When Christina Zimmerman returned to teaching last year after maternity leave, she grappled with postpartum depression that she says could have led to quitting her job. 

But her school’s onsite day care made all the difference, as she knew her daughter was just a few classrooms away.

“I can be mom and teacher in the same breath,” said Zimmerman, who teaches fourth grade at Endeavor Elementary in Nampa, Idaho. “I’ve dreamed of teaching since second grade. Truthfully, it’s all I’ve wanted to do, but I also want to be there for my child.”

In states such as Idaho and Texas, where funding for early childhood education is limited, some schools are spearheading initiatives to provide quality, affordable child care. It’s a teacher retention tool as much as it is a way to ensure youngsters are prepared when they enter kindergarten. 

Some districts are transforming donated spaces — a former recycling center or house — into day cares for staff and, in some cases, for first responders in the area as well. Others are incorporating child care on their campuses. 

The schools hope parenting teachers don’t have to choose between career and motherhood, as the education workforce remains predominantly female.

Women are more likely than men to leave their careers to care for children, data shows. On top of that, teachers’ salaries aren’t keeping up with inflation, according to the National Education Association, even as child care costs have become more untenable. 

Dropping out of the workforce can be an attractive option for educators with young children, which adds to retention challenges already facing schools. 

“If we’re going to support our community, … we need the very best teachers in the classroom,” said Tabitha Branum, superintendent of Richardson schools, north of Dallas. Her district runs two day cares, with goals of opening more. 

“This is one of the strategies that we have in place to attract and retain the very best of the best,” Branum said.

In 2022, district leaders nationwide reported increased staff vacancies; most administrators — 63 percent — cited the pandemic as a cause. Last school year, nearly 1 in 4 teachers said they were likely to quit their job due to stress, disillusionment, low salaries and heavy workloads, according to a RAND survey.

Related: What convinces voters to raise taxes: child care

School-sponsored child care can mitigate that stress.

The devastating feeling of dropping off her three-month-old daughter, Gracee, with a caregiver each day still haunts Heather Yarbrough, even 14 years later.

She cried every day for weeks, but didn’t have the option to quit her job as an elementary reading specialist in Nampa.

Yarbrough and her husband, both educators, needed two incomes to get by financially. Over time, she realized having a career was healthy for her and her family. 

That brought her to a eureka moment: “Why do we have to choose? There’s got to be a better way,” she said.

Now Endeavor’s principal, she spearheaded an on-campus day care. Funded through a combination of grants and parent fees, the program is in its fourth year. It’s become a recruitment and retention tool for the district, which doesn’t pay teachers as much as neighboring districts. 

A dozen of the school’s 30 teachers use the day care. 

Child care for school employees has trickle-down benefits for students, said Van-Kim Lin, an early childhood development researcher at nonprofit Child Trends.

The kids can build stronger relationships with educators, counselors or other staff members because turnover is minimized and children are on campus at younger ages.

“This is a great strategy by which you can … support both children, families and then also on the flip side, districts and their workforce,” she said.

As Molly Hillier, an instructional coach at Endeavor and mother of a child in the day care, put it: “It benefits students because if you have happier teachers, … they can pour that into the kids.” 

The school’s teaching staff is predominantly young and female, and it had become routine for teachers to drop out of the workforce to care for their infants or to move on to less stressful or higher-paying jobs. In Nampa, teachers start out earning about $44,000 and top out at about $69,000, compared with a range of about $47,000 to $86,000 in the nearby Boise School District.

But now, “Nampa School District right now can offer me something nobody else can,” Zimmerman said. “That time with my child is invaluable — it’s worth its weight in gold.” 

Related: Our child care system gives many moms a draconian choice: Quality child care or a career

When Texas school counselor Kelly Mountjoy decided she wanted to start a family, she wondered if she could handle working and being a mother.

Three children later, she and her husband considered expanding their family by one more. However, the costs would add up: She was already paying more than $1,200 a month to send one of her kids to day care. So they hesitated.

“It’s just so impossible to pay child care with that many kiddos,” said Mountjoy, who works at Parkhill Junior High in Richardson.

Texas school officials, frustrated with failed legislative attempts to fund teachers raises, recently began unfolding strategies to recruit and retain teachers. Large districts with bigger budgets offered higher pay, while others experimented with four-day school weeks or other benefits to sweeten the job.

“We may not be able to pay every teacher what we should be able to,” said Branum, the Richardson superintendent. “But what if we could create a compensation package that took a little stress off of them?”

Richardson has a starting salary of $60,000 — above the state average of about $53,300 — but is also in the highly competitive Dallas-area market. So now RISD offers employees a health clinic for acute care with a $10 copay, no insurance required, and free counseling — plus the help with child care.

The district runs two child learning academies, Little Eagles and Little Mustangs, that serve more than 120 children starting at 6 weeks old until age 3, when they become eligible for the district’s pre-K program. 

With more than 134 children on the district’s wait list as of the end of April, Branum said they’re considering at least one more center that could open as soon as next year.

Mountjoy said the perk gives her peace of mind because she knows her children receive high-quality attention.

“I know that my kids are taken care of really well,” Mountjoy said. “They know the kids individually and know their strengths and where they struggle.”

This story was written by Carly Flandro of Idaho Education News and Valeria Olivares of the Dallas Morning News. Idaho Education News data analyst Randy Schrader contributed to the story.

This story is part of a series on how the child care crisis affects working parents — with a focus on solutions. It was produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.

The post ‘I can be mom and teacher’: Schools tackle child care needs to keep staff in classrooms appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

DALLAS — Daisy Donjuan’s family never saw the value in college. After graduating from high school, she did what was expected of her — dropped education, worked and pitched in at home as her parents did.

So when she enrolled in Dallas College after a five-year break in school, she was left to navigate a dizzying array of options and decisions solo as she sought to train for a job outside of retail management.

The college’s steps to enroll included a checklist that laid bare what Donjuan needed to do, including scheduling an appointment with a success coach.

Success coaches, a more hands-on approach to advising, are Dallas College’s latest effort to demystify the process of obtaining a degree and help its students overcome obstacles along the way. 

With her coach’s help, Donjuan created a plan to graduate through the college’s paralegal program. She avoided taking classes that didn’t advance her career and stayed on top of coursework.

“It felt good, the fact that someone is actually checking up on you and that they’re keeping up with you,” Donjuan, 24, said. “They actually care about us succeeding.”

Supporting students — particularly those who come from nontraditional paths — is key as difficult circumstances, unclear pathways to a career and uncertainty about the value of pursuing a college can derail their education, experts say.

About half of Dallas College’s students are first-generation; a little more than 20 percent are parents; and about 22 percent are adult learners who are at least 25 with a full-time job,according to self-reported responses and data from a fall 2022 survey.

Soon, ensuring that students are successful could be even more important as Texas lawmakers want to tie community college funding to outcomes. 

But without purposeful guidance on choosing the right classes or taking advantage of available resources, students can easily get lost and end up “making decisions that don’t get them to a degree,” said Josh Wyner, who leads higher education programs at The Aspen Institute. 

In efforts to mitigate the mix of challenges that students encounter, Dallas College leaders invested in a heartier, more intrusive advising nearly three years ago that pairs students with success coaches as research suggests that contact with a significant college staffer is a crucial factor in retention.

Trustees approved $10 million to strengthen the system’s student success infrastructure and nearly doubled its coaching and advising capacity. 

Related: More than a third of community college students have vanished

Donjuan’s father, a car salesman, often boasted that he was able to create a business without a high school diploma or degree. Following their lead, she began working at a retail store where she quickly ran out of room for growth after reaching a management position.

Mulling over the sacrifices her father made when he upended his life in Mexico in pursuit of a better life, Donjuan saw this as wasted potential.

“I felt lost,” she said. “I wanted to break that cycle. We can do better than this … we came for a reason.”

Such details about a student’s life and struggles usually aren’t immediately available to success coaches. 

That’s why it’s key to ask probing questions that “dig a little deeper” to find the underlying challenges interfering in students’ education, said Garry Johnson, a success coach at Dallas College’s Richland Campus. 

“It felt good, the fact that someone is actually checking up on you and that they’re keeping up with you. They actually care about us succeeding.”

Daisy Donjuan, Dallas College student

If a student is missing classes due to transportation issues, Johnson can point those who take six credits or more to a free bus pass. Experiencing food insecurity? Here’s the campus’ food pantry. Need last-minute child care? These are the four system campuses that offer flexible assistance.

Success coaches not only provide academic advising or help with financial aid applications, they also anticipate barriers.

“No student should be hungry, homeless or hopeless,” Johnson said. “Our job … is to address the whole student, not just mere academics.”

Students are assigned to one coach, allowing them to develop more meaningful relationships with someone who can help them “navigate the Dallas College maze” without having to bounce around to different people, said Jermain Pipkins, dean of success coaching at the school.

More than 64,500 students are enrolled at Dallas College, and the system employs nearly 240 success coaches who are spread out across its seven campuses. Before the revamp, it had only about 130 advisers.

The coaches are distributed among teams who focus on dual credit high schoolers, older adult learners or traditional students.

“The underlying hope is that these navigators and these coaches help students manage to navigate the inevitable bumps that will come up and be able to persist in their academic studies.”

Nikki Edgecombe, a senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University

If students aren’t ready to open up or feel ashamed to ask for help, that can limit how much the advisers can support them initially, said Lisa Frost, another success coach at Richland. That makes follow up meetings essential.

“Building rapport with a student takes time, and sometimes one session is not going to solve this,” she said. 

Overall, enrollment in community colleges has plummeted in recent years. In 2020, as COVID-19 spread across the country, the number of students at Texas community colleges fell by 5.7 percent, or by more than 1.5 million students, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Nationally, the number has dropped by 37 percent since 2010 — nearly 2.6 million students.

Related: Bachelor’s degrees of community college students stymied by red tape

Getting students to enroll and stay can be a challenge as such schools aren’t typically known for intense advising.

Their student-to-advisor ratio is usually quite high and labor costs are among the biggest barriers for such institutions, said Nikki Edgecombe, a senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University.

“The underlying hope is that these navigators and these coaches help students manage to navigate the inevitable bumps that will come up and be able to persist in their academic studies,” Edgecombe said.

After Frost coached a student on how to ask her instructor about grades and opportunities to earn extra credit, she knew she’d developed a relationship with her. 

The student soon opened up about how she had never been able to speak her own mind with her family, but the advice allowed her to work on her confidence.

“This simple skill alone helped this student overcome a barrier of being shy to ask what she wanted without holding back,” Frost said.

At Dallas College, the student-to-success coach ratio is roughly 350 to one. Some caseloads may be higher or lower depending on the success coach’s role and the type of students they serve.

Related: Trade programs – unlike other areas of higher ed – are in hot demand

Many advocates have said that Texas’ support for community colleges isn’t enough as the schools grow, expand wraparound services and pivot offerings to meet workforce demands.

“Any model that doesn’t fully fund or potentially starve those efforts is gonna run up against challenges,” Edgecombe said. “Institutions will struggle to deliver on their mission.”

Currently, Texas’ community colleges are funded through a blend of local property taxes, student tuition and fees and state contributions. 

Lawmakers set aside a fixed amount of money toward public community colleges each biennium. The funds are then distributed to schools based on a complex formula. 

At Dallas College, that state support is nearly 20% in the current budget. The bulk of its revenue, almost 60 percent, comes from property and other taxes while tuition and fees make up about 20 percent.

“I was stagnant for a very long time,” she said. “If you want more you have to go for it, it’s not as easy as being comfortable where you are. But it’s worth it.”

Kianna Vaughn, Dallas College student

A commission tasked with examining how the state should finance such schools — made up of college officials, business leaders and lawmakers — spent a year reviewing options. 

The group released a set of recommendations in November proposing a complete overhaul that would funnel more money to community colleges based on student success.

Those measurable outcomes could include the number of credentials that provide professional skills; credentials awarded in high-demand fields; and transfers to four-year universities. 

The related legislation — which has wide bipartisan support across both chambers and is endorsed by the state’s 50 community college districts — was passed by the House last month. Lawmakers have until Memorial Day weekend to send the proposal to Gov. Greg Abbott, who has expressed support for a funding revamp.

The overhaul would require lawmakers to allot roughly $650 million in additional funding toward community colleges every two years, Harrison Keller, Texas’ commissioner of higher education, previously estimated.

Meanwhile, Dallas College leaders say they’re ahead because of how they shifted priorities over the past few years. 

Although they’re still committed to getting people in the door and increasing enrollment, there’s a heightened focus on assessing how to keep students on track, college completion and students’ achievements after graduating.

Kianna Vaughn, 28, didn’t immediately enroll in college after graduating from Cedar Hill High School in 2013 because of its sticker price. Although she received an acceptance letter for Texas Southern University, she didn’t qualify for financial aid.

Many of her friends went off to college, which overwhelmed her as education was the only path to success she’d ever heard about.

A well-paying job cushioned Vaughn’s worries for some years, but she noticed younger people were often filling positions above her own. Despite her years of experience, the absence of a degree was preventing her from procuring different opportunities.

After enrolling last year, Vaughn met with a Dallas College success coach who helped her lay out a flexible roadmap that allowed her to juggle school and a full-time job.

“I was stagnant for a very long time,” she said. “If you want more you have to go for it, it’s not as easy as being comfortable where you are. But it’s worth it.”

Now, Vaughn is set to transfer to Jarvis Christian University, a historically Black institution with a Dallas location, starting next year to pursue a bachelor’s degree. 

This story about community college advising was produced by The Dallas Morning News, as part of the series Saving the College Dream, a collaboration between Hechinger and Education Labs and journalists at The Associated Press, AL.com, The Christian Science Monitor, The Seattle Times and The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. Sign up for Hechinger’s higher education newsletter.

The post How success coaches anticipate and tackle college students’ challenges appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Andrea Maldonado was diagnosed with Graves’ disease during her sophomore year of high school, which stopped her from swimming competitively and began impacting her mental health.

The immune system disorder regularly bumps Maldonado’s heart rate to nearly double what it’s supposed to be. That not only makes athletic activities difficult, but it also has led to her having trouble falling asleep and struggling with anxiety and depression.

“It was just a lot of life changes and lifestyle changes for me, which can get discouraging at times,” she said. “It’s just like a ripple effect of all of these other symptoms that come with it.”

Maldonado didn’t know who to turn to, and her parents often did not understand her struggles. When she started classes at Paul Quinn College in 2019, counselors and school staff constantly encouraged her to visit its mental health clinic.

“Mental health overall is a very taboo thing within people of color and under-resourced communities,” said Maldonado, now a junior majoring in business administration. “Coming to a place where it was super, super emphasized and pushed … I have been able to get through some of the hardest things I’ve gone through.”

Paul Quinn, a historically Black college in southern Dallas, has interwoven mental health awareness into its foundation as the small school aims to recruit students from areas often overlooked by other colleges. Many of its 680 students come from historically underserved communities, some of which are plagued with gun violence or high poverty rates.

Too often, school leaders would see students delay or derail their graduation even after maintaining good grades. Class disagreements would sometimes turn into fights. Paul Quinn administrators realized addressing students’ mental welfare — such as helping them manage trauma, stress, guilt and depression — was the missing link to their success.

“I failed to realize the level of post-traumatic stress that people would experience once you lifted them out of those environments,” Paul Quinn President Michael Sorrell said, “the depression that people go through once you’re in a place where you can begin to unpack these experiences.”

Related: We know how to help young kids cope with the trauma of the pandemic – but will we do it?

Paul Quinn developed an exhaustive program that begins supporting its undergraduates as they commit to the school. All students start their academic journey at the college by sitting with counselors who assess their mental health needs. The school has an on-campus clinic where students can receive therapy and join support groups — all free of charge.

The cornerstone of the college’s mental health initiative is interceding and introducing students to services early as well as approaching students directly instead of hoping they reach out themselves.

Such proactive efforts help keep more students on track as they learn how to manage challenges in a positive way, officials said.

Before the clinic opened, students struggled with graduating on time or at all. At one point the college had one of the country’s lowest graduation rates at barely 1%. Now that rate is about 36%, school officials said.

“I tell the students all the time, ‘Everyone has a season. Everyone has a season where they struggle.’ And the difference between a season and being trapped in that place your whole life is your ability to get the help you need.’”

Michael Sorrell, president, Paul Quinn College

Experts say college students — particularly students of color — have added stresses and pressures that can impact their mental health even as they are going through biological brain changes.

So robust resources — including screening, counseling, support groups and medication management — should be available widely on campuses, said Greg Hansch, executive director of the Texas affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI-Texas).

“We see colleges and universities as being a critical leverage point for facilitating access to mental health care,” Hansch said. “If there are no mental health resources on campus, then we’re just throwing caution to the wind.”

It’s not as simple as just being there for students. Once students arrive on campus, staff must jumpstart the process of breaking down barriers to mental health and pointing them toward available support.

“I tell the students all the time, ‘Everyone has a season. Everyone has a season where they struggle,” Sorrell said. “And the difference between a season and being trapped in that place your whole life is your ability to get the help you need.’”

Related: College students to administrators: Let’s talk about mental health

Paul Quinn pushes a campus-wide approach where there’s no wrong door to walk through. Professors, coaches or academic advisers can offer support or direct students to on-campus resources, said Stacia Alexander, Paul Quinn’s mental health and wellness clinic director.

While trying to normalize asking for help, the college — and other schools — are still challenged by the stigma and shame often associated with mental health among communities of color.

Black “college students are less likely to access services around mental health than their white peers,” noted Nance Roy, the chief clinical officer at The Jed Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes emotional health and aims to prevent suicide among teens and young adults.

Black students are more likely to reach out to family, friends or spiritual leaders than a mental health professional, Roy said. That’s often due to costs and the lack of insurance, not believing therapy will help or the dearth of counselors of color, Roy noted.

At one point the college had one of the country’s lowest graduation rates at barely 1%. Now that rate is about 36%, school officials said.

During orientation, incoming Paul Quinn students learn about the clinic, campus services and the mental health assessment they can opt out of if they choose. Students can then schedule an appointment with a counselor who will help them navigate the resources and identify their personal challenges.

During the initial evaluations, students are asked if they’ve ever had a traumatic experience, to which most say no. Many don’t understand what trauma is, explained Alexander.

So counselors ask more specific questions. Have you experienced neglect, physical or sexual abuse? Ever been homeless? Do you have support from your family? Lost someone to violence?

It isn’t always easy to get students to open up. Having a counselor who looked like her was invaluable to sophomore Ericka Drinker, who is Black.

“I was a lot more comfortable to speak about things such as microaggressions and racism in the workplace with (them) than I would have been with somebody who didn’t look like me,” Drinker said.

Campuses across the country struggle with staffing counseling centers that reflect the diversity of their student bodies. About 83% of psychologists in the United States are white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Hispanic psychologists make up the second-largest group at 7%, while only 3% are Black.

“They’re not seeing a lot of therapists that look like them and perhaps don’t think they will be able to understand their circumstances,” Roy said.

Paul Quinn’s clinic boasts a staff mainly composed of three women of color.

From 2003 and 2017, researchers found that suicide rates rose among Black youth of all ages — with the biggest increase seen among the 15- to 17-year-olds, according to an article published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

When researching how to help students, the school reached out to experts and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, which helped develop the clinic’s programming.

Now UT Southwestern provides the campus clinic a full-time psychiatrist, who often pulls in two more residents to assist students.

Drinker, 19, heard about the college’s mental health clinic before she even started classes. Monthly visits are a requirement for all honor students. Now Drinker frequently visits multiple times a month, often simply to talk.

It’s “an outlet that’s not my friends or my parents to talk to about what’s really going on … somebody that’s kind of a neutral person in my life that can just give me either advice or just hear me vent about what’s going on,” Drinker said.

Related: Inside a college counseling center struggling with the student mental health crisis

Mental health screenings are essential for early identification and intervention, said Hansch, of NAMI-Texas.

“It is all too common for mental illness to go unnoticed,” he said. “There’s often a significant delay in between when mental health symptoms arise and when a person gets access to mental health care.”

On average, that’s up to a 10-year delay across all age groups to when a person accesses the mental health services they need, he added. However, about 50% of all mental health conditions begin before age 14 and 75% by age 24.

A challenge with such screenings is that they essentially rely on self reporting of your mental health status and counselors “can only hope that people are going to answer those questions honestly,” Hansch said.

Although it’s an imperfect tool, experts say it remains one of the most efficient ways of identifying those in need of services and resources.

From 2003 and 2017, researchers found that suicide rates rose among Black youth of all ages — with the biggest increase seen among the 15- to 17-year-olds, according to an article published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

The numbers don’t reflect the impact the pandemic and social justice movements over police killings have had on Black youth.

A study done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2020 found that the percentage of people who reported having seriously considered suicide in the 30 days before completing the survey was significantly higher among young adults and Black respondents.

The early screenings help integrate the on-campus resources into students’ everyday routine “as opposed to an afterthought,” Alexander said. That gets the young adults using services regularly instead of when there is a crisis, she added.

Related: Can ‘work colleges’ in cities become a low-cost, high-value model for the future?

Before COVID-19 rolled in, the Paul Quinn clinic was coaxing more and more students toward its mental health services. Alexander would go to campus club meetings, basketball games and other events to encourage students to use the resources.

Counselors saw a drop in students using its services as the pandemic upended lives and moved courses — and the clinic — online. Although many expressed their need for support, the amount of students reaching out dwindled significantly the longer remote learning went on.

Many students also went back to their hometowns, which set back the strides they’d taken on campus.

“Once you start getting people to heal, then you put them back in the environment which damaged them without the ability to escape from that, it makes it tough,” Sorrell said.

Although staff constantly reached out to students through emails and direct phone calls, mental health counselors relied mainly on the faculty to alert them if they noticed a student was struggling.

Paul Quinn returned to in-person learning in the fall of 2020. Clinic staff showed up at student events, reintroducing them to the clinic’s resources and reminding them of the support systems on campus.

Attendance at the clinic isn’t up to what they experienced before the pandemic. But school officials are hopeful that, with each incoming class, more students will reach out as they’ve done in the past.

“We’re serving a purpose in a big puzzle,” Alexander said. “We have one piece of that puzzle that we need to execute proficiently so that these students can have what they need emotionally and cognitively … so that they can have this fabulous picture when they come out of college.”

This story on Paul Quinn College was produced by The Education Lab at The Dallas Morning News, as part of the project “Supporting students: What’s next for mental health,” in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, The Christian Science Monitor and the Education Labs at AL.com, the Fresno Bee, The Post & Courier and The Seattle Times. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post This Texas college’s focus on mental health helps students work through trauma, stay on track appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Building confidence in students is an essential part of teaching children who are new to the country and learning English, says Fort Worth educator Kimberly Fabela.

Most of them not only struggle with a new language but also have suffered trauma, some refugees fleeing from war zones where they may never have been in a classroom setting.

So first, Fabela makes them comfortable in her classroom through heavily interactive lessons and by encouraging lots of talking. She gives students who might feel awkward or uncomfortable small ways to get familiar with the language.

“When you’re in a new country, new friends, new culture, new everything — what a hit that takes to your confidence,” said Fabela, who teaches at Fort Worth’s International Newcomer Academy.

Children learning English were among the students hardest hit in the pandemic as they faced challenges with language and technology.

Such students had fewer opportunities to interact with teachers and peers who could help them practice English, a summer report from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights noted.

Meanwhile, their parents often struggled with their own language barriers and strains on the family that made it even more difficult to help their children thrive, particularly when it came to online learning.

Some school systems estimated that less than half of all English-language learners were logging on to virtual learning — many because they lacked digital access, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

As schools try to address widespread learning loss caused by COVID-19 disruptions, particularly for students learning English, those who work at newcomer academies offer lessons in how to quickly identify needs and fill learning gaps so that children can get back on track.

In Texas, one in five students in public schools is an English-language learner. About 10 percent of students nationally are as well.

Newcomer students are asylum seekers, immigrants, refugees or migrant children. Some Texas school districts have programs specifically designed for these children where they not only work on language skills but also receive “wraparound services” that help them through struggles outside the classroom.

They are designed to be intense learning environments where students generally spend at least one year catching up before moving on to regular campuses.

Students come from about 30 different countries, speaking nearly two dozen languages at Fort Worth ISD’s International Newcomer Academy. The children — who range from sixth to ninth grade — often learn best through routines and repetition, Fabela noted.

“When you’re in a new country, new friends, new culture, new everything — what a hit that takes to your confidence.”

Kimberly Fabela, Fort Worth’s International Newcomer Academy

Students help each other build on skills by tackling reading assignments together in small groups. They find ways to complete tasks together, even when the children might all speak different languages.

Although they might not comprehend an entire reading assignment, the students build on their vocabulary as they discuss the assignment. They answer questions on the story, draw out its main idea and, as a group, present to the class what they learned.

Working in groups allows students to learn more about the content of the lessons and also build up vocabulary, analytical, social and behavioral skills. It also helps Fabela identify the words that they’re missing or struggling with at that moment so she can build the next lesson.

“We make sure that we embed a lot of that at one time so that we’re getting more bang for our buck,” Fabela said.

Teachers at the academy are specifically trained to provide not only language support but also on how to teach in a way that students — many who have arrived recently to the United States — will understand, said Cloris Rangel, the executive director of FWISD’s Bilingual/ESL Department.

“For many of them, this is the first time they ever even hear English,” she said.

While they may learn at a slower pace than peers at other schools, students are still learning the same content — only in bite-sized pieces with educators emphasizing the use of visuals and encouraging communication and expression to better absorb the language.

Since many of the students come from traumatic backgrounds — often arriving to the country with little resources — the academy emphasizes helping newcomer families by providing clothing, food, furniture or even help paying bills.

Just before school started, for example, FWISD’s newcomer academy gave away backpacks and school supplies. Staff talked to families about the services offered to help them get settled for the new year.

One older sister of two children needed help finding out where she and her siblings’ could get school uniforms. She also worried that it would be an issue that her family did not know English. Academy staff reassured her.

“We’re here to help everybody, the student and the family,” Rangel said. “We know if the family is under any stress, it’s going to affect the kids and it’s going to affect their learning.”

The pandemic made such stress even more pronounced for families.

Many parents had jobs that cannot be done remotely or lost them entirely due to staff reductions during the pandemic. Families worried about being able to pay for medical costs or accessing care. Meanwhile, immigrant families often faced additional roadblocks that prevented them from participating in assistance programs or applying for aid, such as language barriers or fears that it would affect their immigration status, according to an Urban Institute report released in May.

And as many schools were operating virtually for so long, some students who needed the intense help of newcomer schools didn’t make it into them, said Steve Przymus, an assistant professor at Texas Christian University.

So what happened to these students during the pandemic is important, he noted.

“To me, that was one of the biggest challenges: wondering where they were; what access they had to schooling; who knew about them; and who was reaching out to them,” Przymus said.

With the pandemic forcing millions of students to learn remotely, FWISD’s academy faced a loss of connection — something essential for English learners.

The amount of time students would be speaking with their fellow classmates and teachers in not just English, but their own language, was significantly impacted, Przymus said.

Students need engagement when they come to these schools, whether that be with classmates who speak the same language or with the general campus community, Przymus said. Kids act differently when they’re not at home, which leads to students creating and cultivating their own identity.

“If a school can do anything to allow kids to feel comfortable, safe and valued, then they will start learning,” he said. “When kids don’t, they’re constantly in this fight-or-flight mode.” 

In Fort Worth, administrators created a “house system” to keep a sense of community, said Angelia Ross, the academy’s principal. Students from different grades were put into “houses” with designated teachers who would act as a support system while students were able to build friendships among peers in different grades.

“We were able to kind of address that social emotional disconnection that kids may feel when doing work online,” Ross said.

A 2012 report by the Center for Applied Linguistics that looked at effective programs for English-language learners praised Fort Worth’s program for incorporating proven effective teaching methods — such as cooperative learning environments, extended instruction time and multi-year plans to guide students.

The report found that 52 percent of students at the school had exceeded standards on a state English-language proficiency test. However, it noted that the costly resources needed for the intense program are largely made up by limited local funds.

Fort Worth officials recently considered shutting down the academy this year when seeking space for other district needs. It was spared but to ease overcrowding at the academy, they did move some older students to a different alternative campus aimed at catching up high schoolers, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

“We know if the family is under any stress, it’s going to affect the kids and it’s going to affect their learning.”

Cloris Rangel, executive director of FWISD’s Bilingual/ESL Department

Other Texas districts operate newcomer programs, including Grand Prairie. The International Newcomer Institute at Fannin Middle School serves about 100 students a school year who come from Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Cuba and elsewhere, said Flavia Romero, a facilitator at the school.

“These kids come with a lot of experience — whether it’s good, bad or ugly — they come with experience,” she said. “The goal is to foster that and tie that into their current learning so that they can be successful.”

Closing the gaps requires being intentional, Romero said.

The school uses “scaffolding strategies,” for example, to learn where the students come from and what education level they already possess. By learning about the student, teachers can then better understand and accommodate their needs, Romero noted. 

“We really have to know where they are to help them achieve where they need to be,” she said.

A key part of helping students succeed at newcomer academies is keeping parents involved.

Faiha Al-Atrash initially joined Fort Worth’s INA to work with those who spoke Arabic. Now she is the community and parents coordinator for the school, reaching out to all families to learn about their histories and current hardships.

“Every student who arrives in this building has a story,” Al-Atrash said. “We don’t know the hardship these families and their kids come from.”

The first question she often asks families is what they like about being in America. “They say, ‘When my son or my daughter leaves in the morning, going to school, I know they are coming back, because where I come from sometimes, the child disappears,’” Al-Atrash said.

Meanwhile, these kinds of schools give students and their families time to adjust to an American school system and the culture without them getting lost, she noted.

The approaches newcomer programs take to ease students into school could help other children learning English across the country reenter classrooms after more than a year of disruptions and trauma brought on by the pandemic, educators say.

“It is the foundation for our kids to start in a school like this,” Al-Atrash said.

This story was published by the Dallas Morning News Education Lab and reprinted with permission.

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