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Posts by Paul Costello1

The trouble with viewing 9/11 and the pandemic through a wartime lens

September 14, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Perspective by Lila Nordstrom and Sarah Senk  Washington Post September 11th 2022

In the 21 years since Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have relied on wartime tropes to understand the tragedy: “Ground Zero” conjured images of nuclear detonation; the dead were described as “fallen heroes”; the proliferation of American flags served as a visual symbol of unity; we conjured up a “war on terror” in response. We used these tropes to create a sense of solidarity, something we’ve also attempted with less impressive results throughout the coronavirus pandemic. In the last two years, calls for unity and common purpose have centered on the same talk of victory and defeat that permeated 9/11 discourse. Vaccines and therapeutics have been figured as weapons, and viral surges described as covid’s “counterattack.” We’ve been at “war” with a cartoon spiky orb, and we’ve been losing.

The way we speak about the pandemic comes straight from the conceptual mold of 9/11 — the last crisis we can remember fondly for the way it brought us all together, if only for a while. Such rhetoric was stunningly effective at convincing the vast majority of Americans at the time that military actions were not only justified but a necessary response to the attacks. That focus, however, left us blind to the extent of the internal damage, including the suffering of those such as sick first responders and civilians. While similar martial metaphors have failed to unite us as successfully throughout the pandemic, they may still serve to obscure pain and loss.

Framing major domestic disasters through the lens of war occludes a role for civilians on the front line, displacing them from our national narratives. In fact, thanks in large part to community advocacy, only recently has the 9/11 commemorative story been modified to include those who are suffering from or have died of 9/11-related illnesses like cancer, respiratory and gastrointestinal illness, and other health issues caused by inhaling toxic dust. Such health problems began emerging in the early days of the World Trade Center cleanup, but they broke into public consciousness only after being championed by comedian Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” in 2010, nine years after the attacks.

9/11 was a test that America failed

More broadly, recognition for 9/11’s second wave of victims has come after a decades-long struggle to secure care for those who cleaned up the World Trade Center site, and for those who lived, worked and attended school in Lower Manhattan’s toxic air in the aftermath of the towers’ collapse. All were assured by their own government that the air was safe to breathe. (Despite insufficient data, the Environmental Protection Agency announced within a week of the attacks that the air was safe, a claim that was debunked in 2003 in a report by the EPA inspector general.) All saw their concerns roundly ignored by those in power, even as officials invoked 9/11 to justify expensive interventions abroad.

But even though the wartime pomp of 9/11 made it harder to see this domestic tragedy unfolding, that same language has been critical for those seeking recognition. First responders had to lean heavily on their Bush-era depiction as the “first soldiers in the war on terror”when they went to Washington seeking care for their post-9/11 health issues. Others for whom that ready-made frame was a poor fit had to adapt their messaging in an almost comical exercise in creative marketing. The more than 300,000 civilians who breathed in the toxic air of Lower Manhattan after the attacks found that the only way to amplify public awareness of their illnesses was to position themselves as different kind of soldiers — troops in the fight to save the economy (a position that played into Rudy Giuliani’s assertion that “the resilience of life in New York City is the ultimate sign of defiance to terrorists”). But while the fantasy of toughing it out in wartime may have helped these patients achieve recognition, it was also what exposed them to danger in the first place. The media at the time highlighted their “brave” return to schools and homes, fulfilling their patriotic duty of “getting back to normal” as quickly as possible, breathing air they were promised was safe.

Today, a similar scenario is playing out in our covid-ravaged communities, and for similar reasons. As in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, our obsession with “getting back to normal” underpins much of the conversation about the pandemic. This fall we’ll be sending our children back to schools that have no covid mitigations in place and repeating the same careless mistakes we made with students after 9/11, potentially imposing a lifetime of illness in service of our desire to believe that our problems are over — or, more troublingly, that we’ve “vanquished” them.

It’s this fiction of triumph that’s critical. Wartime metaphors feel good because they tap into our understanding that wars end. Never mind that war has been our reality for the past two decades, no matter how many times we attempt to bookend it into a set of defeats and victories. Indeed, it may be this implicit idea of a terminus that makes the fact of perpetual conflict bearable.

Much the same is true for the pandemic, which lingers in ways we find we can endure precisely because our martial metaphors accustom us to thinking we will definitively defeat it. But until we stop using wartime language to describe domestic crises, we’ll be stuck with an unrealistic notion of the future, unable to imagine it as anything other than a return to some golden version of the past where everything was “normal.” That means we won’t be able to meaningfully move forward, let alone confront the lingering traumas and other consequences of the crisis we’re still living through.

Stop calling covid-19 a war

We have an opportunity, however, to think outside the war framing and look critically at which experiences and impacts should inform our covid response. The coronavirus pandemic in the United States is a self-inflicted national tragedy whose uneven effects on people make it hard to classify. The fact that it has occurred in an age of intense political polarization and was exacerbated by the incompetence of the nation’s leaders has only made matters worse. Like the story of 9/11, the story of the pandemic is about the struggles of civilians to be taken seriously in the aftermath of government negligence. They are both stories of the failure of institutions and imagination and, frankly, our failure to recognize them as such is tied to our inability to conceive of these events as chronic rather than acute disasters.

We are not living through a war. We cannot fight our way out of a pandemic. Understood in terms of their domestic ramifications, the coronavirus and 9/11 are both public health stories, not war stories. Responding to them properly requires attention to social systems and health infrastructure, neither of which tends to capture the public imagination like victories and heroes do. When we think about chronic problems through a wartime framework, we make them more tolerable, but at the expense of our capacity to solve them. We must stop speaking as if we were all good soldiers and recognize that some human tragedies are just that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/09/09/covid-911-anniversary-war-metaphors/

When a parent’s mental health struggle affects their kids

September 14, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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By Caitlin Gibson July 21, 2022 at 10:28 a.m. EDT Washington Post

Eileen Grimes was sitting on the examination table, already feeling rather exposed in a thin paper gown as she waited to begin a routine appointment with her OB/GYN last August. Then the doctor walked in, looked Grimes in the eyes and gently asked with genuine concern: “How are you doing?”

Grimes, a married mother of two in Spokane, Wash., had spent the previous months caring for her husband through a recent addiction relapse, working a full-time job in IT and attempting to launch a new career as an author and entrepreneur, all while trying to keep her young children safe in the pandemic. Her 4-year-old daughter had grown increasingly clingy recently, often wanting to be held and comforted. Grimes’s 7-year-old son had started asking her what was wrong — are you mad at me? —and she knew that even though she’d been trying to shield her children from her own stress and anxiety, it wasn’t working.

All of this flooded her mind as she sat in the exam room, and Grimes suddenly found herself sobbing. “The floodgates just opened,” she recalls. “There was the stress of the pandemic, and not knowing the right thing to do with my kids, and my husband was struggling with his own mental health, and I felt like I was supposed to hold everything together.”

For the first time in her life, Grimes, 38, left her doctor’s office with a prescription for Prozac — a choice she made not only for herself, she says, but also for the sake of her kids.

The pandemic’s profound toll on the mental wellbeing of children has been well documented — especially by parents, teachers, pediatricians, counselors and psychologists who have witnessed the impact firsthand. Suicide has become a leading cause of death for children ages 10 and up, and mental health problems were responsible for a surge of children’s visits to hospital emergency rooms during the first months of the pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But many kids are not grappling in a vacuum with life-altering changes to school, community and routine wrought by the coronavirus. Their families, too, have struggled — sometimes limiting the children’s ability to cope, or even amplifying the emotional impact on all members of a household. Meanwhile, demand for mental health resources has soared since 2020 even as the availability of therapy and other support, especially for families who are most vulnerable and in need, has plummeted.

Researchers like Jessica Borelli, a clinical psychologist and associate professor of psychological science at the University of California at Irvine, are trying to decipher exactly what all of this means for parents and children who are carrying the trauma of the past two years. In her work so far, which has included a national survey of parents conducted in the first few months of the pandemic, she has found that parents who reported higher levels of mental health symptoms often had children who were experiencing the same: “The more covid impacted parents’ lives, the more a parent’s mental health was adversely affected,” she says, “which in turn impacted their children’s mental health.”

Schools are struggling to meet rising mental health needs, data shows

Grimes had seen this pattern taking shape in her own household. In the weeks before her doctor’s appointment, she had noticed her son assuming a protective posture around her — if his little sister started throwing a tantrum, he would step in and try to intervene, behaving almost as a surrogate parent.

“That broke my heart and triggered something in me. I don’t want him to feel like he has to be another parent,” Grimes says. “It was a red flag. I knew I had to do something.”

The fact that so many parents and children are experiencing mental health crises right now is not surprising, Borelli says; the societal tumult of recent years has forced many families into impossible situations.

“Parents are not meant to meet all of a child’s needs, and when we are all of a sudden in a situation where parents need to meet all of their children’s needs — their social-emotional needs, their educational needs, their physical health and exercise needs, their nutritional needs, everything — the system cannot survive,” she says.

Her study was conducted in the early days of the pandemic, and much has changed since then. Schools, camps and day cares are largely available again, she notes. But parents are still facing extraordinary instability — unpredictable schedules, unexpected quarantines, shifting rules about masking and testing, children who are struggling to re-adjust to in-person schooling — and these constant fluctuations are mentally and emotionally taxing.

“We are asking so much of our kids, and we’re asking so much of our parents,” Borelli says. “The number of routines that children have had to transition between is just staggering, and parents are the ones who have to do that transitioning. It’s just a tremendous cognitive and emotional load.”

As a parent and an elementary school teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools, Samantha Altmann, 38, knows this better than most. When the lockdown began in March 2020, Samantha was teaching her third-grade students online, and her husband, Eben Altmann, was running a commercial kitchen for local food businesses. They had to balance those obligations with childcare for their then-2-year-old daughter, Mabel. Samantha, who was nearly four months pregnant at the time, soon learned that she could longer bring Eben with her to prenatal appointments.

This meant that she was alone when a grim-faced doctor told her, at 25 weeks pregnant, that their son no longer had a heartbeat. And she was alone as she underwent a subsequent dilation and evacuation procedure.

“Five days later, I was in front of my computer virtually teaching my students again,” she says. She felt she had to be there for them — she was a trusted presence in their lives amid so much upheaval, and her students were still reeling from the murder of George Floyd, and she wanted to support them, she says. “So in the middle of me losing the baby, and talking about what’s going on in the country and George Floyd — we’re talking about this virtually, with parents in the background, who are really engaged and wanting to contribute — I’m sitting here in my own trauma, with my daughter on my lap, and that was the start of the pandemic for me.”

When she became pregnant again a few months later, the doctor expressed concern about protecting Samantha’s mental health during another pregnancy — and wrote her an antidepressant prescription. Throughout the pregnancy, Samantha says she was dogged by constant fear of the worst happening again, until their son, Gus, arrived safely in March 2021.

How much of this experience did Mabel absorb? Her parents aren’t certain. “She’s just transitioned into the next age group at school, she’s changed classrooms, she’s left some of her friends behind. Sam’s grandmother recently passed away, and Mabel was very close to her,” Eben says. So when Mabel, now 4 years old, has a tantrum or struggles to listen or behave, there are many possible explanations, he says — “or it could be that she’s picking something up from our own issues and anxieties related to the pandemic.”

For Kim Alexander, 44, serving as director of an assisted living facility in Houston put her on the pandemic’s front lines, and she became fixated on making sure that she did not bring the virus home, where two of her adult children, her teenage son and her then-5-year-old granddaughter lived.

Teen suicides are increasing at an alarming pace

She was especially worried about her 13-year-old son, A. Jay, who has a chronic disorder called eosinophilic esophagitis that has resulted in 48 surgeries since his birth. The condition has led him to experience both depression and post-traumatic stress.

“One day I realized that I was no longer hugging my kids,” she said. “I was keeping myself away from them, which then made them feel more isolated, separate and apart from everybody else. The hurt for me was seeing their hurt, seeing how frustrated they were.”

The toll of isolation, virtual learning and the difficult return to in-person high school exacerbated her son’s anxiety and anger, Alexander says — and when he started running away from home several months ago, she was terrified. “It got to the point for us where I was scared to leave the house, because I didn’t know if when I got home he would still be here.”

Now 16, A. Jay longs to be seen as a “typical” kid, she says, which creates tension between them when she advocates on his behalf and pursues the accommodations he requires. “I’m doing what he needs and not what he wants,” she says. “I’ve become the parent who has put all of these things in place to try to safety-net him from a world that doesn’t want him. And now I’ve made him feel special, I’ve made him feel like he is the center of attention, and his anger with me is ‘I just want to be left alone.’”

All of this weighs on her heavily, she adds: “I’m mentally exhausted. I really am.”

When parents turn to her for help, Jessica Borelli says, she tries to emphasize one thing above all: That a strong parent-child relationship can help shield children from the damaging impact of a parent’s mental health issues. It is a pattern she has consistently observed in her own research, across a range of cultural and socio-economic groups. The strongest predictor of a child’s mental health, she says, is “attachment security” — the feeling of having an open relationship between parent and child, even if one party is battling depression or anxiety or post-traumatic stress.

“Do your kids feel safe? Do they feel loved? Do they feel accepted by you?” If the answers are yes, then that’s what matters, she says. “This isn’t necessarily a time to excel, it’s a time to survive. Focus on the connection that you have with your child.”

Hidden by isolation, schoolchildren struggled with mental health

For Eileen Grimes, that means being transparent. When she filled her first prescription for Prozac, she immediately told her children about the medication.

“I told them, ‘This is what Mommy’s taking, and there’s nothing wrong with it, it helps me to do what I need to do and be the mom I need to be for you,’” she says. “I want to normalize talking about this stuff. I don’t want mental health stigma to exist for them. And I want my kids to know they can come to me when life gets hard.”

Since April, Kim Alexander’s son A. Jay has lived with his father, Alexander’s ex-husband, in a nearby neighborhood. Alexander’s relationship with her youngest child has been strained by all they’ve endured, she says, but she hopes this distance might create a reset of sorts, and she has faith in the strength of their bond. “I’ve been a parent for 28 years, and I know there are ebbs and flows of parenting,” she says. “I’m not concerned about our relationship not being repaired. He will get there. I just want him to find his joy.”

For now, the temporary separation has helped her own anxiety level come down, and she knows that much is essential for both of them. “Honestly, I am relieved,” she says. “As a parent, you’ve got to put your own oxygen mask on first.”

8 ways to feel less anxious about things beyond your control

September 14, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Advice by Lesley Alderman, LCSW Washington Post September 13th 2022

One of my patients showed up at her virtual psychotherapy session last week looking tired. She had always been ambitious and concerned about injustice. During this session, she sighed when talking about a meeting where her colleagues complained about unfair treatment. She said: “I don’t know why they bother getting upset, when it feels like nothing matters.”

I was concerned by her disengagement. But then a colleague sounded similarly worn down. She had spent the pandemic helping her third and fourth graders with remote school while trying to keep her small business going. She confided to me: “I haven’t followed the war in Ukraine at all, I simply don’t have the bandwidth.”

To an unusual degree, people are weary.

During the spring of 2020, just as the pandemic started, the question my patients asked was, “when do you think things will go back to normal?” Now, no one talks to me about a return to normal. There’s an unspoken recognition that the chaos we are experiencing might be with us for a long time.

Patients who had been concerned about national and world events and visibly frightened during the pandemic, now seem exhausted. The murder of George Floyd was horrific, and mass shootings are increasingly common. Now it feels like we are all in a relentless game of whack-a-mole, but in this case the rodents are existential threats.

I’m noticing that many of my patients are experiencing a deficit of optimism, and are overwhelmedabout important issues that are beyond their control.

I’m calling it “hope fatigue.”

People are tired of hoping that the pandemic will end, that the Ukraine war will be over, that mass shootings can be controlled, and that our government can address these pressing crises. Two in 10 Americans said they trusted the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time” in a 2022 Pew Research Center poll.

Pandemic anxiety is making us sleepless, forgetful and angry. Here are tips for coping.

The symptoms of this fatigue are feeling anxious, tuning out or giving up.

“People are having a lot of difficulties — covid has done a number on us. And now they are insecure about the state of the world,” said Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, who has been studying the psychology of risk and decision-making for over 60 years.

Therapists are struggling to help. We try to instill a sense of hope in our patients: that they can feel better, that they have agency, that their catastrophic thoughts may be overstating reality. But when a patient laments climate change and questions whether they should have children, it’s a challenge.

It’s tempting, at times, to commiserate with them — but that’s not productive. I try to validate their concern and then explore what this means for them personally.

Our nervous systems were not designed for this

Many of the problems threaten our fundamental sense of security. Will my community be decimated by fires, are my children safe at school, could there be a nuclear war?

“I see a lot of people ‘going through the motions of living’ but, since they don’t know what to make of life, how to keep safe, how to have control over anything or make a difference in anything, how to have fun, they slip into a kind of detachment,” said psychologist Judy Levitz, founding director of the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Study Center in New York City.

Humans need to feel they have some degree of control. When you take away a person’s sense of safety, depression and anxiety can set in. Our nervous systems were simply not designed to attend to so many crises at once.

It’s no wonder that 33 percent of Americans reported symptoms of depression and anxiety this summer, up from just 11 percent who reported those symptoms in 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Household Pulse Survey.

How to stay up-to-date on terrible news without burning out

Eight steps to refocus your anxiety

Dwelling on issues that seem unfixable can lead to an anxious paralysis, but there’s hope.

“Just because you can’t fix an issue, doesn’t mean that you should ignore it,” said Slovic, whose website, the Arithmetic of Compassion, highlights obstacles to humanitarian decision-making. “We are not helpless.”

This is some of the advice I give my patients.

Take a break from the news. Doomscrolling can be addictive and amplify the tragic nature of events. In one study, researchers found that those who were immersed in the Boston Marathon bombing news for multiple hours a day in the week after the event experienced higher acute stress than individuals who were on the scene. “We speculate that the graphic nature of the coverage and the repetition of those images triggered the intense distress,” said Roxane Cohen Silver, the senior author of the study and a distinguished professor of psychological science, public health and medicine at the University of California at Irvine.

I advise patients who are feeling depressed by the headlines to read the news just once a day, turn off alerts on their phone and, if possible, check social media sparingly.

Take care of yourself. I tell my patients: “You have to be in good fighting shape to cope with the current turbulence.” That means boosting your resilience by taking care of your nervous system (sleep well, eat well, exercise wisely) and engaging in life-affirming activities.

Focus on the present. Get in the habit of anchoring yourself in the here and now. Fretting about the future is not helpful.

Try a breathing exercise. Taking a few deep breaths — for instance, inhaling to the count of five and exhaling to the count of five — will help calm your sympathetic nervous system (the fight or flight response) and lower your anxiety.

When I offer deep breathing exercises, some of my patients can be skeptical, as if I am offering some kind of woo-woo, new-age mumbo jumbo. But I remind them the exercises are based in science. They typically report back that at the very least, breathing gives them something to do when they feel their heart rate escalating.

Think about your victories. Remind yourself of what’s working well in your own life — whether it’s your job, friendships, or the uplifting array of houseplants you nurtured during the pandemic.

What science tells us about the mood-boosting effects of indoor plants

Be your own therapist. Ask yourself, what do I specifically feel hopeless about and why? Being able to put into words what’s getting you down can help you feel less flooded by emotions and better able to process the information rationally.

Take action. Worrying doesn’t help one’s mental health, but taking action does. Look around your community. Maybe your local playground would benefit from a basketball court, or your church or synagogue could sponsor a refugee family. When people engage in local issues, they have a renewed sense of optimism.

Join forces with a friend. Pick a cause. There are hundreds of nonprofits dedicated to addressing some of the most tenacious challenges on the planet. Donate money to an inspiring organization or volunteer.

Slovic offers this advice: “Think about what you can do rather than what you can’t.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/09/13/mental-health-hope-fatigue-coping/

FACT SHEET: Biden-⁠Harris Administration Launches National Effort to Support Student Success

September 6, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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File:US-WhiteHouse-Logo.svg - Wikipedia

President Biden calls on schools to leverage American Rescue Plan funds to expand programming and services to help students make up for lost learning time and succeed

America’s students are on average two to four months behind in reading and math because of the COVID-19 pandemic. President Biden understands the pain and loss our nation’s students, families, and educators are experiencing, and is committed to supporting our nation’s children. That’s why President Biden’s American Rescue Plan (ARP) provided an historic $122 billion in funding to help schools safely reopen and stay open, combat learning loss, and address student mental health and other needs.

Today, President Biden is calling on schools to use the $122 billion in ARP funds to provide high-quality tutoring, summer learning and enrichment, and afterschool programs that are proven pathways to helping students make up for lost learning time and succeed in school and in life, including by supporting their mental health. Building on President Biden’s call to action in the State of the Union, the Biden-Harris Administration is also joining with leading organizations to launch the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS) to provide students with an additional 250,000 tutors and mentors over the next three years.

We know what works: fully staffed schools, and personalized support for students through high-quality tutoring, summer learning and enrichment, and afterschool programs that help students not only make academic gains, but also stay connected to school and one another. The steps announced today will further help ensure America’s children have what they need to thrive.

Use American Rescue Plan Funds to Provide Additional Instruction So Students Can Make Up for Learning Time Lost During the Pandemic

Thanks to the ARP, states and schools have the funds they need to help students recover from the pandemic. A majority of schools are already using these resources or have developed their plans to provide tutoring, mentoring, summer learning and afterschool programs, and to support staffing. Independent experts at Georgetown University have found school districts plan to spend over half of the $122 billion in ARP Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding for these purposes.

To ensure students are set up for success, the President is calling on states and school districts to continue using American Rescue Plan funds to fully staff schools and provide high-quality tutoring, summer learning and enrichment, and afterschool programs to support, on average, an additional four months of learning gains in reading and math. These programs are most successful when paired with initiatives that support student well-being and mental health, like arts and music, and the programs like those supported by the National Partnership for Student Success.  

  • High-quality summer learning and enrichment: Multiple studies indicate that high-quality summer learning and enrichment programs lasting five weeks, with at least three hours of academic instruction per day, can help students gain roughly an additional two months of learning in math and one month in reading.
  • High-quality tutoring programs: Research has consistently shown that high-quality tutoring programs of a range of durations can produce about five months of additional learning. The best programs provide tutoring three times per week, for 30 minutes each day, and use teachers and well-trained volunteers.
  • High-quality afterschool programs: High-quality afterschool programs are associated with academic gains of roughly the equivalent of four months of learning, with positive impacts on attendance and student behavior as well. These high-quality programs include a concrete focus on skill development, including personal and social skills, and provide opportunities for students to practice new skills.

To help parents and schools ensure these critical supports are available in every district, the Administration is taking the following actions:

  • Tracking Progress in Providing Additional Learning Opportunities: The Institute for Education Sciences, the Department of Education’s statistics, research and evaluation arm, will use monthly surveys to track schools’ continued progress in providing summer learning and enrichment, tutoring, and afterschool supports.
  • Empowering Parents: Most decisions about how schools invest ARP funds are made at the local level and districts are required to engage families, educators and other stakeholders as they create their plans for using these historic funds. The Department of Education recently launched its National Parents and Families Engagement Council, and has created a new tool to help families and communities engage with district leaders around ensuring recovery funds are meeting students’ needs. Using this interactive map, families and communities can review how their state and district plans to spend their ARP funds. Parents and families should engage their local leaders if plans do not adequately address the needs of their students.
  • Highlighting Schools Effectively Supporting Student Success: Today, the Department of Education is launching a campaign through the Best Practices Clearinghouse to highlight states and schools using ARP funds to support learning recovery and student mental health in evidence-based ways. The Department is calling on education leaders to nominate work for national recognition through the Clearinghouse.
  • Highlighting How States, Cities and Counties Can Help: Ensuring our students have the supports they need to succeed cannot fall on education leaders alone. States, cities and counties can use the American Rescue Plan’s $350 billion in State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) to support student success. As outlined in a new White House toolkit, SLFRF can be used to hire and retain school-based staff; build the educator pipeline; and invest in other ways to support our students, including academic and mental health supports.

Recruit 250,000 New Tutors and Mentors to Help Students Succeed

Research shows that high quality tutors and mentors positively impact student achievement, well-being, and overall success. In fact, the CDC released analyses in March finding that students who are connected to adults and peers at school – the kinds of connections that tutoring and mentoring programs can foster — reported better mental health outcomes than those without such connections. However, many schools need help recruiting and training the caring adults who are essential to implementing these high-quality, evidence-based programs.

Today, the Biden-Harris Administration, led by AmeriCorps and the Department of Education, is joining forces with leading national education, youth development, and service organizations and the Johns Hopkins Everyone Graduates Center to launch the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS). NPSS will help expand high-impact tutoring, mentoring, and other evidence-based support programs that help students succeed. The NPSS will bring together school districts, non-profits and higher education institutions to recruit, train and place screened adults in high impact roles as tutors, mentors, student success coaches, integrated student supports coordinators, and post-secondary education transition coaches, with the goal of ensuring an additional 250,000 adults serve in these roles over the next three years. This will also help build the pipeline of educators. As more Americans gain experience working in our schools, more will seek out roles as teachers and student support professionals.

To support this effort, AmeriCorps will prioritize the American Rescue Plan’s $20 million in Volunteer Generation Funds to assist non-profit organizations in recruiting and managing up to 200,000 additional volunteers in these critical positions in schools. The Department of Education has also made it clear that schools can use federal education funds as matching funds for AmeriCorps programs, making it easier for schools to partner with AmeriCorps grantees to support students. 

President Biden is calling on Americans to come together to support our students in a number of different ways:

  • Individuals, from young adults to retirees, can learn more about supporting youth through a range of volunteer and national service opportunities, through AmeriCorps and the NPSS.
  • Community-based organizations and school districts can expand or improve tutoring, mentoring and other programs through the NPSS or through AmeriCorps  
  • Employers across the country can pledge to support their employees in serving as volunteers, amplify these opportunities to serve, and get help in supporting these volunteer efforts.
  • Colleges and universities can learn more about and sign up to partner with K-12 schools and community-based organizations, providing their post-secondary students with meaningful opportunities to support K-12 students’ success. 

Organizations participating in NPSS include Accelerate, Afterschool Alliance, American Federation of Teachers, American School Counselor Association, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, City Year, Communities in Schools, COVID Collaborative, MENTOR, National 4-H Council, National College Attainment Network, National Education Association, National Student Support Accelerator, National Summer Learning Association, AASA: the School Superintendents Association, and Voices for National Service. For a full list of participating organizations, visit https://www.partnershipstudentsuccess.org/.

###https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/07/05/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-launches-national-effort-to-support-student-success/

The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading

September 6, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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The declines in the national test scores spanned almost all races and income levels and were markedly worse for the lowest-performing students.


By Sarah Mervosh New York Times Sep 1 2022

The results of a national test showed just how devastating the last two years have been for 9-year-old schoolchildren, especially the most vulnerable.

National test results released on Thursday showed in stark terms the pandemic’s devastating effects on American schoolchildren, with the performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading dropping to the levels from two decades ago.

This year, for the first time since the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests began tracking student achievement in the 1970s, 9-year-oldslost ground in math, and scores in reading fell by the largest margin in more than 30 years.

The declines spanned almost all races and income levels and were markedly worse for the lowest-performing students. While top performers in the 90th percentile showed a modest drop — three points in math — students in the bottom 10th percentile dropped by 12 points in math, four times the impact.

“I was taken aback by the scope and the magnitude of the decline,” said Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal agency that administered the exam earlier this year. The tests were given to a national sample of 14,800 9-year-olds and were compared with the results of tests taken by the same age group in early 2020, just before the pandemic took hold in the United States.

High and low performers had been diverging even before the pandemic, but now, “the students at the bottom are dropping faster,” Dr. Carr said.

In math, Black students lost 13 points, compared with five points among white students, widening the gap between the two groups. Research has documented the profound effect school closures had on low-income students and on Black and Hispanic students, in part because their schools were more likely to continue remote learning for longer periods of time.

The declines in test scores mean that while many 9-year-olds can demonstrate partial understanding of what they are reading, fewer can infer a character’s feelings from what they have read. In math, students may know simple arithmetic facts, but fewer can add fractions with common denominators.

The setbacks could have powerful consequences for a generation of children who must move beyond basics in elementary school to thrive later on.

“Student test scores, even starting in first, second and third grade, are really quite predictive of their success later in school, and their educational trajectories overall,” said Susanna Loeb, the director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, which focuses on education inequality.

“The biggest reason to be concerned is the lower achievement of the lower-achieving kids,” she added. Being so far behind, she said, could lead to disengagement in school, making it less likely that they graduate from high school or attend college.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is considered a gold standard in testing. Unlike state tests, it is standardized across the country, has remained consistent over time and makes no attempt to hold individual schools accountable for results, which experts believe makes it more reliable.

The test results offered a snapshot for just one age group: 9-year-olds, who are typically in third or fourth grade. (More results, for fourth graders and for eighth graders, will be released later this fall on a state-by-state level.)

“This is a test that can unabashedly speak to federal and state leaders in a cleareyed way about how much work we have to do,” said Andrew Ho, a professor of education at Harvard and an expert on education testing who previously served on the board that oversees the exam.

Over time, scores in reading, and especially math, have generally trended upward or held steady since the test was first administered in the early 1970s. That included a period of strong progress from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s.

But over the last decade or so, student scores had leveled off rather than gained, while gaps widened between low- and high-performing students.

Then came the pandemic, which shuttered schools across the country almost overnight. Teachers taught lessons over Zoom, and students sat at home, struggling to learn online.

In some parts of the country, the worst of the disruptions were short lived, with schools reopening that fall. But in other areas, particularly in big cities with large populations of low-income students and students of color, schools remained closed for many months, and some did not fully reopen until last year.

The national tests, Dr. Ho said, tell the story of a “decade of progress,” followed by a “decade of inequality” and then the “shock” of the pandemic, which came with a one-two punch.

“It erased the progress, and it exacerbated the inequality,” Dr. Ho said. “Now we have our work cut out for us.”

He estimated that losing one point on the national exam roughly translated to about three weeks of learning. That means a top-performing student who lost three points in math could catch up in as little as nine weeks, while a low-performing student who lost 12 points would need 36 weeks, or almost nine months, to make up ground — and would still be significantly behind more advanced peers.

There are indications that students — fully back in school — have begun to learn at a normal pace once again, but experts say it will take more than the typical school day to make up gaps created by the pandemic.

The results should be a “rallying cry” to focus on getting students back on track, said Janice K. Jackson, who led the Chicago Public Schools until last year and is now a board member of Chiefs for Change, which represents state education and school district leaders. She called for the federal government to step up with big ideas, invoking the Marshall Plan, the American initiative to help rebuild Europe after World War II.

“That is how dramatic it is to me,” she said, adding that politicians, school leaders, teachers’ unions and parents would have to set aside the many disagreements that flared during the pandemic and come together to help students recover.

“No more of the arguments, and the back and forth and the vitriol and the finger pointing,” she said. “Everybody should be treating this like the crisis that it is.”

But solutions may be rather basic, if difficult to carry out. Martin West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board that oversees the test, said that low-performing students simply needed to spend more time learning, whether it was in the form of tutoring, extended school days or summer school.

The federal government has budgeted $122 billion to help students recover, the largest single investment in American schools, and at least 20 percent of that money must be spent on academic catch-up. Yet some schools have had difficulty hiring teachers, let alone tutors, and others may need to spend far more than 20 percent of their money to close big gaps.

“I don’t see a silver bullet,” Dr. West said, “beyond finding a way to increase instructional time.”

This Chart Measures Your Life — and it Doesn’t Look Good

September 1, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Chad Williams  in Medium 

I’m supposed to live less than 4000 weeks, and each one breezes by

I read an article from Bloomberg titled “A Typical American Life, Week by Week”. The piece shows the chart below and then goes on to analyze the percentages these phases of your life take up, and how retirement is longer than people plan for, blah blah blah on and on it goes.

The whole time I’m just thinking: holy crap. Life is short.

Image Source: Bloomberg

Is this really all there is?

  1. Early Years
  2. Elementary School
  3. Middle School
  4. High School
  5. College
  6. Career/Graduate School
  7. Retirement

Seven phases of my life? I’m a dude. That means I get less than 4,000 weeks in this life. The last two weeks alone feel like they’ve flown by.

I’m prone to existentialism and cosmic claustrophobia when I think about how minuscule the span of our lives is.

How can we make our lives worth more than a collection of weeks easily condensed into a chart and colour-coded?

I’ve struggled with this question for a long time, and maybe there isn’t a satisfactory answer for everybody. But there are universal principles for working towards happiness we can all apply.

Think About The Next Generation

Building up the next round of troops for the universe to assail is quite rewarding. This can come in many forms.

  • Caring for your family. Love your kids, cherish the moments you get with them, and instruct them carefully so they can be upholders of goodness and right as they enter into the world.
  • Leave the world better than how you found it. Accomplish something that will continue to impact people once you’re gone, no matter how small.
  • Mentor a young person. Children — yes even the crowd of high school graduates who preen their feathers counts as children — need guides. The world is a crazy place. Help someone learn to navigate. Be an ear for their troubles and triumphs, and teach them a valuable skill. Set a good example for them.

Help Others

If you want to get scientific: helping others is linked to heightened reactions in your brain that correlate with happiness.

If you want to get honest: true satisfaction comes from being useful to other people. From benefiting other people. It’s a great thing to be able to help someone.

  • Invest in your community: Support locally owned businesses. Volunteer at homeless shelters. Actually slow down and chat with a librarian for once. Every person you see outside is just as interesting as you. So have neighbours over for dinner and get to know them — you may not think having dinner with someone is helping them much, but having a good friend is a very big thing. Being part of a collective outside of your individual self is a powerful path towards meaning and satisfaction.
  • Make yourself uncomfortable: Doing something good is going to be inconvenient for you. This is true almost absolutely. So go out of your way to make time for a friend, meet someone new, or offer to take on the extra load at work.

Perfect Yourself

Most people want a partner to live out their lives with. Well, how are you so certain you’re good enough to be lived with? Maturing into your best self is not only beneficiary in attracting partners and friendships — it feels good.

Not in a self-centred way of wanting to be better than everyone else. Rather it springs from a love of life. A love of life means wanting everything to be the best it possibly can be; for everything to grow to its highest potential.

  • Be good at something: Sound easy? Get really good at something — become competent. It’s such a powerful thing, being competent. And once you’ve gotten good at something, become the best at it. There isn’t a person in this world who is incapable of being the best at something, there are simply those who don’t know it yet.
  • Be kind: This is harder than you might think. I don’t mean just to be kind to your friends and people it’s easy to be kind to. Be kind to those everyone else despises. Be kind to those who despise you. Do we dream of a world where everyone gets along? No better place to start than in your own conduct.
  • Make your bed every day: What I mean is to have your life in order, and keep it that way. If you have broken relationships, mend them. If your career path is tedious, stabilize it. If your house is messy, clean it. And if your bed is disorderly, make it.

I know lots of people look at our short life span and think that it indicates life has no meaning. I believe our finite amount of time on this earth should push us to seek out our meaning all the more.

https://medium.com/illumination/this-chart-measures-your-life-and-it-doesnt-look-good-621c6ee844be

Finally, some basic justice for my girlfriend, Breonna Taylor

August 29, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Washington Post August 26th 2022 A21 Kenneth Walker is a native of Louisville.

After nearly two and a half years, a person connected with the Louisville Metro Police Department has finally taken some responsibility for the death of my girlfriend, Breonna Taylor.

Since March 13, 2020, I have had to hear lie after lie about what happened that horrible night. Now the police have begun to tell the truth — that the cops knew that they did not have probable cause to search Bre’s apartment, that they lied to get the search warrant that resulted in officers unlawfully breaking down our door in the middle of the night, that they conspired to cover their tracks after gunning Bre down, and that they kept lying for years.

Moments after I held Bre as she died, the police arrested and charged me with attempted murder. Knowing all the problems that this failed raid would create, the Louisville police tried to use me as a scapegoat to deflect blame. It almost worked.

Justice has been a long time coming. For two months in 2020, I sat in custody thinking and believing I might die in prison — and for what? But, during that time, the police in Minneapolis choked the life out of George Floyd as he repeatedly told them, “I can’t breathe.” Floyd’s murder led the world to look into the death of Breonna, the woman I loved. After Bre’s case started to receive attention, the case against me started to receive attention. Soon after, a judge dismissed it.

Following my release from jail, I sat by shell-shocked and waited for the Commonwealth of Kentucky to investigate the officers who caused the death of Bre and who wrongfully arrested, charged and blamed me for their mistakes. But instead of holding the officers responsible, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron told the world in September 2020 that it was my fault Bre died.

It was not my fault that the police refused to respond to Bre’s calls of “Who is it?” and returned more than 20 shots after I fired one shot to protect us in her apartment — a shot fired after the cops, holding a fraudulently obtained warrant, refused to identify themselves and knocked down our door in the middle of the night. Louisville police and local government officials made this about my (lawful) use of a firearm instead of their illegal conduct that led them to our doorstep.

This week, we got some accountability. Former police detective Kelly Goodlett pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy and admitted that the only information in the affidavit that might have justified a warrant was false. She admitted to knowing the warrant would be executed in the middle of the night and that it might risk injury or death to people in the home. She admitted that the warrant did not reflect up-to-date information. She also admitted that she and other members of the police department tried to cover up their lies.

The Justice Department’s investigation has begun to reveal the real story about what happened that night. There was no good reason for the cops to execute a search warrant at Bre’s apartment at any time, much less in the middle of the night. Federal charges are still pending against former officers Joshua Jaynes, Kyle Meany and Brett Hankison. All of these officers have been fired, although Meany did not lose his job until last week. The wheels of justice have turned very slowly, but I am grateful that the Justice Department has been faithful in its pursuit of the truth.

For me, Goodlett’s guilty plea is bittersweet. This case will follow me the rest of my life. I have to live as a witness to Bre’s horrific and tragic death. The memory of that door being forced open is with me constantly and makes it very hard to sleep. My mug shot has been shown all over the country. Even now, I am wrongly called a “thug” and a “drug dealer” by people I have never met. The Louisville police tried to have my civil suits against city and county officials dismissed, but they are proceeding.

I have to live with constant reminders of police falsely charging and mistreating me. While driving from Atlanta back to Kentucky last year, a Tennessee officer pulled me over for a traffic violation. When the officer ran my information, his system showed that charges of attempted murder of a police officer had been filed against me. Before I knew it, more police cars drove up. Luckily, the officers allowed me to explain that those charges had been dismissed. But, for a moment, I felt as helpless and afraid as I did on March 13, 2020.

This is my life. While I am grateful to have it, the nightmare continues.

AmeriCorps Project CHANGE at AFI Film Festival

August 24, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Project CHANGE 2021-22 at AFI for Graduation

It was a first for Project CHANGE for a number of reasons.

Firstly, to host a graduation in the form of a film festival. We have never done that before. We usually have speeches that we film and turn the graduation INTO a video memento. But this time, we did one better. We turned the graduation into a film festival.

Second, being based in Silver Spring, we have always known the prestigious AFI theater and complex is on our door step, but the idea of having an event there was beyond our thinking. It is a magnificent venue run by the best. We felt privileged to be staging our event there. And the ticker on the outside read “Congratulations to the Project CHANGE team of 2021-22.” Having your name up in lights is something else.

Lastly, Project CHANGE is lucky to have an award winning film maker on the team and a home grown film studio. With Ahmed Mansour and Filistia films directing the productions, we were assured of a moving tribute to the class of 2021-22 and their amazing year of service during the third year of the pandemic.

Enjoy the Show.

Some kids need harder lessons than schools are willing to give them

August 22, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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New data reveals stubborn preference for below grade-level instruction


Perspective by Jay Mathews Washington Post August 22 2022

Hundreds of teachers and much data over many years have convinced me that too many schools think the best way to educate kids is give them easy stuff.

I have heard complaints about this mostly from teachers of college-level Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs in high schools. They discovered impoverished children did surprisingly well in their difficult courses if they had more time and encouragement.

Yet these teachers continue to struggle against a widespread, if well-meaning, resistance to raising the level of learning. A new study of reading instruction in the 2021-2022 school year suggests this bias in favor of dumbing down instruction is still with us — and may affect our ability to recover from the pandemic.

A look at more than 3 million children in more than 150,000 classrooms who frequently use the ReadWorks reading instruction program indicates that students were just as successful on grade-level work as they were on below grade-level work. So their teachers rushed to give them more grade-level assignments, right?

Apparently not.

“That shift doesn’t appear to be happening,” said the report by TNTP, a nonprofit organization formerly known as The New Teacher Project. It has been working for 25 years to link poor and minority children with effective teaching. The report’s title is “Unlocking Acceleration: How Below Grade-Level Work is Holding Students Back in Literacy.”

Public education is facing a crisis of epic proportions

“Students are spending even more time on below grade-level work than they were before the pandemic,” the report said. “Students on the ReadWorks platform spent about a third of their time engaging with below grade-level texts and question sets. In fact, they received 5 percentage points more below grade-level content” than before the 2021-2022 school year.

“Students in schools serving more historically marginalized communities — particularly students experiencing poverty — were assigned the most below grade-level work. Students in schools serving the most students in poverty spent about 65% more time on below grade-level texts and question sets than their peers in the most affluent schools,” the report said.

The study does not compare the achievement of students taking below grade-level classes with those taking grade-level classes using randomly selected groups.

“We are making no data claims that say learning acceleration improves achievement by X, or students who were in a learning acceleration classroom had X better outcomes than those who were not,” TNTP spokesperson Jacob Waters said. “We simply seek to point out that across a giant sample of assignments, we’re not consistently making the choice to get kids access to grade-level content, especially if those kids attend schools that are serving large numbers of systemically and historically marginalized students.”

Tom Loveless, former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me more research is necessary before we accept the TNTP conclusions. He pointed to one randomized middle school study in Florida showing long-term benefits from below grade-level remediation, although the students in that program took two English language arts classes at the same time, one below grade-level and one at grade-level.

The TNTP study said students in high-poverty schools got less access to grade-level work “even when they’d already shown they can master it.” Students in such schools who consistently succeeded on grade-level assignments got less access to grade-level work in the future than students in more affluent schools who hadn’t mastered those assignments.

I have found in schools across the country that a kindly reluctance to put too much pressure on children leads educators to bar low-income and minority students from challenging courses.

An inside look at classrooms finds ‘false promises,’ wasted time, and failure to learn

In 1987, two math teachers at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles produced 26 percent of all Mexican American students in the country who passed an AP calculus exam. The only reasonable explanation for that seems to be that plenty of such students in other schools were capable of such work if well taught, but their schools wrongly thought they lacked the ability. The recent success of IDEA network charter schools in Texas focusing on AP and IB classes for Mexican American children supports that conclusion.

However, it takes more than squelching bad assumptions to improve schools. Thuan Nguyen, chief executive officer of the nationwide AVID program to raise student achievement, said what teachers need is “proven practices to support students when rigorous content becomes challenging and confusing.”

The TNTP report said the most effective way to alter incorrect assumptions about disadvantaged children’s abilities “is to give educators a chance to enact high expectations, then reflect on what students were able to accomplish when given a chance to engage in reading, writing and discussing content-rich, meaningful texts.”

I would like more randomized studies on that. Wrongheaded assumptions hurt progress in nearly every field of human endeavor, but they are particularly galling when they affect children.

It’s not political. I have never seen a campaign leaflet saying we shouldn’t give children hard work. Improving how we categorize our kids is something we can work on together.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/21/grade-level-reading-difficulty-challenge/






Parents and teachers cautiously optimistic for new school year

August 22, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Mental health, teacher shortages and monkeypox join list of covid concerns

By Nicole Asbury, Lauren Lumpkin and Hannah Natanson Updated August 20, 2022 at 10:22 a.m. EDT|Published August 20, 2022 at 10:00 a.m. EDT

Across the Washington region, thousands of children are getting ready to return to school. Teachers are preparing lessons and setting up their classrooms. Parents are booking last-minute doctor’s appointments for children behind on routine vaccinations.

The past few years have been difficult, with challenges including the coronavirus pandemic that forced some of the most drastic shifts in teaching and learning, and instances of school violence and culture war clashes.

Those issues — and others — are still on the minds of parents and teachers. In response to a Washington Post survey, parents and teachers said they were concerned about the lingering mental health challenges the pandemic caused for their children, students and themselves. Some also were concerned by the seeming disrespect shown by some students, parents and politicians for education and the work done in schools. Others fear a new health risk with the spread of the monkeypox virus, and the possibility of re-emerging coronavirus outbreaks continue to haunt many of them.

Still, many parents and teachers say they are optimistic about the new school year, hopeful that the past year of in-person learning has made a difference in students’ academic, social and emotional standing.

“That’s the big question,” said David Potasznik, an ESOL teacher at Rockville High School in Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools. “We’re hoping … but the fact remains that we’re behind where we would have expected.”

Many of the students Potasznik teaches are newcomers to the school district, so he’s uncertain whether they learned virtually or in-person during the year before. Montgomery County dropped its masking requirement in the spring; that move can help Potasznik teach students English, since they can see his mouth as he forms words. But Potasznik, 68, is in an age group that is more vulnerable to the coronavirus. He has both shots of the vaccine and two boosters, and he says he has avoided contracting covid-19 thus far. As the school start date has approached, he has considered whether to prioritize his health by masking or to forgo masking to better model speech patterns for his students.

“I guess I’m just going to have to see what it’s like in a week and make a call,” Potasznik said.

Advika Agarwal, a rising 11th-grader at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Md., was looking forward to seeing her friends back in the classroom and to work on environmental issues around the school district, including starting more composting programs at schools.

She says she is mostly positive about the upcoming school year but is concerned about coronavirus transmission rates increasing. She said she has seen emails from the school system’s PTA members about reinstating a mask mandate. Regardless of the school system’s decision, Agarwal said she plans to continue to wear a mask and sanitize her hands frequently.

“Cases are kind of coming down and then going up again, and it’s just kind of unpredictable,” Agarwal, 16, said.

Like many districts around the country, and most in the D.C. metro area, Montgomery County has made masks optional. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relaxed its covid guidelines this month, recommending that schools end quarantines for staffers and students exposed to the coronavirus and discontinue test-to-stay programs that allowed exposed students to stay in school if they repeatedly tested negative for the coronavirus and showed no symptoms of covid-19. The CDC’s guidelines are not mandatory, but many schools systems use them to set their own policies and, consequently, also have relaxed their covid rules.

In Virginia’s Prince William County, where school starts Monday, Marion Lasswell’s concern centers mostly on her two children still in grade school — and she has one starting college — and especially on her daughter, a high-school senior. Her son is in seventh-grade, is on the autism spectrum and receives an Individualized Education Program. For both children, she doubts their ability to behave appropriately with friends and in classroom settings: “They’ve been socially isolated for such a long time, I just don’t know how they would deal with other people.”

Lasswell’s children underwent fully virtual schooling for about two years. Although they went back to the classroom last year, her children kept their masks on and were very strict about social distancing, so she doesn’t feel that the year of brick-and-mortar instruction made much of a difference in teaching them how to speak to other children their age.

She said she feels less anxious about her son after an open house Thursday during which she watched him “interact with other kids, which was a little reassuring.” She is still apprehensive for her daughter, though, because the girl struggled intensely during isolation.

“We moved here just before the pandemic struck, so she hasn’t really been able to make friends as easily,” Lasswell said. “And in that age group, they already have their cliques and stuff.”

What parents should say to teachers (according to teachers)

As districts continue to adjust to the realities of the two-year-old coronavirus pandemic, there are concerns about a different virus: monkeypox. Dominique Moore, a teacher at Johnson Middle School in Southeast Washington, said there has not been much guidance about dealing with a potential outbreak.

Nathaniel Beers, a general and developmental-behavioral pediatrician at Children’s National Hospital in D.C., said that despite the low numbers — only two cases had been confirmed in children as of Aug. 10 — parents do have concerns about monkeypox.

Monkeypox is different from many other childhood viruses, such as the flu, coronavirus and chickenpox, in that it requires not just respiratory transmission, but direct and sustained contact and is most likely spread with direct contact with a lesion.

Beers, who supervises the Children’s National program that places school nurses in D.C. public and charter schools, said that nurses’ most recent training includes an update on monkeypox, how to identify it and reminders about taking precautions as they care for children.

Most viruses are contagious for a short time, but people with monkeypox may have to isolate for two to four weeks, he said. “It’s not ideal, given the last two and a half years that we have had to have a virus that would cause prolonged periods of time that a child was unable to return to school.”

Beers said he does not expect to see widespread monkeypox disease in schools and day cares. Instead, spread is more likely to be seen on college campuses, “where people are living in congregate settings and young people are making questionable decisions,” Beers said.

Beyond the health questions, some parents and teachers also have academic concerns about their students.

“The two years that they were virtual, they were literally cheating. They would look up the answers on Google,” Lasswell of Prince William said. “I’m not sure if they have the quality of education or are caught up to where they need to be.”

Nonetheless, she is beginning the 2022-2023 school year with optimism, she said. She is determined to feel hopeful for what the fresh school year will bring. “I’m worried but hopeful. Concerned but hopeful,” she said, emphasizing each “but.”

Jenna Portnoy contributed to this report.

============

Metro area systems begin classes Monday. Here’s what to expect in your school:

D.C.

School system and city leaders launched an urgent effort this summer to bring roughly 30,000 children — or a quarter of public and private school students — up to date on routine vaccinations for illnesses including polio and measles.

Students over age 12 also will need to be vaccinated against the coronavirus to attend school this year, a measure that was passed by the D.C. Council and has drawn some criticism for its potential to exacerbate academic disparities between Black and White children. Students who do not comply with the requirement will be barred from school.

Students have 20 days after the first day of school, however, to comply. The Office of the State Superintendent of Education will host weekly vaccination events next month.

D.C. schools, like other districts nearby, also will soften some coronavirus protocols to mesh with updated guidance from the CDC. But D.C. schools will continue to enforce a “test-to-return” policy, which requires students and staffers to show proof of a negative coronavirus test for the first day of class.

D.C. also is feeling the effects of a nationwide shortage of teachers. D.C.’s public school system serves more than 50,000 students and employs about 4,000 teachers on average each year. Leaders expect to start the school year with about 150 open positions, and central-services staffers will fill teacher gaps during September. Substitute teaching contracts also will be expanded.

But those measures do not address the root causes of teacher resignations, including an evaluation system that feels punitive and inflexible, said Lucia Cuomo, an ESL teacher in Northeast Washington.

“I think it’s time for policymakers and school districts to reevaluate how teachers are treated all around,” Cuomo said, “to reevaluate how change is being implemented and to revaluate how teachers are being financially rewarded.”

Maryland

Maryland’s largest school districts — in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties — are bringing students back Aug. 29 amid hundreds of teacher and staff vacancies.

As of Friday morning, 187 full-time teacher positions were open, with 34 applicants in the process of being hired, Montgomery County officials said. Also, 457 staff positions were open. Seventy bus driver positions were open, with 41 candidates being trained.

The teacher openings will be filled with substitute teachers, many of which are retired teachers, until the positions are filled permanently, and Schools Superintendent Monifa McKnight has pledged not to increase class sizes.

Prince George’s County has about 900 vacant teacher positions and 400 vacant support staff positions, officials said. Teacher gaps will be filled with substitute teachers and retirees; with increased pay. Extra pay also will be offered to teachers who cover more classrooms.

Prince George’s County Public Schools, with roughly 128,000 students, has 168 bus driver openings. Parents have been warned to expect delays during the first few weeks of school. Bell times have been shifted at some schools to make sure students get to class on time.

Parents also will be allowed to enter school buildings this school year, but many parent-teacher meetings are likely to be conducted virtually. The school system has a mask mandate for students and staffers on school grounds, with coronavirus transmission levels being periodically reviewed. The school system will provide coronavirus rapid tests to symptomatic students.

Masks are optional in Montgomery County Public Schools. The school system’s new coronavirus protocols fall in line with the CDC’s latest relaxed guidance for schools. MCPS also will provide coronavirus tests to students who are in high-risk situations, such as during confirmed outbreaks, and to symptomatic students.

Virginia

In Northern Virginia, school will begin this year with few coronavirus precautions, some stopgap measures to solve teacher shortages and, in the Alexandria district, extra precautions to ensure student safety.

Both Fairfax County Public Schools — the state’s largest system, with roughly 179,000 students — and Alexandria City Public Schools, which enrolls close to 16,000 students, send children back into classrooms Monday.

Neither district is requiring masking, per state law. Alexandria is requiring that staffers be vaccinated against the coronavirus; Fairfax is not. The vaccine is not required for students.

The Loudoun school system and the Arlington system do not return children to classrooms until Aug. 25 and Aug. 29, respectively. Loudoun enrolls slightly more than 81,000 students, and Arlington enrolls roughly 27,000. Loudoun is not requiring employee vaccination, but Arlington is; neither district is requiring students to be vaccinated.

All four districts experienced a rise in teacher resignations over the past academic year, but officials said staffing gaps are shrinking closer to the start of the school year.

Arlington was down to 56 full-time-teacher vacancies as of Aug. 18. Alexandria has shrunk its teacher vacancies to about 4 percent (60 or so positions). Fairfax is 99 percent staffed with teachers, and Loudoun is 98 percent staffed.

Each district will rely on short- and long-term substitute teachers to ensure that all classes are staffed.

Alexandria’s start of classes also will bring increased safety measures, after a run of safety incidents involving students in the 2021-2022 school year, including the fatal stabbing of an 18-year-old near Alexandria City High School in May.

The district is instituting a policy requiring students to have their school identification cards with them each day. Secondary schools also will receive additional “school security officers … to support school administrators,” the district has said. The district also has expanded cellphone service at Alexandria City High School.