Students who started school during or after the COVID-19 pandemic have a harder time saying goodbye to their parents when they drop them off, Plains Independent School District Superintendent Robert McClain said.

Third graders are behind in their reading, teacher Heather Harris said, so the district hired a reading specialist to work with their youngest students.

They’re also struggling in math, San Antonio ISD Superintendent Jaime Aquino said.

“When I go into classrooms of students who are currently fourth graders or fifth graders who were either kindergarten or first grade [during the pandemic], you can see that there is a lack of mathematical fluency around basic facts,” he said.

Texas school administrators, educators and education policy experts say they’re seeing troubling signs that students in the earliest grades are not doing as well academically as children who started school before the pandemic. State and federal officials devoted significant resources to help students affected by the pandemic but they mostly focused on older children whose schooling was disrupted. Experts worry that the state’s youngest students will have a harder time catching up without intervention.

A recent by Curriculum Associates Research looked at national academic growth trends in the last four years and compared them with pre-pandemic data. It found younger students — like those who were enrolled in kindergarten or first grade in 2021 — were the furthest behind in both reading and math compared to their peers before the pandemic.

According to the report, those students may be struggling because of disruptions in their early childhood experiences, difficulties building up foundational skills like phonics or number recognition, problems engaging with virtual learning during the pandemic or insufficient resources being devoted to help children in the earliest grades.

Aquino, San Antonio ISD’s superintendent, said attendance in early grades is lower than before the pandemic, which is impacting foundational learning.

“We told families to stay home during the pandemic. Now we’re sending the message: You have to be in school,” Aquino said.

Low pre-K enrollment during the pandemic may be another factor. Children who attend pre-K are nearly twice as likely to be ready for kindergarten, said Miguel Solis, president of the education research nonprofit Commit Partnership.

In the school year 2019-2020, there were 249,226 students enrolled in pre-kindergarten in Texas, according to state data. This number dropped by nearly 50,000 in the following year.

Low academic attainment can compound in ways that become increasingly difficult to fix. Harris, the Plains ISD teacher, said it’s hard for third-grade students who fall behind to catch up because their teachers will likely not be able to spend much time helping them develop foundational skills they already should have learned.

“Pre-K through second, you’re learning to read, and then third grade on up, you’re reading to learn. So there’s that huge switch of what you’re teaching,” she said.

Mary Lynn Pruneda, an education analyst at the public policy think tank Texas 2036, said the Curriculum Associates Research study raises concerns about young learners but it’s difficult to pinpoint the impact in Texas because of a lack of data.

“We have very limited data on how younger students are doing that’s consistent across grade levels,” Pruneda said.

Without data to help diagnose the problem, students are being set up for continually low results in the state’s standardized test, she said.

There are some indications of how the problem might be manifesting in Texas. In Dallas County, for example, declines in math and reading scores between 2023 and 2024 were most acute among third graders, who would have been in kindergarten during the pandemic, Solis said.

Solis said the state needs to start collecting literacy data for early grades to identify students who are not on track and intervene. He’s hopeful because some lawmakers in both the Texas House and Senate have already expressed interest in taking a close look at how young students learn foundational skills, he said.

“We can’t wait until the third grade STAAR to see how younger students are progressing,” he said.

Pruneda said one step Texas can take to start reversing the trend is raising spending in public education — something educators are desperate for — to help school districts hire and retain the best teachers possible. The superintendents of both Plains and San Antonio ISDs said it is imperative for the Texas Legislature to approve a significant funding boost next year after lawmakers failed last year to do so amid .

High-impact tutoring, like the one legislators mandated for grades 3-8, may also help early-grade students, she said.

The full program is now LIVE for the , happening Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Explore the program featuring more than 100 unforgettable conversations on topics covering education, the economy, Texas and national politics, criminal justice, the border, the 2024 elections and so much more.

This article originally appeared in at .

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

The appointment of Mohammed Choudhury as Maryland state schools superintendent has been a gripping story which I have followed closely.

As he was about to assume office in July 2021, I the state board on appointing someone with his potential. Then, in a , I wrote that he “seems to be living up to his advance billing … as a smart and high-powered change agent.” However, I also questioned whether “he will be too brash or impatient in his relationships not just with staff but with Annapolis leadership, teacher unions and …. local school systems.”

In fact, between then and this spring, his relationships rapidly deteriorated across the board: many documented allegations of a toxic work environment; rifts with the Blueprint Accountability and Implementation Board; growing tensions in his dealings with local districts; and widespread complaints by education advocates.

I this past May, after weighing the pros and cons of his tenure, that “it seems unavoidable that Mr. Choudhury must go.” The state board was then negotiating his contract renewal. At first, the board seemed strongly in his corner; however, . Democratic Gov. Wes Moore was when asked just a few days ago whether he supported the renewal.

So Friday’s that Choudhury would not seek to renew his contract was not the complete shocker that it would have been several months ago. At this point, he seemed to have no choice but to accede to the reality that he would not be offered a contract renewal.

The tale is a Shakespearean tragedy of self-inflicted downfall. I’ve noted that Choudhury “is hardworking, smart, data-driven at warp speed and passionately devoted to equity.” But he is also in denial — unable to get beyond his misbelief that criticisms about him were because he was, in his own words, “.”

The truth is that his ultimate undoing was less his style and much more his substance — or, to put it more accurately, his lack of substance (disruptive or otherwise): After two years on the job, Choudhury had little to show for it in reform action.

He has been mired for nearly two years in the process of a . But it has not moved beyond conventional platitudes to specific tasks, timelines and measurable outcomes.

A telltale failure is the absence of any significant movement on his part to develop comprehensive instructional reforms, especially in early literacy, while aborting staff initiatives that were underway before his arrival.

Where does the Maryland State Department of Education go from here? It must bring in acting or permanent leadership as soon as possible. The blueprint is in jeopardy, and a first urgent task is to rebuild collaboration between the department and the Accountability and Implementation Board.

The name of Carey Wright has already surfaced as someone who can immediately help. She is the retired nationally acclaimed leader of the “Mississippi Miracle,” now a resident of Baltimore County and formerly a career teacher and top administrator in Prince George’s, Howard and Montgomery counties school systems. (I wrote about her recently in a : “In teaching children to read, Mississippi puts Maryland to shame.”)

There’s no more time to lose. Educators, elected officials and all of us must rally behind the state board’s courageous leadership efforts.

Maryland Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury, who took the helm of state public schools in 2021 as a change agent and recently faced criticism from state lawmakers, former employees and others, has decided he will not seek a second term.

According to a Friday from Choudhury and the State Board of Education, the superintendent “will pursue other opportunities.” The board will present plans for the transition of a new leader and a national search for his replacement when it meets Sept. 26 in Baltimore.

“The State Board is grateful to Superintendent Choudhury for his leadership in Maryland through the first phase of educational transformation in the State,” according to the statement. “During the remainder of his tenure, the Superintendent will work with the State Board and other stakeholders to continue the critical work of leading education transformation in Maryland.”

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The board noted several accomplishments under ���dzܻ��ܰ���’s tenure since he took over in July 2021, including guiding the state Department of Education’s , the Maryland Tutoring Corps initiative and other programs.

, Choudhury said in an interview he was optimistic he would continue his work leading the department on various programs such as the state’s major education reform plan called The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future.

However, a new four-year contract .

According to board bylaws, the panel needed to approve a new contract for Choudhury this coming Tuesday.

The board held a to discuss “a personnel matter.” Two days later on Friday, Choudhury decided to not seek a second term.

���dzܻ��ܰ���’s has a base salary of $310,000 and runs through June 30, 2024, though it is unclear if he will remain in his position until that time.

Choudhury, who came to Maryland after working as  of strategy, talent and innovation at the San Antonio Independent School District in Texas, has received national recognition for his efforts on economic integration of schools.

Although he’s received some praise in his two years in Maryland for analyzing data, decreasing staff vacancies and a push to help local school systems hire teachers from their community, Choudhury has also been  and  with some advocates.

Robert Eccles, a former education official who left the department last year, testified before the board this year requesting a third-party investigation into ���dzܻ��ܰ���’s direction of the state agency, alleging intimidation and harassment of former staff.

“This is a new day and the right move for everyone involved,” Eccles said in a text message Friday. “We all want our education system to meet this moment with the Blueprint, and I have full confidence that the board will select an exceptional leader for this important work.”

But Choudhury did receive support from some board members such as board President Clarence Crawford, who credited the superintendent for achieving the department’s lowest vacancy rate in a decade. The board has undergone dramatic turnover in the past year. Six members of the 14-member panel have been appointed by Gov. Wes Moore (D), while eight are holdovers from the administration of Gov. Larry Hogan (R).

Moore, who has recently with Choudhury, released a statement Friday thanking him for leading state schools “admirably during an unprecedented global pandemic and a transformative time for our state’s education system.”

“His implementation of the initial phase of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future has set our students and educators up for success as we continue the work of making Maryland’s public schools the best in the country,” the statement continued.

As far as the next superintendent, the governor said he expects the state board “to ensure we find an exceptional leader who will commit to transparency, accountability, and partnership with all stakeholders to improve education outcomes in every corner of Maryland. Our educators, students, communities, and families deserve nothing less.”

Cheryl Bost, president of the Maryland State Education Association, which represents 75,000 school teachers in the state, said the union appreciated ���dzܻ��ܰ���’s “willingness to always have an open door for educators, his strong focus on the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, and his data-driven decision-making to help our most challenged students and schools.”

The union hopes the next schools leader will remain committed to Blueprint reforms and maintaining a “laser focus on ending the educator shortages.”

Danielle E. Gaines contributed to this report. 

As it became clear the pandemic was accelerating widespread enrollment declines, demographers, economists and school funding analysts started counseling that communication is key to winning buy-in from angry parents. Few education leaders heeded their advice, instead ducking the topic. 

Now, school finance experts are watching to see whether things will go more smoothly in the San Antonio Independent School District, which last spring announced it will shutter a yet-unspecified number of schools at the end of the 2023-24 academic year. The district’s decision-making process, they say, appears to be unusually transparent. 

Describing the contraction as long overdue, San Antonio officials at the June school board meeting by showing a PowerPoint slide from 2008, making the case for confronting what was then 40 years of enrollment declines. At the top of the image, under the headline “Critical Junction,” two yellow school buses start down divergent paths: “Stay on Course” and “Change to a New SAISD.”

The same illustration could be used today. Over the last 15 years, enrollment has dropped from more than 55,000 students to less than 45,000. Twenty years ago, the district operated 106 schools. Now, it has 98, 35 of which have undergone some form of transformation in recent years. 

Many reorganized around popular curricular themes, such as dual-language immersion, Montessori or gifted-and-talented academics. As a result, more than 2,200 students from other communities now attend SAISD schools, making it the most popular interdistrict-enrollment option in its Texas region. 

But even with a boost from outside students, enrollment is expected to continue to decline over the next decade. The number of district residents under age 18 has fallen 14% since 2010, and births have declined 36% since 2007. Enrollment losses are likely to accelerate as older students graduate and there are too few kindergartners to make up for them. 

Such seismic demographic shifts are taking place virtually everywhere. Between 2019 and 2023, public school enrollment nationwide , or 2%. Schools are projected to lose another 3 million students by 2029. 

In most states, education funding is meted out according to enrollment, so even a small change to a student body has budgetary ripples. Adding to the pressure, many districts used their share of $188 billion in temporary federal pandemic relief to stave off what, amid fights over everything from face masks to teaching about race, was just one more explosive conversation. 

“Most district leaders, in anticipation of angry backlash, just don’t raise the topic,” says Marguerite Roza, head of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. “We’re seeing a lot of districts right now say, ‘Don’t worry, we’re not talking about school closure.’ And [leaders] thinking, ‘If I can just make it a few more months, then I’ll say it, because I don’t want to deal with it right now.’ ”

Postponing the painful conversation has financial consequences, she says, but that leaders could have spent engaging the community about their priorities for a streamlined district.

“The public needs its opportunity to weigh in and marinate,” says Roza. “Not everybody’s going to be happy, but our experience is that when people have seen , and they’ve had an opportunity to go back and forth, if it doesn’t have to be a situation where you’ve eroded trust in the leaders.”

In February 2022, Oakland, California, school board members voted to close 11 schools over two years. Protests and a hunger strike ensued, several sitting board members lost re-election and last January the board changed the plan to . 

In St. Paul, where public outrage had stalled past consolidations, lame-duck officials scheduled a vote on long-postponed closures to occur during the short window between elections and the seating of new board members. The timing enabled the district to invest more of its federal COVID-19 recovery funds in academics than many districts.

Contentious discussions about closures have also , Los Angeles, Minneapolis and other shrinking districts. New Orleans, which has had a formal process for shutting underperforming schools for years, is struggling to determine how to shrink its all-charter school system.

Last fall, following a , the board of Colorado’s Jeffco Public Schools voted to shutter 16 elementary schools. In June, it followed with of one middle and one high school into a single 6-12 facility. The process was emotional, but no one was ousted.

Newly installed as San Antonio’s superintendent, Jaime Aquino was watching. Last spring, he took a delegation from his district to Jeffco, and also arranged conversations with officials in Cleveland, which has scrambled to address population declines. Taking what they learned, and heeding the experts’ advice about communicating clearly and early, San Antonio officials focused not on a budget crisis, but on the need for equity within the district.

“We are not right-sizing because we’re approaching a fiscal cliff,” says Aquino. “We’re doing this because we need to deliver on the promise that we make to our students and our families that no matter where they attend [school], they’re going to get an excellent education.”

Right now, the district’s larger schools subsidize their underenrolled neighbors — which still can’t afford a full array of basic academics and extracurricular activities. 

Operating an elementary school with 644 students costs $6,888 per child, according to a district analysis, compared with $16,261 where there are 109 students. Despite the higher per-pupil funding, some of the undersubscribed schools can’t pay for math and reading teachers with expertise in each grade, mental health workers and extracurriculars. 

Particularly in early grades, it’s harder for teachers who have students from more than one grade to deliver instruction. And even where educators can focus on one age group, not having colleagues with whom to share strategies can pose problems. Meeting the needs of students still learning English or with disabilities is harder with a small staff.

Aquino started talking about the need for a district contraction in spring 2022, when he was appointed superintendent, describing the excess capacity as a barrier to equity.

More recently, district leaders shared information on how many students schools are drawing from their assigned neighborhoods and other parts of the district, as well as how many children from those communities are enrolled elsewhere, either in a San Antonio ISD school or one outside the district. The .

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Contributed to by Meghan Gallagher (The ������Ƶ Inc) • or read text

S.H. Gates Elementary, for example, is at 25% of capacity, built for 615 students but serving 156. Meanwhile, 202 students who live in its attendance zone attend schools elsewhere in the district. Approximately one-fourth of its third- through sixth-graders were reading and performing math at grade level at the end of the 2021-22 school year.

Meanwhile, Bonham Academy has 599 pupils — 13 more than its official capacity. Four hundred of those students live outside its assigned residential area, while 114 neighborhood kids either attend non-district schools or programs in other zones.

Bonham does not outperform Gates in math, but its pupils read at grade level at twice the rate. It is a dual-language immersion school, an especially popular model in a majority-Latino city. 

Advanced Learning Academy, one of several magnet schools created as a part of a district’s 2018 academic reorganization, has space for 927 students but enrolls 1,047. At Douglass Elementary, half of the 385 kids come from the surrounding neighborhood, which sends an equal number to outside schools.

To Roza, these numbers underscore an important and frequently misunderstood element of closure discussions: People typically protest shuttering any school, even if its poor performance means they won’t send their own children there. 

“Communities will just react so negatively, like it’s a punishment that you’re closing us because we were doing poorly,” she says. “But the truth is that parents already do that when they have a choice. What we tend to see is that the underenrolled schools aren’t the higher-performing ones.”

In addition to enrollment, capacity and cost per pupil, the “right-sizing” criteria detailed on the district’s website include academic performance, investments in buildings and partnerships with local industry, colleges and other organizations. No school will close until it can be determined — using the same criteria — where its displaced students can be accommodated.

Partly because he anticipates better distributing the district’s existing staff and allowing its educator corp to shrink through attrition, the superintendent doesn’t anticipate large-scale layoffs.

On Sept. 18, SAISD leaders will present the school board with a proposed list of schools for closure or consolidation. In the six weeks that follow, the district will hold a series of community meetings about the initial recommendations, with a particular focus on where, if the changes are implemented, students would end up and how they would progress from elementary to secondary school.

On Nov. 13, the board will vote on final recommendations as a package — which means it will not make exceptions for individual schools. Because this will be complicated by the need to accommodate English learners, students in dual-language programs and other children receiving unique services, each school to be closed will be assigned an enrollment specialist to help families with placement.

Will the process go more smoothly than in other places, or touch off the kind of political churn that has led some districts to back off of closures in the face of community anger? The executive director of the San Antonio parent advocacy group MindshiftED, Maribel Gardea, says the process so far seems very different from poorly led closure conversations in neighboring districts.

“It looks like they are trying to be as transparent as possible at the forefront,” she says. “But parents are just kind of waiting for a list of possible schools that will close.” 

Announcing up front that the board will vote on the entire list, and not bow to pressure about any given schools, is smart, says Gardea. She is less convinced that the contraction will boost academic achievement at the low-performing schools that remain open but have not received the same district investment as the ones reorganized in recent years.

Board Chair Cristina Martinez is more optimistic. “This is a real opportunity to really help families find a school that’s going to meet the needs of all of their children, because none of our schools are the same,” she says. “It’s also an opportunity to make sure those students who might not have been receiving some offerings really do have those options now.”

Now, to correct the troubling pattern in the new academic year, some school leaders are launching attendance campaigns in hopes of luring more students into the classroom. The techniques include an “” in Charlotte, North Carolina; and new bikes in a district outside Kansas City — and, in San Antonio, the possibility of .

“Not only is it a chance to win something amazing for your family, but it also shows our families and our students, we really want you in school every day, that your attendance matters,” said Judy Geelhoed, executive director of the San Antonio Independent School District Foundation, which coordinated the campaign.

Whether induced or not by incentives such as the prospect of new wheels, early signs show students coming to school at higher rates this year than last, said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works. She works with educators across the country and has been encouraged by their anecdotes.

“I actually am hearing folks saying this year is better,” she said. “Everyone I speak to is like, ‘This is almost like a normal school here. Fingers crossed.’”

Preliminary attendance data for the new school year will not be released in most school districts for several weeks or months. But in Oakland Unified, one of the few school systems that publishes in real time, the numbers are hopeful. So far, just 25% of students have been chronically absent, compared to 45% last year.

That’s a good sign for the rest of the year, said Chang, because “absences in the first month of school … predict absences later in the school year.” 

Last year was particularly difficult, she noted, because the start of the fall and spring semesters each aligned with a COVID surge: first Delta, then Omicron. With most districts having ditched hybrid learning at that point, students forced to quarantine often found themselves more than a week of content behind before they even began the semester.

But as leaders seek to reverse the trend this year, experts doubt whether attendance incentives are the most effective strategy. 

“Both learning and attendance … they rely on your intrinsic motivation,” said Jing Liu, a University of Maryland education professor who researches absenteeism. “I don’t think this is a very good approach to solve this issue. You might see a bump of attendance in the short run, but I don’t think it can work in the long term.”

indicates that financial incentives tend to be effective in motivating young people only when they reward behaviors students feel they can control; for example, how thoroughly they prepare for a test as opposed to how well they score once they sit down to take it.

Schools can, however, adjust their incentive structures to reward even students who may face more challenges showing up to class, the Attendance Works director pointed out. 

That’s exactly what San Antonio, with its Toyota challenge, has done. Students will earn raffle tickets every marking period not only for high attendance levels, but also for posting rates that improve on their attendance from the 2021-22 school year. 

“We wanted to give an incentive to folks [for whom] … things were holding them back. Sometimes there’s issues happening in the family and we wanted to give families an incentive to say, ‘I’m going to do my best to get my student there every day,’” Geelhoed said.

The $28,000 cost of the car, which the Foundation director noted would be more expensive on the showroom floor, will be covered by sponsors Frost Bank and Cavender Toyota. 

But while a ribbon-adorned shiny SUV may be a tantalizing prospect for many, she knows “this kind of incentive can’t mitigate all the challenges that our students may have.”

The district also deploys specialists to monitor chronically absent students and assist them in getting to campus, including home visits when they aren’t able to contact families, communications manager Laura Short said in an email. They analyze data across the school system to identify which students might be most at risk, she added.

“We believe it takes a whole-district approach to work on student attendance.”

The by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, focuses on pre-pandemic performance, looking at the 2017-18 and 2018-19 school years.

Compared to an average student in the state, students in San Antonio overall showed weaker learning gains in reading, but similar gains in math during that time. 

The study found that in 2017-18, charter school students received the equivalent of 10 more days of instruction in reading, but five fewer days of instruction in math, compared to their peers elsewhere in Texas. 

The following year, however, charter school students outshone others, getting the equivalent of 51 more days of instruction in reading and 46 in math, compared to peers statewide. 

“Charter performance seems to show (an) increasing upward trend” over the two years of the study, said researcher Won Lee. He noted that, as far back as 2014, data shows consistent growth for San Antonio charter schools, in both reading and math. “So that’s encouraging, I think.”

Brian Whitley, spokesman for the Texas Charter Schools Association, attributed a portion of the performance boost to the diversity of educational opportunities offered by San Antonio charters, such as schools focused on STEM, classical education and rich liberal arts curricula. He also attributed some of the performance gains to charters’ longevity in the state, where the first charter law went into effect in 1995.

As a result, he said, “charter schools get increasingly good at zeroing in on what different kinds of students need, and refining their curriculum, refining their instructional methods.” 

The district did not respond to several requests for comment on the new findings, but Nora J. Walsh, who leads the George W. Brackenridge Foundation, welcomed them: “As a foundation committed to supporting charter schools throughout San Antonio,” she wrote in an email, “we were thrilled to see that the data in this study supports what we knew to be true, that charter schools offer a valuable option for students and their families looking for an education beyond the one designated by their zip code.”

A nationwide look at school performance

The new study is part of an ongoing CREDO series examining school performance , first published in 2019. Since then, CREDO has taken on examinations of achievement in another five cities.

Lee said it’s difficult to generalize overall charter performance from the San Antonio findings, due to heterogeneity of schools and students, among other issues, across the 11 cities. But he noted that CREDO is working on a that covers 25 states and may be able to zero in on the overall effect of charter schools on achievement when it’s published early next year. 

As in several other cities, CREDO researchers in San Antonio examined achievement in so-called Innovation Schools, district-managed public schools with strategic plans that allow waivers to specific district policies, state statutes, and collective bargaining agreements. These schools were introduced in the city in the 2018-19 school year, so researchers had no data for them from 2017-18.

Lee likened these schools to open-enrollment charter schools that are also accessible to students outside of the district. Priority admission, however, is given to students within district boundaries. 

The data suggest that the sector has shown a few growing pains: Students in San Antonio Innovation Schools in 2018-19 showed weaker growth in reading than the state average, but similar growth in math. 

The researchers found that Innovation Schools students receiving the equivalent of six fewer days of instruction in reading and 13 fewer days in math, compared to peers statewide. 

Progress across demographic groups

Whitley, of the charter schools association, said San Antonio has seen heavy growth in the charter sector over the past few years. In the last school year, he said, the city’s metro area, which comprises several districts, boasted about 48,800 students, or just under 11 percent, enrolled in charters.

Between the 2018-19 and the 2021-22 school years, Whitley said, charter enrollment rose by about 11,000 students, or nearly 30 percent. 

He said about two-thirds of charter schools in the metro area had a wait list. Statewide, there are about 58,000 students on Texas charter school waitlists, he noted. 

He said San Antonio is also representative of large cities nationwide in terms of student demographics: Charters there enroll a larger share of students of color, low-income students and English language learners than traditional district schools. 

And these students are making some of the most noticeable gains, the CREDO data show: Black students in San Antonio charter schools got the equivalent of 42 more days of instruction in reading and 73 in math compared statewide. 

Likewise with Hispanic charter school students, who showed benefits equaling 49 extra days of instruction in reading and 36 in math. Students in poverty had similar findings: Low-income charter school students got the equivalent of 56 more days in reading and 48 more days in math.

Whitley noted that the new results are similar to CREDO results that researchers found over the past few years in Houston and Austin. “They’re all sort of showing the same thing when it comes to charter school students achieving all these additional days of learning, especially …traditionally disadvantaged student subgroups.”

What’s perhaps most notable: Charter schools offered eye-popping advantages for English language learners. In reading, these students received the equivalent of 95 extra days, more than half the typical school year.

For disabled students, the findings on charter schools were similarly promising, with charter students received the equivalent of 87 extra days in reading and 68 in math. Innovation School students actually received the equivalent of 16 fewer days in reading, but 55 more days in math. 

, president & CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, welcomed the results, saying the gains are due to “the flexibility and autonomy offered by public charter schools. The charter school model empowers teachers to provide innovative, high-quality instruction and gives them the autonomy to design a classroom that fits their students’ needs.” 

Rees noted charters’ strong philanthropic support in San Antonio, adding, “Charter schools are led by dynamic individuals who have the flexibility to create a school culture that responds to the needs of the community and fosters student performance and parent satisfaction.”

An erroneous outcry around critical race theory created more red tape for Akeem Brown, complicating the opening of , a school designed to celebrate the Black and brown communities who partnered with Brown to co-create it.

identifies and prepares excellent leaders to transform education in their communities. Brown is a , and we are proud to have walked alongside him in his remarkable journey to found Essence Prep, set to open in August 2022 serving students in kindergarten through second grade. 

Building and leading a locally responsive public charter school is the ultimate exercise in community organizing and engagement for school leaders. BES understands how to do this, and we believe Brown did it very successfully in designing Essence Prep.

While Essence Prep will deliver a high-quality education to any and all students, Brown intentionally co-created a public charter school with a predominantly Black and Latino community; a community who expressed a desire for a public educational option designed to meet the unique needs they face every day in San Antonio’s Eastside and beyond. The charter application he submitted in 2021 promised high academic standards, culturally responsive teaching, social-emotional learning and a focus on learning about public policy. 

At first, the Texas Education Agency enthusiastically recommended the school be granted a charter with an 11-3 vote. Days later, TEA leadership received feedback from an elected official citing . Though this criticism inaccurately lumped together the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion practices with critical race theory, it effectively influenced TEA to request that Brown and his team remove anti-racist language from their website and from the charter application, unnecessarily lengthening the authorization process. Not only did this delay cost Essence Prep energy, time and money, it forced them to rewrite parts of the application that were important to the founding of the school — a process they had worked on together with the community.

To be clear, Essence Prep never promised to teach critical race theory; critical race theory was not mentioned in any part of the application, its curriculum, or its website. What Essence Prep promises is an inclusive learning environment that celebrates students’ cultures; ensures a psychologically safe environment for students of all backgrounds, needs and abilities; and teaches students to examine and interrupt the inequality they see in their own lives. Preventing anti-racism is inherently racist, and it is wrong.

Under the new Texas law, a “teacher may not be compelled to discuss a widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.” Charter schools are public schools, held to the same accountability standards as any district-operated school and the curriculum taught in public charters must uphold state law. Unfounded claims about Essence Prep’s charter application created more work for a team made up entirely of people of color, forcing them to compromise on authentically representing the voices of the community, one of the hallmarks of their school model that parents stated they couldn’t find in other schools. Using these laws to limit opportunity for people of color is rooted in white supremacy. It is racist, and it is wrong.

Essence Prep was pressured to abandon its equity vision statement, which called for its school community to focus on “educational reform to achieve social, cultural, environmental, economic, and racial justice.“ All references to “Black and brown students,” and all references to anti-racism were dropped from their website and marketing materials. We at BES believe this pressure was driven by the fear that children might be taught to critically examine the world around them and create pathways to help all people overcome oppression. Those who fought against Essence Prep’s anti-racist design argued that such an educational experience would be uncomfortable for the school’s white students. This claim is baseless, and it is wrong. 

Families have a right to high-quality educational options that are intentionally designed to celebrate their communities and cultures and meet the unique needs of their students. Brown and his team spoke with nearly 500 families when designing Essence Prep; families who want their students to be able to interrupt the injustice they experience, develop knowledge of themselves and be agents of change in their communities and beyond. Essence Prep has promised to do this and more.

 Just as privileged, often white, communities have the opportunity to create and choose school options that meet the needs of their children, communities of color have the right to help design public school options that are aimed at creating safe, inclusive and anti-racist spaces for all students. Essence Prep will be that school when it opens its doors in a few months.

San Antonio high school band leader Alejandro Jaime Salazar knew something was off — really off — when he listened to the Mighty Owl marching band practice one morning this past winter. 

Salazar, a tall man with a friendly face, even when concerned, walked between the rows glancing over shoulders, studying fingers to see what was wrong. 

Finally he stopped them. 

“Raise your hand if you’re on page six,” he said. To his surprise, most of the students in the Highlands High School band hall were not.

So, with a fluttering of pages, the Mighty Owls began again. It was better. 

And it’s getting better all the time. 

This kind of gaffe would have been pretty much unheard of years ago, when the band from Highlands High School in San Antonio consistently earned top marks in competitions, bringing home trophies, plaques, and ribbons.

But this school year, as the strain of the pandemic has worn on, and on, Salazar now says he takes mistakes in stride. 

After all they’ve been through, all they are still going through, he says he knows it’s going to take time to get back on the same page and playing the same tune. 

“They regressed a lot, but I’m okay with it because we brought them back,” said Salazar who spent the earliest days of the pandemic, March through May 2020, using every tool he had to hunt down more than 70 band members, stay connected to them over Zoom — sometimes with his own baby on his lap — and muster what enthusiasm he could to create structure, routine, and dependability in their lives.

Now that he has them back in the band hall, is able to check in on their mental health, can make sure they are eating and sleeping somewhere safe, he can start to revive their joy of playing, the thing that brought them together in the first place. 

The entire U.S. school system has been in survival mode for the past two years, focused solely on getting kids back into buildings. Now, feeling as if they’re through the worst of it, one band teacher is determined to see his kids thrive again. “We’re bringing music back.”

Seasons of Love

In some ways, bringing the music back is a sign of hope and progress. Back in the spring of 2020 Salazar remembers being happy if he was able to get even a stanza out of his clunky Zoom practices, with his players waiting out the pandemic at home. He says most of his effort then went towards making sure everyone was safe — while some kids were juggling internet connections and noisy houses, others were facing food insecurity, newly unemployed parents, and mental health crises. 

Salazar quickly realized that the band was often students’ strongest connection to school, and the essential resources it could provide — not just individual academics, but the community that was only as strong as its members. 

But in other ways, bringing the music back doubled as a sign of just how much had been taken from the Mighty Owl Band over the last two years.

Sitting down with Salazar this past December, it was difficult to tell if it’s determination, weariness, hope or relief one now hears in Salazar’s voice. Maybe all of those, as he considers what it means to lead a marching band in the middle of a persistent pandemic and an escalating mental health crisis. 

Salazar knows he probably won’t be adding much to the line of trophies in the Highlands High School band hall in southeast San Antonio — not this year, anyway. This year, it’s about using music to strengthen the bonds of the band, the same bonds he’s been relying on for almost two years to keep students within reach, safe from the ravages of isolation.

A lifelong performer, Salazar knows how close a band can be — he still plays trumpet with a group of mariachis. In fact, touring with a band was his original career goal. He eventually pursued teaching so that he could have a stable gig and start a family, and quickly realized giving students life experiences and confidence they didn’t have before was even more fulfilling than focusing on craft alone. 

“I’m very competitive,” he admitted, and is at times envious of the well-resourced bands where students can afford private lessons and well-funded booster clubs make a band director’s every dream come true. But he says his wife, also a teacher, reminds him: “You wouldn’t do well in one of those places where the kids don’t need you. What is a trophy going to do for you?”

It’s great to make beautiful music, sure, he said, but the real reason he’s remained in his role is to see students grow as people, as a team. In sharp contrast to the isolation of the pandemic, he said, band is about more than just music — it’s about being part of something bigger than yourself, caring for others and being cared for, and believing in others and being believed in. It’s also about finding a connection with people you might not otherwise spend time with. 

“I think that’s what’s going to turn this pandemic mentality around for the people who are not having a positive experience right now,” Salazar said, finding more spaces to forge new connections.

Ain’t No Mountain High Enough

Even before the pandemic, Salazar knew camaraderie among the band was the reason some of his students showed up to school, the reason they kept their grades up, so they could stay eligible. In March 2020, that bond became a lifeline.

When schools closed and students were disappearing by the thousands, Salazar had flute-players tracking down flute-players and trumpet-players tracking down trumpet-players. He tracked down every single one. But making contact once didn’t guarantee a student’s situation was stable. One student became homeless in the early months of the pandemic, and it took a band-wide effort to keep in contact with them. 

Like many, he hoped the pandemic would pass, and kids would be back in formation by marching season. It was not to be, of course. San Antonio ISD brought back only 20 percent of students in September 2020. More and more trickled in throughout the year, but none without scars.

“Their communication skills regressed quite a bit. They forgot how to reach out and ask for help,” he said, adding it’s up to him and his assistant directors to offer it. 

The kids in the band call him their “Band Dad,” he said. “The first time I heard it, it was very odd for me. Now it’s a normal thing.”

As someone who had involved and supportive parents whom he credits with much of his success, being a strong “Band Dad” isn’t a responsibility he takes lightly. He knows other teachers who feel this too, like surrogate parents, whose main job isn’t conveying information or handing out grades but being a consistent, supportive presence. 

Lean On Me

While Salazar’s expertise uniquely qualifies him to be a band director, he’s just one of many adults who can take the time to listen, encourage, and help connect a kid to the help they need. That’s the part of his job he takes more seriously than making sure the horns are on cue and the winds are in tune.

Sometimes Salazar says he just listens. The students trust their band family, but sometimes he has to convince them it’s time to bring a counselor or social worker into the conversation. He said some of his students have seen family members get sick and die. They’ve watched their parents go from stable working class incomes to wondering where next week’s groceries would come from.

In the depths of the pandemic, he said students couldn’t worry about mastering marching formations or concert pieces, because they were worried about supporting their families, caring for siblings, and keeping up with classwork, he said. Like the virus, those concerns haven’t evaporated entirely. San Antonio ISD only allowed remote learning in a few circumstances at the start of the 2021-22 school year, but a couple of the kids from the band took it.

“They went through so much at home, it’s hard to leave because they have so much to take care of,” Salazar said.

His compassion and care for the kids is bottomless, it seems, but he’s a true believer in the power of a good routine. Even when the entire band was remote, he conducted regular practice, as a way of creating regularity and normalcy when days, nights, weeks, and months were blending together. 

From the earliest days of the pandemic, Salazar felt it was essential to reach every kid, every day. “I want it to be as normal as possible,” he said back in May 2020, “There are kids who are freaking out. So I want to be that consistency in their life if that’s what they need.” 

Even though other teachers only required contact once per week in the early days, he insisted on daily check-ins. “A lot of teachers don’t understand how important the relationships are,” he said in 2020, during the height of the crisis. 

He also believes band can now play a key role in rebuilding the social and emotional skills kids have lost. He thinks back to his own band directors in high school, who emphasized teamwork and conscientiousness just as much as trumpet skills. 

Whereas some activities and sports tolerate selfishness and arrogance from superstars, that’s not how Salazar learned to train the band. ​​”They encouraged me not only to be a good musician but to be a good person,” Salazar said. 

“They’d say, ‘you’re a good player, you know, but you can’t be a jerk.’” 

We Are Family 

For those who are now back at school in person, the majority of the band, Salazar expects hard work. He drills them on the fundamentals, he connects the effort they put in at band practice to the character they will need to succeed in the future. But the support and acceptance he gives in return is just as committed — he’s all in. “There’s days when I feel like I don’t make an impact at all, but that’s not true,” he said. He knows band is making a difference, because the kids prioritize it. Given the crushing stress of the pandemic, he said, when kids are showing up for 6:45am band practice, he knows they see the value in what they are getting. 

“We’re here all the time,” said flute-player Victoria Martinez, “This is my family.” 

Martinez is a junior and a drum major. While her freshman year was cut short by the pandemic, marching season in the fall and concert season in the winter had given her a taste of what it feels like to win, and a vision of the triumphs that awaited in her years as an upperclassman. 

Now, her perspective is different, she said. Returning to in person school at the end of last year, spring 2021, she could see the toll of the pandemic on her peers, many of whom felt disconnected. Those who have band have somewhere to reestablish that connection. 

“My freshman year success was about trophies,” Martinez said. “My junior year it’s about giving it all to the band.”

Giving their all doesn’t mean perfection. It can’t. The band is inexperienced. Practicing at home in apartments or full houses was not an option for some. Parents were working, siblings were studying. It wasn’t the right environment to pick up a trumpet. 

ABC

To bring back the music, Salazar said, he’s got to do it note by note, and he needs space to do that. 

“We’re expected to come back 100%,” said Salazar, referring to statewide reinstatements of academic testing and band competitions. “It’s like we’re pre-COVID again, and that’s not realistic. They want to call it a rebuilding year, but it’s not a rebuilding year if we’re not able to go back and work on these fundamental skills.”

This is the kind of basic back-and-forth that takes up time. Salazar reviews breathing and posture. Basics. It’s tedious, but the kids are up for it. Band President Isaiah Vigil urges them on, reminds them to focus.

Vigil is only a sophomore, and this is his first year with a full varsity band, but as one of the few who were in school in person all year last year, he’s actually one of the more well-rehearsed. Being the president, as a sophomore, he said, is, “Weird…really weird.” 

But he likes it. Band teaches responsibility, determination, and respect, he said. Getting it right, practicing, showing up — even when motivation is lacking, those are things the band members do for each other. That’s the thing about band, the members said: No one succeeds or fails alone. If a trumpet wants to sound good, they need the other trumpets to be on cue too. It works the other way too, even when individual members might be tempted to slack off, have an “off day,” they still don’t want to let the band down.

“They really care about each other a lot,” Vigil said of his bandmates.

Better Days

Salazar knows one of the main contributions of a band program is motivation and connection it provides. It’s why some kids come to school, he said. Students have to be academically eligible to perform, and pre-pandemic, that kept the kids on their toes. 

Now, he said, no matter how hard they work, eligibility has been a struggle. 

Even with about 70 kids enrolled in band, Salazar went through most of marching season with about half that on the field. It’s difficult to prepare for competitions with so many students at risk of sitting out. 

But he’s also seeing growth. At the beginning of the year, he said, it was difficult to get through the first four measures of a piece, basically the first line. At a competition a few months later they earned a second tier recognition at a competition. Salazar celebrated it as much as he had cheered the top marks the band had gotten at that same competition in previous years. “The growth was there.” 

He posted the win on social media, and band directors and composers around the country celebrated with him.

Bittersweet Symphony 

Jose Pulliza hadn’t imagined quite so much growth in his senior year. He wants to be an engineer, so he pictured himself playing his baritone, having a blast with his friends while they earned high marks and trophies.

“It’s nothing like I would have thought,” Pulliza said, reflecting on the difference between his freshmen and senior year. “A lot changed — I grew.” 

The pandemic struck at the end of Pulliza’s sophomore year, just before the band was set to perform in San Antonio’s lively parade season. His junior year would be spent entirely at home, as his parents weren’t willing to take the risk of sending him back to school in person. He didn’t march in half-time shows or perform from the stands as the air turned cold during football season of his junior year. 

“A year and half really threw me off,” Pulliza said. “It was like being a freshman again.” 

He quickly got back on top of his academics — he’s been accepted at the University of Texas at San Antonio — but when it came to band, rebuilding meant more than just polishing his own skills on the baritone.

Pulliza may have been rusty, but he was one of the only members of the band who had actually completed at least one full year. Salazar would need him in leadership. 

Pulliza auditioned for drum major, successfully, and he’s been surprised how he’s taken to the role. The responsibility bonded him to the band, helped him settle back into a community. 

“People don’t understand how good band is for an individual,” he said. He’s focused on growing as a person, and that’s the message he passes on to his bandmates: success is measured by how you show up, not what accolades you get.

“We just give it our all. We don’t worry about the rewards,” Pulliza said. 

One Love

Salazar knows the slim odds that few, if any, of the Mighty Owls will go on to musical professions. But what they are getting from band can still carry over into their future. Passion, caring for each other, hard work, commitment — these are themes in Salazar’s lectures to the band, which he admits are more frequent than they used to be as he focuses on social and emotional health. 

“You make them a winner by being there for them, supporting them, and by making this a safe space where they can express themselves.” 

Whether it’s the notes on the page, or the melody in their laughter, or the harmony as they work together — that’s what brings the music back.

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to both the Weave Project and The 74.

Lead Image: San Antonio high school band leader Alejandro Jaime Salazar (Bekah McNeel)

But his new job comes with lots of time in the spotlight, dustups included. 

Next month Aquino will become the superintendent of San Antonio Independent School District where there’s already pressure to get schools back on their pre-pandemic reform track.

But Aquino is also headed for Texas, a state in relentless turmoil over anti-transgender politics, book banning, and pushing Black, Latino, LGBTQ, immigrant, and English-learning children further to the margins.

In his 57 years, Aquino has walked those margins himself. As an immigrant learning English. As a Latino. As a gay man. 

He knows how lonely that journey can be, and he has a message for the children of San Antonio ISD, especially those on the margins: 

 “For those who are in all these groups who have been told they don’t belong, that they aren’t part of our community, my message is: You belong in our community. We love you. In San Antonio ISD you will always have a place. We’re going to do everything we can to make sure you’re going to shine.”

Aquino, who insists on being called Jaime, has never made his career about any part of his identity other than “teacher,” and he’s very careful not to set himself up as a spokesperson for the LGBTQ — or any other — community. 

When asked, he has been open about his sexuality. “I want other leaders like me to not have to hide who they are.”

He’s also open about the realities of being an immigrant. English will always be his second language, just like nearly a quarter of San Antonio ISD students, and Aquino is not shy about the myriad challenges that come along with that. He knows the importance of demonstrating what is possible for kids, and while he’s no “superman,” he said, he wants the children of San Antonio to see that they, like him, belong in the community, in leadership, no matter where they come from or what politicians say. 

As he spends time with the district’s teachers, parents, and students, Aquino will be able to hone his plan to recoup the losses in enrollment and academic performance after the pandemic all but erased the gains made under previous superintendent Pedro Martinez. He’ll also be getting acquainted with the district’s performance data, and the predictable gaps in student outcomes.

Martinez’s administration focused heavily on bilingual education, and mitigating the effects of poverty on schools. Increased funding, expanded dual language, and school choice initiatives were billed as proof that kids from low income neighborhoods were as brilliant and capable as their middle class peers. 

Martinez did acknowledge, however, that during his tenure, special education had not seen the gains other areas had. In an interview with The 74 before he left, Martinez said he could see the “components being put in place,” including new administrators, to give those services more attention. 

But the parents of students entitled to special education services say they are tired of being shoved off on lower-level administrators, and run around district offices, and are already lining up for a place at the top of Aquino’s agenda. From his home in New York, Aquino watched via livestream as parents spoke for a full hour at the April 18 board meeting on their dissatisfaction with the district’s special education services. 

The parents—who had planned to speak at the same board meeting where Aquino was announced, but were asked to delay so as not to disrupt the celebration—shared stories of being passed from administrator to administrator, regularly denied time and effort from anyone who would make meaningful change for their children. 

“No more promised and then deferred conversations,” said special education parent Becky McMains. “Special education is the neglected corner of education in this district. We as parents are far from optimism and hope.” She mentioned how English language learners had benefited from the expansion of dual language programs in the district, and asked for similarly innovative attention, expressing hope that Aquino himself would lead that effort.

“We know the difference a new superintendent with vision and a heart for equity can make,” McMains said.

Special education will indeed be a “top priority” in San Antonio, Aquino told The 74 after watching the meeting. “I have seen first hand how our special education students are sometimes treated as stepchildren, and I don’t want that to happen.”

While Aquino is not certified in special education, he pointed to his top-level administrative work in Hartford, Los Angeles, and Denver, where he had special education moved from its silo and placed under his purview so he could make it an academic priority.

Addressing the special education discontent will be part of another challenge awaiting Aquino: falling enrollment. Many parents at the April 18 meeting said they were actively considering leaving the district—that in a district with a lot of choices, none were designed with their children in mind.

The Martinez administration did create at least nine open-enrollment schools in addition to the two the district already had — two dual language, two Montessori, two career and technical education, two single gender, and the Advanced Learning Academy — and placed opt-in dual language programs in more than 30 other schools. The efforts briefly stemmed the district’s decades-long enrollment decline, but in the wake of the pandemic, numbers have again tumbled.

While he believes that parents should have the information and the options to make a the best choice for their student — and he wants every San Antonio ISD school to strive to be that best choice for all students including those receiving special education services — Aquino is agnostic when it comes to the various models and structures that have occupied much of the debate around school choice and education reform. He’s seen good and bad charters, good and bad small schools, good and bad magnets. 

“What really makes the difference is the interaction that happens between the teacher and the students in the classroom,” he said.

To that end, Aquino has already reached out to perhaps Martinez’s harshest critics, the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel, the district’s union. President Alejandra Lopez said she shared the union’s priorities with Aquino, and looks forward to continuing to build on the conversations they have started with interim Superintendent Robert Jacklich. 

She and her members were, she said, pleased to hear Aquino’s repeated emphasis on prioritizing what happens between teachers and students. “We are encouraged to see someone who has classroom experience, who through his statements appears to understand the necessity to engage the work we do in the classroom.”

Aquino’s relationships to teachers unions have been constructive in his previous roles, he said. As a teacher in New York City, he said, was a delegate with the American Federation of Teachers. He also served as his campus’s union representative, a role he said he filled on the condition that his colleagues understand he would never defend actions or advocate for decisions that were not best for the students. 

As part of John Deasy’s team in Los Angeles, Aquino spearheaded some reforms unpopular with teachers unions, including implementation of the common core and increased use of test scores for accountability. “Not surprisingly, United Teachers Los Angeles did not mourn the departure of Aquino,” the Los Angeles Times when Aquino resigned in 2013.

However, when he left Hartford in 2004, the president of the teacher’s union wrote a lamenting the district’s “loss.” 

“Although we may have not always agreed, we have found that Mr. Aquino will work diligently to reach consensus on issues that directly affect teachers and students,” Cathy Carpino wrote. 

Aquino pledged to pursue a similar dynamic with Lopez and the union here.

A less splashy, but structurally significant Martinez-era reform — the system of great schools model — could be on firm ground. Aquino was present during the Michael Bennet era of Denver Public Schools, which brought the portfolio model, a precedent for what Martinez and former innovation chief Mohammed Choudhury would do in San Antonio to give principals more control over campus staff, budget, and curriculum. 

“I really believe that those closest to our kids should be making most of the decisions” Aquino said, “I will support that, but with a caveat. I need to make sure those who are making these decisions have the right professional learning, training, resources, and skills to make those decisions. I don’t ever want to be in the place where we are questioning why school X made such a decision even though it’s not backed by data or science.”

In many ways, Aquino was brought to the district to give answers like that. Even handed, nuanced, and focused. For him, a quiet tenure of steady improvement without flashy initiatives or saber-rattling would suit just fine, as long as the community is well-served by great schools. He admires the work Martinez did, but as a man planning to retire after his time in San Antonio — a city where he said he already sees himself at home — he plans to do things in his own way, to “build on the great foundation, and hoping to take it to the next level, but in a way that honors the sense of humanity, both in the district and in the community.”

San Antonio Independent School District will soon have a new superintendent — Jaime Aquino, a reform-friendly career educator with experience in the nation’s largest school systems.��

“I will work tirelessly to ensure that every child in every school receives the highest quality education possible. I don’t take this job lightly,” Aquino said at a Monday school board meeting. In touring the schools in San Antonio during the interview process, he said, he “was inspired by their stories, by their hopes, and by their sense of optimism.” 

Monday’s announcement, which will be followed by a mandatory 21-day waiting period before a contract can be signed, comes six months after Pedro Martinez left the job to helm Chicago Public Schools. Many are hoping Aquino will pick up where Martinez and his innovation chief, Mohammed Choudhury, left off.

“Pedro, Mohammed Choudhury and our board ran the first lap of a race, but that race is far from finished,” former district board Trustee Steve Lecholop told The 74. Lecholop, who also had a large hand in recruiting Martinez to San Antonio in 2015, played an active role in the search, despite losing his board seat in 2021 to one of Martinez’s most outspoken critics. “This is not tearing down and rebuilding in your own image. This is a continuation of a significant amount of process,” Lecholop said. 

The board still has the majority that carried out Martinez’s reforms, and Trustee Ed Garza told The 74 the board was looking for someone who “didn’t need any convincing” as to the value of Martinez’s and Choudhury’s reforms, which included socioeconomic integration, open-enrollment schools and a framework for teacher incentive pay.

However, Garza acknowledged that Aquino, having served as a deputy superintendent in Los Angeles, Denver Public Schools and New York City, will bring ideas and experiences of his own — as well as, he hopes, a steady hand. In areas where Martinez and his team struggled, such as coalition building, the district board hopes Aquino will shine.

“He’s coming at a time when the district needs some healing. Not just from COVID, but from the roller coaster of the last six years,” Garza said. While he celebrated the pre-pandemic progress made under Martinez in increasing student enrollment and academic achievement, he said there had been some who had been jarred along the way. 

The board gave special consideration to Aquino’s ability to balance the needs of various communities, Lecholop said, and to his experience in large, urban districts where kids experience high poverty and have diverse needs. He said he wanted to see a candidate’s commitment to equity based on experience and results.

Feedback from the community during the search process indicated that parents wanted a superintendent who shared the lived experiences of their children, said San Antonio ISD Board President Christina Martinez. 

“I think what we need right now is inspiration, and you bring that,” Martinez said to Aquino at Monday’s meeting.

Born in the Dominican Republic, Aquino learned English as his second language, as do more than one-fifth of San Antonio district students. He immigrated to the United States in the 1980s as a teacher. 

“My life journey is probably very similar to many of the families in San Antonio,” Aquino said, shortly before continuing his remarks in Spanish.

Among issues that came up in vetting Aquino were a purchasing controversy in Los Angeles and Aquino’s departure from Rochester City School District in New York.��

Aquino has any wrongdoing in L.A., where critics questioned whether he had given his former employer, Pearson, advice on bidding for a contract to provide iPads for the district’s one-to-one technology rollout. Many attributed his 2013 departure to the stalled rollout of the Common Core standards, and he wrote in a memo to district employees, “​​the current political climate does not allow me to lead an agenda that is in the best interest of kids.” 

In Rochester, where Aquino was appointed a “distinguished educator” to consult on needed improvements in 2018, he left after his one-year contract was up. Some expressed frustration with his short tenure, and his final report declared Rochester “a community with low expectations for students rooted in a deep history of institutional racism.”

By contrast, Aquino said he plans to serve San Antonio in the interest of making it “a city that gives every child a fair shot at the American dream,” where any kid can see a pathway forward, including those who see themselves in his journey.  

For politicians like Fort Worth Republican Rep. Matt Krause — who for more than 850 titles related to sex and race — books are the encroachment of liberal values into classrooms. 

School boards do see challenges about particular books from time to time, but speaks to the contentiousness of the last two years as mask mandates and critical race theory have packed boardrooms and ballot boxes. 

Some parents have said that the graphic or salacious nature of the sex and violence depicted in books is the problem, but Dallas ISD student Symerra Lincoln, 16, like other students her age, said it was nonsensical to try to “censor” the information in the internet age. 

“We’re going to find the content they’re censoring from us either way, whether that will be from the school, or online on social media or Google,” she said. 

But behind the iconography of a dangerous idea or a political fight, Texas students told The 74 the books — more so the ability to choose for themselves which they read — are a critical part of their development. 

They contain stories and protagonists who help them see the world through another’s eyes, and ideas that challenge them. And whether or not they identify with the characters or accept the idea, students said, they feel more mature having formed their own opinion. 

“It is very important to read about social issues,” said Lincoln, “We need to read different views and information to form our own opinions on the issues.” 

Mature content

Most of the students did recognize the need for guidance, especially for younger readers, and said librarians should be the one to decide what books are available to which students. 

“Librarians should have the most power, because in their profession they have to have a degree (in library science),” said KIPP Beacon (Austin) eighth grader Kai Cantú, 13, “Their job kind of rests on them being unbiased”

Lucy Ibarra Podmore, chair elect of the Texas Association of School Libraries, and a high school librarian in San Antonio, said while parents and politicians are honing in on graphic passages, students rarely focus on those.

“They’re really focusing on the overall arc of the story. That’s what people are missing,” Podmore said. Students are drawn to stories in which teenagers like themselves have complex feelings about their identity, relationships, and the world around them. 

Some books do include violence, sexual relationships, and social issues like race and LGBTQ rights come into the story, Podmore explained, because teenagers encounter those things in their real lives. “There are books that are talking about sexual relationships between teenagers because that’s happening.”

Young adults 

While Podmore sees the political posturing and power struggles for what they are—she notes how books about race and LGBTQ identity made up the overwhelming majority of Krause’s list—she also sees the alarmism over mature content as a result of the “rose-colored glasses” through which many adults see teenage lives.

While today’s parents grew up with a dearth of young adult fiction in the 1980’s, going “straight from Beverly Cleary’s Ramona to adult books,” Podmore said, the last 20 years have seen a bloom of novels both resonant and appealing for teenage readers.

Along with the timeless coming of age challenges, today’s students live in a world shaped by social media and political unrest. Lockdown drills to remind them of the possibility of a school shooting, and the pressure to achieve starts as early as selective admission pre-schools. 

Books speak to the emotional and social world they are in, Podmore said, “Some kids aren’t talking to anyone about it.” When she recommended that her entire high school read Turtles All the Way Down, by John Green, which tackles the topic of anxiety, she said many students said they’d finally found a way to explain their own anxiety to their parents, friends, and teachers. 

She’s been heartbroken to see books about LGBTQ characters at the center of so much furor. It amplifies the message many LGBTQ kids already hear: they are not welcome in the community. 

Books help students make sense of things they’ve experienced in other ways too, Podmore said. “Fiction has always been a safe place to explore situations or conversations that you may not be familiar with.” For some, that means putting words to feelings they have or even being able to name ways they have been hurt or abused.

That’s one reason Bellville ISD student Carlos Aponte, 13, said he didn’t want to see parent permission required for checking out books based on content. His teachers let their classes select their own reading, and his parents encourage him to read broadly, but he knows that’s not the case for all of his classmates. 

For students who come from abusive situations, or families who might respond negatively to a student coming out as queer or even expressing different political ideas, Aponte said, “Books are an escape.”

At the same time, because his classmates are going through more than the adults in their lives might understand, Aponte does have concerns about content that might graphically depict or romanticize self-harm or death by suicide. “That could have a big impact,” Aponte said, “It’s tricky.”

Reasonable boundaries

While older students felt they should have access to any content or topic, they recognized the need to be cognizant of people’s sensitivities. 

“I don’t think that any high school would allow content that contains violence that does not pertain to history,” said Dallas ISD student Kennedie Westbrook, 16, “However, I think that content which details heart-wrenching events like Antisemitism and slavery should advise the reader to be wary. Viewer discretion advised.” 

Podmore said she did something similar when she was a middle school librarian, by putting “YA” (young adult) stickers on books with more mature content. She told students just like they knew their family’s rules about what they could and could not watch l on television or the internet, they needed to respect their family’s boundaries around reading. If their parents wanted them to hold off on some of the more mature content, she said, she hoped they would. 

“They’re kind of self-governing and very self-aware,” Podmore said, “More self-aware than the adults are giving them credit for.” 

At the same time, Cantú said, it could be a good idea for a librarian to monitor certain books, and require the student to debrief with the librarian, such as books with Nazi or neo-Nazi characters, or books like Mein Kampf. Having access to those ideas is important, Cantú said, even if just to see how “messed up” and dangerous those views are. but the school should make sure that is indeed the message the students are getting. 

What it’s really about

The American Library Association does offer for communities to reconsider books accused of being offensive or inappropriate, and it’s a process that isn’t unfamiliar to most librarians, Podmore said. What’s bothering her now is the political furor and fear have led many to shortcut the process— which keeps books on the shelves as committees of parents, librarians, and teachers deliberate— and give into the loudest voice in the room. 

In some ways, it does feel like the political fight over books and the reality of how students engage those books are happening on two different planes, she said. Students are not gobbling up graphic content, nor are the books transforming ambivalent teens into activists. 

On the other hand, whom teens empathize with, and what their minds are open to are not without political consequences. Empathizing with their LGBTQ neighbors or the concerns raised by the Black Lives Matter movement might change the way they vote one day. It might change the policies they support.

“I think that it’s important to read about social issues because it helps society to grow empathy towards oppressed groups,“ Westbrook said, “It also exposes people to the harsh reality that their neighbor next door might face.”

Podmore referenced Ashley Herring Blake’s middle grade novels that tenderly handle the issue of pronouns in ways sixth graders took in stride. “The adults tend to make a much bigger deal about this than the kids,” Podmore said. The kids took the issue of pronouns and gender identity in stride, while adults feel like much more explaining is necessary.

Books come to the aid of students whose parents aren’t ready to have a conversation a student is ready to have, Podmore said, but it would be a mistake for parents to think the book put the idea in the kid’s head. 

Students suggested adults — both parents and teachers — embrace the discomfort.

“While it’s typically an uncomfortable topic to talk about, at our age we already know about sex and how babies are made,” Westbrook said. “But we have to take health class. So why not talk about other uncomfortable topics like racism, stereotypes, homophobia, etc?” 

But making pronouns not a big deal — even more putting queer characters in the central role with whom the reader is supposed to identify — is part of the social change parents and politicians are resisting, Podmore said. “That’s what scaring a lot of people. Their experience isn’t centered anymore.”

“One of the things I’m the most proud of here—I can see both in direct conversations as well as the data—is that the culture has shifted from when I started,” Martinez told The 74 after announcing his departure to become CEO of Chicago public schools. “Now that people see what is possible, there’s no going back.”

Mohammed Choudhury, Martinez’s deputy and the architect of many of his reforms told the 74’s Beth Hawkins in 2018 he wanted to create a system that would outlive them.

“I have told my team and I continue to tell them, ‘Design as if you won’t be here one day,’” said Choudhury, who left San Antonio in June when he was hired as the Maryland superintendent of schools.  

That day has come. The durability of those designs is already being tested. 

Most of ���dzܻ��ܰ���’s successors are gone, as are other district leaders, with both men recruiting key staff to take with them to their new jobs. 

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The scale and sustainability of the district’s eye-catching progress, based mostly on a series of high profile innovations and school-by-school success stories, are less certain, especially with the gains lost to COVID-19 and current teacher shortages. The district is also searching for a new superintendent, who will likely bring their own vision to the role.

“SAISD is at a critical point with a lot of unfinished business for the next leader to address,” said former school board member Steve Lecholop, who was on the board for all but the final months of Martinez’s tenure. The work was dramatic and changes were fundamental, Lecholop said, “But the foundation we poured hasn’t yet set.” 

Hired in 2015, Martinez oversaw dramatic reforms—such as open-enrollment schools, expanded dual language, and a teacher evaluation system with higher pay. 

Over the first four years of his tenure, the district went from failing to a B rating, a fast turnaround for a district where 87.6% of the 45,800 students qualify for the federal free and reduced lunch program. In 2020 Martinez set more goals for the district. 

While the results came fast, they were driven by a few key successes at individual campuses, as well as grants with a limited lifespan. The systems that would spread change to the entire district and sustain them over time are not fully operational. The new superintendent will need to take those blueprints and put them into practice, Lecholop said. “Otherwise, six years of hard work and dramatic improvements will have been for naught.” 

Not everyone would be sad to see Martinez’s reforms fade. Partnerships with charter networks and changes to teacher contracts , while some felt the district over existing neighborhood schools. Others criticized a lack of meaningful as the administration rolled out reforms. 

Those critics have a voice on the school board now, as Lecholop, a stalwart supporter of Martinez, lost his seat to union-backed Sarah Sorensen, an outspoken critic. But the reform-minded majority remains in place. 

“We have every intention of ensuring that all of the innovation that has occurred in SAISD over the last 5 years, stays,” said San Antonio ISD Board President Christina Martinez (no relation). She would not comment on whether specific initiatives and structures from the Pedro Martinez era would continue as is, calling the conversation premature. 

“COVID has brought immense challenges, and it is crucial for the district to be flexible and nimble as we continue to put kids first and strive to be a national model urban district,” she said.  

One of Martinez’s key achievements had been reversing decades of falling enrollment numbers, gains nearly erased by disenrollment during COVID-19. 

The board will need to address the teacher shortage and ongoing pandemic-related issues like mask mandates and quarantine protocols, while conducting a nationwide search for a new superintendent, but Christina Martinez said the board feels a sense of “urgency” to maintain as their top priority—one of the key cultural reforms of the past six years—holding the administration accountable for improving student outcomes. 

Parent advocates hope a new superintendent will include more students in those improved outcomes. While the district saw significant gains for English language learners following a massive expansion of dual language programs, special education services remain a point of contention.

“For years we have asked for an internal review of poor performing, toxic, abusive campuses and staff,” said San Antonio ISD parent Denise Ojeda, who served on a parent advisory council. “For years we have championed creating campuses that are purposely inclusive, safe, and welcome for our children.”

Those requests went unmet under Pedro Martinez’s administration, she said, and now parents have to wait for the new superintendent “to assess if our children are worth educating or protecting.” 

She hopes the new leadership will take the advisory council and special education students more seriously, and the board will hold them to it.

“Our board is deeply committed to the families and staff of SAISD,” president Christina Martinez said, “We live in the district, our children attend school in the district, and we are intent on getting it right.”

Another challenge, however, is that several district leaders who would have been key to that continuity and accountability are, according to news reports, being by Martinez to go with him to Chicago. The district did not return a request for comment on the recruitment. 

���dzܻ��ܰ���’s Office of Innovation, which oversaw enrollment in school choice programs, talent management, and nonprofit partnerships, has been essentially dismantled. 

As he left, Choudhury expressed confidence in the staff who would be carrying on the work, but by October three of his former deputies had left the district and another one followed him to Maryland.  

Some changes made by the Office of Innovation must continue as designed—like the master teacher initiative and nonprofit partnerships—because the designs are tied to state funds. 

The master teacher program and evaluation system qualified the district for the statewide Teacher Incentive Allotment, boosting salaries to over $100,000 for the most effective teachers in the highest-need schools. District officials confirmed that the Master Teacher initiative will continue. 

Nonprofit partnerships under the “1882” program bring in state money as well. Those partnerships, coupled with increased autonomy for principals—another recent reform—are helping some principals feel better about changes at the top.

Usually when a new superintendent comes in, changes they make at the district level can cause disruption at individual schools. But some principals in SAISD have control over budgets, staffing, and curriculum, independent of the central office. 

Where changes and improvements made it to the campus level, they seem secure. 

Gates Elementary was one of the schools that improved most dramatically during the Martinez era, so much so that the district gave Principal Sonya Mora an additional campus to oversee in an attempt to replicate her success at Gates, as well as a formal nonprofit partner to help garner additional resources. 

Autonomy will allow her to keep doing what works, whatever changes happen in the superintendent’s office, she said. Starting from scratch under some new curriculum or initiative would be a setback.

“Sustainability is everything because it takes forever to get out of these holes,” Mora said. “That’s what makes me feel good about this, and why we’re not as stressed.”

The cases arrive as schools have become a culture war flashpoint in a nation divided over its pandemic response and reckonings with racism past and present.

Classroom coronavirus safety measures such as masking requirements and teacher vaccine mandates have , and in some cases, even violence — with reports of .

Meanwhile, local school boards have become the of superheated debates over the perceived encroachment of critical race theory into U.S. curricula, spurring conservative takeovers that have led to the departure of .

Tensions have escalated so high that the National School Board Association urged the Biden administration to protect school leaders who faced “an immediate threat” from what they called “domestic terrorism.” The group on Friday for the letter’s strong language, but their initial message was enough to prompt the U.S. Department of Justice to mobilize the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to combat the spike in harassment.

With the politics of school policymaking red hot, here are three key upcoming education cases to watch:

1 ACLU sues Oklahoma over its CRT teaching ban, arguing the law restricts educators’ and students’ free speech

On Oct. 19, a group of educators and civil rights groups — backed by the American Civil Liberties Union and ACLU of Oklahoma — challenging an ​​Oklahoma rule that restricts public school teachings on race and gender issues.

The organizations allege that violates students’ and teachers’ right to free speech, tamping down on classroom discussions of race and gender for political motives. The suit also argues that the state has committed a 14th Amendment violation, because the legislation is so vague that it places teachers’ jobs in jeopardy if they misunderstand its clauses.

The Oklahoma law, which took effect in May, prohibits classroom activities that would make a student feel “by virtue of his or her race or sex, (he or she) bears responsibility for actions committed in the past.” Observers described the rule as an “.”

Though the bill text does not expressly mention critical race theory, the state legislature quickly took up and passed the law while a wave of similar legislation swept through Republican-held statehouses nationwide, some of which did explicitly prohibit CRT.

Critical race theory is not an ideology, experts have previously told The 74, but a scholarly framework that views racism and inequality as ingrained in law and society. However, right-wing politicians and pundits frequently use the phrase as a catch-all term for any classroom content dealing with race.

As a result of the law’s approval, according to the ACLU, school districts in the state have told teachers to avoid using terms such as “diversity” and “white privilege” in their classrooms, and have removed To Kill a Mockingbird, Raisin in the Sun and other seminal books from reading lists.

Because a total of , the Oklahoma lawsuit could prove the first of many challenges to curricular prohibitions, legal experts say, providing a bellwether for future cases.

2 Parent claims discrimination against the unvaccinated as Los Angeles mandates COVID-19 shots for eligible students

On Oct. 8, the Los Angeles Unified School District was for its requirement that students eligible to receive coronavirus shots be vaccinated in order to attend school in person.

The parent, who was not named in the suit, alleged that COVID immunizations are too new to be mandated for young people, and that the district’s policy discriminates against unvaccinated children by denying them the right to an equal education.

Students ages 12 and up in the nation’s second-largest district must be fully immunized by Dec. 19, according to LAUSD policy. Those who fail to comply will need to enroll in an online schooling alternative called independent study to remain in the school system.

Just down the coast in San Diego, a parallel lawsuit with near-identical language and prepared by the same law firm was also against the 121,000-student district, which requires students 16 and up to receive shots by Dec. 20.

Other California school systems and Culver City, as well as Hoboken, New Jersey, have also instituted COVID vaccine mandates for eligible students, and Washington, D.C. is . In early October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that coronavirus vaccines will be required for all eligible students in the state, though the rule will .

The twin cases will provide a litmus test for whether student vaccine mandates, which legal experts have told The 74 may be vulnerable to lawsuits, hold up in court — all while shots for even younger children, ages 5 to 11, are on the verge of authorization.

3 Texas top court halts San Antonio teacher coronavirus vaccine mandate, case moves to Fourth Court of Appeals 

Hours before a teacher COVID vaccine mandate was set to take effect in San Antonio, the Texas Supreme Court issued an opinion Oct. 14 that the district’s policy, delivering a brief win to Gov. Greg Abbott, who has in the state via executive order.

A more final ruling on the state’s request for an injunction against the mandate will soon come from the Fourth Court of Appeals in San Antonio. The Texas Supreme Court , in the words of its authors, was issued only to “preserve the status quo” until the appeals court settles the matter.

School districts across the country have enacted coronavirus vaccine requirements for school staff, including over one-third of the nation’s 500 largest school systems, but San Antonio Independent School District is the only Texas district so far to attempt such a policy in opposition to Abbott’s ban.

What the appeals court decides regarding San Antonio’s rule may prove an arbiter of whether blue cities in hyper-red states will be allowed to follow through on implementing their chosen COVID safety measures amid opposition from state lawmakers.

With the vast majority of U.S. students once again learning in classrooms, 180 of the largest 500 U.S. school districts have enacted requirements for their staff to be vaccinated against COVID-19, according to an analysis published Monday by Burbio, an organization that has tracked school safety policies through the pandemic.

It’s a safety measure that health experts say represents a key step toward improved coronavirus safety in school — especially as younger students remain ineligible for shots likely until November. Although children rarely fall seriously ill from the virus, young people still make up of new cases in the U.S. and school-based outbreaks have triggered some already in 2021-22.

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“Most pediatricians that I’ve spoken with … absolutely support vaccine mandates for teachers,” Kristina Deeter, professor of pediatric medicine at University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine, told The 74. “It’s the right thing to do.”

In 11 states, coronavirus vaccines are mandated for teachers statewide, the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education reports, meaning a considerable share of the 180 districts with staff mandates enacted such policies because state law required it.

Still, vaccination rules , with some mandates having already kicked in and others not taking effect until next month.

Some school systems have more lenient policies, such as Philadelphia, which acknowledged that unvaccinated teachers , though they will be subject to twice-weekly testing. Others impose stricter sanctions, like New York City, which is barring unvaccinated teachers from entering school buildings and putting them on unpaid leave until they get the shot.

Even those districts where staff have a choice between vaccination or regular testing are included in the 36 percent tally, Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche confirmed to The 74.

The New York City mandate, which took effect Oct. 4 after a brief legal challenge, applies to roughly 150,000 people who work in the nation’s largest school system, and of employees to receive their shots in the weeks before the rule took effect. Some 96 percent of teachers in the district have now been immunized against COVID-19, The New York Times reported.

By contrast, Los Angeles, the country’s second-largest school system, on Monday extended its deadline for employees to receive their shots from Oct. 15 to Nov. 15, fearing that strict enforcement would . Unlike the New York City mandate, the L.A. rule requires two doses before the deadline for educators receiving the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine.

While many teacher mandates are in deep blue states, the San Antonio Independent School District has an immunization requirement set to go into effect Oct. 15. Earlier this month, the district’s rule from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton when a county judge denied the state’s motion to secure a temporary injunction on the mandate. A ruling on the policy from a higher court is .

Meanwhile, on Monday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order banning all COVID-19 vaccine mandates in the state, .

“We are reviewing the new executive order and consulting with our legal counsel and Board of Trustees to determine how the district will proceed with its employee vaccine mandate,” a San Antonio ISD spokesperson wrote in an email to The 74.

In lieu of mandates, other Texas districts are providing cash incentives for teachers who roll up their sleeves. , and each deliver $500 bonuses to fully vaccinated educators.

Vaccine mandates for students remain much more rare, with only a select few districts having implemented such rules. California districts Los Angeles, Oakland and Culver City as well as Hoboken, New Jersey have each made immunization a requirement for in-person school for vaccine-eligible students, with deadlines in the coming months. Washington, D.C. is .

In early October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that coronavirus vaccines will be required for all eligible students in the state, though the rule will .

Burbio’s count that 36 percent of top districts require teachers to be immunized comes as the rush to embrace such policies has slowed considerably. After eight states moved to enact educator mandates in late August and early September, only one — Delaware — has added a similar rule since then, CRPE reports.

But even as COVID case counts , Deeter, the pediatrics professor, warns that now is not time for the country to let down its guard.

“As the surge goes down … now everybody’s like ‘Yay! [The pandemic] is over.’ It’s not over. It’s not even close to over. We are just prepping for the next wave,” she said. “We have to prepare.”

He was using census data, he explained, to determine the extent of the need at each of the district’s 90-plus schools, some of which have families with incomes as low as $8,000 a year.

“I made a map,” he said. “You should come see it.”

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When Martinez introduced himself a few weeks later in a tiny conference room at district headquarters, he was carrying a rolled-up paper map. On it were lines, drawn in marker, that identified each block — and, by extension, its neighborhood school — by poverty level. With this tool, he intended to engineer an , breaking up concentrations of the lowest levels of poverty via a novel socioeconomic integration plan that offered students in destitute neighborhoods access to new and sought-after schools. In addition to making enrollment more equitable, he believed, the plan would stanch an exodus of families from district schools and attract wealthy students from neighboring communities.

Education reporters are used to watching K-12 administrators use grand PowerPoint presentations that communicate very little. Who the heck was this guy, carting a homemade map around to Rotary Club meetings and coffee klatches and hoping to get buy-in on resolving some of education’s most intractable problems?

I tried to answer that question in a 74 Interview with the superintendent, part of a wide-ranging 2018 series, 78207: America’s Most Radical School Integration Experiment. After those stories appeared, the district was declared the fastest-improving in Texas, moving from a C to a B on state report cards in a single year, and drawing national attention to Martinez’s work.

Now, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has named Martinez the next superintendent of the third-largest school system in the nation. It represents a homecoming of sorts for Martinez, who came to the United States from Mexico at age 5, graduated from Chicago Public Schools and became the first in his family to earn a college degree, which he eventually parlayed into a stint as the district’s chief financial officer, followed by local and state leadership positions in Nevada and finally a move to Texas.

You can read more about Martinez and his San Antonio experiment here. Click below to watch our full interview:

The Food and Drug Administration has fully approved the Pfizer vaccine, further affirming that it is . Scientific and medical experts reviewed extensive clinical trial data and other evidence — in fact, has the agency had so much information to determine whether a shot is safe. Data showed the Pfizer vaccine was 91 percent effective at preventing COVID-19. We owe it to ourselves and one another to get the vaccine.

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It saves lives. It will help keep schools open. And it is how we will finally end this pandemic.

Ninety percent of the staff in my district have already been vaccinated. We have set up for employees and families at all our large high schools. Students and parents are participating in our outreach and have recorded about their experience. We are also partnering with local doctors to answer any questions people may have.

This is what my community expects and demands: Families have made clear that schools must be open this year, and that the district must use every available tool to protect health and promote stable classrooms. These tools include not only the vaccine, but the recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — like masks and regular COVID testing — that prevented the virus from spreading in our schools last year and that continue to make a difference this year. As the school year started, the positivity rate in Bexar County hit 20 percent. In our schools, however, it is less than 2 percent.

As we are seeing in San Antonio, there is nationally for requiring teachers to get the vaccine. In addition, the , some of the nation’s largest and many are doing so. States such as , , and have instituted vaccine mandates for educators and certain other workers. Increasingly, leaders are requiring the vaccine because they understand that it is necessary in order for our country to emerge from the COVID crisis and begin to recover.

As chairman of , a bipartisan network of school superintendents and state education commissioners who collectively serve one-third of the children in the United States, I know that, 18 months into the pandemic, educators continue to face tremendous COVID-related challenges in their communities. The school year just started, and already colleagues are scrambling to figure out how to feed students and get them to school, since so many food service workers and bus drivers are in quarantine.

In , the governor has said he will withhold federal relief funds from school districts that require masks. Florida is from school board members in districts with mask mandates. Here in Texas, the attorney general sued my district and me over our vaccine mandate. That lawsuit has since been dropped. In the latest case of political posturing at the expense of students and families, however, the governor recently issued a new executive order maintaining his ban on vaccine mandates for school district staff — despite full FDA approval of the Pfizer vaccine.

This is not the time for politics. I encourage my fellow educators to stand strong against partisan interests and intimidation and to just do what is right for children. Everyone can see the devastating impacts of the pandemic, and we all know that kids urgently need the kind of learning and supports they get in school.

To help schools stay open, a few K-12 systems, including those in , , and are, like San Antonio, adopting staff vaccine mandates. For the good of our nation, I hope all districts will do the same. With the safe and effective vaccine, we have a way out of this pandemic. Let’s not lose sight of that. We must all do our part by getting the shot and following the health guidance that we know works. Students are not going to have a successful academic year unless everyone who is eligible gets vaccinated. The shot must be required in schools. It is just that simple.

Pedro Martinez is superintendent of the San Antonio Independent School District and chairman of Chiefs for Change, a bipartisan network of district and state education leaders.

“We’re definitely seeing pent up demand,” said Perot Museum CEO Dr. Linda Silver.

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Schools are feeling the pressure, she said. Fifth grade science scores dropped precipitously last year. Not only was science on the back burner as schools doubled down to salvage reading and math, what science instruction did happen lacked stickiness.

“Science is best taught in a hands-on, experimental, participatory way,” Silver said. That simply couldn’t happen with half the class in remote learning, as was the case in many schools.

Teachers will be under immense pressure to help kids gain ground, and fast. With that in mind, Texas museums are presenting themselves as assets for classroom teachers by offering lesson plans and guides to help visiting classes make the most of exhibits. But with the pandemic and the more contagious Delta variant as unpredictable as ever, museums are also providing videos and other tools when field trips aren’t possible.

However they can, museum officials plan to continue promoting curiosity—an attribute they say will help kids make the most of classroom STEM instruction.

At The DoSeum, a children’s art and science museum in San Antonio, vice president of education Dr. Richard Kissel and his team are preparing a series of lesson plans based on the Texas curriculum standards.

The online lesson plans help teachers prepare for upcoming field trips, so the various exhibits can be used as, essentially, lab equipment designed to efficiently teach concepts, but also to enhance curiosity and wonder that will propel further learning.

Even as news broke of the Delta variant, Silver and her colleagues remained committed to getting kids’ hands onto STEM experiences this year. Unlike the chaotic cancellations and unknowns of spring 2020, Silver said, the museum has contingency plans ready to go, and they are good ones.

In fact, some of the tools they developed specifically for the pandemic will continue no matter what Delta has in store. “We’re planning for multiple scenarios,” she said.

If schools don’t conduct field trips this year, the Perot Museum will still reach around 300,000 students through its outreach programs. Hands-on STEM projects often require more materials and staff than low-cost afterschool programs can afford, so the museum sends TECH Trucks (Tinker, Engineer, Create, and Hack) to providers around the Dallas area. During the pandemic the TECH Trucks also distributed Wonderkits, take-home boxes with projects and experiments the kids could do at home.

It’s okay if some science education happens outside the classroom, Silver said. That’s been the case since long before the pandemic. She cited several on the role of informal education in giving kids the kind of positive science experience that leads to a lifelong love, even a career, in STEM fields. Elementary school seems to be the prime time for those experiences, .

Of course, this begs the question of equity, and who does and does not have access to these informal positive experiences, especially if field trips go away again.

With reduced capacity and safety protocols, the Perot Museum plans to stay open for now, and even if field trips cannot happen safely, family visits have been operating safely since last summer.

The Perot Museum wants more families to take advantage of the experience, especially those who might not see themselves as the museum’s target audience.

Working with 16 community partners like the North Texas Food Bank and neighborhood groups, the museum has given free memberships to 5,000 Dallas-area families. The partners usually organize the first group trip to the Perot Museum, and Silver said, many come back again, and bring their kids.

That first trip is key, she explained, because it breaks down the non-financial barriers around culture and education level that might be keeping families away.

Right now participants in the community partner program make up about 10 percent of the museum’s daily attendance, along with those who qualify for $1 admission anyone who can show proof that they are enrolled in a public assistance program.

Whether or not informal visits and field trips can happen during the surge in Delta variant cases, Texas students are learning in person, and museums are prepared to help teachers cultivate curiosity and wonder in the classroom.

The Perot Museum has produced a bilingual science show, the . Each episode covers topics required by Texas curriculum standards for a given grade range, and is available for free on the museum’s website. So far the program has around 60,000 subscribers.

Silver said, and the museum is offering it to schools across the state. Even though a show is not necessarily hands-on, the Whynauts episodes create whimsical narratives with real world uses for things kids will learn in the classroom.

Since it opened in 2015, The DoSeum has provided professional learning opportunities for teachers to cultivate curiosity and excitement in their classrooms. In addition to numerous single day programs, this year The DoSeum joined with several other local museums to form the Museo Institute, where 40 teachers per year will learn the various tools and techniques used in informal learning environments.

The teachers learn not only how to make the most of a field trip, but also how to translate the methods back to the classroom.

With a “slight flip” in how it’s taught, Kissel said, so much is possible in STEM education.

“If you don’t have (curiosity and wonder) you’re not going to get as far as you’d like,” Kissel said. It can be difficult, he knows, because the content and history of science — definitions, names of scientists, etc. — is only the beginning.

Even more critical is the ongoing process of understanding, he said. The more interested students are, the more of that content they will appreciate and absorb.

Even though these open-ended, inquiry based experiences are important, Kissel said, teachers need not feel the same pressure they feel with regard to getting grade-level content in front of kids. Kids aren’t “falling behind” in wonder and curiosity. In his experience as a researcher and educator, he said, “Scientists are simply those kids who never stopped asking, ‘why?’”

The scientific process can come alive for any kid at any time, he said, and museums will be there to light the fire.

When Texas teachers return to their public or open-enrollment charter school classrooms later this year, a new state law will restrict how they can discuss current events, encourage civic engagement and teach about America’s history of racism.

Texas educators overwhelmingly denounce the new law, born from House Bill 3979 — the so-called critical race theory bill passed during this year’s regular legislative session. They say its sweeping language, which includes a ban on teaching that a student should feel guilt because of their race, will mean that classroom conversations about racism could unintentionally spur parents’ anger and cause teachers to be punished.

They say it will make it more difficult to creatively meet the curriculum standards given to them by the state and teach students to think critically. And they worry that the legislation altogether will chill discussions and lessons about social studies and current events in ways that give a generation of Texas students an incomplete and white-centric view of history and the world around them.

The Texas Tribune interviewed more than two dozen teachers across the state to learn how the legislation’s provisions will impact them — and Texas students.

Texas’ majority white Legislature limited how race is taught to a generation of students

When Gov. signed HB 3979 into law, Texas joined a broader national backlash against teaching about racism and sexism. The law was passed by a Texas Legislature that is far more white than the state’s public school students.

Republican officials say it is meant to ban from K-12 classrooms, even though the term never appears in the bill. Academic experts say GOP leaders have repeatedly misrepresented the tenets of the academic framework, which is used to examine structural causes of racial inequity. Plus, experts and teachers say the theory is not being taught in K-12 schools.

State Rep. , R-The Woodlands, the bill’s author, said that much of the new law — especially the provisions meant to prevent critical race theory from being taught — came from concerns he heard from parents who feel their kids are being “indoctrinated.”

“We’ve heard, ‘You should feel guilty for what [white people have] done,’” he said. “We have heard, ‘You’re people of privilege, and you should feel guilty for that privilege.”

The new law includes key provisions from that appears in other states’ bills that target what Republicans label critical race theory. Toth said that in crafting the legislation, he conferred with the template’s author, Stanley Kurtz, a conservative commentator and senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and collaborated with Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist helped the current controversy over critical race theory.

Texas teachers and experts say the term is being used politically as a catchall phrase for any teachings that challenge or complicate dominant narratives about the role of race in the country’s history and identity, which are historically centered on white people’s perspectives.

“They have thrown social studies teachers out on the front lines of a cultural war,” said Kerry Green, a U.S. history teacher at suburban Sunnyvale High School east of Dallas.

The new law takes effect Sept. 1.

Teachers say a provision about students’ discomfort, guilt or anguish will chill necessary discussions

Critical race theory says racism is baked into American institutions — like education, government and the media — and it must be addressed not just by punishing individuals, but by shifting structures and policies. But Texas teachers point out that HB 3979’s language focuses on individual traits and feelings, opening the door for parents to litigate against them based on their children’s reactions to any lesson or discussion in the classroom.

Toth said the bill isn’t trying to ban lessons on slavery, Jim Crow laws or lynchings, which he said were portrayed as being “evil things” when he was in school.

“No one ever said, ‘Oh, you can’t teach me that, I don’t want you teaching my son or my daughter that’ — no one ever said that, and this bill doesn’t say that,” said Toth, who is white. “This bill simply says, ‘Don’t accuse my child of being part of that. Don’t blame my child for that.’”

But teachers say that the language makes them vulnerable to backlash from parents, in particular the clause forbidding teaching that individuals should feel “psychological distress” due to their race or sex. The law doesn’t apply to Texas colleges or universities, but University of Texas history professor and public historian Monica Martinez said the law’s vague language causes concern for public schools.

“Any parent could just say, my child felt embarrassed, or felt shamed, or felt guilt,” she said.

The potential chilling effect, teachers say, will further minimize opportunities to weave in the perspectives and historical contributions of people of color.

“The more we remove the ability to have these critical and crucial conversations, we are going to continue to whitewash the system that is already whitewashed,” said Shareefah Mason, a master social studies teacher at Zumwalt Middle School in Dallas.

In interviews and during legislative debates, lawmakers’ justifications for the new law focused on how white people could react to mentions of race. For example, Toth expressed outrage about “Not My Idea,” a children’s book examining how power and privilege affects white people that he claimed was being recommended to students in Highland Park schools, though the district .

But teachers say students of color already feel distressed when learning about racism throughout history.

David Kee, a seventh grade Texas history teacher at Hill Country Middle School in Austin, said he teaches a unit on slavery that usually includes screening “,” the acclaimed 1970s miniseries that follows a Black man as he is enslaved and abused. One year, the one Black student in his mostly white class watched on the first day and said she felt uncomfortable, and he gave her an alternative assignment, assuring her that it wasn’t an issue.

Kerry Green, who teaches U.S. history at Sunnyvale High School, pointed out that movements aimed at progress for some Americans — like second-wave feminism starting in the 1960s — ignored Black and brown people.

“And so there’s all these kinds of things that history is just triggering,” she said.

Angela Valenzuela, an education policy professor at the University of Texas, said the law perpetuates the long-running practices of whitewashing history in schools and disregarding the lived experiences of people of color in public policy.

“It’s very much centering white people’s, white children’s feelings,” she said.

The law doesn’t specify how it will be enforced, leaving educators and school districts scrambling to prepare

Because the bill doesn’t specify how teachers should be punished for breaking its provisions, school districts and teachers are clambering to prepare for how it could impact them.

Angela Valenzuela, a professor in education policy at the University of Texas at Austin, said this lack of direction could make the bill even more dangerous to teachers than if it clearly stated how it would be enforced.

“Then, everybody’s an enforcer,” she said. “You create a watchdog situation.”

Districts have their own processes for parent grievances, Valenzuela said, and how complaints are handled will depend on the district. If a school board dismisses a parent’s grievance, there’s the possibility a lawsuit is filed. Until that happens, Valenzuela said, there’s no knowing how exactly the law will be interpreted. She anticipates that teachers would be protected by the first amendment.

But the mere specter of legal battles is already causing teachers to worry about conversations about race that come up in classrooms — even outside of social studies classes. Tania Tasneem, a science teacher at Kealing Middle School in Austin, said the law will influence teachers’ focus during such discussions.

“It’s not having a conversation with the kids, it’s ‘what is that going to translate to when a parent comes at me with legal stuff I won’t be able to afford?’” she said. “That’s the scariest part.”

Dallas school district Superintendent Michael Hinojosa said that after the law goes into effect, there will likely be a teacher who becomes a “test case” for how the law is interpreted and enforced.

“Some student is going to videotape a teacher, and then it’s going to go viral,” he said.

Austin Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde said she’s in conversation with other superintendents about how to address the law. She said that her school district would make it part of teachers’ upcoming professional development sessions to detail what to do in the case of a parent complaint and outline the support systems in place to protect them. She noted that parents often have different perspectives on topics than the ones teachers present, like evolution.

“I want to remind our teachers not to be too nervous or too concerned because we’ve handled these types of issues at the local level, regularly,” she said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, our issues are able to be resolved at the campus level.”

A limit on current events discussions could stifle conversations in some classrooms — but not others

Teachers worry that clauses about current events in the new law will weaken a cornerstone in teaching and studying history — connecting the past with the present.

The law forbids them from being compelled to discuss current events or controversial policy issues. But they more urgently criticize the edict not to give deference to any one perspective if they choose to do so, pointing out that it’s vague and that there are cases where giving equal weight to all perspectives would be untruthful or harmful.

Kerry Green, a U.S. history teacher at Sunnyvale High School, said current events sometimes come up organically in discussions about historic events. For instance, one class discussion about genocide organically dovetailed into a conversation about lynching and racist violence in the 20th and 21st centuries.

“What if somebody else in that classroom felt like I was criticizing white people?” she asked. “Somebody could have complained, and with the critical race theory law, then that could have created a much more complicated conversation.”

In schools with mostly students and families of color, teachers are less fearful of retaliation from students or parents for these conversations.

After George Floyd was killed last summer, Nitasha Walder talked to her fifth graders at Thurgood Marshall Elementary School in the Richardson school district, most of whom are Black, about methods to avoid being accused of stealing by police, and how to protect themselves in interactions with officers. Walder said the parents appreciate that she addresses these topics in the classroom — and she anticipates that won’t change after the new law takes effect.

“It’s very sad that at fifth grade, we have to have these conversations, but it’s just the reality that we’re in now,” she said.

Anaïs Childress, an International Baccalaureate history and African American studies teacher in the Dallas school district, said that this section of the law could ensure students get to discuss controversial issues without being reprimanded by teachers for their beliefs.

“I can only hope this will encourage teachers to really think about the types of conversations we have,” Childress said.

But Andrew Robinson, an eighth grade U.S. history teacher at Uplift Luna Preparatory in Dallas, voiced concern about the direction not to give “deference to any one perspective.” When the Capitol insurrection happened in January, he stopped class and played it on TV.

“Once the election is over and there is a winner, and the other one’s saying that our democracy is fake, that the winner wasn’t really a winner — at that point, I feel like staying neutral is wrong, I feel like no, there’s not two sides to the truth,” he said.

Eliza Gordon, principal of Wells Branch Elementary School in Austin, fears this clause could especially intimidate teachers who are new to discussing current events in the classroom.

“Teachers that were just starting to feel ready and had built up some confidence, and tried it, are now going to say, ‘There’s no way I’m gonna do that now. I’m gonna lose my job,’” she said.

Teachers say prohibiting activism and policy advocacy will curb civic engagement

Texas teachers worry that the new law’s ban on requiring or incentivizing political activism will prevent them from teaching the state’s next generation of citizens how to participate in politics and shaping policy. They say it goes against one of the core goals of a civics and social studies education — to create an engaged citizenry.

“This bill is going to prevent us from changing the trajectories of the most disenfranchised, marginalized and impoverished students — those who already do not have a voice,” said Shareefah Mason, a master social studies teacher at Zumwalt Middle School in Dallas.

Texas is the only state, as of July, to include a ban on political activism, according to new “critical race theory” , which covers K-12 news. The Texas law does not define political activism or social or public policy advocacy.

Lucero Saldaña has taught Mexican American Studies at the public school, community college, and university levels. While the ban on political activism only applies to required social studies classes, not elective ethnic studies classes that some campuses offer, Saldaña said it will take away opportunities for all students to learn how to participate in the political process on topics that are important to them.

“This bill is directly impacting our students to not have a voice and not be engaged with what’s currently going on in our society,” said Saldaña, who currently teaches at San Antonio College and the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Sarah Wiseman, a humanities and African American studies teacher in the Frisco school district, often has students write letters to elected officials about current events, letting them choose who to write to and what to write about.

“It is teaching them a way to make a real difference in their world,” she said.

She fears the new law means she can’t give out such assignments. She’s also worried about the legality of the open-ended assignments she gives in which students research a topic that is interesting to them and create something about it.

“If a student chooses [letter writing] as their final product, could we get in trouble, even if it’s not something we’re requiring them to do?” she asked. “That’s pretty scary.”

The bill also prohibits districts from accepting private funding for materials or teacher training for courses that include political activism or policy advocacy as a component.

Meghan Dougherty, an instructional coach for social studies in the Round Rock school district, said she thinks this provision is a response to educators’ and advocacy groups’ unsuccessful push for legislation that would encourage students to be civically active.

“There’s a fear on the other side that that’s gonna lead to, like, the corruption of our youth, the dissolution of our social stability,” she said.

The law requires learning about several women and people of color, but GOP lawmakers are trying to walk that back

The new law requires students to learn about several dozen figures, events and documents. Most of those were African-American and Mexican-American writings and movements added to the bill by Texas House Democrats, even though many are already part of the state’s core social studies curriculum. Those include writings by Caesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass.

But the law also adds several new required materials and subjects that aren’t currently in the curriculum.

Scott Frank, an 11th and 12th grade history teacher at IDEA Frontier in Brownsville, said the additions are the “only good clauses” of the bill.

“I’ve had kids that come up to me and say, obviously I was born in Mexico, and I live in the United States. Where am I on this test? Where am I in these textbooks?” he said. “‘I don’t feel fully American sometimes because whenever I look at the textbook, I’m not there.’”

Republican Texas senators tried unsuccessfully to strip many of the additions from the bill during the regular legislative session that ended in May. They tried again in this summer’s special legislative session, a bill that those requirements to teach that white supremacy is “morally wrong” and to teach about particular women and people of color. That move got little traction because House Democrats left the state in an attempt to block passage of voting restrictions bills.

Even if Republicans’ efforts to strip those provisions from the bill are ultimately successful, most of the items on the list will still be in the state curriculum as long as the State Board of Education doesn’t remove them. But Frank said that removing the new provisions would send a bad message.

“If you look at the American creed — e pluribus unum, out of many, one — this is missing the mark,” he said. “It’s saying that we’re only going to talk about white founding fathers, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant version of the U.S.”

Prohibiting “The 1619 Project” is seen as intentionally targeting lessons on systemic racism that benefit all students

Teachers say the new law’s explicit ban on teaching “The 1619 Project,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times endeavor that centers the lived experiences of Black people and the enduring consequences of slavery in America’s narrative, makes it clear that lawmakers are specifically targeting lessons examining racism in America.

“They don’t mention ‘Mein Kampf,’ they don’t mention ‘The Communist Manifesto’ — they’re not mentioning writings by Fidel Castro, they’re not mentioning Mao Zedong,” said Scott Frank, the history teacher at IDEA Frontier charter school in Brownsville. “It’s ‘The 1619 Project’ that you can’t force kids to learn.”

Teachers emphasized that the law’s attempts to marginalize people of color in the curriculum, reduce spaces for them to make sense of their society, and curb opportunities to learn about political activism harm all students — not just students of color.

“How do I prepare my students to engage in conversations that are going to help them be critical thinkers and build towards racial reconciliation in this country?” said Anaïs Childress, an International Baccalaureate history and African American studies teacher in the Dallas school district.

Caroline Pinkston, a ninth grade English teacher in the Austin school district, said that ultimately, the bill makes teachers’ work harder as they deal with an ongoing pandemic and need more support than ever.

“The message we’re getting is, we don’t trust you to handle conversations about race in the classroom, and we’re going to have another thing for you to worry about, and micromanage you on,” she said. “And we’re going to make it harder for you to support your students in figuring out how to navigate the world around them.”

Disclosure: San Antonio College, The New York Times, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas at San Antonio have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

“It’s bigger than just us,” she would say.

Because she could provide that safe place, fear, happiness, and relief showed up in artwork the students created for The 74, when they were asked to illustrate the “best” and “most challenging” parts of the year. The drawings conveyed two distinct messages: First, the kids loved their friends, teacher, and community, and had suffered during remote learning. Second, they saw the value in safety protocols even though they hated the masks.

In this video, the students talk to reporter Bekah McNeel about their paintings and their pandemic school year. 

• Read more: The Second Pandemic — A Children’s Mental Health Crisis

Ashley Crandall’s second grade students didn’t like remote learning during the pandemic, and they hated wearing masks.

But they did like keeping their friends and family safe, and, as Crandall told them, the best way to do that was to keep masks up and to social distance.

“It’s bigger than just us,” Crandall reminded the kids when they would complain about the masks. “We have to really think ‘big picture’ about what’s happening in our community.”

Crandall did her best, largely successfully, to keep the scariest parts of the pandemic at bay in her classroom of 19 seven- to nine-year-olds at Democracy Prep at the Stewart Campus on the southeast side of San Antonio ISD which was hit particularly hard by COVID-19.

“They’ve all been impacted in some way,” Crandall said, referring to lost jobs, family members who fell ill or died, and the general anxiety swirling through the community. “School provided a place for students to disconnect from fears that might have been placed on them.”

Because she could provide that safe place, fear, happiness, and relief showed up in artwork the students created for The 74, when they were asked to illustrate the “best” and “most challenging” parts of the year. The drawings conveyed two distinct messages:

First, the kids loved their friends, teacher, and community, and had suffered during remote learning.

Second, the kids saw the value in safety protocols even though they hated the masks.

One girl even added a little second-grader shade to her response, “I like how people couldn’t get in my fase [sic] because of Covid.”

The mental health effects of the pandemic went beyond fear, grief, and loss related to the virus, and even the additional economic strain placed on families. Experts say the disruption and discomfort of safety protocols were stressful for kids.

“Kids are more sensitive, they’re not all rolling with the punches,” said school counselor Phyllis Fagell, author of the book Middle School Matters. It’s the job of the adults in their lives to keep stress from turning into anxiety by giving them tools to cope, she said.

Powerlessness — feeling that the pandemic and all of its protocols have been forced upon them — was part of the stress, Fagell said.

Having the power to help protect their loved ones and friends could actually help, if framed correctly, Fagell said. “We want them to focus on what they can control and what they care about.”

That’s a lesson that extends beyond the pandemic. Mask-wearing isn’t the last opportunity kids will have to embrace an inconvenience or disruption by seeing it as a contribution to their community.

Crandall’s success in helping alleviate her students’ anxiety meant that the kids didn’t feel the urgency of mask wearing out of fear. She instead had to appeal to their shared values as a class — empathy for those who might have been fearful, civic duty to “slow the spread”, and care for the health of others.

So instead of “the school is making me wear this uncomfortable mask,” Crandall would emphasize that choosing to wear a mask is a way to strengthen the community bond, because they knew they were sacrificing some comfort to keep each other safe.

The mind-shift worked: “keeping our community safe” was the best part of the year, student David Sutton said.

Lead photos by Bekah McNeel, design by Cheryn Hong

Updated 

For years, kids in Veronica Salgado’s “transition camps” have enrolled because they are anxious about making the challenging leap from elementary to middle school, or from middle to high school.

But this summer, after more than a year of isolation, the struggle to keep up with online learning and little contact with friends, Salgado, Youth Development Manager for Family Service Association, and her team are seeing bigger problems than just helping kids figure out how to find their lockers or make new friends.

Anxiety levels are skyrocketing as kids worry about their ability to keep up with school work, focus in a room full of peers, and navigate social situations with peers they have not seen face-to-face in more than a year. The need is so great that some of the kids in the camp are in non-transitioning grades.

“It’s all hands on deck, for sure,” said Salgado of the camps, hosted in coordination with school districts, and now connected to a hub of mental health services, many established just months before the pandemic hit in March 2020 in what was once a mental health desert on San Antonio’s South Side.

Counselors say it was just in time too: The six organizations at the hub were inundated with requests for services during the pandemic. Now, with the pandemic waning and re-entry weighing on the minds of anxious students and families, they are going full steam to prevent disaster.

At the transition camp, Salgado and her colleagues are on alert for signs of what educators and healthcare providers are calling a “second pandemic” of mental health issues in young people.

“We want to keep them as motivated as possible,” Salgado said. Without someone making a deliberate effort to draw them out, she said, many remote learners will not simply bounce back into the social rhythms of school. “They just go back into their shell.”

While students are participating in transition camps, other family members can access counseling, addiction support, and parenting classes.

The pandemic itself originally accelerated the demand for mental healthcare. Where they had expected to provide about 300 people with counseling and related services in their first few months with the collaborative, said Talli Dolge, CEO of Jewish Family Service, which provides counseling services at the hub, by May 2020 her organization saw over 1,600.

Demand stayed strong in the next school year: From August 1, 2020 to May 27, 2021, the collaborative served 4,619 people.

Most of the counseling during the pandemic had to do with grief and fear as jobs disappeared, loved ones fell ill, and domestic violence increased.

The collaborative weathered the pandemic with telehealth, including donating burner phones to families who didn’t have access to the necessary technology. Family Services continued seeing clients in person, and Communities in Schools, another collaborative partner, made house calls.

But now there is a new issue: re-entry.

Kids started going back to school mid-year, Dolge said, and instantly the mental health crises exploded — the hazards of being isolated at home gave way to all out panic over returning to school.

“The crisis rates are up tremendously,” Dolge said. “Social anxiety is huge and across the board.”

It’s a daunting forecast, but two years ago it would have been devastating.

In 2018 student advocates in South San Antonio ISD hadn’t begun speaking out on the mental health challenges they faced, and the extraordinary lengths they had to go to in order to get help. Texas ranks 50h out of 51 states (and the District of Columbia) in access to mental healthcare for children and adults, and the situation is far worse for lower income communities like the South Side of San Antonio.

The first Mobile Mental Wellness hub opened at a building on the campus of a South San Antonio ISD elementary school in November 2019, not knowing then that a once-in-a-lifetime crisis would soon begin on the other side of the globe.

Going forward, organizations like Rise Recovery, a hub partner, will have their work cut out for them. Alcohol, marijuana, and prescription drug abuse rose during the pandemic as teens self-medicated in isolation.

Experts say they won’t really know how much until students return to school, where the eyes of teachers, coaches, and counselors can spot the warning signs.

What worries Rise Recovery CEO Evita Morin and others are the new cases, the ones that have been hidden behind screens during remote learning.

“The lack of data (during the pandemic was) disturbing,” said Morin said, “I’m not a fan of disciplining kids with addiction, but at least before COVID schools were catching drug use and they could report it to us.”

Because Texas schools started bringing a percentage of students back in the fall of 2020, educators got early glimpses of the coming mental health crisis. So, even with the pandemic still raging in San Antonio, other school districts asked the collaborative to set up shop in their district.

Neighboring school district Harlandale ISD launched their hub in November 2020, and Edgewood ISD, where the pandemic was falling heavily on working class and impoverished neighborhoods on the city’s West Side opened a hub in January 2021.

Altogether the three hubs have created mental healthcare access for 23,535 students from pre-k to twelfth grade.

For many, Dolge knows, the suffering is only getting deeper as the world moves forward, and traumas, anxieties, and grief goes unaddressed. She’s trying to raise more awareness in the community that help is within reach.

“If you didn’t know where to get help before,” Dolge said, “It’s so much more important to get help now.”

For mental health support related to COVID-19, call Texas’s 24/7 at 833-986-1919. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or text 741741 from anywhere in the country to text with a trained crisis counselor. 

Dallas principal Ruby Ramirez knew trouble was brewing when the school counselor came to her office looking grim.

A once gregarious, curious student was disappearing before their eyes, the counselor told her, rarely speaking in class, ignoring his work and classmates, and combing his hair forward over his eyes as if to block out the world.

The bright middle schooler had been struggling with remote learning, and Dallas Independent School District’s School for the Talented and Gifted was able to convince his parents to send him to school in-person, hoping that would reignite his love of learning.

It didn’t.

The counselor also had an ominous message for Ramierez:

“He’s not the only one.”

That’s when Ramirez knew for sure: the second pandemic, the pervasive mental health challenges facing youth around the world, was at her doorstep. If her school didn’t get out ahead of it, they could lose their students. With the looming crisis, Ramierez decided it was time to revisit her training.

“We have work to do,” Ramirez said. Once she saw students’ languishment extending beyond remote learning, enduring into the school building, she knew deeper challenges awaited. “We had gotten to a point where the desire was fading.”

It was time to prepare her staff for the challenges to come.

Mental health professionals and doctors around the globe are warning that after more than a year of stress, isolation, grief, and fear, students will not simply spring back into school. Young people everywhere from to to the are reporting more anxiety, depression, and trauma symptoms.

In addition to withdrawal, increased moodiness and volatility, parents are reporting terrifying instances of self-harm, or young children expressing thoughts of suicide, which have led to a nationwide for children under 18.

The CDC reported that between April and October 2020, the proportion of emergency department visits for kids ages 5 to 11 was up 24% from the same period in 2019, the proportion of visits for 12–17 year-olds increased by 31%. Experts say the stressors of the pandemic have added to the already mounting crisis of anxiety-related disorders in , some as young as eight years old.

As a result, demand for the Mental Health First Aid courses is soaring among teachers, counselors, coaches — people who interact with kids, said Judith Allen, a certified Mental Health First Aid instructor.

Through her , Allen trained 500 adults this spring, and the nonprofit will triple instructors to meet demand this fall. The online courses made it possible for people from across the country to participate.

During her youth-oriented course — roughly seven to eight hours between the pre-work online, class session, and assessment — adult participants started by learning a foundational truth: administering first aid is not about the adult saving the day.

“You’re not a superhero, there’s no cape,” Allen said. In a session in early April, she showed the online group several scenarios where an adult might be tempted to come up with the saving insight or even offer an arm-chair diagnosis. The students in the scenarios expressing loneliness, hopelessness, and lack of motivation mirrored what parents and teachers are describing seeing more of in the wake of the pandemic.

Seeing a kid in crisis elicits a strong desire to save the day, Allen said, but rather than focusing on saying the right words to inspire, motivate, or even break through to a teen going through a mental health challenge, the training encouraged adults to be observant and open, listening to students without judgement or quick answers.

“(CPR training) does not qualify you to crack open their chest and massage their heart,” Allen told our class. She compared this to Mental Health First Aid: offering advice, diagnosis, or counseling should be left to professionals. “No one is leaving here with a doctorate in psychology or psychiatry.”

That didn’t mean walking away without new knowledge. Merely spotting trouble among adolescents can feel like something that requires just those degrees sometimes, and that’s where the course does offer tools most adults don’t already have, like looking for warning signs, indicators that something was amiss with the teen.

As students flood back into classrooms, experts are warning that the anxiety and mental health challenges could increase. Knowing the warning signs will be key to catching challenges early, getting the young person professional help, and possibly saving a life.

The course explained developmentally appropriate pulling away from family, changes in interests, and emotional expression and compared that to signs of trouble.

While most teens will pull away from family to some degree, pulling away from friends and mentors at the same time could be a sign of trouble.

Changing interests from childhood hobbies to more socially or ambitiously motivated interests is also typical. Losing interest and motivation in every area is a warning sign.

Watching the videos, it’s clear that a mental health challenge would be hard to spot from one interaction with a teenager. It was also understandable why signs were so much harder to spot over zoom: the intensity, frequency, duration of the warning sign is what Mental Health First Aid responders should note. While teachers might notice withdrawal or lack of motivation over Zoom, it was hard to tell where else that might be showing up. As Ramirez had noted, remote learning was tough for everyone, and it was hard to tell whether a child was experiencing Zoom fatigue or something more pernicious.

Teachers, coaches, and youth leaders who see the kids regularly and in person are ideally situated to catch the red flags when kids go back to school. Seeing students day in and day out will allow them to track the moods and behaviors that might need to be addressed. A bad day is going to happen, but lots of worsening bad days that extend into bad weeks is a sign of a mental health challenge.

Much of the data presented in the course helped lay people understand the difference between a mental health challenge and mental illnesses or disorders. One in five young people must manage a longer term mental illness in order to thrive, but many more will face a mental health challenge—for instance, a season of depression, substance abuse, or anxiety— during adolescence.

Thriving with a mental illness or disorder is possible if it’s properly managed, Allen reiterated during the training, just like with chronic physical conditions.

The converse is true as well. Mental health challenges can occur in people with no underlying mental illness.

That’s what’s going to be so tricky for teachers, experts warn. The conditions are right for just about anyone to have a mental health challenge in the next year. At the same time, mental illness, especially those illnesses related to trauma, will likely show itself more readily.

In some ways, Ramirez has been in the eye of that hurricane for a long time, though. Nearly half of all mental illnesses present by age 14, the last year of middle school.

Children who grow up in poverty, like 88% of the students at the School for the Talented and Gifted, are at for mental disorders, toxic stress, and trauma. They’ve also been more heavily impacted by the pandemic.

“It’s scary,” Ramirez said, “Traumas have set in for our students, in their minds, in their thinking, that are really going to hinder them forever if we don’t address them.”

Ramirez first took a Mental Health First Aid course, along with her administrative team, in 2018 through Mental Health America of Greater Dallas. Students are taught how to look out for each other as well. This year, with the increased urgency of the pandemic, 10 more staff members took the class so that a quarter of the adults on the School for the Talented and Gifted campus will be certified in Mental Health First Aid. She’s hoping to get parents to enroll as well.

“It changed the way that I saw mental health,” Ramirez said, “It helped destigmatize, for me and my administrative staff, mental health.”

For mental health support related to COVID-19, call Texas’s 24/7 at 833-986-1919. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or text 741741 from anywhere in the country to text with a trained crisis counselor.

Legislation that would limit transgender students’ participation in school sports advanced out of a Senate committee on Monday after similar legislation during the regular session.

With no Democratic members present after dozens of , in an attempt to halt GOP-backed , six Republicans on the Senate Health and Human Services Committee still had a quorum and held their first public hearing on two bills during the days-old special legislative session. Gov. added the issue to lawmakers’ agenda when he called the special session.

Sen. , R-Lubbock, who is also vice chair of the committee and who authored and , said the bills would protect cisgender women’s rights to compete in their desired sports.

Both of the bills would require student athletes to participate on sports teams that correspond with the student’s sex assigned at birth or listed on their official birth certificate at or near the time of birth. SB 32 would impact sports at K-12 public schools, while SB 2 covers both K-12 and public colleges and universities.

“It reminds us that it’s not OK to destroy the dreams of one for the benefit of another,” Perry said during the committee hearing, arguing that transgender boys and men could take opportunities away from cisgender girls and women.

Advocates for transgender athletes and other opponents of the bill argued that there was little evidence that transgender athletes were joining sports teams.

Maddox Hilgers, who identifies as nonbinary and is a graduate student at the University of Houston, implored the committee to halt the legislation.

“This argument that transgender athletes will take over women’s sports is ridiculous, because there just not enough transgender girls to do that,” Hilgers said.

The University Interscholastic League of Texas — which oversees and governs high school athletics in Texas — currently requires the gender of students be “determined based on a student’s birth certificate.”

But the UIL recognizes changes made to a student’s birth certificate, including when a transgender person has the gender on their birth certificate changed to correspond with their gender identity, said Jamey Harrison, the UIL deputy director. But SB 2 and SB 32 would no longer allow that.

During the regular legislative session, Lt. Gov. made similar legislation a priority, with sailing through the Senate chamber. The bill ultimately died after the House for passing all Senate bills in the lower chamber.

Cassie Villela of San Antonio was one of many parents with transgender children who showed up again on Monday after testifying before the Legislature during the regular session. Bills considered earlier this year — but that were not part of Monday’s committee hearing — sought to restrict or punish transition-related health care, like puberty blockers, for children.

“My husband and I are just doing our best to give my daughter the support that she needs,” Villela told the senators while testifying against the sports bills. “We struggled for the last few years to figure out what that looks like.”

Villela said her 7-year-old daughter, who is trangender, already has a difficult road navigating obstacles such as discrimination “without having to justify her existence to the Texas Legislature.”

Villella said she came to the Capitol more than five times during the regular session to testify and talk with legislators individually about bills affecting transgender youth.

“I think they don’t see people’s lived experiences with it, the reality of it,” Villela said.

Allyson Waller is a reporter , the only member-supported, digital-first, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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Nearly next school year, according to a recent tally from Burbio, a website that tracks school calendars and reopenings.

Of the 200 largest U.S. school systems, 128 will hold virtual programs this fall, while 60 — such as those in , and — will offer no fully remote options, save for medical exceptions for immunocompromised students. Another 12 have yet to announce their plans.

The update comes as the highly transmissible Delta variant now accounts for the , casting uncertainty on an upcoming school year that, just weeks ago, many observers had hoped would mark a — and spurring many parents to revise their expectations for the fall.

“Everyone is assuming that all kids are going back into buildings in September,” Annette Anderson, who is a mother of three children in Baltimore City Public Schools, told The 74. “And I’m not really clear with the Delta variant what’s going to happen.”

Her kids — rising 8th-, 9th- and 11th-graders — had already endured a year and a half of remote classes, and were itching to see their friends, she said.

But when COVID case counts once again began to rise in late June, her family’s calculus suddenly became much more complicated. Kids under 12 do not yet have access to vaccinations, Anderson points out, and with many schools following a recent update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that said vaccinated students and staff could forgo face coverings, she worries that schools could become vectors of spread this fall.

A possible precursor of dangers still to come, the U.S. has experienced a in states such as Texas, Illinois, Florida, Missouri and Kansas in June and July.

“There is still a lot of outstanding questioning on my part about whether or not we are ready to let our kids go back into buildings full time,” said the Baltimore mother, who is also an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education.

At first, “I was comfortable with [my kids] going back to school,” she said, “[but now] the question of children carrying the Delta variant is still very open ended.”

Halfway across the country, just outside of San Antonio, Texas, Deneatra Terry feels similarly. Her state has banned virtual-only school options this fall, and now the mother of two is shopping around for a charter school that would allow her youngest to stay online or keep class sizes low for social distancing.

“If there is something out there … worse than the [previous strains of] COVID, you shouldn’t be in such a rush to open that damn [schoolhouse] door,” she told The 74. “If you keep knocking on the door, the devil does answer, eventually.”

The mothers are not alone in their concern. Worry for the highly infectious mutation could impact the schooling choices that many parents make for their kids this fall, says Robin Lake, director of the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education.

“I think the Delta variant has quite a few families spooked,” she told The 74 via email. “A lot of families may decide to hedge their bets and enroll in alternative programs.”

Because the new strain is even than the Alpha variant before it, which originated in the United Kingdom, the coming months may mark the “most dangerous” time in the pandemic for unvaccinated individuals and young people, University of Missouri infectious disease expert Taylor Nelson told The 74 in late June.

But while acknowledging that the Delta variant is “incredibly concerning,” Philip Chan, medical director for the Rhode Island Department of Health, says that schools do not have to be risky places for children.

Last year, “we really did see minimal transmission in the K-12 setting, which is reassuring,” he told The 74. In Chan’s home state, the vast majority of student and staff coronavirus cases came from out-of-school exposures, he explained.

Last spring, hundreds of academic studies pointed to mitigation measures such as masking and ventilation that schools could use to reopen safely. New CDC guidelines now emphasize flexibility for schools and districts to implement “layered mitigation strategies” to keep kids safe, which proponents say will allow schools more freedom to problem-solve and take local levels of infection into account. Critics meanwhile worry the new guidance will allow decision makers to sidestep key safety measures.

Above all else, however, the Rhode Island doctor emphasizes immunization as the single most effective way to limit spread, including for the new variant.

“We know that the vaccines, certainly the ones we’re using here in the U.S., are effective against the Delta variant,” said Chan. “As long as people in the community … are vaccinated, hopefully the risk of transmission within the K-12 setting will be minimal.”

According to a recent announcement from Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company will seek to expand its existing emergency authorization for shots to . Their pediatric vaccine trials are currently underway. Even with expanded authorization, it’s unclear whether parents will immunize young children in large numbers and there remain swaths of the country, especially in the South, .

In the meantime, Lake, of the University of Washington, underscores the well-documented benefits of face-to-face learning for most students versus attending virtual school.

“Most of the studies comparing learning outcomes in remote learning compared to in-person show students do better both academically and emotionally when they have in-person instruction,” she said.

Ahead of the July 13 Global Education Meeting, UNICEF and UNESCO extolled the benefits of in-person learning, urging decision makers around the world to to “avoid a generational catastrophe.”

Still, there were students and families that thrived in remote learning, the Center for Reinventing Public Education director points out. The key takeaway for district leaders, she says, is that “quality options are the right solution.”

School systems, however, do not yet appear to be altering their plans.

“We’re not seeing any districts walk back plans [for in-person school] yet,” Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche told The 74. Most districts’ strategies for the fall were formulated this past spring and were announced early in the summer, he said.

If spread of the new COVID strain does spur changes to reopening plans, those revisions would likely come “in about a three-week window in advance of school,” according to Roche, because districts take time to alter course.

In the meantime, parents will mull how to balance the academic, social-emotional and physical health needs of their children in yet another uncertain back-to-school season.

“We wanted COVID to go away with a vaccine and it has largely dissipated, but it has not disappeared,” said Anderson, in Baltimore. “So that’s what I’m wrestling with.”

All around Lourdes Flores there are signs that her border town of Mission is returning to pre-pandemic life: More restrictions have been lifted, she’s no longer working strictly from home, and most people in her household have been vaccinated.

However, there’s one sign Flores is slow to embrace: Her daughter, Jazmin, will return to in-person learning for her sophomore year this fall in the La Joya Independent School District.

“If a choice is given, then I’ll keep her at home for as long as I can until I know that it’s really safe to be out there,” Flores said, adding that she worries current COVID-19 infection rates don’t paint an accurate picture of the virus’ spread, as her daughter’s district plans to move ahead with a full .

Remote learning soon won’t be an option for many parents in the fall, as the Texas Education Agency pushes districts toward returning to in-person learning, citing data showing that it leads to better learning outcomes compared to remote instruction. The agency has announced that state funding for remote-only options won’t be available for the upcoming school year, prompting many districts to announce a return to 100% in-person instruction.

Despite this, the return to in-person learning is not a simple transition for some parents — particularly parents of students of color — after a year in which they say their children reaped some benefits from remote-only learning.

When districts gave parents a choice between in-person and remote classes during the past year, according to data from the Texas Education Agency, students of color in Texas returned to in-person learning at lower rates than their white counterparts.

As of January, about 56% percent of Texas students on average returned to on-campus instruction during the school year, including 75% of white students, about 53% of Black students, 49% of Hispanic students and 31% of Asian students.

In an emailed statement, the TEA cited “Covid-19’s disproportionate economic and public health effect on communities of color” as a reason for the lower in-person attendance and engagement rates among students of color.

Experts say it’s necessary to consider the intersection of circumstances that could lead to such rates: Students may live in a multigenerational household and worry about infecting family members, or they could be tasked with extra responsibilities during the pandemic — such as taking care of siblings or supplementing family income — that make remote learning more conducive to their needs.

“There’s mostly quite a bit of fear and economic uncertainty. All of those things play a role in wanting to continue remote learning, said Hector Bojorquez, director of operations and educational practice at the Intercultural Development Research Association, a nonprofit that seeks to ensure equal opportunities for children in public education. “Everybody’s lives [were] thrown into chaos during the past year. People whose lives are already precarious economically are even more frightened of taking certain risks.”

The disproportionate impact COVID-19 has had on communities of color can also present a challenge for parents in deciding to let their child return to in-person learning, said Leann Smith, an assistant professor at Texas A&M University’s Department of Educational Psychology.

“We know that there were higher rates of COVID-related illnesses and death in those communities, so we are then putting the burden on parents for the most part to decide whether or not they want to risk further exposing their own community or their family to this virus,” Smith said.

Throughout the pandemic, a majority of in the state have been among Hispanic and Black Texans, who together comprise a little over 50% of the state’s population. As of late June, about 26% of Black Texans and about 32% of Hispanic Texans have been , compared to about 38% of white Texans, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.

For Stacey Smith, whose daughter is pregnant and contracted COVID-19 this past year while attending school in-person and participating in sports, an option for her child to learn remotely would put her more at ease.

“I feel like there should be options for parents that have kids that are at high risk instead of just saying ‘This is what it is,’ ” said Smith, who’s Hispanic and lives in Austin. In June, announced it would no longer be providing a virtual learning option for students.

Catering to social needs

For some parents, the desire to keep their children at home during the school year stemmed from some of the social challenges students may face in a school setting that can be unique to their race or identity.

Tonya Reyes-Dickerson, who lives in Springtown outside of Fort Worth, said that before the pandemic, going to class in person was a challenge for her 10-year-old transgender son, who in the past has been the target of bullying at school. Springtown ISD has announced it’s returning to full in-person learning this fall.

“Being in virtual [school], we don’t have to worry about that,” Reyes-Dickerson said. “Our child is protected from any of those types of dangers.”

During a school year that started on the heels of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, and a summer of protests against racial injustice and police brutality, Smith said that because they were home, many children of color were also able to have more substantial conversations with their families that acknowledged their cultural perspective. That doesn’t often happen in school, she said.

“The socialization that we would hope would happen in school but that research shows does not happen in school — the parents were able to create that space at home, which is good,” Smith said. “So there are some mental health benefits of [students] being protected from what we know is very negative, discrimination and microaggressive experiences.”

Lashonda Chavers said virtual learning has given her two daughters a much-needed reprieve from some difficult interactions in the public school system. For example, her youngest daughter told her that during a dissection of a sheep’s heart in science class, her teacher commented that it was Black people’s heritage to eat chitlins and Hispanic people’s heritage to eat menudo — both dishes made with animal organs.

“I think we did better, my children, my girls, did better” learning from home, said Chavers, 46, who is Black and Hispanic and whose daughters, a rising freshman and a rising senior, attend school in Hurst-Euless-Bedford ISD outside of Dallas. “Their grades were just as good, and they were well adjusted, and they were happy, and they felt liberated.”

Her daughters’ school district has already announced that it will be returning to in-person learning with no online options for the upcoming school year. Chavers said she and her daughters aren’t vaccinated against COVID-19 because of her “distrust in Western medicine.” And she’s nervous about them returning to the classroom in the fall.

“I think that all schools should provide hybrid courses for every child until this is over, or until we have such a good handle on it we haven’t even heard of any COVID cases,” Chavers said.

The return to in-person learning 

Learning loss during the pandemic has surpassed the usual decline associated with the summer months, according to the TEA. Between March 2020 and September 2020, students have lost an average of almost six months of learning, according to the TEA, with virtual learning students being “disproportionately affected.”

Newly-released also show the percentage of remote learning students who met grade level expectations dropped significantly this past year, especially in math and reading.

For example, districts in which a quarter or more of the students were learning virtually saw a 32% drop in mathematics performance from 2019 to 2021. However, in districts where less than a quarter learned virtually, performance only dropped by 9%.

“Thankfully, from early on, Texas prioritized the availability of in-person instruction during this tremendously difficult year,” Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath . “When students come into Texas public schools, they are well-served by Texas educators — a fact that these scores confirm.”

In the plan that to the U.S. Department of Education that details how it intends to use federal stimulus funds from the , the agency said that “African American and Hispanic students in Texas have experienced, in general, more lost instructional time due to absenteeism, lower student engagement, and have engaged more in remote learning than their peers of other races/ethnicities.”

The TEA said it “is actively working to address pandemic-induced learning loss,” and is overseeing the distribution of $18 billion in federal stimulus funds for public schools. In April, the state released for public schools that were allocated to the state through the American Rescue Plan.

The recently released money requires that districts reserve 20% of their funds to address learning loss through strategies such as summer programs, after-school programs or extending the school year.

Kathy Rollo, superintendent of Lubbock ISD, said steps like those have helped students get back on track in her district, particularly through summer school programming to get children reacclimated to learning in person.

Some districts, such as Lubbock ISD, San Antonio ISD and Austin ISD, have said they opted to return to full in-person instruction for the upcoming school year because the Texas Legislature failed to pass a bill that would have helped to fund virtual school programs.

House Bill 1468 died as a result of House Democrats’ walkout to stop the passage of a . In a joint letter sent to Gov. , 30 school districts, including San Antonio ISD and Austin ISD, called for virtual school funding to be added to the agenda for the Legislature’s special session, which starts this month.

Rollo said even if the bill had passed, Lubbock ISD would not have offered virtual instruction for Pre-K through eighth grade.

“We were interested in investigating the potential of having an online virtual school for our high school students who are older, are able to more self-navigate through their learning opportunities, but when that bill did not pass that really is not an option for our district at this point,” she said.

Allyson Waller is a reporter , the only member-supported, digital-first, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.