have learned and are able to do, such as solving for “x” in an algebraic equation; what behaviors they bring that enable learning, such as attendance and turning in work on time; and how much they’ve grown and improved.

In traditional models, teachers combine these three, muddling them together and assigning a single mark for an assignment — often a letter grade or a percentage. At the end of a semester, these assignment scores get averaged into a final grade that goes onto a transcript or report card. Proponents of standards-based grading argue that this presents an unclear and inaccurate picture to parents, students and colleges. 

“It makes the grade impossible to interpret,” according to Guskey. For example, a “C” on a paper could mean the student really only understood the material at a “C” level or it could mean they turned in an excellent paper but two weeks late. Further adding to the confusion: what goes into a grade is inconsistent from teacher to teacher and school to school.

Traditional grading not only presents accuracy concerns but also equity ones, according to Matt Townsley, assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Northern Iowa. “For example, if we award points for assignments that are completed on a daily basis — called homework — outside of class, you can imagine a scenario where some families are more privileged in their ability to do it,” he said. 

Some students have access to a quiet place to work, tutors, parents who can help them with assignments, and other key resources, while others work after-school jobs or take care of younger siblings. When teachers grade homework, experts like Townsley argue, they are grading for these factors, rather than what students have actually learned. 

To combat this, standards-based grading does it differently. Rather than lumping together academic, behavioral and improvement grades, it separates them and reports them out individually in what Link calls a “dashboard of information.” 

Too often, she said, consultants and other self-proclaimed experts, who are not researchers, will push to throw away behavioral grades altogether. But she warned “that becomes problematic very, very quickly. We shouldn’t be using our gradebooks to punish and control. But those factors — those behavioral factors — are academic enablers, and we know that to be true as well.”

Reporting it out separately makes students recognize that these other components still count and, in some ways, it makes them each count more because they can no longer be disguised by other factors, like extra credit, according to Guskey.

It’s important for schools to decide upfront what behaviors they want to prioritize — whether that’s attendance, work ethic, responsibility— and then build a guide on how teachers will score for them. “By giving these kinds of dashboards of information, it helps colleges, trade schools, etc. have a deeper understanding of what kind of students they’re accepting into the programs and what kind of support they will need in college,” Link said. 

The academic grades should be based on grade-level standards and learning objectives, like the ability to find strong evidence to support a claim if a student is writing a paper or answering a test question.

A second key criteria is moving away from handing out percentage grades based on 100 to using a much smaller measurement scale, like 0 to 4. On each standard, students could also be graded as “exceeding,”, “meeting,” “almost” or “not yet.” Guskey noted that while this all may sound novel and unusual, other countries around the world, including Canada, have been using these practices for decades.

A third component — providing students multiple opportunities to demonstrate their understanding and mastery of a standard — is often where the greatest controversy crops up and things are most likely to go awry. Some educators argue that students should receive limitless opportunities to redo specific assignments. Researchers such as Link, though, argue that while students need multiple opportunities to demonstrate their understanding, that does not necessarily mean redoing the same assignment. 

“This is where a lot of non-academic proponents encourage that standards-based grading means you give as many retakes as it takes for mastery. Not true. Not true. That’s an assessment issue. That’s not a grading issue.”

So, while a second chance at one assignment is perhaps the fair thing to do, it is not inherent to the ethos of standards-based grading. She emphasized that if schools do implement retake policies, the process needs to be purposeful: If a student doesn’t get it the first time, they need to get corrective feedback and instruction. But “if they don’t get it on the second chance, you’re going to record their grade and move on,” she said. 

There is no empirical evidence supporting the benefits of endless retakes and, she added, such practices can be a time-consuming and unrealistic ask of teachers. 

Because many of the people who write about and consult on testing don’t fully understand what’s behind assessing students more than once, Guskey said, their recommendations on how best to do it are often untested and can’t be supported in practice. Their inconsistent advice, he said, can lead teachers and administrators to forsake efforts to reform grading. 

While it’s important to understand what standards-based grading is, it’s also essential to debunk what it’s not. At its core, experts say, it’s purely a communication tool. It doesn’t tell educators how to create assessments, build curriculum or manage behavior. It can make space for teachers to provide more individualized feedback and for students to move through the skills and knowledge they need to master at their own pace. But these things aren’t inherently a part of it. 

“Basically everything is just to pass.”

When Kenny Rodrequez became superintendent of the Grandview school district a decade ago, he knew the grading system needed to change. He was concerned that as it stood, the traditional grading model they relied on wasn’t communicating students’ progress to their parents accurately. Leaders in the district, located just outside of Kansas City, ultimately decided to shift to standards-based grading for kindergarten through 6th grade. 

Now, in his eighth year as superintendent and ninth year overseeing the transition, he feels good about what they’ve accomplished. One key factor of the successful implementation, he said, was “not trying to do it all at once.” It can be tempting to “just say, ‘Let’s bite the bullet and let’s just roll it all out at the same time,’” he added. It was important, though, to fight this urge and instead find a balance that allowed for deliberate policy shifts that still didn’t take an inordinate amount of time to implement.

Another key factor: making sure there was strong teacher and parent buy-in. The first year in particular, staff was nervous to explain this new system to parents before they even fully understood it themselves. Rodrequez said they created talking points for teachers and gave them the resources they needed. 

In the future, the district plans to bring standards-based grading to 7th-12th grade classrooms, but he anticipates at the high school level this will be trickier. “Our challenge … is nationally we still have a system that’s still pretty based upon our letter grades. And that system’s been around for so long and never was designed to do what we’re trying to get it to do right now.” Demands for GPAs and class rankings, in particular, are incongruous with the standards-based model but often necessary for college applications.

These very challenges have played out in one New York City high school, according to parent Talia Matz. When her stepson started 9th grade at Future High School in Manhattan, the school had orientation sessions to explain to parents how their standards-based grading system works. Still, she and her husband were skeptical. And over the past three years, they’ve only become more concerned, she told The 74. 

Some of the major assignments that the school uses instead of statewide Regents exams “are a bit of a joke,” she said, and students are not held accountable. “Basically everything is just to pass. It doesn’t matter how well you do,” she said, adding, “it doesn’t seem like there’s any love of learning. It’s just kind of to get it done.” 

Contrary to best practices, on his report card there are no separated out comments or grades about behaviors. All standards are scored on a 0-4 scale, and parents and students can see grades on an online platform called JumpRope. But, the school then converts this scale into a traditional percentage grade, which is ultimately sent to colleges — another big no-no, according to experts. (According to the , schools may choose from a number of grading scales, including A-F, but it appears that regardless of what they select, all grades are ultimately converted into percentages.)

Students have a number of opportunities to redo assignments and no clear consequences for late work, Matz said. Rather than getting grades on daily assignments, he gets a “Work Habits/Independent Practice” score, which his stepmom said never appears on a transcript. This, she said, provides no incentive to turn assignments in on time or get them right the first time.

School administrators did not respond to requests for comment. The school’s website contests this point: Their official policy states that the “Work Habits/Independent Practice” score becomes 10% of a student’s final grade. Never reporting the behavior grade or averaging it into a single final grade would both go against standards-based grading best practices. 

Matz fears all this lends itself to lowered standards, which will leave her son unprepared for college. In the fall, he’ll enroll at SUNY Buffalo, “but we’re concerned because there’s going to be different expectations … You have to study on your own, you don’t necessarily get second or third chances.”

For starters, experts suggest, get the kids back into school. Routines matter in the raw aftermath of trauma.

Child health experts say the shooting that killed a mother and wounded several children at the close of Kansas City’s celebration of the Chiefs’ latest championship likely left kids traumatized. Whether they were near Union Station or, for some, just hearing the news.

Schools quickly made social workers and counselors available Thursday and put out advice to parents on how to help children return to a sense of normalcy and safety.

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Some children, the experts say, need to talk about their concerns. That, the experts say, needs to be balanced against dwelling too much on what happened or trying to force conversations that could go wrong.

Wednesday’s violence came after clinicians saw a troubling mental health hangover from the pandemic.

“Rates of anxiety and depression doubled for young people,” said Dr. Shayla Sullivant, a child and adolescent psychiatrist with Children’s Mercy Hospital. “Now we have more kids that have experienced trauma.”

Multiple school districts told The Beacon that they’re turning to what’s familiar — like going right back to school — to help restore calm after a calamity.

When disaster strikes, “it comes from a place that we didn’t expect, and we don’t know how to deal with that,” said David Smith, a spokesperson for the Shawnee Mission School District. “Being able to connect people, kids, to the familiar, to the routine, can be helpful and give them a comfort that the world is returning to the world that they know and (where) they feel safe.”

Adults matter, too. Parents and teachers, Smith said, need to recognize and seek support for their own distress “in order for us to be there for our kids.”

The shooting marked a “community-level trauma,” said Damon Daniel, president of the Ad Hoc Group Against Crime, even in a city that saw a record 182 homicides last year.

“We live in a city where we’re not strangers to violence,” he said.

His group worked with prosecutors and other organizations to offer counseling on Thursday at the Kansas City United Church of Christ in Brookside. He said it’s time to talk with professionals and not to lean on isolation, substance abuse or more violence to cope.

“It’s a very complex problem. It’s not one solution,” Daniel said. “There’s no silver bullet to this.”

For starters, public places might never feel the same to some people after the Union Station shooting. Chris Williams, a counselor with Heartland Therapy Connection, said teenagers and young adults might be particularly damaged by the trauma.

“There are no public places they can look at and be, like, ‘I’m safe here,’” he said. “More and more children are on guard, looking out.”

He said survivors can experience extreme post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, such as paranoia or fear of loud noises, and will look to adults for assurance.

“We’re losing that ability to tell them it’s gonna be OK,” Williams said. “There are no safe spaces.”

Kansas City Public Schools Superintendent Jennifer Collier emailed parents urging them to address the trauma directly.

“While our instinct may be to shield them from the harsh realities of the world,” she wrote, “it’s essential to proactively address their concerns, especially with our older students who are more likely to seek information independently.”

The district was still sorting out Thursday how many students were close to the shooting even as it suggested parents limit their children’s exposure to news coverage.

Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools also enlisted counselors and social workers and told parents that their kids need someone to turn to.

“People deal with pain and tragedy differently,” district spokesperson Edwin Birch said. “The main thing is just being available.”

At Wichita’s USD 259, the largest school district in Kansas, administrators strove to return to the routine.

“Children are pretty quick to move on to the next thing,” said Stephanie Anderson, who works in the district’s counseling services. “They don’t dwell on stuff like this, unless they hear adults dwelling on it.”

That, she said, needs to be paired with candor.

“(Don’t) sugarcoat it or don’t create fear,” Anderson said.

She and other experts suggest parents look for routines breaking down in the aftermath of the Super Bowl parade. Is your child having trouble sleeping? Has their appetite dwindled? Are they crankier than usual?

An adult’s ear can prove especially helpful, said , a clinical psychologist specializing in children and adolescents at Laurel School’s Center for Research on Girls in Shaker Heights, Ohio.

She said trusted adults — family, mental health professionals, school staff — need to be available. Cordiano said younger children may prefer to process their emotions about the parade shooting through art, and older children will need someone to confide in.

“When they have those places to talk,” Cordiano said, “it can help them cope.”

The more comfortable kids feel to talk, she said, the better to keep them grounded and feeling safe.

“When we shut it down,” she said, “it makes it too big or scary.”

Yet exposure to leaves some psyches damaged for a lifetime. Starsky Wilson, president of the left-leaning Children’s Defense Fund, said gun violence can heighten children’s risk of abusing drugs and alcohol or weigh them down with depression and anxiety.

“The normalization of gun violence in society can desensitize children to the impact of violence and contribute to a sense of helplessness or resignation about the problem,” he said in an email to The Beacon.

Wilson said, in turn, that can make it harder to feel secure, form relationships or thrive in school.

“When exposed to violence,” he wrote, “school-aged children tend to exhibit lower academic grades and increased absenteeism.”

This story was compiled by Scott Canon based on staff reporting. Suzanne King contributed.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on and .