He co-sponsored this year that would give parents an ed-tech “right of refusal.” A former English teacher, he was never a fan of the shift toward every student having their own laptop. Technology, he said, isn’t making students any smarter.

“In fact, we know it’s making them dumber,” he said, expressing a view shared by parents across the country, especially those with students in the elementary grades. 

When his fellow lawmaker Rep. Leanne Harple read the bill, she imagined how tough it might be for teachers to accommodate such requests. An English teacher herself, she also speaks from experience. Her students do research online, where the information is more up to date than in books and academic journals. A 2024 American Federation of Teachers showed 83% of teachers use technology in the classroom daily.

The bill “would create, in some cases, a lot more work,” she said. For every assignment, teachers would “have to create an alternative that’s completely analog.”

Their opposing views on the topic reflect a growing national debate. Parents who advocated for bell-to-bell cellphone bans are now targeting Chromebooks and other ed tech. Influenced by researchers like Jonathan Haidt and Jared Cooney Horvath, who argue that cellphones and classroom technology have harmed students’ development, they’ve mobilized in Facebook groups. They’re demanding pencil-and-paper assignments and asking teachers to excuse their kids from computer-based math and reading apps. Their pleas have sparked pushback from districts that for years have relied on technology for everything from curriculum to testing.

“In August, almost no one was talking about this, and now I’m having no other conversations,” said Kelly Clancy, a mom of three in South Brooklyn, New York, who also serves on her local community education council. “There’s a sea change in parents realizing that they don’t want their kids in front of screens.”

She’s among those challenging the New York City schools’ use of digital programs. She refused to let teachers enter her kids’ work into , an AI tool from the curriculum company HMH that generates feedback on student writing. But when she tried to opt her children out of i-Ready, a widely used testing program from the company Curriculum Associates, she met resistance. The tests are a “baseline component” of the district’s assessment system, David Pretto, superintendent of District 20, wrote in an email. Her school’s principal, he said, “is not in the position to exclude your child from universal screening.”

Clancy didn’t take no for an answer. 

“We will get legal advice if necessary, but my children will not complete these,” she wrote back.

In a statement, the district said any tool using student data “must undergo a rigorous … review process to meet strict privacy, security and compliance standards before it is approved for use.” Officials urged parents to contact local schools with their concerns.

Across the country, the Seattle Public Schools has advised staff that “families may not opt out of district-adopted digital curriculum,” but a spokesperson for the district told The 74 that “this is an evolving landscape,” and “we will continue to review and update the guidance as needed.”

Parents in Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion School District are also determined to keep their students off Chromebooks at school. 

“They’re saying we can’t, but we’ll find a way,” Yair Lev, a parent of two, said after a last month in which Superintendent Frank Ranelli said opting out wasn’t possible because the curriculum is computer-based.

Teachers, Lev said, are caught in the middle. He collected from five teachers, who said students often access gaming sites and YouTube during class, and even make video calls to students in other classrooms.

“There should be clear districtwide policies and parameters for when laptops should and should not be used, rather than leaving major decisions to classroom-by-classroom discretion,” one wrote.

Not ‘our best moment’

Lev, a cardiologist and professor at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, said he’s not opposed to technology. He consults for cardiology startups using AI and has taken the lead on AI use in his division at the hospital. But he and his wife realized that “kids are being exposed to a lot of screens, and we decided to try to reduce it at home.”

In some ways, he represents many of the parents pushing for tech opt outs. His children are young, and they’re starting school at a time when Haidt, a social psychologist, that cellphones and social media have harmed children’s mental health. Lev’s kids are also beginning their education after the pandemic, when parents are demanding more say over what’s taking place in the classroom and data breaches have compromised student privacy.

“The image of technology in schools that’s seared into every parent’s mind is the lockdown version of technology. It wasn’t our best moment,” said Joseph South, chief innovation officer at the International Society for Technology in Education, which merged in 2023 with ASCD, a major curriculum organization. 

Until the pandemic, Elyssa East, a New York City mom, was raising her son screen-free. That became impossible during school closures. Around the same time, she learned that he had some learning difficulties and would “really fall apart when it came to any instruction on the screen.”

Online math programs like Zearn and IXL made him feel “defeated,” she said, because they were assigned for remediation. 

“Here is this technology that’s supposed to help him, but it makes him feel even worse than a human teacher would,” East said. 

She eventually switched him to a private school. She has opted him out of math apps and he writes on an old electric typewriter.

​​”He likes that a lot,” she said. Compared to a laptop, “it’s a totally different experience.”

‘Caught in the crossfire’

Some teachers have no problem with .

Dylan Kane, a seventh grade math teacher in Lake County, Colorado, near Aspen, went . Students, he wrote, are more focused, are completing more work and spend less time “fussing with logistics,” like connecting to the internet or forgetting their Chromebook at home.

Like many parents, he was influenced by Horvath’s . In his 2025 book, the cognitive neuroscientist argues that the widespread use of classroom technology has left students distracted and unable to retain information.  

But prior to January, Kane never had a parent request to opt their child out of using computers or specific software. Even during parent-teacher conferences this spring, his decision to ditch Chromebooks in class never came up.

“I work in a small, rural town that’s relatively low-income, not a lot of college-educated parents. I think much of the tech backlash from parents is coming from the more-online, higher-educated folks,” he said. He thinks trying to accommodate individual parents’ objections would be tricky. “Teachers could be caught in the crossfire because they have to deal with district-mandated online programs and then potentially parent opt-outs.” 

South at ISTE+ASCD said he’s heard plenty of “horror stories” about technology, like apps dominated by advertising and students spending class time “shooting aliens” on the screen. But those examples are often due to teachers using a program that was never vetted by their district or “some random kid who found a workaround,” he said.

He and Richard Culatta, the organization’s CEO, added that moving through state legislatures that limit screen time don’t necessarily address parents’ other concerns like cyberbullying, protecting student data or improving the overall quality of instruction. 

Many of the bills require paper worksheets to be used instead of technology, said Culatta, who quipped that he often feels like he’s in a “time warp.” 

“There’s no quality indicator,” he said. “You could literally take any garbage worksheet and it would be fine.”

‘Rapid innovation’

Opt-out requests have forced districts to be more thoughtful about how they use technology. 

The Worcester Public Schools in central Massachusetts is like a lot of districts. It went through “a period of rapid innovation and tech acquisition” prior to the pandemic to make sure “teachers and students had the tools needed to be future-ready,” said Sarah Kyriazis, director of the district’s Office of Innovation. 

Schools added even more ed tech tools during COVID lockdowns for remote and hybrid learning. Now some parents are questioning those decisions at a time of “national concern about data, privacy, security and screen time,” she said. 

The district’s school committee has so far to allow parents to opt out of ed tech programs. But Kyriazis is collecting feedback from teachers on the apps they feel are most important for instruction. The goal, she said, is to whittle down the amount of data sent through online platforms to third-party vendors. Principals and teachers, she said, should be able to “speak with parents about each app and its purpose in the classroom.” 

Further west, the Northampton, Massachusetts, district is accommodating opt-out requests from about 12 parents. To do so, teachers must come up with activities that allow students to learn from the same curriculum as their peers “without using the disputed programs,” said Superintendent Portia Bonner. 

Laura Carney Erny, who has a second grader in the district, hasn’t tried to opt her son out of tech yet, but she’s thinking about it for third grade. Even learning which programs the school used took “months of back-and-forth emails” with teachers and administrators, she said.

Parents say they don’t want to further complicate the lives of teachers, especially those who lack classroom aides. Northampton lost in 2024 who were paid with temporary COVID relief funds. 

“I don’t blame teachers for relying on tech because it’s an easy thing to do,” she said. “Some of these programs help keep the kids in their seats.”

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, former teacher Kate Brody is among those who have opted their children out of practice sessions on i-Ready, now the subject of a over student privacy. She decided the program was a problem when her first grader couldn’t tear himself away from the screen to use the bathroom and started having accidents. 

“I used to teach full time,” she said. “I definitely don’t want to create a world where we’re asking teachers to do multiple lesson plans and monitor half the class on the computer and do analog lessons for the other half.” 

It’s unfair to teachers to field opt-out requests every year, she said. That’s why, as a board member for Schools Beyond Screens, an advocacy group of parents and educators, she backs a that calls for limits on the use of technology for all students, especially in the early grades. The board will vote on the plan April 21.

“Right now,” she said, “it’s the Wild West.”

Part of the way he sold it to her, he explained, was by focusing on the time-limited nature of Let’s Grow Kids and the plan to sunset the group in 2025. 

Davis, a longtime philanthropist focused on supporting children and families, believed that investing in early interventions geared toward children ages 0 to 5 would make the biggest impact on creating opportunities for kids in his state. Let’s Grow Kids homed in on an ambitious goal to provide quality child care for every child in Vermont, and Davis created an aggressive timeline to get the job done. 

Richards wasn’t convinced right away, she explained, but after persuasive calls from former Vermont Govs. Peter Shumlin and  Howard Dean, she came aboard and built a team that would drive the state to become the first in the nation to have a near-universal child care system. 

Over the last decade, Let’s Grow Kids raised over $70 million in private philanthropy and grew to a team of 40 staffers. Their efforts built momentum around child care issues and drove progress that supported Act 76, the bill that created Vermont’s near-universal child care program, which was signed into law in 2023 after a . In the two years since Act 76 passed, more than 100 new child care programs have opened, creating over 1,000 spaces for children and 230 new early childhood educator jobs — and an additional 4,000 children in Vermont now qualify for tuition assistance. Let’s Grow Kids was heavily involved with implementing these changes.

On Oct. 3, the organization officially sunset its operations, just as Davis and Richards had planned. 

The time-limited nature of the organization has been critical to its success supporting and implementing legislation, both leaders said, and the wind-down process signals that the state is ready to sustain the changes. 

The Behind-the-Scenes Process of Sunsetting the Organization

In September, Richards addressed a room filled with more than 200 child care advocates in Burlington Vermont to highlight the progress made by Let’s Grow Kids, surface the gaps that remain and to discuss the roll out of the next phase of work, which will be carried out by a group of permanent organizations focused on child care financing, workforce, data and advocacy. 

But the organization began planning for this transition years before it was fully dismantled, building partnerships with the organizations that would move implementation forward, and creating a phase-out plan for the staff. 

“Nothing works without a deadline, it’s human nature,” said Richards. “It sharpens focus and adds accountability. We would always ask, are we on track to win? There wasn’t enough time to pat ourselves on the back.” 

Because Let’s Grow Kids was never intended to be permanent, the team was able to operate at a “faster pace, raise money more effectively, and attract top tier talent” explained Erin Roche, who worked at Let’s Grow Kids for six years before heading up First Children’s Finance, a nonprofit focused on the business development needs of child care centers and providers in Vermont, and one of the organizations picking up the baton from Let’s Grow Kids now. “[Let’s Grow Kids] was inclined to build more infrastructure because they knew they were leaving. They knew they would need support in place for child care businesses they were supporting once they were gone,” said Roche. 

The organization’s expiration date also spurred more philanthropic investment. “We never could have sustained the level of philanthropy [as a permanent group],” said Richards. “Part of the reason we were successful is we could ask for a one year capital gift.” And during the COVID-19 pandemic, the timeline helped the team stay focused on their mission, even as they pivoted to working with child care organizations to receive personal protective equipment supplies and American Rescue Plan Act funds, she said. When the state’s legislative session resumed in 2021, Richards explained that they’d gained a stronger network and the trust of elected officials and child care providers alike.  

Staff, too, have been part of the sunset strategy. By having a declared end date, the staff, including Roche, were inclined to find new roles at various organizations throughout the state. Some former staffers from Let’s Grow Kids now lead Vermont’s National Association of the Education of Young Children. Others work with Roche at First Children’s Finance. One former staff member, Janet McLaughlin, is now the Deputy Commissioner for Vermont’s Department of Children and Families, leading the Child Development Division, which oversees child care policy and implementation in Vermont. 

The final remaining staffers are transitioning to the Let’s Grow Kids Action Network, a 501(c)(4) group tasked with doing the political work necessary to protect the funding provisions in Act 76. 

“Right now we don’t really know the lobbying needs,” said Jerusa Contee, managing director at the Let’s Grow Kids Action Network. “Implementation is still new, so we know we are going to need some help, but we could find out that in a couple of years people have accepted that child care is a core part of the budget.”

While Act 76 brought major changes to the state’s child care infrastructure and increased access to subsidies for many families, the state still doesn’t have what would be considered “universal” child care. Between 80% to 90% of Vermont families with children in child care programs are eligible for subsidies, according to an internal analysis conducted by First Children’s Finance using 2024 Census data, said Roche. “The families it doesn’t capture are spending a lot on child care, and that’s a hardship,” said Roche, who is working on figuring out who is left out of the subsidies and why. At a certain point, she said, it takes more effort to run a program that leaves only a handful of people out than it would to make it fully universal and eliminate the paperwork required to prove eligibility — a step New Mexico recently took. 

Could This Happen Elsewhere? 

Child care remains a among voters across party lines. Polling indicates that younger generations are prioritizing child care that many consider child care a leading workplace benefit. While efforts to improve child care infrastructure at the national level have stalled, advocates are closely watching states that have developed policy and funding solutions, and many are asking what aspects of Vermont’s child care program could be replicated elsewhere. 

Richards said she’s been contacted by people who work on child care policy in other states, including Colorado, Nebraska, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Arkansas, looking to hear about what helped the state pass the landmark bill. In these conversations, Richards holds fast to the idea that the sunset provision is key to running an effective campaign and setting up the necessary infrastructure to carry on implementation and protect the bill. She also points to the Vermont has gathered about how increasing access to child care has impacted the state’s workforce participation and increased tax revenue, and how quality child care has contributed to education factors like kindergarten preparedness. 

After the September event in Burlington, the alumni and remaining Let’s Grow Kids staff gathered outside for a group photo, noting the symbolic pun of the sun setting behind them over Lake Champlain. No one is brazen enough to say “mission accomplished” out loud, Richards said, but both she and Davis acknowledge a deep satisfaction with what they have built. 

As for the immediate future, Richards is taking a month off, then will stay on as the chair of the board for the Let’s Grow Kids Action Network. “I’m tired,” she said, while smiling. “I’ve been running nonstop for the past ten years.”

Downstairs, six children are snacking on pretzels and apple slices. Chase explains that they spend a lot of time outside, adding that her curriculum is nature-based and the woods and backyard pond make it ideal for the kids to explore. 

For Chase, working in early childhood education is her “life’s passion for sure.” She worked as an early childhood educator for 10 years before deciding to open her own program in 2015. Chase recalls that she was working 50 to 60 hours a week when she first started, which drained her, so in 2016 she hired a staff member to help. 

Her program, which serves six children ages 3 to 5 has been successful over the years. Because the , she always has a waiting list, rarely has vacancies and doesn’t have to advertise. That’s why in 2024, she decided to expand her business from a registered family child care program with one classroom to a licensed facility with two. This shift would allow her to serve 12 children full time — double the number she can serve as a registered family child care provider. The process, which she kicked off this January, will take well over a year.

Chase explains her plans for the expansion. She’ll add a new room on the first floor, which will serve as a second classroom for infants and toddlers and the cubbies will move indoors. And to transition from a “registered” child care provider to a “licensed” one, she’s required to meet a number of complicated compliance regulations. She has to upgrade her septic wastewater system which will cost $55,000; deepen her well for more water storage capacity, which will cost $14,000; spend another $112,000 to expand the space; and pay an additional $6,500 to fence in the playground. 

Chase is adamant that this investment only makes financial sense because of , Vermont’s landmark bill to bring near-universal child care to the state. The bill, which passed in 2023, aimed to increase access to high-quality child care and stabilize the early care and education workforce, including supporting family child care programs. Act 76 brought changes to various areas of child care and early childhood education, including significant updates to the , which provides subsidy payments to providers for children from eligible families. Under CCFAP, subsidy payments vary by income and the number of children that families have in child care, but providers now get a higher rate per child than what they typically charge. Since most of the families Chase serves qualify for CCFAP, this change nearly doubles the amount of money she brings in each week for each child.

There are more than  in Vermont — including family child care and center-based care providers — who could be impacted by the changes to CCFAP. One of them, Sherry Boudro, has been caring for children in the basement of her home in Windsor, Vermont for more than 30 years. Her house lends itself well to running a family child care program. It has a separate entrance to the children’s space, though it’s still connected to her main house by an internal staircase. Two fluorescent sensory swings hang from the ceiling, and the room is brightly painted and lined with bookshelves. 

“Before Act 76 I was living paycheck to paycheck,” explains Boudro. Now, she has more than doubled her income. Boudro was charging families $150 per child per week; now she receives $364 per child per week — a portion of which is paid for by the state depending on each family’s financial assistance agreement. Windsor “doesn’t have a lot of high-paying jobs,” she explains, so she couldn’t charge families more money, even though she was working all the time and barely breaking even. The extra income she receives now is going toward her retirement. “I’m 60 years old and I have no retirement savings,” she says. She’s also planning to make some long-awaited repairs to the space, replacing carpets and fixing the ceiling tiles, which droop down.

Act 76 Benefits Most — But Not All — Providers

Act 76 is the “opportunity and social change of our lifetime,” says Aly Richards, CEO of Let’s Grow Kids — the advocacy organization which spearheaded the bill’s passage. Richards, who has become the state’s chief champion of the bill and de-facto expert on how to bring a near-universal child care program to a state, outlines the success of Act 76 thus far. In its first year, the legislation created 1,000 new child care slots, nearly 50 new family child care programs, over 40 child care centers and 220 new early educator jobs. And in 2024, for the first time since 2018, more child care programs opened in the state than closed.

While ACT 76 has been a game changer for many child care providers in the state, not all have received the benefits. Tammie Hazlett, for example, runs a family child care in Vermont near the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. Most of the families she serves work have well-paying jobs at the medical center and do not qualify for subsidies, so she isn’t able to collect the higher true-cost-of-care rates. Another provider, Apryl Blake, serves two children who come from a neighboring town in New Hampshire, so they aren’t eligible, and she hasn’t asked the rest of her families to apply. “I have a problem asking them for their financial information. Not my business,” she explains.

Chase says all but one of the families she serves receives a subsidy, and the one family that doesn’t feels excluded and resentful of the process. The mother is a teacher and the father works in the tech industry. They don’t consider themselves to be well-off and they say the cost of child care is still a major expense. 

For some longtime providers like Merry Ann Gilbert and Laura Butler, these changes may be coming too late. Gilbert is 59, and though her practice is winding down, she still takes care of five kids a week at her home in Milton, Vermont. She is looking to retire and spend more time with her four grandchildren but Act 76 is motivating her to stay another year or two to make additional money. 

Butler, 66, who has been a family child care provider for 33 years, is also missing out — the families she serves don’t qualify for subsidies because their incomes are too high. Vermont’s support for child care has assisted Butler in other ways though, including  she took on when she got a master’s degree. 

With a 6-month-old baby sleeping in her arms, a toddler resting on a nearby couch and another toddler playing in her living room, Butler shares that she is retiring in June and moving to South Carolina with her husband so they can be closer to her family. She says she has given the families in her program notice, encouraging them to seek out other child care options.

For years, Butler worked as an advocate in the effort to professionalize the work of child care providers — something that Vermont may be the first state to do. “When I would tell people I watched children, they’d say ‘oh you’re a babysitter,’” she says; her work wasn’t recognized as a profession, but that may soon change. In late 2023 the Vermont Association for the Education of Young Children submitted an application to the state’s Office of Professional Regulation to make “early childhood education” a recognized profession; a  has been sent to the state Legislature for review in anticipation of introducing legislation, but Butler won’t be working in the field when it comes to fruition.

Butler has no resentment though.  She says she is ready for her next chapter and the warmer weather. “The next generation of providers will get the benefit,” she says. “I am satisfied that I worked hard for them.”

A new initiative from the University of Vermont hopes to address the shortage of mental health professionals available to support the state’s youth.

Known as the Catamount Counseling Collaborative for Rural Schools, the program plans to train and place 52 school counselors, social workers and mental health clinicians in rural schools throughout Vermont for the next five years.

 from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found rising levels of depression and anxiety among Vermont middle and high school students. 

Despite this, Vermont lacks an adequate number of . In 2023, the state’s Workforce Development Board estimated a need for 230 more providers to meet growing demand. 

The new Catamount Counseling Collaborative for Rural Schools aims to address the gap. 

Through the program — funded by a $3.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education — University of Vermont graduate students are expected to contribute at least 25,000 clinical hours annually to support rural communities.

“Vermont mental health needs are pervasive and complex and they’re currently underserved and this is a way to reach them,” said Anna Elliott, associate professor of counseling.

Elliott, the principal investigator for the grant, has experience running a similar initiative in Montana, where she spent five years developing a program to support rural communities with mental health professionals. 

A key part of the program, Elliot said, is to encourage graduates to continue working in rural schools or mental health facilities after completing their training. She said she tailored the program to Vermont’s unique needs. This included analyzing various statistics from community needs assessments on issues such as suicide rates, substance use disorder and the stigma associated with seeking mental health services, ensuring the program aligns closely with the landscape of Vermont’s mental health needs.

“One of our primary goals in setting up the training program was attending to students’ reports that they often didn’t feel prepared to go and work in a rural environment,” she said. “Having an intensive and intentional training program that sets them up to really understand what they’re walking into and how to be prepared and how to ask for support incentivized students to stay, so we’re hoping to replicate that here.”

The program offers a stipend to those who remain in their assigned schools for at least one year, helping to ease potential barriers like securing a full-time job or finding affordable housing.

In Montana, Elliott said she noticed some graduate students couldn’t stay in rural schools due to limited funding for permanent positions. Other challenges, including housing and job security, also made it difficult for them to remain in these high-need areas.

“I’m taking the model that I did in Montana and integrating that in with the community schools model to not just say, ‘here’s a couple graduate students that will be here for a year’ but let’s actually take a systemic look at what’s happening in the school — what are the needs, resources, barriers and strength,” Elliott said.

To address these challenges, the program focuses on recruiting graduate students who already come from rural areas. By offering low-residency options, the program allows these students to complete much of their coursework remotely. This means they can stay at home rather than moving to campus, making it easier for them to balance their studies with their existing commitments.

“This grant provides significant opportunity to bring students into the helping professions who might not otherwise have access to this kind of specialized training,” said Danielle Jatlow, a co-principal investigator and social worker who coordinates UVM’s bachelor’s of social work program, in a press release from the university.

UVM faculty, including program co-leaders Robin Hausheer and Lance Smith, both associate professors of counseling, are starting outreach to rural schools. They hope to place graduate students in schools as early as this semester, according to the release.

“There are people and kids that are getting served this year that might not have been otherwise,” Elliott said in the release. “So that feels like everything.” 

This was originally published on .

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin and Vermont Public reporter Lola Duffort, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

The motels that serve as emergency shelters in Vermont have been home to hundreds of children. They include 8-year-old Summer, who loves Disney’s Inside Out and potato chips, and a 6-year-old named Sariyah, who always chooses to go down the biggest slide at the playground near her elementary school.

But as restrictions on the motel program come to bear this fall — resulting in a mass  – the landscape of available shelter for families with children is particularly tight. 

There were  living in motels before the limits took effect in mid-September, but only 203 shelter units statewide that accept families with children. And those slots, by and large, are already full.

Some will win the shelter lottery when their voucher expires. That’s the case for Summer and her family, who are moving into a temporary unit managed by Capstone Community Action. Sariyah and her grandmother accepted an offer from a stranger for a place to stay. When those accommodations fell through, they took a charitable donation to help pay for a hotel room.

Other families – including James and Teala Ouimette and their two young daughters,  last month – will have no other choice but to pitch a tent. When the Ouimettes tried to access a family shelter in Burlington before leaving their hotel room, they were told it had a lengthy waitlist.

The number of families experiencing homelessness in Vermont has grown precipitously in recent years. Particularly as motel shelter capacity retracts, providers now have to balance the long-term goals of boosting shelter and housing options for families, while triaging those families’ acute needs.

“We just got a request for a cooler to keep milk cold for toddlers at a campground,” said Paul Dragon, executive director of the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity. “This is unprecedented.”

‘We’ve kind of lost control’

Not too long ago, Vermont believed that ending family homelessness outright was within reach. In 2015,  to eliminate child and family homelessness by 2020, which involved giving families with children  and rehabbing run-down housing. And as recently as January 2023,  to solve child homelessness, arguing that doing so would “help break the generational cycle of poverty.”

But as the scale of the problem has grown amid a deepening housing crisis, some feel that goal has slipped out of reach. Not only have the numbers grown, but so have the needs of unhoused families.

“Now I feel like we’ve kind of lost control,” Dragon said.

An annual federally-mandated census in January , but this census is widely considered to be an undercount, and does not include those who are couch surfing. According to preliminary data collected by the state Agency of Education, which does count couch surfing and other types of doubling up, there were 1,927 unhoused students enrolled in Vermont public schools last school year — nearly double the figure from five years prior.

Vermont has capacity to shelter 61 households with children at dedicated family shelters that receive state funding. Those family shelters are located in Bennington, Brattleboro, Burlington, Hartford, and in scattered temporary apartments in Washington County, according to information provided by Lily Sojourner, director of the Department for Children and Families’ Office of Economic Opportunity. 

Another 82 shelter spaces are available for households experiencing domestic violence (with another nine currently in development), which can include children. Another 60 units can serve families but are also open to a broader population. 

In three Vermont counties — Orange, Essex, and Grand Isle — there does not exist a single formal shelter option for families. 

Decades of research has cataloged the  of homelessness on children.  are more likely to have developmental delays, to do poorly in school, and experience higher rates of victimization, bullying, suicidality, substance abuse, and hospitalization. And children who experience homelessness are less likely to have .

Precisely because children are so vulnerable, family shelters are more resource-intensive, space-intensive, and staff-intensive than those serving individuals. And so there are fewer of them.

COTS has long run two family shelters in Burlington. Both are staffed around the clock so families don’t have to leave during the day, said Rebekah Mott, director of development and communications for the organization. The family shelters also have a dedicated family housing navigator, as well as an education liaison and a new mental health specialist fully-funded through private donations. 

Providers for the most part agree that congregate shelters – typically, cots or bunk beds lined up in a large space – aren’t best for families. Family shelters in Vermont are generally “semi-congregate,” meaning families might have their own room, but share a kitchen and common spaces, or fully “non-congregate.”

“I think the prospect of getting one up and running from scratch is probably…seems very difficult and overwhelming,” Mott said.

‘It’s shameful, to be really honest’

With shelters full, the city of Burlington has set aside temporary campground space for unhoused families with children, and, alongside the school district, put out a public callout for camping equipment in the wake of the new motel limits taking effect. 

Victor Prussack, the school district’s engagement director, expressed bewilderment that some students were living outdoors. Citing student privacy rules, he declined to give the precise number.

“It’s shameful, to be really honest,” he said. “I don’t understand how we allow that to happen in this day and age and in the state of Vermont.” 

There’s also a concern amongst local officials that the effort, although perhaps necessary, also endorses the status quo.

“We don’t feel great about reaching out to our community and saying, ‘Hey, could you give sleeping bags? Could you give tents? Could you give cooking fuel?’,” he said. “Because to me, that is supporting what the state is not&�Բ�����;��Ǿ��Բ�.”

Despite their limitations, schools throughout the state are trying to plug in the gaps. They often host food pantries, collect clothes, provide counseling, and, as is federally required, will arrange transportation for their unhoused students, even if seeking shelter forces families to move out of the district.

At the Hilltop Inn in Berlin, a white sedan arrives every school day to bring Summer 45 minutes south to Bradford Elementary. The 8-year-old, who has autism and is now learning to speak in full sentences, is well supported at school, her mother, Kimberlin Gowell said. And the elementary, which she has attended for the last three years, has also become a refuge from life in the motel, which sometimes overwhelms Summer.

“She loves school,” Gowell said.

But even as schools attempt to provide some measure of material support and constancy for children experiencing homelessness, local school officials say there’s only so much within their power.

“We have families reaching out to the school, seeing if there’s anything we can do to help support them. And the reality is that what we can do in schools is limited,” said Bianca McKeen, the assistant superintendent for the Rutland City school district, where there were 104 unhoused children enrolled last year — 5% of all students.

‘Anywhere I can keep her safe’

Asked how much additional family shelter she thinks the state needs, Sojourner, of the Department for Children and Families, emphasized the need for Vermont to create more housing.

“We can’t lose sight of that North Star,” she said. “I think if someone said, you know, ‘Would you rather build housing or more shelter capacity?’ I would want more housing.” 

Dragon agrees that Vermont needs to bolster its housing stock to address homelessness. CVOEO administers a rapid-rehousing program for unhoused families, offering vouchers for rental assistance. But 60 families have vouchers in hand – including some who are being exited from the motel program – and can’t find anywhere to use them, Dragon said.

“I think in lieu of adequate housing for families, we have to provide more shelters, especially if we’re not going to continue with the hotel program,” Dragon said. “Nobody likes to see more shelters, but that’s the place that we’re in.” 

As motel vouchers expire for hundreds of Vermonters over the next few weeks, , including from the very lawmakers who wrote the new limits into law. But for now, families will have to figure out how to survive until the program’s rules loosen up again in December.

Sariyah and her grandmother, Terri Ann Garrett, briefly stayed with a stranger who reached out to them after  a few weeks ago. They’ve since returned to the Barre motel where they’d previously had a state voucher; a charitable donation has covered a room for them and Garrett’s husband. But Garrett doesn’t know how long that help will last. She is trying to get them into an apartment of their own.

Sometimes, she and Sariyah talk about imagining their dream home. 

“Hers is somewhere with a pool that is all hers, with a Lamborghini,” Garrett said, laughing, as she watched Sariyah run around the playground on a recent afternoon. Then she grew serious.

“My idea of a perfect home is anywhere I can keep her safe,” she said.

Erinn Rolland-Forkey has been a foster parent in Vermont for about 25 years, and has been active in that time advocating for the rights of parents and children in the system. In 2016, she was even appointed to sit on a foster parent workgroup created by the Legislature, which pushed, , that the state provide a two-pager to foster parents each time a child was placed in their care.

But while Rolland-Forkey is glad to receive that document, which is supposed to guarantee she’ll get at least some basic information about the child in her care, she never assumes it’ll be accurate or complete.

As Rolland-Forkey was speaking to a VTDigger reporter over the phone, she began inspecting the state paperwork that had come with a child who had recently been in her home. Under “allergies and dietary restrictions,” she said, someone had simply drawn a line, suggesting there were none to report.

“Actually, that child has an EpiPen,” Rolland-Forkey said, “and was allergic to all shellfish.” 

She learned about the allergy from the child, who mentioned it in conversation about a week after arriving.

Rolland-Forkey and many advocates — including Vermont’s newly created independent ombudsman for child welfare — say such scenarios are not rare, and the culprit, in most cases, is clear: antiquated information technology systems serving the family services division at the Department for Children and Families. 

Vermont’s state government is no stranger to IT woes. Amidst a pandemic-induced economic shutdown, for example, the state’s unemployment system  and later  of thousands of Vermonters. 

But the problems with the family services divisions’ IT systems nevertheless stand out — not only because of the age of the databases, but because of the stakes involved. 

The primary system, called SSMIS, for inputting and warehousing basic information about minors in state custody and their placements was created in the early 1980s. State officials and advocates alike note frequently that this means the cyber backbone of Vermont’s child protection system predates the creation of the World Wide Web. A secondary system, FSDNet, that handles child abuse reporting intake information and case notes, dates back to the 1990s.

Before becoming deputy advocate in Vermont’s , which has independent oversight powers over DCF, Lauren Higbee worked at the department for five years, and has firsthand experience with these data systems. She’s since developed a shorthand for conveying their limited functionality.

“It doesn’t even have the capability of using a mouse,” she said of SSMIS. “That’s how old it is.”

In her former role, Higbee oversaw residential licensing and special investigations at DCF. And she recalled how badly the system complicated her work.

“You can’t search by facility to see all the allegations attributed to one facility. Right? So I’m not getting the scope, the history, the issue of what happened, or has happened or allegedly happened in one facility,” she said. “Huge issue.”

SSMIS is so clunky that even the most basic information about a child can be hard to find. If they’re placed with a private service provider which may have several locations, for example, the system will only register that provider’s name — not the specific address where that particular child is located. 

DCF Deputy Commissioner Aryka Radke, who helms the department’s family services division, argued that this doesn’t mean that the state doesn’t know the location of the children in its care. But she acknowledged that identifying where it has stored such information is sometimes difficult.

“The address could be in case notes, which means that it’s gonna be harder to find. Obviously, the worker has the address for the child, which means we need to contact the worker to get the information. Or the district director may have it. Or it’s in a paper file at the district office. Or it’s in the worker’s telephone,” she said. “So it’s not readily available sometimes, but it’s absolutely there.”

But for Matthew Bernstein, who leads Vermont’s Office of the Child, Youth and Family Advocate, information that’s hard to find is almost as bad as information that doesn’t exist — putting kids at risk.

“We don’t know what medications a kid is allergic to,” he said. “A kid is in the hospital having an acute event — and sure, medical providers can do their thing and sure, some DCF workers can shuffle around looking for some paper that says what medications the kid is allergic to or anything else relevant to that. But that information is not at our fingertips. And that can obviously be catastrophic.”

As work-arounds to these inadequate systems, state workers and administrators report that they rely on an unwieldy and rickety system of supplemental databases, their own memories, and more than 30 Excel spreadsheets. The result is redundant data entry which is time consuming and, most importantly, vulnerable to human error. 

“When we remove a child and take them into state custody, we’re really taking responsibility for them and all that that entails,” said Amy Rose, the policy director for the nonprofit advocacy group Voices for Vermont’s Children. “And not prioritizing just even accurate information — or the ability to access that information — really sets us all up for mistakes. And those mistakes can have a significant impact on the lives of the children that we’re taking responsibility for.”

 on the drivers behind the high rates of children in state custody in Vermont, produced by researchers at the University of Vermont two years ago, named the “immediate priority” of replacing the division’s IT infrastructure as its first recommendation.

The researchers found that data systems were inadequate and did not allow child welfare workers to “meaningfully measure and track child safety, permanency, or wellbeing.” Bad data impacted decision-making, and created “opportunities for individual bias in decisions to place a child,” the study’s authors wrote.

In November 2021, Sally Borden, the co-chair of Vermont’s citizen advisory council to DCF, urged lawmakers in to invest in a new IT infrastructure and marveled that the system wasn’t riddled with even more errors. She argued that the status quo makes the foster care system a sort of black box. Because family services databases cannot reliably search, organize, and collate data, administrators and advocates alike often find it impossible to accurately measure a problem — let alone measure progress in fixing it.

To figure out how many parents involved with DCF were dealing with substance use disorders, she noted, the department had recently relied on a hand count, derived from asking individual family services workers to tally up their cases.

“This, in the middle of an opioid crisis, is absurd,” Borden wrote.

In October 2020, Christine Johnson, then the head of DCF’s family services division, offered a similar critique during a . Johnson recalled arriving at her job the year prior and, in an attempt to get a lay of the land, requested a variety of data points she believed would be available “with a few strokes” in a user-friendly dashboard. 

“What I found very quickly was that we had a system that was built in 1982 — back when computers weren’t even really a thing,” she said.

Radke, Johnson’s successor, pushed back at the notion that the state’s IT system puts children at any risk. “I think it impacts my team and that they have to go the extra mile to make sure that we have the level of care that we need,” she said. 

Nevertheless, she stressed that an upgrade was of utmost importance. And Radke has made more progress than any of her predecessors to fix the problem, although it is only a start: She is finalizing a request for proposals to build a new IT system, expected out this January.

But once contractors submit their offers, the state will have to decide whether it is willing to pay for an overhaul. No one knows yet what the price tag will be.

“At this point, based on our estimates of similarly situated states, we’re estimating that the cost could be anywhere between $35 and $40 million,” Radke said. “But of course we’ll have a much better idea when we get those responses.”

Luckily, the federal government will likely pay half the cost. And those pushing for a new system can also plausibly argue the upfront cost will pay for itself over time. The state leaves federal dollars on the table each year in reimbursable expenses because the data system regularly fails to comply with federal reporting requirements.

But even if the state fully commits to funding a new system, it’ll be years before a new one is in place. Radke guessed three — at a minimum. 

In the meantime, state workers and families will have to keep making do. 

Rolland-Forkey, the veteran foster parent, wonders whether that’s tenable — for her, for other foster parents, and particularly for the children they bring into their homes. She worries the system causes even more “fracturing” for children already dealing with such instability. And she struggles with a feeling of “moral injury,” when she realizes a kid in her care isn’t taking the medications they need, or missed a doctor’s appointment, court hearing, or after-school activity because there was no reliable record available for her to consult.

“We’re supposed to be doing no harm,” she said. “We don’t take an oath or anything, but I feel that. I feel like that’s what we should be.”

This was originally published in VTDigger.

As Vermont  a new secretary of education, Vermonters have weighed in with their preferred qualifications for a candidate. The state’s top education official, parents, educators and administrators say, should education,  and opportunity for students, and  what some see as an ineffectual agency.

Some Vermont advocates are pushing for a secretary with expertise in one particular area: teaching kids to read. 

“We feel like there’s a tremendous opportunity for our state right now in appointing a leader who has the reading crisis high on their radar,” said Laurie Quinn, the president of the education nonprofit Stern Center for Language and Learning. “Who understands the opportunity that we have right now in Vermont to turn the reading crisis around for our kids.”

The push comes amid a nationwide reckoning over how kids learn to read, as a  movement pushes schools to change their reading curricula to better follow scientific data.

Legislatures in  have implemented reforms intended to bring reading instruction in line with that research. Now, Vermont advocates are seeking a new secretary who will follow in their footsteps.

‘Someone that understands that science’

A growing number of educators, parents, teachers and lawmakers across the country are arguing that schools have been teaching kids to read the wrong way. 

Galvanized in part by an American Public Media podcast called , advocates point to numerous studies that show that children learn reading better when they are explicitly instructed to connect letters and sounds, also known as phonics. 

But for years, they argue, school reading curricula have omitted or underemphasized phonics instruction — to the detriment of students.

“With the secretary of ed vacancy, we really need someone that understands that science, and why it’s so important to support teachers — so that we can therefore support our kids,” said Abigail Roy, a board member at the International Dyslexia Association’s Northern New England Alliance and an evaluator at the Stern Center.

Through the Dyslexia Association, Roy has led a campaign urging Vermonters to write letters to the Vermont State Board of Education and governor asking them to choose a secretary who knows how to teach reading.

“Now is the time to organize efforts to encourage Governor Scott and members of the State Board of Education to choose a Secretary that is knowledgeable in the Science of Reading and supportive of structured literacy instruction in our Vermont classrooms,” the association said on 

More than a dozen Vermonters have drafted letters or submitted testimony to the State Board of Education asking for a secretary who will prioritize literacy instruction. A Seven Days  last week also raised the issue’s profile. 

How bad is it?

Every other year, Vermont fourth and eighth grade students are tested in reading and math by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, a standardized test sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card.

For much of the 2000s, Vermont’s average test scores in reading and math were largely steady, even ticking up slightly. According to NAEP, the state’s average scores in reading were at a  high Around that same year, the state recorded highs in the percentage of students — 45% — who scored “proficient” and above at the tests. 

That year, however, marked a turning point. After 2015, Vermont’s NAEP reading scores started to drop, a decline that continued through the Covid-19 pandemic. 

By 2022, 71% of the eighth graders tested in Vermont were scoring  level — up from 60% in 2002. Among fourth graders, 68% of those tested were below proficient, compared to 61% 20 years earlier. 

Those declines largely mirror national trends. The state’s average test scores in mathematics have followed a similar trajectory, peaking around 2013 and declining in the years since. (The state of Vermont also administers its own standardized tests, but they offer a much more  of data.)

Is inadequate reading instruction behind the state’s middling scores? Some advocates speculated that it was. Quinn, of the Stern Center, said that she had consulted with a colleague who guessed that poor reading curricula became “entrenched in the decade prior.”

Others said it was best not to dwell on that data.

“If you spend time with youth, and watch them and see them attempt to construct sentences, there’s plenty of qualitative data in every classroom,” said Dorinne Dorfman, a former administrator, teacher and board member at the regional International Dyslexia Association’s chapter. “It’s really evident in their everyday lives.”

Ted Fisher, a spokesperson for the Vermont Agency of Education, declined to make any state officials available for an interview. Asked about the causes behind that decline, Fisher referred VTDigger to a  from the Vermont Agency of Education.

 “I urge school districts to pay attention to these results and make sure we are focused on providing high-quality instruction in core skills like literacy and mathematics,” then-Secretary of Education Dan French said in the release.

‘Take it into consideration’

Not everyone is convinced that the silver bullet is more phonics instruction. 

Marjorie Lipson, a founding board member of the literacy nonprofit Partnerships for Literacy and Learning and former education professor at the University of Vermont, said that the focus on phonics oversimplifies the many factors that go into how kids learn to read. 

“My argument is not with phonics,” Lipson said, noting that it’s a key part of curricula. “It’s with an approach that says that’s all that’s important, and that you need to hold back other aspects of becoming a reader until after that job is done.”

She likened phonics instruction to practicing shooting a basketball: “You could have a child go into a gym and practice shooting hoops till they, you know, collapsed from fatigue,” she said. “At the end of the day, if that’s all they’d ever done — was shoot hoops — they would be pretty skilled at shooting hoops. But they wouldn’t be a good basketball player.”

Jay Nichols, the executive director of the Vermont Principals Association, compared the current discourse to the “reading wars” of the 1980s, when educators debated how much of a role phonics instruction should play in classrooms.

“It’s exactly the same,” he said. “The pendulum’s kind of swung back and forth. And I think it’s, as usual, the answer’s somewhere in the middle.”

Either way, it’s not clear that advocates will succeed in getting a secretary who will prioritize reading instruction. 

Under Vermont law, the State Board of Education is supposed to present at least three candidates for the position to the governor, who will make a final choice. The job application window closed on Oct. 5. 

Jennifer Samuelson, the chair of the state board, declined an interview, saying she was preparing for a trip. Asked about the campaign for a secretary of education to prioritize literacy, she said in an email that “I think this is an area that is clearly of interest to a lot of Vermonters.” 

But the board had not discussed the topic, she said. She declined to say whether the body would prioritize reading instruction in its search for a new secretary, saying that information about the hiring process was “privileged” under Vermont law.

Nor is it clear how much Gov. Phil Scott will focus on the issue. 

In response to an emailed inquiry from VTDigger, Jason Maulucci, a spokesperson for Scott, said, “The Governor will certainly will take it into consideration, along with other public feedback.” 

This was originally published in .

Unfortunately, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, due to difficulties in accessing health care, vaccine hesitancy and the loosening of vaccine requirements. These put children and communities at greater risk of outbreaks of preventable disease.  

Measles provides a helpful case study. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “ that if one person has it, 9 out of 10 people of all ages … will also become infected if they are not protected.” Despite this risk, almost 250,000 kindergartners in the 2021-22 school year may not have been protected against measles. Measles cases have resulted in , productivity loss and direct medical costs; the CDC estimates it can . 

State requirements that children be vaccinated to attend public school have a proven track record in producing high immunization rates. These generally are around grace and provisional enrollment periods, which temporarily allow children who are getting but have not completed their vaccinations to attend school. Yet, during the 2021-22 school year, due to pandemic-related health care disruptions, many states allowed students who did not meet school requirements and lacked valid exemptions to continue to attend class. In part because of these lenient policies, 4.4% of kindergartners nationally on their measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. 

This is particularly concerning because a population . This means that measles is less likely to spread, protecting the 5% percent who are not vaccinated. that have vaccination rates of less than 95% for measles, and prevent outbreaks if they were able to vaccinate kindergartners who do not have valid exemptions. For instance, , mumps and rubella, and . If those children were vaccinated, Vermont’s overall rate potentially would exceed 95% and all youngsters — and their surrounding communities — would be protected.

Unfortunately, state immunization programs are facing that supports data systems, as the result of unspent COVID funding being pulled back during congressional debt limit negotiations. The country can’t afford to waste the , including data modernization, during the height of the pandemic. Now is the time to build on those improvements, making sure states have efficient and effective systems to track vaccine orders, enroll health care providers as vaccinators, provide patients and families with timely information about their immunization status and their need for updates, and address gaps so all children are protected from preventable disease.  

The back-to-school season is a key moment to catch kids up on their vaccines. To do this, schools should reinstate and reinforce vaccine requirements, sending a message to families about the importance of routine childhood immunizations. Schools should also engage community leaders to bolster vaccine confidence, counter disinformation and provide families with timely, accurate, culturally sensitive and evidence-based information about vaccines. Lastly, schools should help families access vaccines through back-to-school immunization drives, which provide an opportunity to identify children who need to catch up, engage their families and connect them to clinical personnel. The CDC provides and tools for schools and health care providers to catch kids up on routine immunizations.

Public health systems are often unnoticed, working behind the scenes to prevent diseases and avoid their health and economic consequences. Americans must keep and prevention to promote good health, reduce absenteeism from preventable diseases and promote positive school environments for learning. Catching kids up on routine vaccinations must be a critical priority for advancing community well-being.

In a country that lacks any federal infrastructure for child care, state efforts like Vermont’s are charting a course forward on what a more universal care economy could look like for families.

How did it happen? Vermont’s efforts come after a decade of advocacy, lobbying efforts and coalition building to shore up a strong majority in favor of universal child care in the state. The state’s aging workforce meant incentives were needed to – and the availability of stable, affordable child care for longer periods of time.

The money for the child care plan will expand the subsidies to families with incomes up to 575% of the federal poverty guidelines. In addition, Aly Richards, CEO of Let’s Grow Kids, was also set aside to increase pay for child care workers. This will be funded from a .44% payroll tax, which is split between employers and employees.

Vermont has caught national attention, particularly among advocates and educators, for its bold and comprehensive approach. The process to get the initiative over the finish line was unique as Vermont is the only state with a Democratic veto-proof majority and a Republican governor.

“The dynamic that played out in Vermont shows what is possible when you have committed legislators, cultivated over years by grassroots organizers, advocates and community members speaking out on the importance of comprehensive investments in child care,” said Nina Dastur, director of state and local policy for Community Change, a national racial and economic justice organization. “We’re seeing the importance of grassroots organizing and everyday peoples’ participation in elections making real, tangible change for the better. The boldness of this veto override is backed by the community.”

In his comments explaining his reason for his Veto, Governor Scott that he had used the $390 million in surplus revenue “to fund many of these shared priorities like child care, voluntary paid family and medical leave, housing, climate change mitigation, and more.” But the initial child care funding had been primarily geared toward families paying less for care. And while the lack of affordability is a crucial piece of the child care crisis, another aspect is the low wages that the providers make, or the very thin or nonexistent profit margins that child care centers face. The additional payroll tax funding is designed to boost wages for providers and increase the subsidy amount they receive for each child enrolled – allowing centers to compete for and retain staff, and to be more financially soluble long term.

Many early childhood education programs in Vermont had been reducing hours and limiting spaces to try and stay open, explained Christina Goodwin, board president of the Vermont Association for the Education of Young Children and executive director of Pine Forest Children’s Center. “This bill means programs like ours can offer more spots to more families. It means financial relief for families who attend our school. It also means stability, as we can pay teachers closer to a living wage and retain our talented early childhood educators.”

will go into effect beginning in summer 2023 with $20 million in one-time “readiness payments” to support child care programs in preparing for the expansion of the child care subsidy system. Then through new public investment in January 2024, programs will receive a 35% reimbursement rate increase. Providers will also receive reimbursements based on enrollment and not attendance, which can be crucial for providers for staffing and planning purposes, and critical for more vulnerable populations that are subject to disruptions. More changes continue through 2024, culminating with the child care subsidies reaching the state population at 575% of the federal poverty level in October 2024.

The success in Vermont took over a decade to come to fruition, but it’s possible that — similar to policies like paid family leave — other states can see Vermont’s actions as a model to emulate. “The public demand for child care legislation in Vermont is loud and clear and legislators heard that cry,” said Julie Kashen, director of the Women’s Economic Justice and senior fellow at The Century Fund, where she writes about child care policy. “When the public demand meets the political will, elected officials can overcome obstacles to lead the way on child care.”

In the state House, 118 legislators voted in favor of the legislation, and only 100 are needed for an override. Twenty-four state senators voted for it and 20 are needed to override.

The child care program comes after almost a decade of work from state advocates and a desire to help shore up young families in the workforce in a state with an aging population. (Child care is still one of the for keeping people, notably women, out of the workforce). “A system transformation” is how Aly Richards, the CEO of Let’s Grow Kids, a Vermont-based agency that has lobbied and organized on behalf of this state’s universal child care movement, described it.

Child care funds will be created by a 0.44% increase in the state’s payroll tax, of which employers will pay three-quarters. It’s estimated that the tax will generate close to $80 million per year, which will be further boosted by an additional $50 million from the state’s general fund.

The payroll tax agreement has been after two weeks of an impasse between the chambers. The funds will go toward child care subsidies, and will provide generous increases both to families that pay for child care and for providers who receive the subsidies.

Previously, Vermont provided some form of child care subsidies to families whose income was at or below 350% of the federal poverty line — one of the highest eligibility thresholds nationwide. The new legislation would increase the eligibility threshold to 575% of the federal poverty level making it the highest in the nation. (New Mexico, another state that leads on providing child care, has increased their child care subsidies to 400%). In addition, low-income families that earn less than 175% of the federal poverty line will not have to make any child care co-payments.

Providers will also see a significant subsidy reimbursement increase. This July, all providers will be reimbursed at the current from the state, with another increase of 35% coming in January 2024. Also, Vermont will increase subsidy reimbursement rates for Family Child Care Home providers, so that the gap between family child care and center-based care reimbursement shrinks by 50%.

“This home-based provider increase emerged as a strategy to really support rural child care and to almost be a rural revitalization effort,” Richards said. “This would infuse additional funding into home-based providers in the area.”

Farm workers have very specific child care needs, such as non-standard hour care and many live in child care deserts. In addition to the subsidy bump, will now be . Tying subsidies to enrollment will keep more child care providers afloat. Payments by enrollment allows providers to pay staff more reliably and plan for the future, rather than relying on a piecemeal approach. This is especially critical in a rural state like Vermont, where families are more likely to travel long distances to find care.

This distinction, explained Richards, is a matter of equity. “If you have a family that is missing days of school for a variety of reasons, especially for vulnerable families, the child care programs can no longer get payment for the program,” she said. “It was creating instability in an already fragile market. This creates more sustainable revenue for the educators and it supports the most vulnerable families that have absences that they cannot avoid.”

Support for such consistent funding increases for child care programs is notoriously difficult to achieve on a large scale. While polls show Americans want affordable, reliable child care — and such legislation has in our country — there has been little movement in individual states and on the federal level to create the required infrastructure to provide child care for more families. Vermont and New Mexico have made headlines for their pragmatic approach to child care — New Mexico as a way to uplift struggling families and Vermont as a way to bolster a young workforce. that are working to expand access to high quality child care include California, Michigan, and Minnesota, but this is hardly a unified approach for a wealthy developed country that treats child care as an individual problem and not a public good.

Julie Kashen, the director of the Women’s Economic Justice and Senior Fellow at The Century Fund, believes that the combination of public demand and political will helped spur policymakers to find a way to make child care and early learning a priority.

“What’s happened in these states will materially improve the lives of families and communities, while also creating models, momentum and mobilization for national progress,” Kashen said. “The progress in the states does not, however, negate the need for national action. We need a robust federal investment alongside state engagement to ensure that all families are able to choose the child care that works best for them.”

Despite the bipartisan support for the bill, Governor Scott announced his intention to veto the legislation. Richards explains that her coalition has a good working relationship with the Governor’s office, and the decision to veto can be traced back to a campaign promise not to raise taxes. Without the payroll tax increase, the program could not have afforded to pay providers more.

“It has come down to a fundamental difference in how you are going to think about affordability,” said Richards. “The Governor agrees child care is essential but won’t raise taxes. Those two things cannot live together. The solution is public investment. We know this is hard work. That is why we have a bipartisan movement. We are making hard choices together, but we are doing so responsibly.”

The legislative session for the veto override is scheduled for June 20 to 22.

For years, Bellows Free Academy Fairfax has needed renovations.

The sprawling pre-K-12 school was constructed piecemeal over the better part of a century. The oldest section is roughly 80 years old. The newest dates back to the turn of the millennium.

As such — and as the district’s population grows — the school needs upgrades. A dearth of space has forced administrators to pack pre-K students into one classroom and teach elementary school classes in the high school section. Many rooms are cramped and lack proper infrastructure. 

The whole building needs to be outfitted with a sprinkler system in case of a fire. (The original BFA Fairfax was destroyed in a .)

“We do regular upgrades on things,” said John Tague, the superintendent of Franklin West Supervisory Union and former principal of BFA Fairfax. “But, you know, to be able to really do a major project (that) requires any kind of expansion is going to require more money than we can set aside in a single year’s budget.”

For Fairfax, however, passing a bond to finance such an expansion has not been easy. 

In 2017, voters rejected a $16 million bond for expansion and upgrades. Two years later, voters a second, roughly $26 million bond. 

, the district finally succeeded in getting voters to approve a $36.4 million bond — a sum more than twice the original amount, due to the rising costs of labor and materials. 

Even that vote, however, did not end the school’s saga. 

October’s “yes” was decided by a margin of only 33 votes, and residents submitted petitions to revisit the issue. Finally, in January, residents went to the polls for a fourth, decisive vote: By a 66-vote margin, they

Throughout the public debates over the bond, according to Fairfax School Board member Scott Mitchell, one opposing argument has repeatedly surfaced: The district should wait for state or federal money to help pay for the renovations.  

“It’s a talking point of those that are against, sort of, bond issues,” said Mitchell, who was the board’s chair during the past three bond votes. “That, you know, it’s a state-funded system. The state should be paying to upgrade our facilities.”

That argument highlights a longstanding question among state and local education officials and lawmakers, one that has been asked with increasing urgency: Should the state government help build and renovate Vermont’s schools?

‘Terrible shape’

Less than two decades ago, Fairfax would have had that option. Vermont used to offer state aid — usually, up to 30% of construction costs — to help build and renovate local schools. 

That money came from the state’s , which pays for construction and renovation of state buildings. 

But in 2007, lawmakers put that program on hold. By that time, the state was sending “an increasingly large percentage of its capital funds to school construction,” according to a  from the Legislative Joint Fiscal Office.

The state was spending about $10 million a year on school construction — often roughly 20% of the state’s total capital funds. By the time the program was halted, the state had roughly  in school construction obligations — debt that was not fully paid off until 2016.

“Clearly, the general assembly cannot pay all school construction aid as well as fund other necessary capital projects,” the 2008 report concluded.

Now, lawmakers are trying to revisit the issue. Language in two bills — , which focuses narrowly on school construction, and , the state budget — would examine the question of state money for school construction. 

Ordering a study, of course, is  that lawmakers will actually take action.

Since the 2007 moratorium on construction aid, questions about restarting the program have  resurfaced, to no avail. The Legislature  on school construction funding just two years ago, in fact — one that the state Agency of Education is currently completing. 

The question is one that is increasingly hard to ignore. Vermont’s school buildings are “in terrible shape,” according to Jay Nichols, executive director of the Vermont Principals’ Association.

“It’s just like, you keep yelling about a problem but you never do anything about the problem,” he said. “And you wonder why the problem keeps getting bigger. This is a classic example of that.”

In 2020, a group convened by the state’s association of school superintendents found that Vermont schools  roughly  on construction and renovation in the coming years. 

A  issued a year ago showed that many of the state’s “” of school buildings were nearing the end of their expected lifespan. Nearly 200 had confirmed “hazardous materials present,” 81 had “indoor air quality issues,” and 52 had “fire/life safety issues,” according to the report.  

That report described concerns only at a district and supervisory union level, and not the conditions of individual schools. A final, more in-depth report is expected this fall.  

A legislative focus

Lawmakers are already concerned about the state of Vermont’s schools.

Last month, the House and Senate Education committees wrote a  to the three members of Vermont’s federal delegation, asking them to “support measures before Congress that will assist the State in providing funding for school construction.”

“Without a dedicated source of funding, the State faces an immense backlog in school construction projects, which has resulted in unsafe and unhealthy learning environments and disparities in the quality of education,” the committee members wrote.

Proposed language in both H.486 and the state budget would allocate $200,000 for a task force, made up of lawmakers and state and local education officials, that would study the state’s school construction needs.

The task force would examine “funding options for a statewide school construction program” and “a governance structure for the oversight and management of a school construction aid program.” A report would be due in January 2024. 

But the House and Senate differ on one key point: whether to halt the state’s  for toxic polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. 

H.486, which passed the House , includes language to pause the testing initiative. That proposal has the support of the state’s associations of principals, superintendents, and school boards. 

Key senators have expressed opposition to halting the program, however. 

“I continue to think it doesn’t make any sense, from where I’m sitting,” Sen. Brian Campion, D-Bennington, the chair of the education committee, which is in possession of H. 486, said in an interview Monday.

‘We literally just don’t fit’

At BFA Fairfax, students and staff don’t need a state report to know that their school needs work. 

On a recent tour of the building, teachers demonstrated their classrooms’ shortcomings.

“Our sixth- and seventh-grader band has about 70 students,” said Glen Wallace, a school music teacher. “So we literally just don’t fit in this room.”

The full band usually does not rehearse together until just before a concert. Then, Wallace said, “we have to take over the gym and go down there to rehearse and kick the PE teacher out of the gym.”

School science classrooms are also lacking.

“I don’t have a lot of space to do labs,” said Zach Smith, a science teacher, demonstrating his room’s lack of infrastructure. “(For) something as simple as water, you have to go to the next room where there’s a sink, or kids go to the bathroom. Or sometimes with labs I’ll have, even, students out in the hall because they don’t have space. Which then disturbs others’ classes.” 

To travel to all the school’s floors, students and staff need to take two elevators — one of which is too small to fit a stretcher.

The bond will add five classrooms to the building and upgrade existing facilities, such as music rooms, elevators, the cafeteria, and school entrances. A sprinkler system will also be installed. 

Construction is slated to begin in about a year.

A ‘more palatable’ option

Driven by inflation and a tight labor market, Vermont’s  is projected to increase by nearly 8% over the current year’s price tag — the fastest spending growth 

In the Fairfax School District, voters  a 2023-24 budget that will increase 12.4% over the current year, largely because of the cost of the construction bond, Mitchell, the Fairfax board member, said earlier this year. That will drive up property taxes by about 7%. 

Vermont’s local school budgets are drawn from a state education fund, meaning taxpayers all over the state contribute to all school budgets. But the more a local district spends per student, construction bond service included, the higher its local property tax rates will be. 

If school spending continues to rise, such bonds could be an increasingly hard sell in some communities — even as school buildings deteriorate further. 

“There’s some urgency, I think, in a lot of schools to get some work done, and it would be helpful to have some clear financial pictures from the state,” said Tague, the Franklin West superintendent.

But that clear picture “is not coming immediately,” he added. “That’s for sure.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No one would touch what I touched because they thought someone that looked like me must have been, like, riddled with disease,” Adii said. One peer told her to change her skin color like pop superstar Michael Jackson did.

After that experience, she went through the rest of elementary and middle school “actively trying to rid myself of any association” with what she perceived as “Black stereotypes.” She studied hard and chose not to wear the Batik clothing she bought when visiting her father’s relatives in Indonesia. Being different weighed on her.

But when, as a high school junior, she first attended a club meeting for students of color to connect with each other, she felt an instant sense of relief. It was the only time in her life she had been in a room with no white people, she realized, other than with family. The group was created to allow Black, Hispanic, Asian and Indigenous students to share about their experiences navigating the over 90% white, 800-person school.

“It felt so validating to just be in a room where you don’t have to give this huge backstory or explain yourself,” Adii said. “It made me feel like all of these little experiences, it’s not just happening to me. All these people can relate.”

Gatherings like the one described by the high school senior — often called “affinity groups” — have long been a strategy that schools, universities and workplaces employ to support community members who are from minority identities. But recently, those programs have become the target of pushback from conservative parent organizations, part of a wider GOP effort to oppose equity measures in K-12 education.

In early January, Parents Defending Education, a national nonprofit formed in 2021 to counter what it sees as indoctrination in schools, filed three federal civil rights complaints alleging that school-based affinity groups for people of color unfairly discriminate against white students and educators. The approach serves to “segregate” youth by race, violating the Civil Rights Act and the equal protections clause of the 14th Amendment, the organization’s letters say.

“Public schools that maintain policies or programs that discriminate against students on the basis of race are unconstitutional, period,” spokesperson Erika Sanzi wrote to The 74 in an email. 

Those complaints come on the heels of the organization has filed since 2021 against districts in , , , , and over similar opportunities for students and educators of color. In the 2021-22 school year, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights received more complaints than ever before, . Some 2,900 of those alleged racial discrimination, but federal officials do not track how many claimed discrimination against white students.

Two of Parents Defending Education’s most recent complaints concern student groups in majority-white school districts — Ashland, Oregon and Shelburne, Vermont — and the third flags a staff group in Portland, Maine, where just over half of all students are youth of color compared to just 14% of all educators.

“Within such a homogenous workforce, affinity groups are one way to help people who may experience marginalization feel welcome and supported,” said Barrett Wilkinson, director of diversity, equity and inclusion for Portland Public Schools. The group for teachers of color has run since 2017 when it was founded by educators, he said, and “the district absolutely supports it and is proud of these kinds of efforts.”

Legal landscape

While affinity groups can be formed around any number of identities — religion, sexual orientation or political outlook, for example — school-based gatherings for students of a specific race or races may fall into murky legal water, scholars say.

According to Derek Black, education law professor at the University of South Carolina, there are two central considerations for determining the constitutionality of race-based affinity groups. First, does the program actually exclude certain students or educators based on race? And second, if so, does the race-conscious policy serve to remedy existing inequities?

Some affinity groups, while catered to students of certain races, do not actually exclude those of other identities. In Shelburne, Vermont, district spokesperson Bonnie Birdsall said all existing affinity groups, including the one for people of color and a sexuality and gender alliance, welcome “any student who would like to be involved.”

Others, however, are open only to students of certain races. Those programs are subject to “strict scrutiny,” said Black. A 2015 from the Obama administration’s Office for Civil Rights found an Illinois high school’s assembly for only Black students in the wake of was unconstitutional.

That precedent, when applied to the question around affinity groups, is “persuasive, but not exactly on point,” said Maryam Ahranjani, professor at the University of New Mexico’s School of Law. Affinity groups have a different structure and purpose than assemblies, she points out, and the Obama-era decision is “not binding law.”

When school-based programs are racially differentiated, their legality may depend on whether they serve to fix prior injustice, said Black, which can create “a legitimate, compelling interest” for their existence in the eyes of the law.

“The state can clearly engage in race-conscious actions … to remedy discrimination,” the law professor said.

Though the toll can be hard to quantify, researchers have that students of color in predominantly white schools typically face challenges such as a lack of curricular materials that reflect their racial identity and more strict disciplinary punishments than their white peers.

Thus, it matters whether racially differentiated affinity groups actually help address those problems, Black said. Over a dozen academic studies examine the gatherings, and most find wide-reaching benefits, including participants reporting , and .

The legal landscape could shift, however, should the U.S. Supreme Court, as is widely expected, this spring in higher education admissions — another race-based policy meant to address longstanding disparities. Such a ruling would “chip away” at the legal basis for race-conscious policies in schools, Ahranjani said.

The U.S. Department of Education said it could not comment on when the agency expects to issue a response to the Parents Defending Education complaints or what actions it may take.

When asked whether her organization would consider filing a lawsuit should it disagree with the agency’s response, Sanzi replied that “a number of options exist to remedy racial discrimination in public schools.”

‘Doesn’t hurt me one iota’

Jesse Tauriac is chief diversity officer and an associate professor of psychology at Lasell University. There, he leads several affinity groups on campus — including gatherings for first-generation students, student athletes, students of color and for conservative students at the predominantly liberal school.

The groups spur “more candid and frank” conversations, he said, and afterward, students “feel better equipped to engage and speak with people who have different perspectives.”

A student who participated in the group for conservatives on campus wrote an email to Tauriac after the experience: “As a conservative student who didn’t always believe that diversity and inclusion meant including my voice, you have proved me wrong.”

Whether affinity groups gather students of one political stripe or a shared racial identity, some familiar with the model say it confuses them why those who don’t share in those attributes or experiences would want to join.

Wilkinson, the director of equity for Portland schools, who is white, said it “wouldn’t occur” to him to want to participate in the district’s group for staff of color. “Why would I insert myself in that way?” he said.

Gail Burnett, an English as a second language teacher in Portland, penned an in the Portland Press Herald.

“As a white person, I don’t qualify for the [Black, Indigenous, people of color] Community Circle. I’m not offended by this any more than I would be offended if I found out that I couldn’t join a men’s support group or a group for staff members who are left-handed, or survivors of child abuse, or flute players. This is about them, not me. It doesn’t hurt me one iota,” she wrote.

However, Sanzi explained that her organization filed the complaints because “racial discrimination hurts everyone whether they are being included or excluded based on their skin color.”

Blake Jordan is a senior at Southern Oregon University and an active participant at his school’s Black Student Union. The college is in the same small city as the Ashland School District named in the legal complaint. His organization “focuses on Black experiences,” but is open to students of any race who want to learn about Black history, art and culture.

“I don’t think it’s the correct approach to make strong divisions along identities,” Jordan said. He acknowledged, however, that there’s a difference between higher education, where students generally have the maturity to center Black students’ voices in the club, and K-12, where white youth “might change the dynamic” by failing to fully listen to the experiences of their peers of color.

Adii, in Vermont, has tried to think about what it would mean for her high school’s affinity group to welcome white students. During the school day, she’s the only person of color in most of her classrooms. In those settings, she feels “a lot less apt to speak up around ideas of race, because I don’t really want to get met with pity from white people … and I also don’t want to feel invalidated,” she said.

The gathering for students of color, 40 minutes twice per week during a free period, is the only time she’s surrounded by people who directly relate to her experiences. Having white peers in the room could “undermine” the club’s purpose, she said.

“The conversations would just have to completely change and we’d have to kind of cater what we were doing based off white people — and that’s what I’ve been doing my whole life.”

By the time Chaunceey Chery turned 18, he had moved nearly two dozen times. 

For years, he bounced between apartments and hotel rooms in Vermont and Florida as his mother struggled with substance abuse. His family, he said, spent more hours than he can estimate driving back and forth on I-95, which runs the length of the Eastern Seaboard. 

As a teenager, Chery tried out online school to maintain continuity amid the many moves, but family turmoil and his own mental health challenges prevented him from fully engaging in lessons. For nearly two years, he hardly learned anything, he said.

At 15, he began living with relatives in northeastern Vermont, hoping for more stability. He began regularly attending school in an alternative program meant for students facing adverse circumstances and was able to land a job, but he felt he was “walking on eggshells” living in a space that was not his own. Meanwhile, his housing nightmare continued as one aunt got evicted, another had landlord difficulties and his uncle’s house got foreclosed. 

“I felt like I was quadruple homeless at that point,” he said.

Circumstances like those that Chery endured as a young person trying to survive and stay in school now threaten to become increasingly common in rural areas, as experts warn of a in remote towns and villages.

In St. Johnsbury, Vermont where Chery lives, the school district’s homeless liaison, Kara Lufkin, said her caseload has jumped to nearly two dozen students this school year after hovering just above a dozen for the two years prior. Lori Robinson, the liaison for a nearby school district in the wider Northeast Kingdom region, also said she’s now serving the most students she ever has since starting the role in 2020, when a nationwide eviction moratorium protected families. 

Federal funding for low-cost rural rentals has been slashed in recent decades. A U.S. Department of Agriculture program that once helped finance the construction of new apartments in sparsely populated areas of the country has been — squeezing an option long relied upon by many rural households.

But local factors also play in as Vermont is phasing out its pandemic rental assistance program. Rebecca Lewis, regional director of Northeast Kingdom Community Action, said her organization is bracing for “a lot more” families to lose their housing in the next six months.

Vermont has the second-highest per capita rate of homelessness in the nation, lower only than California’s, according to a December 2022 report from the . At the same time, the Green Mountain state provides temporary shelter to a higher share of its residents without homes than any other state, with 98% safely indoors on a point-in-time count from last year.

While dwarfed in size by places like New York City, where the number of homeless students , rural students without housing face challenges that are distinct from those in metro centers. Emergency shelters, public transportation and cell reception tend to be scarce or nonexistent. Quiet places to work like libraries and coffee shops may be miles away. And in far north regions like St. Johnsbury, one winter night without proper shelter can be lethal.

As a homeless liaison, Lufkin understands it’s her job to mitigate these difficulties as much as possible. She coordinates transportation to and from school when families need it and often provides youth in need of winter gear with jackets, hats and gloves. Robinson, in the district next door, celebrated being able to scrape together the equipment and transportation for a student on her caseload to play football in the fall and basketball this winter. 

Still, much remains beyond their control, Lufkin said, and some conditions can cripple learning for homeless youth regardless of whether they’re happening in a teeming city or the remote reaches of New England. 

“[Students] may not be sleeping as well if they’re sleeping on a couch,” she said. “If you’re hungry, your focus isn’t on reading that textbook or doing that math work.”

These are just a few of the many factors that explain why youth experiencing homelessness have worse education outcomes than any other peer group, with the lowest overall attendance, standardized test scores and high school graduation rates of all students. The limited data that exist suggest roughly the same share of youth in rural areas experience homelessness as in urban areas, but with .

“It’s definitely a survival mindset,” said Chery. 

For the embattled teen, a level of stability finally came when, at 18, he entered a temporary housing program for homeless youth run by Northeast Kingdom Youth Services. He finally had a space to himself without worrying about eviction.

“It felt like I could breathe for a second,” he said.

He began taking courses at the local community college, which conveniently was walking distance from where he was staying. He applied to nearby Northern Vermont University for the spring term and was accepted, attending school there for three months until the COVID school shutdowns of March 2020 derailed his plans.

The disruption underscored the fragility of his situation, he realized. At his new college, he had depended on his dorm room as his only place to stay and often felt a level of “imposter syndrome,” he said, as it seemed that other students were more prepared for the coursework and campus culture. He had a long way to go before fully recovering from the traumas of his teenage years, he thought to himself.

“I got out of those situations that I was in, but now there’s so much more work to do trying to build a life, lay the foundation.”

Homeschooling while homeless

For Elysia Gingras, the spiral into homelessness didn’t come until she was in her 30s with five children, who now range in age from 9 to 13. 

The once financially comfortable seven-member family now stays in two rooms at an inn in St. Johnsbury as a part of Northeast Kingdom Community Action’s supportive housing program. The family burned through roughly $15,000 in savings, the mother said, after their dog attacked their nephew in an incident that was heavily covered in local outlets. While the family followed the injured toddler to hospitals in Boston and Hanover, New Hampshire, a health inspector condemned their apartment of five years, forcing them to crash at a nearby Comfort Inn — a move they thought would last a couple of weeks, tops. 

Now two years and hundreds of unsuccessful rental applications later, Gingras has come to understand just how tough the area’s housing market is. Even with her husband working full time as a roofer making over $20 an hour and her selling Arbonne cosmetics part time, nothing has panned out yet.

“I look [for rentals] every day, and I’m not exaggerating,” Gingras said. 

“Every place that we thought we were gonna get, it was like this constant roller coaster of getting your hopes up and finding out, nope, we didn’t get that one.”

Low-priced housing units in the Northeast Kingdom have been in short supply for years, explained Patrick Shattuck. He works as executive director of Rural Edge, the region’s main affordable housing development organization and its largest landlord. The Kingdom’s population of roughly 65,000 is both shrinking and aging, he said, meaning big houses that used to be occupied by young families now often hold just one or two elderly inhabitants. 

At the same time, the rise of seasonal tourism — with enticing skiers in the winter and the popular drawing mountain bikers in the summer — have led some property owners to convert rental units into more lucrative AirBnBs. Despite the efforts of Shattuck’s organization to maintain and add affordable options to the market, apartment prices have soared. Local institutions like schools and hospitals, he said, have lost would-be hires because the candidates can’t find affordable places to stay.

For the Gingras family, the housing squeeze has translated into some major life adjustments. Elysia Gingras, previously the type to bake homemade bread and meal-plan a month in advance, had to serve cereal and Hot Pockets when they first moved to the inn due to lack of kitchen access. 

She homeschools four out of her five children from their two motel rooms, but they now complete worksheets on clipboards rather than at the kitchen table. By homeschooling, Gingras is able to incorporate the family’s Christian faith into the school day, teaching prayer alongside math lessons, spelling quizzes and visits to the local Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium. She ensures all her children make their beds nicely each morning so their shared area stays orderly and there’s floorspace during the day for group yoga breaks.

But for all the family’s work to maintain normalcy, keeping up morale can be tough at times, the mother told The 74 just after New Year’s. The last few months were especially difficult. 

“Everybody’s trying to be joyful because it’s the holidays, but how do you really have a merry Christmas when you’re all in a hotel?” she said. “When we see [the other unhoused parents] outside and we’re like, ‘Hey, how are you?’ It doesn’t even matter what you say … because we’re here. We’re still here. And it’s like that unspoken acknowledgement of pain.”

Identifying and supporting students

Gingras, with her self-created curricula and Harry Potter read-alouds, exemplifies something Brittnee Dwyer, two months into a job with Northeast Kingdom Community Action, has quickly come to realize.

“It doesn’t mean if someone’s homeless that they’re a bad parent,” the newly hired housing specialist said.

But still, Asia Goldsmith, the Gingras’s neighbor at the inn, sometimes can’t avoid the creeping thought that she’s failing her three children. After spending the summer couch surfing and camping, the four of them have been at the hotel since September. She’s proud of her kids for earning good grades this school year thanks to afterschool tutoring provided by the district, she said. But she asks them to conceal their home life as much as possible.

“They hate that they can’t have friends over, but, I don’t know, I’m embarrassed,” Goldsmith said.

Her family had not yet connected with the school district’s homeless liaison, she said.

“I imagine there are probably families out there who are not on our list but are maybe experiencing homelessness for one reason or another,” Lufkin acknowledged. She said she couldn’t comment on individual families’ cases for privacy reasons.

The district is working to improve its efforts at identifying students experiencing homelessness so they can provide them with the needed services, she said. The liaison runs professional development sessions to help school staff learn the possible signs of housing insecurity. Bus drivers, for instance, can flag if a young person’s pickup location fluctuates, indicating that the family may be in a couch-surfing situation, she said.

The superintendent of the St. Johnsbury School District did not respond to requests for comment.

Over 2,750 Vermonters are experiencing homelessness according to a from early 2022 — more than double the state’s pre-pandemic level. The state’s overall percentage increase in homelessness from 2020 to 2022 was the highest in the nation. 

Much of that rise, advocates say, may be residents who once fell under the radar while doubled-up with relatives but were forced to seek independent shelter because of families’ COVID concerns.

“We started to see more people who had no place to go,” said Shattuck, the Rural Edge director.

In response, state lawmakers have approved major investments to add more affordable housing to the market. Vermont built 800 new low-cost apartments in 2022 and has another 800 currently under construction, Gov. Phil Scott said in his January State of the State . He said the state helped 1,300 families transition out of homelessness last year.

“Housing is having its moment in Vermont,” Shattuck said.

Chery, for his part, is seeking to address the issue from another angle. After relying on the transitional housing offered by Northeast Kingdom Youth Services as an 18-year old, he now serves as a case manager for the program. 

Having lived in the shared apartment building, the 23-year-old understands the challenges the young people he works with are facing — and he knows what it can mean for their schooling.

“There’s this pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality about education,” he said. But for housing insecure youth, “getting to a place where you’re stable enough that you can fully commit to education, that’s another whole journey.”

“These are my grandkids and my daughter has to work,” she explained in an interview with Better Life Lab, published in . “If it wasn’t for me, who would take care of my [grand]baby for no pay?”

The complicated, bureaucratic process around child care subsidies and payments is something many child care experts believe must be addressed for the system to work for more families. In better news, innovations surrounding the subsidy model are showing great promise for correcting some of these problems – including changing the way rates are set.

“For years, subsidies were set by a market rate,” explained Simon Workman, principal of Prenatal — Five Fiscal Strategies, a consulting group focused on early education. States determine the “market rate” via a survey of what parents are willing to pay for care.

But in 2016, federal regulations changed and states were allowed to explore alternative models for setting subsidy rates. Instead of looking at market rates (what families are willing to pay), innovative states began to look at true cost (how much actual care costs to deliver). What followed was a burst of innovations across the states focused on the way subsidies are determined, delivered and at what amount to a variety of providers.

Understanding the flaws of the current subsidy system

Currently, only a small fraction of families that qualify for child care subsidies actually receive them, — 75% — receiving subsidized care attend licensed child care centers. go to families who use informal, Family, Friend and Neighbor caregivers like Sanchez in the child’s own home.

Much of the funding for child care assistance comes from the federal Child Care and Development block grant, . The CCDBG gives states flexibility in how they develop their child care programs and policies, and distribute funds given to them annually by the federal government. Under federal regulations, the block grants subsidize child care for families with incomes up to 75 percent of state median income (there are proposals to raise this rate to ), and also provide funds for activities to improve the overall quality and supply of child care, .

Today, approximately 1.8 million children receive CCDBG-funded child care in an average month, but that includes just one in seven eligible children. It is through these funds that a provider like Sanchez can get paid, in a state like California which allows FFN providers, who are unlicensed, to receive child care subsidies. (Eight states and D.C. to receive subsidies). FFN care is especially crucial for marginalized communities, who may seek a cultural connection or relation for their preferred caregiver, as in Sanchez’s case where the preference is for a grandmother to care for her grandchildren.

In addition to subsidies going to too few children, another major flaw is the way subsidies are calculated that makes quality care out of reach for families. Until recently, the subsidy reimbursement amount set forth in the rules of the CCDBG was pegged to the 75th percentile of that market rate. That means if a state finds the market rate for child care is $419 per week ( — the most expensive in the country), then families who qualify for child care subsidies will receive three-fourths of that price to send their child to a qualifying provider. In most instances, it is up to families to pay the differences or for providers to absorb the cost difference.

But this model often doesn’t work well, explains Workman. In practice, most states can’t afford to set the subsidy rate at the 75th percentile. Even with the federal block grants and any additional state revenue earmarked for child care (only some states contribute; others rely solely on federal funds), there often isn’t enough.

Further, in rural areas, the subsidy rate is even lower. The market rate of child care established in surveys could be very low, and yet the cost of providing care still remains high. For example, rural providers must still pay for educators, facilities, supplies, equipment, food and all other expenses, even if their clientele are more dispersed and live farther from the provider. Finally, the low rates from subsidies mean providers take in less money per child, and then are forced to cut costs even further. “What it really means is that providers who cannot get much money from parents get very little from the government. Inequities from the market continue into the subsidy system,” Workman said.

Key finding: Innovations are still needed around subsidies and making the process more accessible and understandable for families. This includes making more subsidies available at higher dollar amounts and for different types of care, including home-based and family, friend and neighbor care.

Washington, D.C.’s cost estimation model

In 2016, the Office of the State Superintendent developed and conducted a to further understand the actual costs of care. This model, which was later revised in 2018 and 2021, took into account different types of child care, at different ages, in both home-based and center-based offerings.

This was the first locality to set rates based on true cost, not market rates. True cost is defined as how much care costs to provide; market rate is the the sticker price a family is willing to pay.

According to Workman, this cost modeling has helped inform other improvements surrounding child care: reforming licensing rules, improving ratio and group size requirement, updated quality rating and improvement systems, and including additional support staff — like coaches and health consultants — in calculating the base rate of what constitutes quality care.

New Mexico’s cost-modeling

, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, made creating a universal early childhood education system a big part of her platform. The state built a cost model, similar to that done in D.C., to find the true cost of quality care, and then set reimbursement rates based on costs, not market rate. Under this new approach, centers are incentivized to accept the subsidies and better compensation to provide high quality care.

New Mexico also drastically increased the income level of families who qualify for subsidies, raising it to 300% of the poverty line. As of May 1, 2022, New Mexico has since , the only place in the country to do so.

Higher subsidy reimbursement for FFN in California

Traditionally, non-center-based care models — including home-based or family-care, or Family, Friend and Neighbor Care — are paid less money per subsidy for the same work. And in eight states and D.C., unlicensed providers, like FFN, are not eligible for subsidies at all.

California is an example of a state that provides subsidy reimbursement for unlicensed Family, Friend and Neighbor Care providers like Sanchez, and California recently negotiated an increase for those providers’ pay.

Some of this support can be attributed to the new union: California’s Child Care Providers United. The union has successfully negotiated better reimbursement rates both for FFN and family-care providers. Licensed family caregivers who accept families on child care subsidies receive up to 75 percentile of the 2018 regional market rate survey , and FFN caregivers get 70% of the licensed caregiver rates — a 40% increase in their previous pay.

The CCPU also negotiated with the state to provide one-time supplemental payments to family child care providers as a bonus during COVID. in spring and summer 2022, large family child care providers (more than six children) received $10,000, and small family child care providers (fewer than six children, , can be fewer than eight children) received $8,000. And FFN providers each received $1,500. Additional payments will be forthcoming in FY 22-23.

“What we hear from our members is that this [stipend] allowed them to pay off credit cards and expenses from COVID,” Aroner said. “It was these providers that carried the ball during the pandemic. They were the ones that stayed open and put themselves at risk.” And if the money runs out? Nationally this continues to be a problem, as closed during the pandemic, due in large part to operating costs.

Georgia’s Quality Rated Subsidy Grant Program

To address the shortage of licensed high-quality infant and toddler care, Georgia’s Department of Early Care and Learning began its program in 2015 to change the way providers and families interacted with child care subsidies. Rather than using a traditional child care voucher, in which a voucher is paid to a child care center when an eligible child enrolls, Georgia’s new program relied on grants to pay providers directly and to contract a select number of slots. Using this “contracted spots” modeling, the state guaranteed the providers a level of income that allowed them to pay staff and stay open, even as a child’s circumstances changed and enrollment dipped.

Participating centers received reimbursement that was 50% higher than the base subsidy rates, a strong incentive to participate in the program. The providers were trained by DECAL staff in how to recruit families, and verify and re-certify family eligibility. Families in the program did not owe copayments, unlike in Georgia’s traditional subsidy program.

This process achieved several goals.

1. It kept a certain number of slots in high quality programs for low-income children.
2. It allowed the child care providers to maintain some stability even as families and children changed child care centers.
3. It allowed participating centers to receive more money for accepting children with subsidies, rather than less.

Katrina Coburn, Senior Manager of State Policy at Zero to Three, who provides technical assistance to state advocates and policy makers, says that more states are beginning to explore this model as a way to stabilize child care programs and to increase access to high quality programs. The infusion of funds through ARPA has given some states the means to pilot this approach.

Unfortunately, Georgia cut funding for the program in 2020, which Coburn attributed to the political landscape. Mindy Binderman, the executive director of the nonprofit Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students, and child care advocate, explained that each state department was directed by the governor to come up with a 4% across-the-board cut. “In the context of the budget cuts mandated by the Governor, it was the least worst option,” Binderman wrote in an email.

Is it enough? Not without more federal support.

Georgia’s break with a successful program exposes the limits of state innovations, even successful ones. Coburn says that the contracted spots model of Georgia is “starting to be recognized as the norm,” with the funding for ARPA being used for similar programs underway in Pennsylvania and Illinois.

“The issue is that subsidies can only do so much,” explained Workman, the early education consultant. Unless a program runs on 100% subsidies, there isn’t going to be a guarantee that the teachers and staff can get a salary. Even improvements in the level and availability of subsidies will not fully solve the fragmentation as only dedicated funding streams create stable jobs at affordable salaries. , subsidies reach only one in seven eligible children, and many more families who are not eligible for subsidies still struggle to afford quality care.

Even the states that have worked to institute such significant public investment — like Vermont and New Mexico, discussed in , will face other limitations.

“The problem with relying on states for child care innovations is that at some point, states will run out of money,” explains Elliot Haspel, author of Crawling Behind, and a top voice in child care and early education. Haspel also write for Early Learning Nation.

“States have traditionally been these laboratories of democracy, they serve that role well. With the political realities at the federal level, states have more of the burden to bear,” Haspel said. “States can help lead the way, to help inform and have a two way dialogue. There is no way we are going to get a fair system until we get federal funding flowing.”

Read other parts of this series here: , , .

Lesaux introduced two Zaentz fellows who are advancing systems change around the country through the skills they developed in the program.

From Vermont to Texas

Between her junior and senior years at St. Lawrence University, 2021 Zaentz Fellow Anna Brouillette interned for , a Vermont nonprofit that works to ensure that young children in the state have access to quality care. After graduation, she worked there for two additional years. The scarcity of programs she saw made her curious about policies that might better align the supply with the demand. Her Zaentz fellowship—the latter half of which was remote, due to the pandemic—nurtured her inner policy wonk. She especially liked the biweekly roundtables led by Lesaux and Jones, and she gained additional real-world experience through a capstone project with the , for which she surveyed businesses on their benefit packages.

“We had a really wonderful community of people who care about and understand the issues,” she says, noting that a text group and virtual happy hours have sustained the energy of the fellowship.

Brouillette recently moved from Vermont to Austin to work on the State Policy Team of the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center at the University of Texas. Her new job involves engaging with early childhood stakeholders in the states and tracking the development, adoption and implementation of policies. The team serves as a resource to the states by sharing relevant studies and best practices, “We’ve come so far with the brain research,” she says. “Now we need to translate that science into policy.”

“We aim to help the states learn from each other,” Brouillette explains, citing one promising example: Illinois has an innovative model of infant and early childhood mental health consultation, and Maine is in the midst of rolling out a similar program. The Policy Impact Center can help bring the administrators running these efforts together.

The Classroom-Policy Continuum

Casey Peeks, a 2019 Zaentz Fellow, began her time as a Teach for America corps member in the St. Louis school system just two days after police killed Michael Brown in 2014. When the funeral took place a few blocks away from her school, her kindergarteners weren’t allowed to play outside. “But they were definitely aware that something was happening,” she recalls, “and there were clear signs of anxiety.”

Although Peeks already knew she wanted to get into education policy, she wanted real-world teaching experience before she applied to graduate school. She also was a founding kindergarten teacher at a charter school in her hometown of Oakland. Her awareness of economic and racial factors beyond the classroom informed her teaching. “I could always tell who had access to high-quality early education prior to entering my classroom, and who didn’t,” she says.

During her fellowship, Peeks partnered with the Massachusetts advocacy organization on their Early Education for All campaign and provided technical assistance to communities that had unsuccessfully applied for funding from the . “I met community leaders throughout the state and helped them to build up their advocacy skills, to improve their chances when they re-applied,” she explains.

After her Zaentz experience, Peeks was selected for a fellowship with the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP). She got to work with Washington State Sen. Patty Murray, a former preschool teacher and longstanding champion of early education. From there, she moved into her current position, federal policy analyst with , during an exceptionally busy period—passage of the CARES Act last March and the American Rescue Plan. She spends much of her time helping organizational and individual members to understand the legislation and implement its measures.

“I miss working with kids a lot,” Peeks admits. “But I’m doing what I should be doing now. Once COVID-19 restrictions lift, I can always volunteer in schools again.”

But in the past decade, demographics in the state house and attitudes around child care have drastically shifted, and Vermont is one of the first states to seize on that opportunity to push for universal child care. There are now state laws codifying a study on implementation and financing (likely paid for by an income task for the workforce). Innovators in the child care space are watching Vermont closely because their efforts have gotten so far in codifying universal child care into law through the state legislature. New Mexico, by comparison, is using executive action and giving to accomplish something similar.

that treating early care and education as a public good will benefit families, children, democracy and society. Vermont’s promising goals notwithstanding, our current national patchwork system still relies on an individualistic approach, where families are left to fend for themselves in finding and paying for expensive child care, early educators earn poverty wages, providers are underpaid and operate on razor-thin margins, and the quality of care suffers for young children at a time when their developing brains need it most.

While we have a way to go for the kind of public investment and public-private partnerships to make quality early care and education truly affordable and workable for all families, there is ample innovation in the field that stands to improve different facets of our child care delivery system. It’s a complicated problem with neither substantive federal investment nor a robust care infrastructure, building a high quality, universal early care and education system will require innovative and creative solutions. Right now, states are lone actors in making sweeping changes with little federal support or public investment. While private sector solutions are useful, they are not sufficient for widespread change.

This 5-part series will explore those innovative and creative solutions. Upcoming articles will focus on innovation, including diversifying types of child care to meet families’ needs; underserved communities; pay increases for early educators without adding costs to parents; and subsidies and provider payment models. This series will be part of a larger report on child care innovation slated for release by in autumn, 2022.

This following is not an exhaustive list of innovations. It is meant to illustrate select innovations for various pain points in the child care delivery system, absent further federal investment, and to inspire more action.

Building the Public Case for Child Care Investment

Vermont’s Push for Universal Child Care: In May 2021, after years of coalition-building, Vermont passed legislation to lay the blueprint for universal child care. Vermont still faces a major hurdle in funding the universal child care program. H.171 puts in place two studies: the first on how to make the program accountable and efficient, and to decide which agency will regulate it and how. The second is a revenue study, designed to map out the costs and payments. Yet this is the furthest a state has come to adopting universal child care into law. For states looking for an innovative way forward on child care, Vermont can serve as a blueprint. Read more about in this feature.

New Mexico’s Year of Free Child Care: In April 2022, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced that the state will cover the costs of child care for the majority of its residents, up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, through June 2023. According to estimates from , this new benefit will make child care free for 30,000 families. This makes New Mexico the first state to offer no-cost care over such a broad range of incomes. New Mexico has also expanded their subsidy program in innovative ways, to be discussed more in Part 5 of this series. Until then, read Bryce Covert’s article: “”

Supporting and Encouraging Private Investment in Child Care

serves as a nonprofit accelerator for entrepreneurs in the early childhood space. It has created a to showcase these innovations with the hope of drawing investment and attracting attention from policymakers, funders and journalists. The group also can collaborate and work with one another via a Slack channel. The goal is to get the early education and child care field to look like most other ones in terms of private investment, explained founder Matt Glickman.

is a private investment company that provides early investment to companies that fit within one of the three themes to support women and working families: career, care and consumer.

Are such innovations enough? These innovations can help spur funding and they can help individual states improve their child care options. But the national child care crisis is too large for a silver bullet solution, even one that has passed state legislatures or received generous Series A funding. (Series A financing refers to an investment in a company after it has shown progress in building its business model and demonstrates the potential to grow and generate revenue. It is considered seed capital since it’s designed to help new companies grow.)

“We cannot out-innovate our way out of paying workers $12 an hour,” said Elana Berkowitz, a founding partner of Springbank Collective. “We need every kind of investment and we need more of it: private investment, government investment, employer benefits. No one should have to shoulder the entire burden of this sector, which is utterly strapped.”

Investment helps. Even as fields such as health care and education have seen a thriving market for private funds for innovation, early child care has lagged behind. Groups like Promise Venture Studio and Springbank Collective, among others, aim to close that gap, create a thriving ecosystem for innovators, spur investment and use the accelerator process to make it happen quickly.

Private sector solutions require less political will and can be scaled to encourage more change nationwide. But private innovation cannot be the only answer. Research by Better Life Lab found that child care is too fragmented and complicated to be solved by a single innovation, no matter how well funded. Reliable, stable funding is crucial to keep child care operations open. This is true of both center-based and home-based care. The margins within the child care market are too thin for most providers to offer basic benefits, including paid family leave and paid sick days. For the majority of Americans who live in states that do not provide such benefits, the burden falls to the families who pay tuition and the care workers who go without.

Absent federal investment for universal child care, it will be up to states to lead the way, like Vermont and New Mexico, which have already acknowledged that quality, affordable and accessible child care is essential for their workforce and economy. such as New York, have drastically increased their budgetary spending on child care, and Connecticut lawmakers have advanced a state budget to include a one-time rebate of $250 per child, up to $750 per household. States that can demonstrate an effective universal child care system may become the blueprints for future state efforts, similar to the which started in a handful of states and has since grown to 11 states plus D.C.

But states can struggle to maintain funding streams to allow for universal child care, as states are required to balance their budgets and not take on a deficit, unlike the federal government. One of the first steps in creating a state-supported child care system is identifying the sustainable funding streams, said Elliot Haspel, author of Crawling Behind, and a top voice in child care and early education. “The states can’t just rely on American Rescue Plan Act money or the state having ‘a good budget year.’”

Haspel added, “States have traditionally been these laboratories of democracy, they serve that role well. With the political realities at the federal level, states have more of the burden to bear.”

It’s long been an underlying logic of pandemic safety for schools: In order to contain COVID transmission, identify which students and staff have been exposed to the virus and make sure they quarantine or test negative before coming back to class.

That wisdom appears to be changing, however, in the wake of the Omicron surge, which experts say may have now peaked in many U.S. communities, but continues to strain K-12 operations.

Three New England states — , and — have recently announced new guidance recommending a pivot away from individualized contact tracing in schools and toward strategies like symptom monitoring and home test kits for those worried that they may be sick.

“We are recommending that school health personnel increase their focus on identifying symptomatic individuals, rather than monitoring in-school close contacts,” Massachusetts Education Commissioner Jeffrey Riley, Massachusetts wrote in a Jan. 18 . 

“Individuals identified as close contacts in school are very unlikely to contract or spread COVID-19,” he continued. “Therefore, extensive contact tracing and associated Test and Stay procedures are not adding significant value as a mitigation strategy despite the demand they place on the time of school health staff and school staff at large.” 

New York announced in mid-January that it was , which was for the general population rather than K-12 specific. And individual school systems including ; ; and have also opted to ease away from the practice, often ramping up other mitigation strategies instead.

Contact tracing puts a “​​now-impossible workload” on school districts, Berkeley Unified School District Superintendent Brent Stephens wrote in a Jan. 15 . The school system is now offering , regardless of exposure, and is investing in highly protective KN95 masks for students and staff.

A pre-Omicron study of classroom transmission in California and Illinois published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that roughly just out of every 100 school-based close contacts of positive cases, on average, ultimately got sick themselves — casting into doubt, for , the added value of the labor intensive practice of cross-checking rosters to track in-school exposure.

Then came the Omicron variant, spurring record-breaking infection levels. In Yonkers, New York, a . In Providence, Rhode Island, some classrooms had than present in class. Last week, across the country, more than caught the virus, a pandemic record and over four times more than at any point during previous surges.

The ultra-rapid spread made it next to impossible for some districts to accurately track exposures, school leaders said.

“Omicron is spreading more quickly than contacts can be traced. Contact tracing for this variant is ineffective,” wrote Lou Goscinski, superintendent of Maine’s York School District, in a Jan. 13 explaining that the practice would be discontinued.

Indeed, the timeline from exposure to transmission is than with Delta or other strains of the virus, scientists say. For districts that are practicing universal masking, that means “contact tracing doesn’t do much as a preventative measure,” said Danny Benjamin, co-chair of the at Duke University, which examines COVID-19 spread in schools.

“By the time you figure out who was in the room, were they really close, were they vaccinated, the list goes on and on, it’s now a couple of days after exposure and that child is now infectious,” Benjamin told The 74. “So [contact tracing] is not as helpful to contain the disease as we were seeing with the ancestral variant or the Delta variant.”

From a labor standpoint, too, Omicron made contact tracing less tenable, said Linda Mendonca, president of the National Association of School Nurses. Tracking exposure was already a heavy lift for school personnel, usually requiring nurses to scour seating charts from mealtimes, bus rides and classrooms every time a student would test positive. In many cases, that work continued into the weekends because schools needed to keep sick or potentially exposed students from showing up on Monday, she said. At some schools, nurses had to let the typical yearly screening of students’ eyesight and hearing go by the wayside because the contact tracing programs took up so much of their time.

Then after the winter holidays, skyrocketing caseloads pushed many schools’ case tracking programs past the breaking point.

“I heard many school nurses just saying, ‘This is not manageable. We can’t keep doing this at this … capacity,” Mendonca told The 74.

Regardless, the longtime school nurse chose not to comment on whether now is the right time to ditch contact tracing altogether.

“We’re waiting to see what the CDC comes out with,” she said, emphasizing the continued importance of mitigation strategies like masking, ventilation and vaccination.

The last update to CDC guidance on contact tracing in schools came in mid-October, according to the agency’s , which says the practice remains an effective strategy for reducing COVID spread in schools when used alongside other layered mitigation strategies.

But Benjamin is willing to take a stronger stance. Even amid Omicron, COVID transmission in schools remains low when all students and staff are wearing masks, he said. His team has a forthcoming paper that answers a key question: How many close contacts in fully masked schools develop infections after being exposed to the highly infectious variant?

“If everyone’s wearing masks, it’s still under 5 percent, but it’s no longer in the 1 percent range,” he said, referring to the secondary transmission rate in school under the earlier strains.

Those numbers combined with Omicron’s speed of transmission and the logistical headaches of exposure tracking lead him to believe contact tracing may no longer be a necessary or useful measure for schools that are universally masking. But for schools that aren’t mandating face coverings, he takes a different tune.

“In the unmasked districts, you probably want to [continue contact tracing],” said the Duke University doctor, explaining that the practice can help determine whether specific individuals who were exposed should mask going forward so as not to infect others and test, tactics known as mask to stay and test to stay.

“It interrupts the chain between a bunch of us infecting each other,” said Benjamin.

As cases begin to subside in some, but not all, parts of the country, many schools are now scrapping mask rules. Virginia Gov. Glen Younkin’s to let parents opt out of school face-covering requirements took effect on Monday (although it is now facing ). And two Long Island districts to end their requirement that students wear face coverings in school when the New York state masking mandate expires on Feb. 1.

A New York state judge, meanwhile, ruled on Monday night that the and can’t be enforced, but that decision was quickly stayed by an appellate court judge Tuesday afternoon. For now, until the appellate court decides whether to uphold or overturn the lower court’s ruling. The back-and-forth created at least temporary confusion for school leaders Tuesday and fueled school mask opponents, with the hashtag #UNMASKOURCHILDREN trending on Twitter.

Meanwhile, students themselves are spooked. In early January, young people in New York City staged a walkout to protest what participants said were unsafe conditions in schools. Thousands of students joined the demonstration, calling for more COVID safety mitigation measures and a temporary pivot to remote learning.

In the following days, students in ; ; and have also staged walkouts making similar demands.

Samantha Farrow, an organizer of the New York City walkout and a high school junior in the city, said that her school did not notify her when her desk-mate in French class left halfway through the school day after testing positive. The high schooler only found out about the exposure, she said, because that student texted her directly.

“No one tells students anything and it feels like we’re getting left out of the loop,” Farrow told The 74 in early January. “It’s not fair to us because we’re the ones being impacted by this.”

In the last several weeks, a slew of showing students vandalizing and stealing paper towel dispensers, printers, projectors, microscopes and even urinals. In one clip, a student is shown pilfering a fire extinguisher from a classroom right in the middle of a lesson. The video-sharing social media platform is known for copy-cat posts by young people hoping to score their 15 minutes of fame.

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The shenanigans come as K-12 campuses struggle to reopen amid a pandemic that left many of them reeling financially. Keeping school facilities clean and in good working order has been a stretch for district officials in numerous parts of the country long before COVID or viral videos. In Washington, lawmakers have that would distribute some $82 billion for school infrastructure, and a massive $3.5 trillion spending bill, which is still being negotiated, could earmark billions more for school construction projects. Such spending is , new research suggests.

To Bryn Hennessey, a 17-year-old senior from Vermont, many of the TikTok videos seemed silly at first, she said. But then she realized the impact the phenomenon was having on students’ learning environments. She said the boys bathroom at her high school was recently closed for repairs after students smashed ceiling tiles and stuffed them into the toilets and vandalized the sinks.

“It’s just not a place to vandalize like that, especially in a bathroom that is a facility that everyone needs to use everyday,” Hennessey said. “The janitors do a really, really great job and it’s actually sad to have them walk into the bathroom and see all of this wreckage everywhere.”

In response to the trend, districts across the country have warned parents that students could face discipline for damaging school property. At Clark-Pleasant Middle School in Greenwood, Indiana, educators noted in a Facebook post that they were taking “additional measures to address this inappropriate behavior” after restrooms were thrashed. In Diboll, Texas, the district announced that a student had stolen a stapler from a teacher and another one had swiped a soap dispenser from a restroom. Officials said that students could be subject to “disciplinary consequences and monetary restitution” for participating in this “destructive challenge.” The Van Buren, Arkansas police department went a step further, announcing that students could be “arrested for theft of property,” and urged teens to consider “the consequences of these actions, and the effect it can have on your school career.”

TikTok, the Chinese social media platform that’s hugely popular among children and teens, announced that it was removing content that violates its policies — and pleaded with students to “please be kind to your schools & teachers.”

We expect our community to create responsibly – online and IRL. We’re removing content and redirecting hashtags & search results to our Community Guidelines to discourage such behavior. Please be kind to your schools & teachers.

— TikTokComms (@TikTokComms)

Districts spend about $110 billion annually on building maintenance, operations and construction, according to by the 21st Century School Fund, a nonprofit that promotes school facilities improvements. Yet nationwide, there’s a $46 billion annual funding shortfall between that investment and the levels needed for the maintenance, operations and periodic capital improvements necessary to ensure the country’s “good stewardship of its schools.” That underinvestment was particularly pronounced in rural towns and those in low-income communities, researchers found. Years of data suggest that student’s .

Predating TikTok becoming an online sensation, the 21st Century School Fund — both the good and bad — to raise awareness about national inequities in school facilities and how many students were forced to learn in classrooms in a state of disarray. Unlike the “devious lick” trend, the project had students using their photography skills in a positive way to document challenges in their schools, said Mary Filardo, the group’s executive director.

“Maybe we could get students capturing this, rather than stealing stuff!” she wrote in an email.

A similar effort is underway in Philadelphia, where decrepit school buildings have been the subject of damning newspaper investigations and parent outrage. For the last several years, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, the city teachers union, has encouraged educators and students to submit photographs and other information about infrastructure issues through a mobile app with the goal of encouraging district leaders to take action. The has received more than 3,000 submissions across 165 schools highlighting issues like water damage, mold, peeling paint and pest droppings.

With the help of school staff who documented settings and took samples from inside some of Philadelphia’s most rundown schools, a series of local newspaper investigations in 2018 revealed how students were being exposed to unhealthy lead levels, asbestos and other toxins — dangerous conditions that were perpetuated by a long pattern of neglect. In one school, students reported frigid classrooms without heat, burst pipes and pest infestations — including a cockroach that was observed crawling out of a milk carton.

Jerry Roseman, an environmental scientist for the teachers union who manages the app, spends much of his time evaluating potentially hazardous conditions within Philadelphia’s public schools. Across the city, those school buildings are still “largely inadequate by any assessment,” he said.

Rather than contributing to the problem through theft and vandalism, Roseman urged students to be part of the solution by documenting the dire need for repairs through services like the Philadelphia app.

Stealing and destroying school property for the sake of internet notoriety “increases the deficiencies already there,” he said, and could compound their future degradation. If a school is repeatedly vandalized, maintenance staff could halt future repairs — a reality that he said is already true in many places. “You have thermostats that don’t exist, you have bathroom conditions that are atrocious, you have drinking water outlets that are trashed, and you’ve got lots of broken, missing stuff.”

When these issues are caused by vandals — whether capturing their malicious mischief on video or not — he said, conflicts brew between custodial staff and educators who are accused of failing to keep kids in line.

“It can really play into and accelerate the broken windows syndrome,” he said. “You know, ‘One toilet is broken, the handle is missing, I’m going to kick in the other two.’”

Proponents and advocates are watching closely, in hopes that this model can be replicated in other states, or extrapolated onto the national scene, as President Joe Biden pledges a historic investment in early childhood education.

A Long Game in Vermont

Change can be years, decades and even longer in the making. Vermont is no exception. For example, in 1982, real estate developer Rick Davis saw that poverty was affecting the livelihoods of families in Burlington, and wanted to take action. He spent decades investing in youth programs, including building a youth center, meeting with families, offering jobs on his work sites to kids who could be mentored and well cared for by his team. But he still felt that the cycle of poverty wasn’t fully broken, and began looking for more tangible ways to make a difference and change outcomes for kids in adverse situations.

This led him to learn more about the brain science of children’s learning and the “return on investments” of diverse interventions. What he found surprised him. “The ages of birth to five,” said Davis, “are when quality care and strong relationships have the most significant impact on the rest of a child’s life.”

That’s when his mission shifted to getting more kids in quality child care programs. Davis became the founder of the Vermont Community Preschool Collaborative, since rebranded as Vermont , which is spearheading the effort of bringing quality, affordable child care to every child in the state of Vermont. The movement has swelled into a nearly 40,000-person coalition, 6% of Vermont’s population.

Experts agree that investing in the first five years leads to better outcomes academically and socially for kids. Quality, accessible and affordable child care also allows parents, especially moms, to stay in the workforce longer, providing more stability to a family overall. But even with strong support in polls and from experts in the field, no state in the country has implemented such a program. Vermont, if successful, would be the first.

Before Universal Child Care, A Push for Universal Pre-K

Before the push for universal child care, Vermonters had a streak of support for early learning and care. Vermont was one of 10 states, including D.C., with a universal pre-K program, and while ,” only Vermont’s program, along with D.C. and Florida, allow any child to enroll, regardless of enrollment numbers, deadlines or funding.

Vermont’s initial universal preschool offering was a “voluntary law” from 1997. This means that a locality was required to set up the program and run it for two years, before becoming eligible for state funding in the third year.

• In 2008, when Davis and his team first began conversations around universal child care, only about 20% of localities had universal preschool programs.
• In 2013, after five years of bringing business leaders, philanthropists and nonprofits to the table to work with school boards to establish funding for those first two years, 80% of Vermont’s localities offered universal pre-K. This created the “tipping point” Davis said, for universal pre-K to be available statewide.
• In 2014, the measure was signed into state law and Vermont became the first state in the country to provide 10 hours of preschool per week for every 3- and 4-year-old in the state, for 35 weeks a year.

After the state passed a universal pre-K program, Davis felt ready to tackle birth- to-five child care. This was when the Vermont Community Preschool Collaborative was rebranded as Let’s Grow Kids, a nonprofit with a specific 10-year mission to bring universal child care to the state. Formed in 2015, the group expects to sunset in 2025. “This creates a clear sense of urgency and purpose,” said Let’s Grow Kids’ CEO Aly Richards, whom Davis recruited from the governor’s office to head the group.

Thus began the effort to mobilize business leaders, political leaders, experts, educators and families around the idea of universal child care. The organization had a policy arm and a political arm, designed to bring a wide array of stakeholders to the table and build a case for universal child care.

The group combined relationship building with grassroots efforts and a public education campaign on the benefits of universal child care. Field staff worked in every Vermont county: tabling at county fairs, community education events on early childhood brain science, door-to-door canvassing, phone banking, text banking, and volunteer development through annual advocacy events and trainings. The public education effort used both grassroots organizing and multi-channel marketing, including radio and TV ads. The campaign’s effectiveness was tracked through polling, which steadily increased as Let’s Grow Kids’ efforts ramped up.

Business Entices Young Families to Thrive in Vermont

Vermont, like the other northern New England states Maine and New Hampshire, has a large retiring baby boomer population without enough children and working adults to replace them; that number is . “Over the next 10-15 years, we will have a huge wave of retirements and no workers in the pipeline to fill the jobs,” said State Senate Leader Becca Balint.

The year 2017 marked the first time that Vermont had as many seniors (over age 65) as children (under age 18). Just two decades earlier, children outnumbered seniors . Balint believes the “shrinking workforce” problem played a key role in attracting support from the business community for universal child care, which she described as “a bright shiny object” to attract and retain young families in Vermont and allow parents to enter and stay in the workforce.

More Women in the State House

Balint also credits changing demographics in the state house, notably the influx of more women who deeply understand the struggle to find child care, just as she had, in building support for the movement. Balint remembers her arrival to the state senate in 2014 as the mother of two young children when most of her colleagues were males, over age 60, “long since retired.”

“They hadn’t been thinking about the issue of having two people in the workforce,” Balint said, whose wife also worked. “They would tell me it was strictly a personal issue, and say ‘someone should just be home with the kids.’”

Now, the general assembly is over 40% women for the first time in state history, including women as Speaker of the House, Lieutenant Governor, President Pro Tempore of the Senate, the House Majority and Minority Leaders, and the Senate Majority Leaders.

Both Balint and Richards point to Covid as that final watershed moment that child care was a necessity that workers couldn’t do without. “We know that child care is an integral part in getting more people into the workforce,” said Balint. If Vermont wants a thriving business community, it needs to shift child care from a “personal issue” to a collective one.

What’s Next?

Despite the groundswell of political will for the program, Vermont still faces a major hurdle in funding the universal child care program. H.171 puts in place two studies: the first on how to make the program accountable and efficient, and to decide which agency will regulate it and how. The second is a revenue study, designed to map out the costs and payments. Balint mentioned one idea for the dedicated funding stream via a payroll tax, shifting the burden of paying for child care to people working, exempting the retirees.

The goal, said Richards, is to present both the revenue and governance bills in 2023 to the legislature for a vote. That’s in keeping with Let’s Grow Kids’ own deadline of 2025 to sunset, and with the urgency and momentum the movement has built.

Richards knows they have their work cut out for them, and both she and Balint expressed optimism that the universal child care program will succeed.

“We have a no-popping-champagne rule,” Richards explains. “The hardest work is still ahead.”

Support for this reporting was provided by Better Life Lab at New America. 

Over the next year, they visited dairy farms, brushed Highland cattle’s long hair, and branched off to learn about elk, deer and llamas. They read stories about cows, counted cows and compared different breeds. That’s the kind of child-led learning experience that Nelson plans to continue this fall when she participates for the first time in Vermont’s Universal Prekindergarten program.

“We base our curriculum on children’s interests,” said Nelson, who has 26 years of experience in the field and even has former students who enroll their own children in her program. “We know the kids’ learning style. We have a history with them.”

Allowing providers such as Nelson to participate in a publicly funded pre-K system could speed up the timeline for providing universal access to 3- and 4-year-olds — along with tuition-free community college, the other half of President Joe Biden’s plan to provide four more years of free public education. But from the National Institute for Early Education Research and Home Grown, an organization working to improve home-based child care, suggests it’s not that simple. Including family child care in pre-K initiatives could satisfy parents who prefer their home-like environment and increase the supply of preschool programs in communities with limited supply, the authors say. However, they caution policymakers against expecting in-home providers to immediately meet the same standards and regulations as pre-K centers.

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As Congress begins writing a $3.5 trillion plan that is expected to include $200 billion for early-childhood education, the report recommends lawmakers take a gradual approach that considers the perspectives of providers and parents.

“It’s really tricky for home-based providers. They lose out when they don’t get included [in public pre-K programs],” said Natalie Renew, Home Grown’s director. But pre-K systems that are primarily oriented toward schools and centers also disadvantage the providers and the families they serve, she added.

The primary downside, she said, is that if more home-based providers seek state funds to serve just preschoolers that could mean less space for infants and toddlers, space that is already in . Working parents are more likely to choose family child care over centers for , surveys show.

According to of Biden’s American Families Plan, families would be able to “choose the settings that work best for them.”

‘People coming into your home’

Parents family child care because it offers a more personalized environment, allows them to keep siblings in the same program and can offer flexible hours that centers can’t accommodate. Including home-based providers in state pre-K also could further diversify the workforce, allowing parents to find caregivers that reflect their culture and speak their language.

Family child care providers have to to be licensed, but many state pre-K regulations regarding facility space, hours of instruction and education requirements for teachers don’t easily translate to someone who cares for children in their living room. State funding could be a predictable source of income for providers, but it also means “more people coming into your home” to monitor compliance, Renew said.

New Jersey, for one, requires pre-K classrooms to be 950 square feet. “Would homes need dedicated spaces for the pre-K program with minimum square footage per child equivalent to the classroom requirement?” the authors ask.

States often require lead pre-K teachers to have a two- or four-year degree and special training in child development. Currently almost 50 percent of home-based providers have no college education, according to the report.

Educational requirements could increase the quality of family child care, but Renew said there’s a mismatch between most college-level early-childhood programs and the realities of family child care — especially around implementing a pre-K curriculum for 3- and 4-year-olds while still attending to the needs of babies and toddlers.

“It doesn’t work if we turn every family child care provider into a teeny tiny center,” she said.

Lanette Dumas, executive director of the National Association for Family Child Care, said she’s encouraged by the direction the administration is taking, but wants funding for an “on-ramp” to help providers earn degrees and make other modifications to their programs.

Finally, Renew added, there’s a false assumption that home-based child care is cheaper. The report argues that including such providers on a large scale could end up costing more.

In the Seattle Preschool Program, for example, a coach or consultant visiting a center would provide training for two to four teachers at once and “indirectly impact up to 40 kids,” said Monica Liang-Aguirre, who leads the program at the Seattle Department of Education and Early Learning. With family child care, that same coach might be working with one provider who serves maybe two or three children. The coach is still receiving the same pay and likely has added travel expenses to reach at-home providers.

Renew said there’s not yet enough research on whether children benefit from home-based pre-K programs in the same way they do in centers.

San Francisco has the most experience, with at-home providers representing 18 percent of the city’s pre-K sites. In Seattle’s program, funded by a local , 25 at-home providers — about 2 percent of the overall number — are expected to participate this fall.

Liang-Aguirre said the department waived the bachelor’s degree requirement because it wasn’t realistic for home-based providers. The majority are immigrants and speak languages other than English.

They serve families that are often reluctant to use out-of-home care and are “trying to figure out if it’s a good idea to let their children go to preschool,” Liang-Aguirre said. “We see it as a really important model and an important way to make preschool accessible for all families.”

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday announced that it will hear , a case involving Maine’s tuition assistance program. Following the court’s decision last year in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, plaintiffs in the case argue that excluding religious schools from the program is a violation of their constitutional rights, while the state has said the program is only meant to provide students a public education they can’t access in their own community. 

School choice advocates celebrated the court’s decision. In a statement, Leslie Hiner, who leads EdChoice’s legal efforts, said, “We applaud the action of the Court in agreeing to hear a case brought by parents in Maine who have been denied the opportunity to send their children to a school of faith using the state’s town tuitioning vouchers.”

The U.S. Supreme Court will discuss Thursday whether to hear a case that could settle for good whether states can exclude religious schools from publicly funded voucher programs.

The argument in is over Maine’s tuition assistance program, which pays for students in towns without a public school to attend another one of their choice — public or private — as long as it’s not religious.

In October last year, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the religious exclusion, and the plaintiffs appealed to the Supreme Court. But earlier this month the 2nd Circuit reached the , ruling that students in a similar program in Vermont can use public funds at religious schools.

“It is a mess, to put it mildly,” said Michael Bindas, a senior attorney with the libertarian Institute for Justice, which is representing the two families in Maine who sued over the state’s policy. The contradiction “cries out for Supreme Court review, and only the Supreme Court can resolve it,” he said.

This time last year, school choice advocates won a major victory in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, when the court ruled 5-4 that officials could not exclude religious schools from a state tax credit scholarship program simply because they are religious. It was a major setback for states with so-called Blaine amendments, 19th century laws that prevent public funds from supporting religious schools. The Espinoza ruling sparked a renewed push at the state level to expand such scholarship programs, and former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos the decision opened the door for religious-oriented charter schools.

The justices, however, left one issue unsettled. The Espinoza ruling means states can’t prohibit religious schools from participating in a school choice program because of their religious status, but the justices didn’t resolve whether states could exclude schools because they teach students about religion.

The Institute for Justice addressed this in to the court following the 2nd Circuit’s decision in the Vermont case, referring to “the utter disarray of the law in this area.”

The court typically schedules days when the justices discuss current cases as well as whether to hear or reject appeals. The “order list” is usually released a day or so after justices hold a conference, Bindas explained. That means the court could announce as soon as Monday whether they’ll hear the Carson case, but a quick decision could mean they’re going to pass, he added. If the justices decide to hold it over for a “cleanup conference” next week, that could signal their intention to hear the case.

Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey has said that the state’s law doesn’t discriminate against religious schools because it is “simply declining to pay for religious instruction that would be unavailable in a public school.” Ted Fisher, spokesman for the Vermont Agency of Education, said the department doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

Anti-discrimination policies

If the justices agree to hear it, Carson could be the first school choice case before the court since the confirmation of Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative Catholic who served as a trustee for a religious school that participates in Indiana’s school choice program and doesn’t welcome children with same-sex parents.

The Espinoza ruling was a 5-4 decision, and conservatives now hold a 6-3 supermajority on the court.

Some legal experts have suggested the court’s decision last week in — a case involving a Catholic social services agency that opposes certifying same-sex couples as foster parents — would have an impact on school voucher programs.

In Fulton, the court ruled unanimously that the city violated the agency’s First Amendment’s religious freedom protections by requiring it to give up its opposition to same-sex relationships in order to receive a government contract. The connection to school choice is that religious schools, such as the one where Barrett served as a trustee, are often opposed to hiring LGBTQ staff or admitting gay students or those with gay parents.

But the impact of the decision on school choice programs is limited. While the opinion was unanimous, the court focused on a narrow exemption in the city’s contract with the agency.

“Fulton does not create a right to religious exemptions from anti-discrimination laws that apply equally to everyone,” said Alex Luchenitser, associate vice president and associate legal director at Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “State constitutional prohibitions and laws that prohibit use of public funds to support religious instruction generally do not have any exemptions and so should not be affected by Fulton.”

The issue is relevant in , a case before a Maryland district court. The state excluded the religious school from a voucher program because the school’s handbook says it “supports a biblical view of marriage” and that “God immutably bestows gender upon each person at birth as male or female.” The school, which serves low-income students, said these statements don’t impact its admissions process, but the state still declined to admit it to the program.

The state is expected to submit a brief Friday requesting a decision in the case, with the plaintiff’s request expected in July.

Bindas, with the Institute for Justice, noted that the plaintiffs in the Maine case are arguing that families attending any religious school should be able to participate in a state’s school choice program. As it stands, Vermont could try to get around the appeals court’s decision by passing new legislation excluding religious schools because they teach students about doctrine or have a time for worship.

“Using public funds for religious instruction violates the religious freedom of taxpayers who are forced to subsidize faiths to which they do not subscribe,” said Luchenitser, who has argued that the court should decline to hear the appeal in the Carson case.

Dave and Amy Carson kept their daughter Olivia at the Christian school she attends but that doesn’t participate in the tuition assistance program. The other plaintiffs in the case, Angela and Troy Nelson, wanted to send their children to a religious school, but instead sent their two children to a secular private school that accepts vouchers.

“You either forgo the benefit,” Bindas said, “or you forgo the school that you think is best for your child.”

In a broader sense, the Fulton decision shows the court continues to move toward a “more aggressive” position in favor of religious rights, said Joshua Dunn, a political science professor at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.

“The reasoning of Espinoza … is hard to square with the 1st Circuit’s opinion,” Dunn said, adding that if the court decides to hear the case, “Maine should be very worried.”

As young people continue to line up for coronavirus shots, the gender breakdown appears, well, surprisingly even.

Compared to a persistent gap between adult men and women in vaccination rates, with , early data indicate that the split has been far less pronounced among youth.

In Rhode Island, as of early June, young people had seen only a 4 percentage point difference between males and females in COVID-19 immunization, according to numbers provided by the Rhode Island Department of Health, compared to a . On the same timescale in Vermont, the gender split was even narrower, at 2 percentage points among vaccinated youth, according to Vermont Department of Health statistics, compared to .

Nicolette Carrion, a first-year at Georgetown University from Nassau County, New York, understands the numbers as being due to “generational difference.”

Young people today are “brought up in a different society,” Carrion told The 74. Not only are kids eager to socialize and connect with peers, but living through a pandemic has helped raise their social consciousness from an early age.

“From what I’ve seen, the care for other people, I think it’s a whole different level,” she said.

Among youth, the gender gap in immunization appears to shrink further when students have increased access to vaccinations.

In Carrion’s home county on Long Island, schools launched a youth vaccination campaign complete with student ambassadors to answer peers’ questions about the shots. Amid their immunization push, rates of inoculation stood virtually even, with 50.1 percent of shots going to young women and 49.9 percent going to young men, according to data provided by the county in late May. East Hartford, Connecticut, which hosted a senior “skip day” for vaccinations in late April, immunized 130 female students and 134 males, the district said.

Carrion, who worked as a vaccine ambassador, said that the even immunization rates across gender for students in Nassau County reflected the conversations she had with her peers.

“I never really saw a difference with how my male peers and female peers spoke about the vaccines,” said Carrion. “They wanted to live out their lives as young people and that’s really what it was all about.”

Among adults, on the other hand, longstanding gender gaps have persisted nationwide. In April, the gap measured about , which some observers initially wrote off as the result of women holding occupations that received early vaccine priority at higher rates than men. But even as access to shots widened, the disparity has remained persistent, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting this week that .

Reports from early in the pandemic found that men were less likely to wear masks and follow virus-related safety protocols, due to ideas that doing so would be a “.”

For Rohith Raman, however, a graduating high school senior in Houston, Texas, the choice was simple. He lives with his grandmother, and his sister has severe asthma, so Raman got a shot as soon as he was eligible.

“It was a pretty cut-and-dry decision,” the Houston senior told The 74. Now he can visit with friends without the risk of bringing the virus home. “A little bit of stress has been relieved.”

Most of the young people in Raman’s social circle have also received their vaccinations. He credits social media with applying a positive peer effect on students, encouraging them to get immunized.

“There is a huge ripple effect when you see your friends getting [the shot],” said Raman.

In mid-May, the Food and Drug Administration authorized youth aged 12 to 15 for shots based on their existing emergency use approval. And though children are still considered much less likely to develop severe symptoms or die from COVID-19, a third of kids who were hospitalized for the disease in early 2021 were admitted to intensive care, and 5 percent required ventilators, according to a . Boys account for while girls make up 44 percent, CDC numbers show.

With more adults now immunized than youth, and with , young people represent an , and health experts are .

Carrion, who after a year of remote classes was able to step onto her college campus for the first time in early June thanks to her vaccination, also emphasized the social upside to immunization for people her age, in addition to the public health reasons. It was prom season in late May and now it’s graduation season, she points out, and students don’t want to be stuck on the sidelines.

“We see the benefits in real time,” she said.

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In Vermont, where the state enshrines a centuries-old prohibition against using tax dollars for religious purposes, a that students in school choice districts may use their town’s tuition assistance at a local Catholic school.

The ruling comes on the heels of a pivotal Supreme Court decision last summer, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, which stipulated in a 5-4 vote that public funding for school choice programs cannot exclude religious educational facilities simply on grounds that they are non-secular.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, the Christian legal group that argued the case on behalf of four Vermont high schoolers and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington, is .

“Vermont’s program provides a public benefit to families to use at a school of their choice. The government cannot take a family’s benefit away from them just because it doesn’t like that the family chose to send their child to a religious school — that’s unconstitutional and discriminatory,” Paul Schmitt, legal counsel for the Alliance, wrote in an email to The 74.

“This decision makes clear that the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause protects families in Vermont from religious discrimination the same as it does those in Montana.”

But legal scholars and education experts say that the case is not so simple — and is probably not over.

They draw a key distinction between a ban on public dollars going to religious schools simply because they are non-secular, which Espinoza clearly outlaws, versus enacting safeguards to ensure, “if you receive this money, you can’t use it to teach religion,” Derek Black, constitutional law professor at University of South Carolina, told The 74.

Vermont’s town tuitioning program dates , making it the oldest school choice program in the country. However, up until 1991, participating private schools were considered by the state to be public schools with private boards, according to a 1989 Vermont Department of Education memo, subject to the same regulatory provisions as other town schools. Vermont’s program also differs from the funding mechanism in Montana, where private school tuition is subsidized through a tax credit scholarship, with donors receiving a tax break in exchange for their contribution versus public money flowing directly to private schools from the government.

Because Vermont has never had a rule to specify how taxpayer funds could be spent at private schools, Black says the court’s recent decision is unsurprising and likely to prompt further legislation.

“I don’t see why this decision suggests that Vermont needs to just wave a white flag and say, ‘OK, the coffers are open to the churches to come get what you want,’” he said. Instead, the state needs to “be nuanced and say, ‘OK, here’s how we’re going to restrict this use.’”

Peter Teachout, who works as a professor of constitutional law at Vermont Law School, agrees, arguing that there should be a process to certify that tax dollars are going to sectarian functions. “Private religious schools have lots of expenses that are unrelated to the propagation of religious feelings,” he pointed out in an interview.

The issue stems from voucher programs run by certain districts. Many school systems in the Green Mountain State are so small, former Vermont Secretary of Education Rebecca Holcombe told The 74, that “it doesn’t make sense for … every single district in Vermont to have its own high school.” Instead, some districts allow funds to follow students to nearby public high schools of their choice, or to private schools as tuition subsidies.

Eli Hulse, who grew up in South Hero, Vermont and graduated from high school in 2015, attended one such district. His family homeschooled him up until the end of middle school. To ease the transition into high school, they selected a small private school and received tuition assistance from their town. It was an adjustment, Hulse said, to learn the formulaic writing expected in essays, pick up on the structure of classes and get used to taking exams, so the reduced class size helped.

“Teachers are able to give more dedicated attention to [a class] of 12 than one of a couple hundred,” he told The 74.

But though his family did not choose a religious school, others in districts like South Hero do.

At Rice Memorial High School, the Burlington Catholic school attended by the students involved in the lawsuit, 17 families from “tuitioning” towns like Hulse’s already are enrolled, . They will now be eligible for funds from their towns as per the recent ruling. Tuition and fees are $12,425 and subsidies may attract new families to the school who previously had been unable to afford it, Lorenz hopes.

But Holcombe remains cautious. With the change comes new questions to be answered, she says. At Rice, for example, the task to “love learning, seek God and serve others” is “weaved into every aspect of life,” according to the school’s . How can tax money go toward the institution without supporting the teaching of religion, Holcombe wonders.

Further, what happens when those views come in conflict with the expectations of public-serving institutions, she asks. “If Vermont is subsidizing religious schools, will religion be used to justify discrimination?” she asked.

Holcombe points to Grace Christian School, a small, religious K-12 school in Bennington, Vermont, where the institution’s handbook .

In May, the school’s administrator told local news outlet VTDigger that Grace Christian “reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to refuse admission of an applicant or to discontinue enrollment of a student if the atmosphere or conduct within the home or the activities of the student are counter to or in opposition to the biblical lifestyle the school teaches.”

For students from tuitioning districts, “the government needs to define what the public education is that they’re purchasing when they pay a voucher,” argues Holcombe.

But regardless of any state-level changes that may arise in Vermont in response to the ruling, some observers predict that the case may ultimately land in the Supreme Court. Last October, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in a Maine case fell in the opposite direction of Vermont’s, .

“One of the issues in the Supreme Court taking up a case is, ‘Is there a circuit split?’” said University of South Carolina’s Derek Black.

If the Vermont case does reach the high court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, Holcombe thinks a larger strategy may be at work. She points to other cases litigated by the Alliance Defending Freedom, such as representing a Virginia teacher who , to argue that the Green Mountain State case may be part of a campaign to promote religious freedom at the expense of LGBTQ rights.

“Vermont is just one Lego piece in a larger building,” said Holcombe. “We were picked precisely because we have a weak statutory and regulatory set of constructs around the use of public dollars in private settings. We’re just a very convenient case test.”

The bombshell federal indictment of a well-known educator will delay the planned opening of a new experimental college he helped design for low-income, first-generation students. But it won’t stop it, the project’s new CEO said recently.

“We will be opening in fall 2022, for sure,” said Chandell Stone.

In the meantime, she and others at Degrees of Freedom, as it’s called, are doing what they can to delicately sever ties to both the suspect in the criminal case and the non-profit he created.

The “social venture incubator” Democracy Builders last year announced it was buying the southern Vermont campus of Marlboro College to create a two-year, hybrid high school and early college program. Organizers last month told supporters that the program would welcome its first students this September.

On April 27, everything changed: The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced that the non-profit’s founder, Seth Andrew, with wire fraud, money laundering, and making false statements to a financial institution. If convicted, he faces up to 70 years in prison.

A founder of the well-known Democracy Prep charter school network and a one-time to Pres. Obama, Andrew, 42, allegedly stole $218,005 from a network account in 2019 in order to secure a lower interest rate on a mortgage for a nearly $2.4 million Manhattan apartment, prosecutors said. He was expected to plead not guilty and declined to comment for this article.

After news of Andrews’ indictment spread, Democracy Builders held an emergency meeting to remove him as board chair.

Last week, Stone said efforts to separate the new college from the alleged crime are going even further: When Degrees of Freedom incorporates this month, it will have no formal association with Andrew. She and members of the Democracy Builders board “are working amicably towards separating the entities, as to allow for formal incorporation without Seth Andrew.”

The first problem: Degrees of Freedom doesn’t actually own the Marlboro campus — Democracy Builders does. That has complicated the college’s efforts to open as planned, Stone said.

“We’d love to be in Marlboro, but the reality is this just happened last week — and we were in the middle of telling kids, ‘Come to campus.’ And I just didn’t feel comfortable with all of the dust-up.”

The developments mean it’ll be at least another year until more than just a handful of students can take part in what many observers see as a promising experiment.

When he announced the new college in 2020, Andrew told that the venture represented “a new model for higher education that doesn’t exist for most kids.”

To that end, Democracy Builders spent $1.7 million to buy the 500-acre campus of Marlboro, a small liberal arts college that, like many of its kind, faced declining enrollment. In 2019, it merged with Boston’s Emerson College, sending students and faculty packing.

Degrees of Freedom last fall ran what it called a successful small pilot of its model with 20 students.It plans to offer a low-residency hybrid program that would require students to be on campus for just two weeks per trimester, or six weeks per year. For the rest of the academic year, they’d be expected to study online, with apprenticeships tied to their majors.

The program’s website actually lays out two separate programs: a three-trimester “,” for high schoolers, summer included, priced at $9,000, that provides SAT and ACT prep, college application support, and an option for international travel, among other offerings. It’s open to high school seniors with 2.5 GPAs, as well as GED holders who aren’t enrolled in college.

For $18,000, high school graduates and GED holders can enroll in a two-year “” designed to help them “gain entrance to competitive colleges.”

Stone said the program will also allow alumni to find full-time employment in their area of concentration or access to tech-focused boot camps that many low-income students don’t typically attend.

“What we want to do is figure out: How do we get low-income students, first-generation college students, to gain access to well-paid careers, and do so with zero dollars in student debt?” she said. Because Degrees of Freedom is “reverse-engineering the program from the Pell Grant,” basing its costs on the federal grant’s maximum allowance to students, she said, low-income students should expect to graduate debt-free.

Kevin Carey, who directs the Education Policy program at , the left-leaning Washington, D.C., think tank, said that’s a laudable — and unusual — goal for a tech-focused college.

“You only do this if you begin from the point of view of, ‘How do I build a college that’s good at serving low income students?’ No one does that. Everyone’s approach to technology is, ‘How do I make money?’”

Richard Saudek, a Montpelier, Vt., attorney who chairs Marlboro’s board of trustees, said the board chose Degrees of Freedom because “the people involved were quite experienced starting up schools that served underserved populations.”

Marlboro officials, he said, “felt that their plans seemed to make sense — and that it would be a good thing to do, basically, to have them purchase the campus at a low price. And we had a lot of hopes.”

Saudek said the sale of the campus won’t be affected by Andrew’s legal troubles. The transaction had no “clawback” or reversal provisions. “They had it to do what they could with it,” he said.

Nevertheless, he admitted that trustees “are watching this situation unfold and were alarmed when they learned about the indictment.”

New America’s Carey had a similar response when he read the news: “Part of my reaction to the whole thing, beyond ‘What the hell?’ was ‘Too bad. This is just going to kill this thing.’”

He recalled hearing Andrew’s pitch as the program was taking shape: Rather than forcing students to borrow $20,000 to attend “some shady for-profit college” or take on even more debt to attend a four-year college without graduating, Carey said, he was intrigued by the notion of using hybrid learning to bring costs down so low that a student could cover them entirely with a Pell Grant.

“At its most basic level, that’s a good idea,” Carey said.

At the moment, the effort is relying largely on funding from the Silicon Valley investor , as well as a group of wealthy donors, to help keep it afloat. In an April 8 email to supporters prior to his indictment, Andrew urged them to “Help us identify funders for our work.” The plea linked to a direct donation site for the college. Andrew noted, “Our entire cost for tuition-room-and-board costs less than a Pell grant. However, we need philanthropy until we break-even at ~500 students, which we hope to achieve in 2022.”

Stone said recent developments have affected fund-raising, and that a few donors have backed out. “We are now working to recover grants for which Seth was the lead point of contact,” she said.

It’s significant that the idea for Degrees of Freedom emerged from the world of K-12 charter schools, Carey said. Unlike most new online universities, which are typically for-profit, charter schools have historically offered educators ways to create mission-driven, non-profit schools that help low-income students.

“There’s no comparable mechanism in higher education for that,” he said.

The irony is that Stone and others now find themselves working to both listen to the needs of these students and separate themselves from Andrew, whose work has long been synonymous with the very charter schools that serve them.

“My goal is to stay laser-focused on ‘How do we continue to uplift their voices?’” she said. “‘How do we make sure that their voices don’t get drowned out by a personal matter that doesn’t really have anything to do with them, and with this project?’”