In the five years since a gunman walked into a Parkland, Florida, high school, killing 17 people and injuring 17 others, national attention has pivoted to more recent mass school shootings in Michigan, Tennessee and Texas.

Yet in Florida, the community is still grappling with fallout from its own deadly attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Just last week, a first-of-its-kind got underway for a former campus police officer who failed to confront the shooter. It wasn’t until November 2022 that the now 24-year-old gunman was and in April, a judge related to the shooting against the former Broward County schools superintendent. 

All these events force Parkland residents to revisit the fatal day. For Ty Thompson, who was the principal of Stoneman Douglas on Feb. 14, 2018, the most pressing issue now is the need for robust campus mental health services, particularly as mass shootings . 

“You shouldn’t have to wait for a tragedy to have a wellness center,” he told The 74. “Every school should have a wellness center on their campus. That’s just the state that we’re in and we need to keep tabs on what’s happening with our youth to make sure that if there are problems, we can catch them early.” 

As a member of , Thompson and other school leaders who confronted mass shootings and their devastating aftermath visited lawmakers last week on Capitol Hill to advocate for additional help in long-term recovery efforts. Their appearance coincides with June being Gun Violence Prevention Month. 

Even after the national attention fizzles away and disaster relief funding dries up, Thompson told The 74, trauma remains omnipresent. Founded in 2019 and supported by the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the Principal Recovery Network works to help guide education leaders immediately after campus shootings and to promote policies that help school communities regain stability. 

Thompson, who retains his principal title, worked for a time as the district’s assistant director of athletics and student activities and is now assigned to the IT department. He talked to The 74 about a range of issues, from the practical advice he offers school leaders reeling from a shooting to his support for school-based police officers, so long as they aren’t monitoring hallways with AR-15s. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

It’s been five years since the Parkland shooting. In what ways is that tragedy present in your community today? 

One of the things we talked about in Washington, D.C., is that while we got a large influx of resources right away, after a year or so people started to disappear as far as the resources. And so that’s one of the things that we’ve been advocating for is the fact that it doesn’t go away. It just continues. 

Even though we’re five years out, there are still things that the school needs. Trauma after an event like this comes in different forms, it hits people at different times over the course of their trauma. For some, it’s right away;  for some, it’s a few years later. For some, it’s many years later. We continue to battle that with the recovery pieces in making sure we’re providing the resources needed, not only to former students and to the staff who are still there, but also our community members as well. 

Can you provide any specific examples of how that trauma from an event five years ago manifests in your community today?

Unfortunately, we see it almost daily on the news. With new shootings, whether it’s at schools or in communities, that brings everything back. So as those things continue to happen in our country and we are constantly reminded of some of the violence happening in our country, that just brings back that day and they think about what took place with their families, friends or community members around our incident. 

It just continues to regurgitate that back up as they go through trying to heal and they are moving toward healing, but as you continue to see this stuff in the news and the daily shootings, it slows down the process.

It’s almost like you take one step forward and two steps back just because of the current environment of things that are going on within our country. 

What tangible policy changes did you present to lawmakers in Washington? What do you think are the most critical steps that we need to take right now to combat this issue?

A lot of our stance with the Principal Recovery Network is exactly that: The recovery. While gun control and all of these things are very pressing factors that are going on right now, that is obviously not our expertise. 

When you’re a leader of a school and you face a tragedy —  it doesn’t have to be a shooting, it could be a tornado taking down a building or suicides and things like that — it’s up to the school leader to be able to help move that school forward. 

Our biggest part is the recovery effort, and a big part of that is wellness and mental health. We are really pushing that part because Congress is moving in that direction, with the importance of mental health. We wanted to advocate for some additional funds in that area because we also feel that’s important not only after a tragedy, but at any time for a school. 

At Stoneman Douglas, after our event, we instituted a wellness center at our school. We had two portables brought in and we had mental health experts who were staffed in those portables and they were able to serve students, staff and community members. Even to this day, five years later, that wellness center is still on campus and it’s still servicing our community. 

One of the things that I brought to Congress was the fact you shouldn’t have to wait for a tragedy to have a wellness center. Every school should have a wellness center on their campus. That’s just the state that we’re in and we need to keep tabs on what’s happening with our youth to make sure that if there are problems, we can catch them early. 

When we look at some of the past shooters, not necessarily mine in some cases but in others, there were red flags along the way. There’s got to be a way for us to get the proper help to students that we see early on that may need some help. I think that having wellness centers on campuses would help that scenario. I’m not saying that it’s going to be a cure-all, but it certainly couldn’t hurt to have that. 

The Parkland shooter did present prior to the attack. What lessons did you and your colleagues learn about threat assessments and early intervention efforts?

Hindsight is always 20/20. In the case of my school, he was only with me for less than a year, and so a lot of these things that we found out after the fact were prior to him being a student at Stoneman Douglas. I’m not passing the blame on anybody, I’m just saying that there are certain things that take place in a student’s educational record that we need to be sure is moving forward through their careers so that people are aware of what’s happening. 

And we’ve made strides in that since our tragedy. With behavioral threat assessments now becoming more digitized and there’s less chance of things falling through the cracks, we definitely have our lessons learned not only from our tragedy, but all of the different tragedies. 

The shooting divided the community. How did you navigate that?

That was probably the toughest part of my job for those 18 months after the tragedy was trying to make sure I put student and staff interests first. Right away, the community rallied behind everyone, they wanted to provide support. Then, after time went by, that’s when the fingers started to point. And that’s not uncommon in any situation like this, where they’re going to start to put blame and figure out who did what wrong. 

The politics are difficult, don’t get me wrong, but I also understand that’s just what happens. It can’t necessarily be avoided though I would like it to be avoided. With a tragedy like this, everyone has their emotions. Emotions get exponentially kind of out there. Someone that may have already been feeling negative about a situation, now they’re feeling that much more negative.

Following the Uvalde shooting, Texas politicians approved legislation to place armed guards at every K-12 school. Florida took a similar approach after Parkland. How do you think this move played out in your state, and how did it affect the overall safety of kids in your schools?

Look, any time you can have extra security on campus is always a good thing. In our case, in Florida, they want every school to have an armed guard or a school resource officer. 

I definitely think that it helps. It’s definitely a good thing, anytime we can increase security and having people feel safe about coming to school is definitely a positive. For the little ones in elementary, when they see people walking around with guns, I’m not quite sure how that could affect their psyche. I just know that when it came to the high school kids, when we got back to school after the tragedy, we had a mini-army on our campus walking around with the same weapon that took out some of our kids. That did not go over well. 

It’s a delicate balance between making sure you’re feeling safe versus feeling scared quite frankly. That’s something that we were able to circumvent after our tragedy, to still have this presence but not have to have people walking around with AR-15s because that really was not the best course of action. 

As far as legislation, SROs are important. It’s good to have someone on campus, at a minimum, to be able to call in resources in the event of a tragedy. There’s so much tension in the country right now when it comes to violence and how to protect kids without making them feel like they’re in jail. I mean, the school is supposed to be a school and not a prison and it’s definitely a delicate balance, but the more people you can have with eyes and ears out there, it definitely makes it a better situation for all of us.

The former school resource officer at your school was criminally charged and put on trial for failing to confront the gunman and stop the shooting. What lessons from Scot Peterson’s response can we learn about the roles and limitations of police in schools? 

Any time there’s an investigation into these kinds of things, they review all those types of policies. I remember after Columbine, they redid how they handle active shooters. Then something else took place and they readjusted policies. That’s the same scenario here. I’m not going to speculate on what he did or didn’t do wrong. I am by no means a law enforcement person, that’s not my expertise and I’m not going to pretend to know what they are supposed to do or not do. But they do review policies after things take place, whether it’s a shooting or it’s some other incident in the community, to determine what could have been done better. 

As a member of the Principal Recovery Network, have you had to make any calls with school leaders after they experienced shootings? What kind of advice do you offer? 

Unfortunately, I’ve had to make a few phone calls. First, I usually send them an email because trying to get ahold of someone on the phone is nearly impossible. So I usually send an email pretty quickly, within 24 hours of when we hear about it. I just let them know who I am and that I kind of know what you may be feeling right now and, ‘Please, give me a call when you can.’ 

Sometimes that call comes quickly. Sometimes the call never comes because I’ve reached out to a couple of principals and never heard back from them. 

And really, it’s just for me to be a listening ear to them to understand. ‘Look, these are some of the things that may start to come up that you may not be aware of.’ Something very logical like your mail is going to start to increase, so you might want to think about getting some extra staff in there just to handle mail. The phones are going to start ringing off the hook, you need to make sure you have some staff for that. You need to think about getting some additional substitutes because some teachers may not be able to come back right away, depending on the size of their school and the tragedy itself. Make sure you don’t try to get back to school before funerals have taken place.

We have a guide to recovery. It’s not like a playbook because not every tragedy is going to be the same exact scenario. But there are some commonalities across all of these things to just keep in mind. You know, you should be meeting with your staff before you bring students back so that you make sure that they’re ready to come back. You want to make sure you have mental health practitioners on campus and ready to go because there’s no way for you to predict how people are going to react.

The main goal is to let them know that I’m here to listen to them. They can call me at any time, no matter what time of day it is. We want them to feel like they’re not alone. 

In his reelection bid, President Joe Biden has made gun violence prevention efforts part of his appeal to young voters. Youth activists from Parkland became leading voices in the gun control movement. Beyond the most outspoken advocates, how do young people in your community view gun violence today and how has the shooting affected their worldviews? 

Our kids rallied very quickly and had the March for Our Lives happen in D.C. within six weeks after our tragedy. I really thought that was going to be a momentum changer, and there were a lot of people involved with that. I was hoping that was really going to make some change. 

I’m not saying that maybe there weren’t some thought processes changed in Washington, but obviously it remains a hot topic. I do know that many of my kids that were involved from Stoneman Douglas still have those thoughts in mind of changing the world, which is what we teach in high school is getting out there to debate the right way and present yourself in a positive light and try to move the country forward. 

A lot of these kids now, five years later, are out of college and some of them are just wrapping up their college careers. It’s going to be interesting to see if they are going to be able to keep the momentum and move it forward with gun control. I’m hoping that continues. 

Any time these things do come up in the news, hopefully it re-sparks them to want to try to do something, to move that legislation and those policies forward. 

What didn’t I ask that you’d like to discuss? 

It’s important that these conversations continue to stay at the forefront. That was the big thing we talked to legislators about because we know that after tragedies take place there’s a lot of attention and then it dies off. It’s like, why do we only talk about this when stuff happens? Why can’t we be a little more proactive on some of these things to make sure we’re moving forward and looking to the future versus being reactionary all the time?

That’s what I was most encouraged by in D.C. is the fact that they’re trying to move not only with the gun stuff, but also with mental health support.

Clarification: The Broward County Public Schools’s online directory identified Ty Thompson as its assistant director of athletics and student activities last month while the former Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School principal told The 74 he was also involved in some IT activities for the district. A district spokeswoman in a July 12 email said Thompson retains his principal title and is now assigned to the IT division. The clarification came after with the district. 

“Even before the pandemic we were seeing serious challenges for communities of color and students from low income communities when it came to educational equity,” said interim chief executive officer Denise Forte.

“So while no one was really too surprised by the numbers, it just tells us we have so much more to do,” Forte said about the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores.

Often called the “Nation’s Report Card,” eighth and fourth grade math scores dropped by eight and five points respectively – the largest decline ever recorded on the test. In addition, eighth and fourth grade reading scores dropped by three points.

From high-dosage tutoring to family-school engagement, advocates and experts weigh in on solutions:

1. Family-school partnerships

Yvonne Johnson, president-elect, said teachers need to build relationships with families to improve student outcomes.

“Families might not be 100% aware that it’s their responsibility too,” Johnson told The 74. “So it’s incumbent upon us to bring them into the schools and have family reading nights and math nights and other things that make learning fun for kids.”

A solution Johnson proposed is funding .

“The goal would be to have these family engagement centers where schools have a centralized area to provide resources, wraparound services and other things families need to help their children succeed in school,” Johnson said. “If we had one in every single state, perhaps we would have been more prepared to help families navigate remote learning.”

2. High-dosage tutoring

Forte said programs such as high-dosage tutoring will expand learning time and target students with the greatest need.

“We need to give kids more time on task and it doesn’t have to be fully about academics,” Forte told The 74. “You can build out really fun learning programs that include other activities that make sure kids feel included and have a sense of belonging.”

But, Robin Lake, director of the , said parents aren’t pushing for tutoring because they don’t understand how much pandemic learning loss damage affected their child.

“We’ve seen in a couple big national surveys that they’re not interested in tutoring and other interventions for their child,” Lake told The 74. “My biggest concern is how do we help parents understand that they need to ask hard questions about their child’s mastery of core subjects.”

Lake recommends training parents to become tutors for not just their own children, but other kids in their communities.

“One of the barriers that districts are running into is that they’re trying to hire more teachers or more office aides to provide tutoring or counseling services in schools – but let’s open that up,” Lake said. “Parents want to know how to help their kids and they’d like to be able to help other kids as well…so let’s get creative about who our after school providers can be.”

3. Technology access for remote learning

Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of AASA, , said that pandemic virtual learning further deepened the digital divide for students nationwide.

“Millions of kids did not have the technology to receive an online education and that was reflected in these test scores,” Domenech told The 74. “The lowest performing schools had the greatest loss because those were primarily the kids that didn’t have a laptop at home – or even if they did, their home didn’t have internet access.”

Domenech believes the priority for the needs to be put into quality instructional material.

“Students are in facilities that don’t have, for example, the technology and all of these other factors that wealthier communities have,” Domenech said. “So if we want equity and if we want to do away with that achievement gap, then we have to do away with the inequity of technology access.”

4. School climate and student mental health

Ronn Nozoe, the chief executive officer, said schools need to pay attention to the role social media plays on student mental health.

“Kids were troubled by social media even before the pandemic, especially girls feeling the pressure that their peers…in school put them in,” Nozoe told The 74. “We need to create safe spaces for kids to talk about these issues who don’t feel comfortable talking to their parents.”

He also noted the challenges teachers face, oftentimes serving as secondary sources of support for their students’ mental health needs.

“If we know teachers are the most powerful and most impactful variable in the development of a child, then why would we make teaching the most difficult profession on the face of the earth?” Nozoe said.

5. Teacher shortages

Richard Carranza, chief of strategy and global development, said the shortage of qualified teachers contributed to test score disparities.

“Is it concerning that teachers are leaving the profession? Absolutely it’s concerning,” Carranza told The 74. “It’s a herculean job that teachers have in front of them to make up for lost ground and continue to accelerate students, and it’s an even heavier lift if you don’t have credentialed teachers readily available in schools.”

The mental health needs of teachers need to be addressed, Carranza added. 

“If we pay attention to the social emotional needs of students and teachers in schools,” Carranza said, “they’re going to create an environment in which they’re able to do their best work – which will be reflected in better test scores.”

“He called me up and said, ‘Frank, you don’t even know what you need, but here’s my number,’” DeAngelis said during an event Monday at the Columbine Memorial in Littleton, Colorado. The road to recovery, DeAngelis would soon learn, isn’t a sprint but a marathon. Help from others who had lived through similar tragedies was instrumental.

DeAngelis hoped he’d never have to make a similar phone call, but in the decades since Columbine, the retired principal has reached out to traumatized educators across the country who similarly became part of “a club in which no one wants to be a member.” 

“Unfortunately, that membership continues to grow,” DeAngelis said. “But we can’t give up hope.”

On Monday, DeAngelis and nearly two dozen school leaders before their schools became crime scenes. While campus shootings remain statistically rare — and no two tragedies are identical — the guide aims to provide practical tips for principals as they begin to lead their communities to recovery. 

The guide was produced by the Principal Recovery Network, a group of current and former school leaders who have experienced school gun violence. “I wish, when that horrific event happened, that we had that recovery guide,” DeAngelis said. “When those events happen, your mind is spinning, and this guide, hopefully, will provide that strength.”

The recovery network was formed by the National Association of Secondary School Principals in 2019, a year after the mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, reignited a national conversation on the effects of gun violence. Though the guide was years in the making, its release took on new urgency after the May school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 elementary school students and two teachers were killed. 

Following such tragedies, network members reach out to the affected school leaders to offer advice and a place to vent. After all, nobody knows what’s needed in the aftermath of a campus shooting better than school leaders who’ve survived one, said Ronn Nozoe, the association’s CEO.

“This is something that nobody wants to go through, and there is no step-by-step manual on how to handle it,” said recovery network member Michelle Keford, principal of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. But, “Having their advice, having their input and having their shared experiences really helps me as a leader, and I hope to pass that along.”

The 16-page guide spells out things to consider before reopening a school, the importance of attending to students’ and staff mental health, how to include student input in district plans and practical advice on managing offers of help from outside groups. 

In the immediate aftermath of a tragedy, the guide recommends that school leaders meet with faculty at the school to explain what happened and assess their needs. Principals should quickly provide mental health supports, from trauma-informed counselors to therapy dogs. And they should consider keeping school closed until all funerals have taken place and all physical damage to the building is repaired. 

Among the network’s members is Michael Bennett, superintendent of Greenville Central School District in upstate New York, who was shot in 2004 as an assistant principal wrestled a gun-wielding 16-year-old student to the ground. Shotgun pellets remain lodged in Bennett’s calf. 

“That’s going to be a permanent part of who I am,” Bennett, who was a teacher at Columbia High School at the time, told The 74. “One of the things you start to learn as you go through this process of recovery is that it’s an ongoing process. It will ebb and flow based on some of your own experiences and how you’re dealing with those.” 

Bennett said he recently offered support to a high school band director in Highland Park, Illinois, who reached out after seven died in a mass shooting at an Independence Day parade. The high school band had marched in the parade, and their teacher was concerned that students’ return to classrooms this fall and their performances at football games could be traumatizing. After getting shot, Bennett said, the sound of fireworks at a homecoming game was alarming. 

In his contributions to the guide, Bennett noted the importance of meeting with staff after a shooting to ensure that everyone is up to speed about what happened and has a chance to ask questions. This is a lesson he learned from personal experience: When Bennett returned to work weeks after the 2004 shooting, some colleagues approached him unsure about what had happened.

“The challenge there for me is that it was reliving the moment again,” he said. “It became a bit of a confusing time for me, and it slowed my process of healing down quite a bit.” 

Following the Uvalde shooting, President Joe Biden signed the most substantive gun-control law in decades. But if history tells us anything, the shootings will continue, the group warned. That’s why it’s so important, DeAngelis said, that educators have each others’ backs. 

“I’ve been doing this for 23 years, and sometimes my wife says, ‘Why do you continue?’ ” he said. “But I made a promise that I was going to do it in memory of our beloved 13.”

But with even Biden concerned that Republicans could of the House — and Congress increasingly unable to pass an annual budget on time — the chances that K-12 schools can count on next year’s budget for a reprieve appear slim.

“I am hopeful that this is a down payment for what’s to come,” said José Muñoz, director of the Coalition for Community Schools. Congress appropriated $75 million for schools that work with outside providers to address hunger, mental health, housing and other non-academic issues for families — an increase of $45 million. But Biden proposed a $413 million increase. Muñoz said he was disappointed by the “extreme shift.” 

“Now, we all have to go back to work to correct what just happened,” he said.

The White House has already indicated that Biden will request at least $400 million for community schools when he releases his fiscal year 2023 budget proposal, expected later this month. Advocates also expect to see him once again request big increases for Title I and special education. But based on this year’s process, some are highly skeptical that Congress will be able to pass a budget before the midterm elections or break out of its cycle of passing multiple short-term budget extensions to keep the government operating.

“We’ll welcome the commitment to education … but we saw how that shook out this year,” said Noelle Ellerson Ng, associate executive director for advocacy and governance at AASA, the School Superintendents Association. She added that she could see another series of continuing resolutions that stretch into the new year. “That brings up all the questions of who’s in leadership come January and how that shapes overall numbers and program allocations.”

The organization’s top priority will once again be full funding of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act,or IDEA — meaning that the federal government would pick up 40 percent of the costs of services for students with disabilities. Biden pledged that he would meet that requirement of the law. He proposed a $2.7 billion increase for fiscal 2022, but the budget includes far less — a $448 million increase — bringing the total to $14.5 billion.

AASA was hoping Congress would at least maintain the higher level of funding special education received under the American Rescue Plan, which provided an additional $2.5 billion for students with disabilities.

Congress is missing “a true opportunity to redirect itself forward on the IDEA glidepath,” Dan Domenech, executive director of AASA, said in a statement. “We applaud them for the small increases included in [the] bill, while also holding them accountable for once again leaving IDEA severely underfunded.”

No more free meals for all

Domenech summed up educators’ less-than-enthusiastic reaction to the budget by calling it a “mixed bag.” The bill, for example, includes new funding to address students’ mental health and $30 million more for afterschool programs, but not a major increase for high-poverty schools.

The budget provides a $1.77 billion increase over fiscal 2021 for school nutrition, but leaves out waivers that would have allowed such programs to continue serving free meals to all students and have flexibility in meal planning to cope with food and supply shortages. 

That means after more than two school years of free meals for all students, regardless of income, families in poverty will need to apply for the National School Lunch Program for the 2022-23 school year in order for their children to receive free or reduced-price meals.

And “given the , schools will likely need to raise prices on those families that do pay” said Diane Pratt-Heavner, spokeswoman for the School Nutrition Association. With the end of pandemic meal programs, schools will also “have to significantly curtail summer meal services,” she said.

Biden also campaigned on tripling Title I funding for high-poverty schools. He proposed a $20 billion “equity” grant program to help close funding gaps between rich and poor districts and between those serving primarily white students and those that enroll more Black and Hispanic students.

The budget instead raises Title I funding by $1 billion, bringing the total to $17.5 billion. That’s the highest increase in more than a decade, but doesn’t include the new funding to reduce disparities.

“The Title I equity grants would have given the neediest districts greater assurance that they could continue effective academic interventions beyond the pandemic,” said Robert Tagorda, who led equity initiatives in California’s Long Beach Unified School District and now consults with districts on their recovery efforts. “Districts are coming to terms with the one-time nature of COVID relief funds. They’re wondering how they can sustain the tutorials, summer programs and other student services once the funds expire, knowing that it will take a long time to get kids back on track.”

Advocates for young children had a similar response after being hopeful last year that Biden would be able to push through his $400 billion plan to pay for child care and universal pre-K as part of Build Back Better. That legislation is now stalled and it’s unclear whether universal pre-K will resurface in a of the bill. 

For fiscal 2022, Biden originally proposed almost $20 billion for early-childhood programs, including Head Start and child care. The budget bill instead provides about $17.5 billion for programs serving preschoolers.

“Without more significant funding increases, these programs will continue to serve only a small portion of the children and families that are eligible to participate in them,” said Aaron Loewenberg, a senior policy analyst at New America, a center-left think tank.

Other advocacy groups say their recent lobbying efforts made a difference in the final numbers. The National Association of Secondary School Principals, for example, sent 350 members to Capitol Hill two weeks ago to press for increases in principal preparation programs and mental health services for students — a topic Biden addressed in his State of the Union address. 

The budget includes a $27 million increase for state grants that fund teacher and principal training and $111 million —  a $95 million increase over fiscal 2021 — that can be used to train more school counselors, social workers and psychologists. Beth Lehr, assistant principal at Sahuarita High School, south of Tucson, Arizona, was among the administrators advocating for those increases to address the aftermath of the pandemic. There are some teachers, she said, “who dread coming to work and parents who are struggling because they feel they can’t keep their kids safe.”

To mark the 24 months since schools shut down because of COVID-19, The 74 spoke with parents, educators, researchers and students across the U.S. We are running some of these interviews in their entirety to give complete accounts of where we’ve been and where some think we’re going. 

Beth Lehr, an assistant principal at Sahuarita High School, near Tucson, Arizona, was named the state’s Assistant Principal of the Year in 2020. A strong advocate for educators, she is dismayed by the extent to which political divisions over the pandemic and other hot-button education issues have left her teachers feeling overwhelmed, dreading to open their emails.

In a February interview, Lehr candidly revealed that she is not immune to such pressures. After she applied for a principal position in her district, she expressed some ambivalence. “‘Why? Why did I just do that?” she recalled thinking. “I haven’t yet gotten to the point where the stuff I dislike about my job outweighed the stuff that I like about it, but it’s hit or miss on a daily basis.” A mother of two, who saw her own children struggle with the isolation of virtual learning, Lehr said students have lost a lot more than academics during the pandemic. “If we don’t address those things,” she said, “the academic piece is never going to come back.”

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Give me a little background on your district.

Beth Lehr: The town of Sahuarita is attached to a retirement community. Green Valley is 55 and over and Sahuarita has families. It’s a very interesting dynamic. Our district covers 606 square miles, so it incorporates a number of very rural areas. We have some [families on] ranches. That means they’re pretty remote and rural, and they don’t have real great internet access. We also have a large farming community with a lot of Hispanic families, some who are undocumented.

How did remote learning impact your students?

The biggest struggle was just that feeling of isolation among our students, especially the students in rural areas. It wasn’t simple for them to get on their bike and ride to their friend’s house or meet in the neighborhood, because they’re 50 miles away. 

What did they do?

Oh my God, the soap dispensers were destroyed over and over and over again. We had to replace sinks. We had to replace toilets — not because they were stolen, but because they were destroyed. The older students were super-annoyed by the freshman because then we ended up having to lock our bathrooms during lunch. 

The problem-solving that they’re [supposed to learn] over seventh and eight grade, they didn’t learn. The relationship skills that you refine when you’re in middle school, they didn’t do. A lot of the stuff that we were seeing at the beginning of the school year is very much what I would see when I was teaching middle school. 

We’ve also had an increase in sexual infractions — not necessarily assaults. It’s consensual, but it’s much more frequent on our campus this year. This is my seventh year as assistant principal, and this year, hands down, we have had more issues with kids getting caught in positions that high schoolers should not be in. Maybe once a year, we’d have kids getting caught having sex on campus. It’s definitely increased this year.

Is that related to the pandemic?

I can’t do causality. I can just say this is what I’ve seen. 

Arizona also has probably one of the worst sex education programs in the country. [The legislature] recently reintroduced where sex education programs cannot talk about homosexuality, other than it being an aberrant behavior. They’re pushing through an anti-trans bill that says trans girls can’t be in sports, which by the way, is not an issue. That’s where the frustration is. Arizona is pushing through all of these hot-button things that the super-conservative think tanks and [political action committees] are doing.

He wanted to target the funds to schools not requiring masks?

It was like Ducey said, “If you follow my direction and do not have any COVID protocols, I’ll give you the money.” The federal government was quick to say, “No, no. That’s not how any of this works.” [Ducey] actually because [they weren’t] letting him spend the money the way he wanted. He came out with an saying essentially that if your child’s school closes ever, for any amount of time, we will give you X amount of money that you can take to a private or charter school — doubling down again on anti-public health measures. As it turns out, when you don’t have a mask mandate, more kids get sick. My district does not have a mask mandate, so we are sending home multiple children.

Have you seen fatigue in your teachers? Are some calling in sick? 

Teachers have been stepping up, but they’re so tired. They’re essentially running three different classrooms in each class period. You have the kids who are sent home because they’re COVID positive and they’re sick so they’re not doing anything. You have the kids who get quarantined. Even though my teachers are keeping up all their Google classrooms and hosting virtual tutoring and sometimes live-streaming their classes, maybe 10 percent of those kids are actually taking advantage of what the teachers are doing. Then they have the kids who are in front of them.

It’s so overwhelming, and they don’t have prep periods because we don’t have any substitutes. We try to protect their prep, but we only have three administrators. If we have six teachers with no coverage, sometimes it has to be the other teachers [covering the classes], and we can’t have all three administrators not available because it’s still a high school and we still have the everyday high school stuff.

Have you lost any teachers mid-year?

Yes. We lost one teacher at our fall break. It was too much for her physical well-being, and her mental well-being. Her position was filled by a long-term sub [until early February].

My site has had very low turnover. I do not foresee that being the case next year. I have one teacher. This is her ninth year. She has already resigned for next year. She said, “I can’t do this anymore. I dread coming to work every day.” 

I have teachers who are brand new to the district who are frustrated because they caught COVID and they have to use all of their personal sick days to stay home.

Do people feel like the pandemic is ending?

There are kind of two camps. There’s the one camp of “This too shall pass,” and then there’s the other camp of “Yeah, it’s going to pass, but I don’t know if I want to wait for it to.” Anybody who was on the fence about education is weighing if the parts that they love about the job are still outweighing the parts that they don’t love. Actually, the teacher who resigned said, “You know, I love the day-to-day of being in front of our kids. The second I have to open my email or grade their assignments is when I realize why I resigned.” The emails. The constant onslaught of the very vocal unhappy parents. We have some amazing families, but we don’t hear the “Thank yous” as often as we hear the “You sucks.”

It’s so hard to see the end, and it’s so overwhelming. What I’ve heard more than anything this year from my teachers is, “We thought that last year was hard. This year is 10 times harder.” We’ve had very, very low turnover. I do not foresee that being the case next year. 

I was looking at The 74, and I read the headline about this not being the great resignation for teachers. That’s just because it’s not the end of the year, and teachers have too much integrity to leave their kids in the middle of the year unless it’s a dire scenario. We are going to see it, and it is going to be bad. In December of 2020, Arizona had 2,500 unfilled teaching positions. I guarantee you, we’re going to have pretty darn close to 4,000 for next school year. We don’t have anybody in the pipeline to fill them. Our profession has been vilified and de-professionalized quite successfully.

Did you ever feel like, “I’ve done this long enough and now is the time to go?”

All the time. I’m still feeling that. I’m so torn. I’ve applied for a principal position within the district, but at the same time I’m like, “Why? Why did I just do that? What am I thinking?” I haven’t yet gotten to the point where the stuff that I dislike about my job has outweighed the stuff that I like about it, but it’s hit or miss on a daily basis. 

What keeps you positive ? 

It’s 100 percent the kids.

Is there anyone in particular?

There is a student who is going to graduate — he’s going to graduate a little late, but I don’t care, he’s going to graduate. I know that our school is home for him. He doesn’t have a supportive household. Everyday that I see him and his sister at school, I say, ‘Yeah, you guys made it. Thank God.” This is a family who was dropping off the radar when we were virtual. I said, “Forget that. This is not going to happen. I’m going to bring you the paperwork for you guys to fill out so that I can get you internet. I’m going to bring you computers.” 

You went to their house? 

I took computers. I showed up at random times to figure out why they weren’t in their classes.

One focus this year has been freshman, specifically to prevent them from failing their classes or from failing too many. We have time built into our lunch where teachers have office hours. We made those office hours mandatory if students had lower than a 65 percent, because if you go into your finals with lower than a 65 percent, the chances are very high that you’re going to fail the class. 

Of course, the students who need to go tend to be the students who don’t go. I have not started it yet this semester. A couple of the students are not doing well again, and they said “Ms. Lehr, are you going to start it again? When can we come in?” I said, “You want to come in with me?” That’s from 14-year-old kids who before I had to beg to come. That’s very heartening.

Some of these freshmen I know are making stupid choices. I had a conversation with a kid who at the beginning of the year was just as quick to tell me to “F… off.” But now, here we are where a relationship has been built.

How have you kept yourself sane?

I do not check my email at all on the weekends. My husband and I will go hiking, and I try to spend my weekends solely with my children. I have a 9-year-old and an 11-year-old. 

We kept them in a remote option all last year, but because my husband and I were both at school, that meant that they were home by themselves. They were 8 and 10. On a personal level, my kids had to grow up a lot faster than I would have preferred, but now they have this certain level of independence that’s really cool. It reminds me of when I was a kid in the ‘80s. Your parents are working. Here’s a key. Don’t tell anyone your parents aren’t home.

How did remote learning affect them?

My daughter is very intelligent and very sneaky. She’s a “how-can-I-work-the-system” kid. All year last year, she was trying to find different ways to make us think she was doing her work. She got caught every time, and then the real-world consequences hit her at the beginning of this school year. She was so used to being advanced. She was in fifth grade, so she thought, “When I go into middle school, I’m going to be in pre-algebra, and then I’m going to be able to be in algebra when I’m in seventh grade.” The thing that she didn’t do all fifth grade was math. You can’t skip a year of math and then go into pre-algebra. That was a super hard lesson for her. It’s kind of actually a good thing, but socially she struggled immensely. There was a definite decline in her mental well-being because she is such a social person.

My son is not particularly social. My son is very quick to rise to frustration, and with that comes some acting out. Because it was just him and his sister at home, there were sometimes some physical altercations between them. Nobody was seriously injured or anything, but that was definitely not something we had seen in the past. There were holes in our walls from my son digging his pencils into them that we had to patch. There was a computer screen that we had to replace because it magically cracked somehow.

What do you think schools have learned from all of this?

I’ve had a lot of teachers really rethink their philosophies — some of my most dyed-in-the-wool [teachers]. This has truly opened their eyes when they’ve seen the disparities. Not everybody’s home looks the same. When we first started doing all of the remote teaching, we had a lot of really serious conversations about requiring cameras to be on or not. A lot of our teachers were like, well, “Why wouldn’t the camera be on?” They never took into account that there might be 10 people in a two-bedroom house. There might be somebody being slapped, hit, cut, whatever while they’re there. They might be embarrassed because they’re doing your class from their car in the McDonald’s parking lot.

What do you think the education system learned?

I don’t know. It’s like, “OK, we figured this out.” Well, we didn’t. For example, we have a guest Wi-Fi that a lot of our students use. It was shut down. They didn’t tell any of us until the day they shut it down. Didn’t ask us. We have a whole bunch of students who are using their own personal devices because we’re not a 1-to-1 district. They don’t have data. They can only use it when they’re on Wi-Fi. All of the stuff that we’re telling our teachers to use — Pear Deck, Kahoot, Duolingo — now all the sudden, students can’t access it. 

Our district is woefully behind on the infrastructure. This was highlighted in 2020. We’ve had two years. Why are we still so far behind? I know that it’s not malicious. I know that it’s not ill will. I know that it’s not because they don’t care. But why is it still not done? 

What do you think schools have learned about working with parents? 

The hardest part of my job is never the students. All of these laws that are passing, if you ask our students, they think they’re terrible. We have a number of students who are very upset because their parents won’t let them get vaccinated. How do we meet the needs of the student when the student has different desires and needs than what the parent wants for them? It’s walking that fine line. I think that we’re doing it. We keep open communication with parents, but we still try to honor the student. 

We’ve definitely had to learn how to redirect tone. We’ve had to step in a little bit more when it comes to our front office and the people who definitely don’t get paid enough to deal with it. When parents say, “This person was rude to me,” we’ve been OK with saying, “Were you polite to them?” My health assistant walked away from a parent yesterday, and I said, “That sounds fine. I would have done it, too.”

My school has not necessarily had some of the higher profile things, but the school that I just applied to for the principal position did make . The parents dragged [their daughter] in and said, “She’s coming [to school]. You’re violating her rights by not letting her be here.” 

She was quarantined?

Yes, and she’s saying, “It’s fine, it’s fine.” These parents literally picked that hill to die on, and they were arrested. Now they’re all facing charges, including the poor girl. Our neighboring district is one where the business owner was live streaming as he and two people took zip ties to the school to do a on the principal. That is not a citizen’s arrest. That is kidnapping. 

There is still hope and the kids are just so happy when they get to be there. One of the things we miss is that brief shining moment in March, April and May of 2020 when people really truly started to appreciate what teachers did. I’m really sad that that didn’t stick.

You talked about the students’ immaturity. What about academic growth? Are you seeing improvements now that they’re back in school? 

The learning loss is going to be there. There’s going to be a new norm, but trying to jam more and more and more down their throats is not helping. Continuing to create these high-stakes environments and making kids feel less because of something that was totally out of their control is not helping. Meeting kids where they are is. Teachers need to be able to have the ability to meet the kids where they are without fearing the loss of their job or the loss of pay. We’ve all had too much loss. 

Why do they have to learn all these things, right? They have to learn it to be successful in the future. Great, what does that success look like? How are we redefining success, because honestly, right now, for some of these kids, success is getting out of bed and showing up. If we provide an environment for them that makes them get up and be there — when that’s the last thing they want to do — that is success. They technically had academic learning loss, but they’ve lost so much other stuff. If we don’t address those things, the academic piece is never going to come back.