By the Editorial Board July 4, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT Washington Post
On July 4, Americans pause to celebrate the brave and radical actions of 1776, when 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence from the British monarchy, creating a nation that not only survives but also remains the world’s strongest. Wars, pandemics, inequality and political strife, among other challenges, have threatened this nation. But what those 56 men envisioned holds firm today: Its strength flows from Americans’ ability to acknowledge and work through differences.S
Today, the United States doesn’t face a common external foe akin to the British crown — or the Soviet Union, as in the Cold War. Instead, cultural shifts among Americans threaten to make the country more divided and weaker. This long Independence Day weekend is time to recognize the danger of Americans’ growing independence from one another.
These cultural shifts are visible not just in increasing partisan polarization but also in how Americans relate to one another day by day. Americans volunteer less than they used to, increasingly making more time for their own hobbies, but not to help others. In the early 2000s, nearly 30 percent of Americans over age 16 saidthey volunteered at least once in the past year.That had fallen to 23 percent by 2021. It hasn’t been a straight decline, but the trend is generally downward. If volunteering rates now were similar to the early 2000s, about 12 million more people would volunteer each year. Many charities say they are seeing this firsthand as they struggle to get enough help. Charitable giving has declined even more. Nearly 70 percent of Americans said they gave money to a charitable cause in the early 2000s versus only 50 percent in 2018.
The reasons are not entirely clear. The pandemic contributed to a pullback in any type of socializing in person. Some also point to the 2017 Republican tax law changes that led to fewer people claiming a charitable tax deduction, since they no longer itemize their deductions. But charitable giving was falling before that change, and most Americans weren’t giving solely for a tax write off. The bigger explanation appears to be a great disengagement from civic life. Many people no longer have interest in joining institutions of any sort — government, religious or civic. The United States is becoming a “less charitable nation,” researchers say.
The decline in volunteering and giving coincides with a drop-off in religious attendance, union membership and childbearing. Suburban areas have seen an especially large decline over time. Parents with children under 18 at home are more likely to volunteer formally. Many Americans say they help out neighbors informally by babysitting, petsitting or running errands, but these courtesies are not the same as formal volunteering, in which one helps people one does not know well — or at all.
More Americans seem to prioritize wellness — their mental and physical health, and their work-life balance — especially after the pandemic and as baby boomers age. In general, this is good — but not when taken to extremes. Entrepreneur Michael Karnjanaprakorn wrote recently that today’s status symbols are “sabbaticals, long attention spans, quality time with kids, valuing time over money, [a] slow and calm lifestyle, [a] meeting-free calendar, having ‘enough,’ early retirement [and a] biological age younger than your real age.” Noticeably absent from the list was any mention of using free time to help others — or connecting with new people, even though research shows that social interaction is crucial to overall health.
One result of these trends is a loneliness epidemic. Another is the weakening of Americans’ understanding and sense of connection to their fellow citizens. The country has a less generous welfare state than other advanced nations, offset somewhat by a strong charitable culture. But Americans now see less often parts of their communities outside their immediate friend circles and neighborhoods. Volunteering makes people aware of different socio-economic conditions and struggles — and ways to help.
The government can fill some of the gaps. The United States is the only advanced economy with no requirement that employers offer paid sick leave or paid vacation days. If employers close on July 4, there is no federal law requiring employees to be paid for the holiday. That should change.
But the government cannot make up for the fraying of civil society, and it should not try. It is up to Americans to sustain and renew their bold experiment in self-government. In past periods of crisis and civil strife, they have. Current and rising generations can again, re-engaging in their communities for the sake of their country — and for themselves.
Editorials represent the views of The Post as an institution, as determined through discussion among members of the Editorial Board, based in the Opinions section and separate from the newsroom.
People’s ratings of life satisfaction, hope, and other dimensions of their well-being have become important metrics in disciplines such as economics and public health because they predict health, productivity, employment, and other social outcomes. Recent research suggests that hope, which can be measured with survey instruments, is the most important dimension of well-being for predicting future outcomes for individuals and society. Trends in hope have been tracked as a key factor in the rising numbers of U.S. deaths of despair—a term that encompasses suicide, overdoses, and alcohol-related mortality. Surveys of hope among low-income adolescents in Lima, Peru, and St. Louis, Missouri, have shown that those who have hope for the future—and who are often supported by a mentor—are more likely to invest effort in their education and avoid risky behaviors. By contrast, individuals in despair are unlikely to respond to incentives or opportunities and are vulnerable to misinformation and conspiracy theories. This article provides evidence that hope influences social and economic outcomes and examples of policies that can help restore hope in populations that have lost it. Preventing another generation from falling into despair is essential to a society’s health and security.
_________________________________________________________________________ Societies in the United States and many other countries have become increasingly polarized and unequal, not only in regard to income and opportunity but also in terms of how people feel about their lives. These sentiments matter to economists and other social scientists because feelings such as happiness, optimism, and hope—elements of what researchers refer to as “subjective well-being”—can, when properly measured, predict for both individuals and groups such important outcomes as physical and mental health, productivity, civic participation, longevity, and success in the labor market.
A growing body of evidence suggests that the single most consequential component of subjective well-being is hope. People usually think of hope as an emotion rather than something that can be measured and linked to behavioral, economic, and political outcomes. Economists who study hope—a small group that includes me—define it slightly differently. In social science, hope is not simply the belief or feeling that one’s circumstances will get better: That is optimism. Rather, hope is optimism combined with the belief that one has the agency to make things better.
Research suggests that hope, like happiness and other aspects of well-being, has a genetic component and is also shaped by environmental factors such as familial and community support, education, and opportunity.1 This influence of environment means that policymakers and civic leaders have an opportunity to promote and nurture hope among citizens.
The stakes for doing so, or failing to do so, are high. My colleagues and I have tracked downward trends in hope in the United States and linked them to the rising numbers of deaths of despair, a term that encompasses suicide, overdoses, and alcohol-related mortality. Individuals in despair—a condition in which people do not care whether they live or die and therefore lack a narrative for their own future—are not likely to respond to incentives or nudges or take advantage of opportunities to get ahead. Research shows that they are more vulnerable to misinformation, conspiracy theories, and radicalization.
Those who have hope for the future are more likely to invest effort in their education and avoid risky behaviors that can jeopardize their health.
Conversely, in communities where hope is nurtured, people are more likely to thrive. With collaborators, I have conducted surveys of hope among low-income adolescents in Peru and Missouri and found that those who have hope for the future—many being the recipients of encouragement from a mentor in their family or community—are more likely to invest effort in their education and avoid risky behaviors that can jeopardize their health.
Social scientists and policymakers should both measure hope as a distinct constituent of well-being and develop interventions that cultivate it.
In this article, I provide empirical evidence and review lessons from well-being research and other disciplines that suggest possible policies for restoring hope in populations where it has been lost or diminished. I also recommend—as I argue in my recent book, The Power of Hope: How the Science of Well-Being Can Save Us From Despair2—that social scientists and policymakers should both measure hope as a distinct constituent of well-being and develop interventions that cultivate it. In the United States, preventing another generation from falling into despair is essential to the population’s heath, well-being, cohesion, and even national security (see note A).
Sizing Up a Crisis of Despair
By several measures, the United States is experiencing a full-blown crisis of despair. Suicides, fatal drug overdoses, and deaths related to alcohol use are at unprecedented levels. For example, overdoses alone caused nearly 107,000 deaths in 2021, up from 52,400 in 2015.3,4 And, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, surveys of high school students across the United States indicate that the rate of mental health problems in adolescents, especially young women, has consistently risen since the surveys began in 2011, a pattern exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.5 In 2021, three in five teenage girls reported feeling persistent sadness, and one in three said they had contemplated suicide.3,5 And the malaise extends more broadly. When asked in a recent Gallup poll whether they were satisfied with the way things were going in the United States, only 19% of Americans said that they were. This percentage starkly contrasts with the high of 65% in 1986.6
The crisis was brought to light in the seminal 2015 article by economists Ann Case and Angus Deaton that introduced the term “deaths of despair.”7 Their 2017 follow-up paper showed that these preventable deaths among White people without a college degree were rising quickly enough to potentially reduce overall U.S. life expectancy.8
At about the same time, Sergio Pinto and I found remarkable gaps in hope and optimism between African American and White people, which were widest for those at low levels of income. We found that low-income African Americans are 3 times as likely as Whites to score high in hope on an 11-point optimism scale. This advantage aligns with trends in mortality, in which low-income Whites, who have traditionally had lower mortality rates, are losing ground compared with low-income African Americans, who are making gradual progress.9 In a more recent analysis published in a Brookings Global Working Paper in 2022, we showed that depression (a sign of despair and lack of hope) preceded deaths of despair among individuals and communities by 2 to 4 years, suggesting that well-being metrics could have served as a warning indicator had they been collected regularly.3
Measuring hope in individuals and across populations is, however, a relatively new area of academic inquiry, especially in economics. Economic research into well-being generally concentrates on happiness and satisfaction with one’s life as key determinants of human welfare and quality of life. Happiness and satisfaction typically correlate with hope and are related to it, but hope differs in its emphasis on a belief in one’s ability to improve one’s situation. Researchers often measure hope by administering surveys, and they are becoming more skilled at verifying that participants’ self-reported hope is, indeed, hope. For instance, researchers may correlate the self-reports with biological or psychological markers, such as the level of the stress hormone cortisol in a saliva sample and the presence of Duchenne smiles—smiles that involve the eyes as well as the mouth and convey genuine happiness.10
Health and Social Consequences of Hope and Despair
As already mentioned, research suggests that well-being traits such as happiness and hope have a genetic component yet hope, like many other traits and emotions, can be influenced by environmental factors like familial support, education, and opportunity, including opportunities created by shifting societal trends.11 For example, in a 2019 study of respondents in the U.S. Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID), Kelsey J. O’Connor and I found that African Americans and women experienced increases in hope in the late 1970s, likely because of expanded civil rights and the woman’s movement, whereas men with less than a high school education experienced decreases in hope over the same time period.12
In our PSID study, O’Connor and I found that a higher level of hope predicts better health and longevity.12 Participants, who were born in the 1930s and 1940s, had been surveyed while in their 20s and asked whether they thought their lives would “work out.” Today I consider the question to be a proxy measure of hopefulness. Participants who said they thought their lives would work out, compared with members of their peer group (matched on age, race, and gender) who were not as hopeful (that is, they indicated that they did not think their lives would work out), were more likely to be alive in 2015.
My colleague Julia R. Pozuelo and I extended our analysis of the link between hope and long-term outcomes by following 400 low-income adolescents in Lima, Peru, over 3 years.13 At the beginning of the study, 85% of the participants told us that they planned to go to college or seek postgraduate education even though none had parents educated beyond secondary school. This was a surprisingly high level of hope and aspiration. An interesting detail is that almost all of them had a mentor—a teacher, a relative, or another respected adult—who supported their aspirations. Three years later, 90% of those who planned to pursue higher education were still enrolled, and they were 15% to 20% less likely than their less hopeful peers to have engaged in risky health behaviors, such as smoking or having unsafe sex.
We repeated the survey in low-income neighborhoods in St. Louis, one primarily African American and one primarily White. Remarkably, the same differences in hope that our earlier work highlighted between low-income African American and White adults held consistently among our adolescent respondents. The African American adolescents were more hopeful and more likely to trust others and to aspire to advance beyond a high school education. The White teenagers showed a good deal of self-reliance but were less hopeful, were less likely to trust others, and did not plan to continue their education past high school. Another clear difference between the two groups was that the African American adolescents were much more likely to have a local mentor who encouraged their efforts in school, whereas the White adolescents much more often reported that their parents did not support any plans for education beyond high school. The implication, here and in the Peru study, is that having a mentor to rely on for support helps young people remain hopeful and on track with their dreams.2
Although community well-being is difficult to measure, empirical evidence suggests that individual-level hope has positive spillover effects. When a community has many individuals with high levels of life satisfaction, their satisfaction seems to spill into the community, increasing the well-being of individuals in that community who have low levels of life satisfaction.14 Hope may spill over into a community and raise its collective well-being in a similar manner. Whether, how, and why this works are matters that can and should be explored in future empirical research. Despair, meanwhile, has negative psychological spillover effects on community well-being.15,16
Other research establishes links between lack of hope and vulnerability to misinformation. Individuals experiencing despair lack a narrative for their future and the wherewithal to pursue purposeful activity; these deficits often coexist with the tendency to believe fake news and conspiracy theories, a correlation that is supported by recent neurological research.17,18
Promoting Hope: Lessons and Policies
In light of the growing body of evidence that hopelessness harms society in many measurable ways—constraining educational attainment and healthy habits among young people; driving addiction, suicide, and other deaths of despair; and impairing voters’ ability to discern truth—it would behoove community and political leaders to take steps to cultivate hope. As I noted in a 2021 Brookings report,19 an important first step would be to regularly track aspects of well-being in official government statistics just as countries such as the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Canada do.19
An important first step would be to regularly track aspects of well-being in official government statistics just the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Canada do.
The United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics pioneered the regular inclusion of well-being metrics in its annual statistics, using the ONS 4. This is a set of four questions that capture distinct dimensions of well-being: two cognitive evaluations (one for life satisfaction and one for meaning and purpose in life) and two daily experience, or affect, measures (one that asks about yesterday’s level of happiness and one that asks about yesterday’s level of anxiousness). Responses to all four are made on a 0 to 10 scale, with 0 being the lowest score and 10 the highest. The United Kingdom is in the process of expanding its battery of well-being questions with several new ones intended to capture satisfaction with specific life domains, such as work and health, as well as a question related to hope. These are still in the testing phase but should be incorporated into the next round of the country’s Annual Population Survey.
If the United States had a standard indicator of well-being that could be tracked across populations and places over time, not unlike how the gross national product serves as an indicator of a country’s fiscal well-being, changes in that indicator could serve to alert policymakers that a population’s well-being was declining so they could intervene before a full-blown crisis arose. Life satisfaction is the most used metric of well-being and an obvious first measure to track. Yet adding a hope metric (as the United Kingdom has decided to do) would further enhance understanding of a critical dimension of the public’s well-being and provide a basis for directing interventions.
Federal agencies also can provide more support for hope cultivation efforts at the local and community levels. In my 2021 Brookings report,19 I recommended creating a federal task force for combating despair that would serve primarily as an information clearinghouse to inform local practitioners about interventions from around the country that succeeded in reducing deaths of despair, keeping adolescents on track in school, and addressing other aspects of hopelessness. Such a task force could provide small grants for logistical support in low-resource settings. Here, too, the United Kingdom offers a useful model. The What Works Centre for Wellbeing was set up at the same time that the ONS 4 was rolled out. The center, funded by both government and private grants, collects reports of experiences with a variety of evidence-based interventions that have proven helpful at fighting despair. These interventions have applied a variety of strategies to counteract despair, such as promoting self-esteem and ways to engage in the community to reduce loneliness; enhancing autonomy and respect among workers to improve workplace satisfaction; and introducing soft skills such as stress reduction, relationship skills, and healthy diet and exercise habits into middle and high school curricula to promote self-esteem and resilience. Efforts like these are most likely to succeed when they include local input and participation, but they also benefit from external logistical advice and support. In the United States, a 10-year-old nonprofit called Results for America plays a somewhat similar role, providing guidance and grants supporting myriad local efforts to optimize opportunities and well-being around the country but without the benefit of government well-being data.
Research on well-being suggests that one straightforward way to cultivate hope in those who lack it is to provide opportunities for volunteering, engaging in the arts, or enjoying nature. Activities like these encourage isolated people, especially older ones, to leave their homes and actively engage with and contribute to their communities. For children and adolescents, teaching coping and resilience tools in school has been shown to have a lasting positive effect on academic performance and well-being scores. For example, students in the Greater Manchester area of England who participated in the #BeeWell program, which teaches soft skills to promote personal responsibility and resilience, continued to show improvements three years after participating. The program was complemented by neighborhood-based support groups.20
The value of local support, in the form of family or community-based mentors, was also a key takeaway from surveys my collaborators and I conducted to measure hopefulness among low-income adolescents in Peru and St. Louis.13 Such support is particularly important in underserved areas, where access to mental health care is limited. (For an example of an organization offering such support, read about the Visible Hands Collaborative at https://visiblehandscollaborative.org.)For a summary of recommendations, see the sidebar Who Should Do What.To spread hope in the United States and elsewhere, scholars must learn more about the factors that underpin well-being and develop interventions that communities and political leaders can apply to nurture hope’s growth where it is lacking and support it where it exists. Policies based on the scientific study of hope could be critical to sparing future generations from lives of despair.
Key Points
•Hope is an aspect of well-being that is increasingly recognized by economists and other social scientists as having important effects on health, employment, productivity, and longevity
.•Like other dimensions of subjective well-being, hope can be measured with survey instruments that are validated by biological and psychological markers. Hope is distinct from happiness and other dimensions of well-being in that it entails a sense of agency in finding a positive pathway forward.
•The United States is in the grip of a hopelessness crisis. This crisis is most clearly reflected by the rising numbers of deaths of despair (suicide, drug overdose, alcohol-related illness) but also by labor force drop-out, dismal academic achievement, and increases in political polarization and beliefs in conspiracy theories
.•Research suggests that hope can be bolstered with interventions and policies aimed at improving resilience among adolescents, reducing isolation among older people, and directing resources to communities in despair. Successful interventions typically involve community leaders creating opportunities for community members to participate in the arts, volunteer, or engage in school-based group activities. Yet more work is needed both in measuring hope and in determining the best ways to promote hope in a given context. (See the Who Should Do What sidebar for detailed policy recommendations.)
Who Should Do What
Following are steps that federal policymakers can take to better understand the scope of despair in the United States and identify programs that can address it:
•Create a federal task force that coordinates efforts to combat despair around the country. It could also serve as an information clearinghouse where people launching new local initiatives can get information about successful strategies and tools, and it could provide logistical assistance and seed grants.
•Track and measure hope and despair along with other well-being statistics with instruments such as those used by the United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics. When surveys are consistent across countries, learning and the generation of an international well-being monitor are facilitated.
•Invest in research that aims to better understand, measure, and facilitate hope, and coordinate with other funders of such research. Programs that rely on a range of public and nongovernmental sources are typically more cost-effective and productive than those funded solely by government grants.
•Although government officials are probably best positioned to measure and track national data on hope and despair, they should make use of the expertise of scholars, statisticians, and others who can advise on survey design and other measurement questions and identify successful community experiences that can be replicated.
Following are steps that community leaders can take to promote and cultivate hope:
•To help children and adolescents, school leaders, civic organizations, and local policymakers can expand efforts to teach self-esteem, resilience, and coping skills in school and community programs, as the United Kingdom’s #BeeWell program does. Media literacy programs can be instituted to teach young people how to identify and reject misinformation.
•To help young adults, local governments and civic groups can invest in mentoring programs and expand access to mental health care and to skills training for the jobs of the future.
•To help older and isolated adults, local governments and civic organizations can implement programs that promote community involvement, such as volunteering, access to the arts, and walks in nature, as the What Works Centre for Wellbeing does in the United Kingdom.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Footnote
A. This article expands on an essay titled “The New Science of Hope” that the author published with The Atlantic in April 2023.Go to Footnote
25% to 54% of Gen Z K-12 students are lacking engaging school experiences
Engagement is particularly low among non-college-bound students
Students are most excited to learn when teachers make it interesting
WASHINGTON, D.C. — As parents and children prepare for the start of a new school year, a survey from the Walton Family Foundation and Gallup finds that the experiences young people in the U.S. have in their middle and high school classrooms are closely tied to their confidence and optimism about their future — but many schools are struggling to engage their students.
The online survey was conducted April 26-May 9, 2024, with 4,157 12- to 27-year-old children and young adults, including 2,317 who are enrolled in a K-12 school, using the probability-based Gallup Panel. This is the latest in the Voices of Gen Z study, a multiyear research effort to understand the educational and life experiences of this generation.
Between 25% and 54% of students say they are not having eight engaging experiences in school, such as feeling that what they are learning is important or interesting. Less than half of students say their schoolwork positively challenges them (49%) or aligns with what they do best (46%).
One-third or less of students strongly agree they are having each of these engaging experiences, and nearly half (46%) do not strongly agree they are having any of them.
The extent to which Gen Z K-12 students feel engaged in the classroom is an important factor in their overall wellbeing and outlook for the future. The 25% of students who report the highest ratings on these engagement items are more than twice as likely as students who report the lowest 25% of ratings to be thriving in their lives (76% vs. 32%, respectively) and are more than four times as likely to strongly agree they have a great future ahead of them (61% vs. 15%).
Students who do not plan to pursue a degree after high school are also notably less likely than college-bound students to feel motivated by, interested in or excited about what they are learning in school. They are also significantly less likely to feel their schoolwork gives them the opportunity to do what they do best.
What would it take to get Gen Z more engaged in the classroom? According to the students themselves, the teacher plays a big role: Six in 10 say that when they are most excited about or interested in what they are learning, it is because their teacher made the material interesting and exciting for them. The same percentage mention that the subject matter was something they wanted to learn more about. Nearly half of Gen Z K-12 students (46%) also say opportunities to engage with the material in a hands-on way drive their interest, and about one in three (35%) most enjoy what they are learning when they can connect it to the real world.
Gen Z Feels Optimistic About the Future — but Not Prepared for It
One of the key findings from the first year of the Voices of Gen Z study was the contrast between the optimism young people had for the future and the relatively low levels of confidence they expressed about their readiness for it. One year later, the gap remains: While nearly eight in 10 Gen Zers (79%) agree they have a great future ahead of them, about half (51%) agree that they feel prepared for that future.
Optimism is largely consistent across age and gender. Black Gen Zers are more likely than their peers to feel they have a great future ahead of them; however, this group remains among the least likely segments of Gen Z to feel prepared for the future. Meanwhile, though not uniquely optimistic, 25- to 27-year-olds, Asian and White Gen Zers, and Gen Z men and boys are most likely to feel prepared for the future.
Gen Z students who do not plan to pursue a degree after high school are less likely than their college-bound peers to agree they feel optimistic about the future. About two-thirds of those who do not plan to attend college (68%) believe they have a great future ahead of them, compared with more than eight in 10 students planning to pursue an associate (81%) or bachelor’s degree (86%). These non-college-bound students are also less likely to agree they feel prepared for their future (40%) than those hoping to earn an associate degree (45%) or bachelor’s degree (54%).
Due to the relationship between school engagement and Gen Z’s future outlook, the dampened optimism non-college-bound students feel may be a reflection of the consistently lower levels of engagement they report at school, as well as a belief that what they are learning may not be relevant to their postgraduation lives.
Bottom Line
The extent to which Gen Z K-12 students feel hopeful about and prepared for their future is linked to how engaged they feel in the classroom. Unfortunately, fewer than two in 10 students strongly agree that what they are learning in class feels important, interesting, challenging or aligned with their natural talents. This disconnect is especially high among students who do not want to attend college, and previous Gallup research finds that engagement declines as students advance along their K-12 journeys.
Gen Z students suggest several strategies teachers and schools could use that might help increase their engagement: Learning from teachers who are themselves highly engaged with the material and finding opportunities to apply what they are learning in a hands-on, relevant way are two such strategies. Finding ways to implement these and other strategies for all students, including those who do not plan to pursue further education after high school, might not only increase student engagement in the present but also better prepare those students for success in adulthood.
Deputy Superintendent; Office of School Support and Well-being; Office of District Operations Social-Emotional and Mental Health Programming and Services for Students A. B. C.
PURPOSE To set forth a framework for a multitiered system of universal, targeted, and intensive student services that support the essential educational mission of Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS): student learning and academic achievement, school attendance, and school completion To affirm the Board of Education’s commitment to student social-emotional well-being and mental health as essential to student academic success
ISSUE Student learning and academic achievement, school attendance, and school completion all have strong social-emotional and mental health components: cognitive demands for learning; social and emotional and mental health demands for behaving according to school rules, norms, and expectations; and physical demands to be active throughout the school day. School communities thrive when the student body is engaged in school life, healthy, and its members make positive decisions that promote their own well-being and the wellbeing of others.
POSITION 1. The Board affirms the importance of students and parents/guardians having access to reliable and caring sources of support in times of worry, concern, or crisis. In every MCPS school setting, students shall have access to social-emotional and mental health professionals and other trusted adults who interact with students regularly and can facilitate appropriate and timely connections with social emotional and mental health supports, programming, and services for students when needed.
MCPS will establish learning objectives and supporting resources for MCPS staff and, as appropriate, volunteers who regularly interact with students, so that they are knowledgeable about the functions of the Student Well-being Teams (SWBTs) and Educational Management Teams (EMTs)., to activate available resources, such as small-group skills training, short-term individual or group counseling, case management, home visits/interventions for absenteeism, behavior threat assessment, suicide assessment, crisis intervention, or referral to community partner agencies for individual or group therapy.
2. 3. 4. Consistent with Policy ABC, Family-School Partnerships, the Board promotes student and family access to social-emotional well-being and mental health supports, programming, and services, provided either directly by MCPS staff or through community partners.
a) b) Students will have regular opportunities to meet in person with school based MCPS social-emotional and mental health professionals, who will help them understand, as appropriate, the programming and services available to students, including each school’s SWBT.
MCPS will effectively communicate school-level information to families and students about the social-emotional well-being, mental health professionals, and programming and services at each school, either through direct provision by MCPS staff or through referrals to community partner agencies.
The Board seeks to support students’ academic success with a multitiered system of supports that – a) b) fosters positive, respectful, orderly, and safe learning environments necessary for effective learning, in alignment with Policy COA, Student Well-being and School Safety, and the Be Well 365 Initiative; and
responds to specific student needs by analyzing, organizing, and activating available resources and appropriate student services professionals, including school counselors, school psychologists, school social workers (SSWs), and direct outreach professionals such as pupil personnel workers (PPWs), emergent multilingual learner therapeutic counselors (ETCs), and parent community coordinators (PCC).
A multitiered system should include, but not be limited to, the following key components: a) b) Universal programming available to all students – grade-specific and age appropriate classroom instruction through the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) curricula for health education and mental health literacy;
research-informed schoolwide social-emotional learning programs; and drop-in support from school-based mental health professionals.
Targeted student supports – consultation among parents/guardians and grade-level or subject-area teams, as appropriate, to consider specific student needs and strengths and develop behavior support and interventions that address identified concerns.
c) 5. Intensive support – coordination through SWBTs and EMTs to activate available resources, such as small-group skills training, short-term individual or group counseling, case management, home visits/interventions for absenteeism, behavior threat assessment, suicide assessment, crisis intervention, or referral to community partner agencies for individual or group therapy.
MCPS shall provide parents/guardians with access to student educational records entitled to them under the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
6. D. MCPS partnerships with with community partner agencies shall be established through memoranda of understanding that specify, as appropriate, partnership roles and responsibilities, referral processes, safety planning, decision-making rules, and confidentiality and data-sharing protocols in alignment with FERPA, which governs MCPS staff and programming, and the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act, which governs health providers.
DESIRED OUTCOMES 1. 2. 3. E.
All students will thrive and become healthy, resilient, self-confident, and successful young people, who are engaged in school life and make positive decisions that promote their own well-being and the well-being of others.
Students and families will access, when needed, the appropriate supports that students may need and understand the purposes of social-emotional and mental health programming.
The educational mission of MCPS will be supported by an effective and efficient system of universal, targeted, and intensive student services to foster positive, respectful, orderly, and safe learning environments necessary for effective learning.
IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGIES The superintendent of schools will –
1. 2. implement counseling, social-emotional learning, health education, and mental health literacy curricula to support student learning and academic achievement, school attendance, and school completion with social-emotional knowledge and skills appropriate for their level of development;
provide students and families with school-level and topic-specific information needed to effectively access each social-emotional and mental health program and practice area, provided through MCPS resources and community partners;
3 of 4 IJA 3. 4. F. collect regular feedback on stakeholder access to social-emotional and mental health programming and services; and establish regulations and/or other administrative procedures necessary for carrying out the commitments and priorities outlined in this policy, consistent with Maryland law and Board policy.
REVIEW AND REPORTING 1. 2. 3. The superintendent of schools shall recommend to the Board the funding necessary and available to implement the goals of this policy and strategically deploy student services professionals and their responsibilities effectively and equitably. As part of deliberations on the superintendent of schools’ recommended budget, the Board will review the capacity of social-emotional and mental health programming and student services for elementary, middle, and high schools and alternative programs, and determine the funding necessary and available to promote equitable and effective staffing, informed by national best practices.
This policy will be reviewed on an ongoing basis, in accordance with the Board of Education’s review process.
Related Sources: Policy History: MD Educ Code Ann § 7-1501 (2018); MD Courts and Judiciary Code Ann §5-609; Code of Maryland Regulations, sections 13a.07.11.03; 13a.05.05.02; 13a.12.03.02; 13a.12.03.07; 13a.12.03.11; 13a.12.03.08.08; 13a.12.04.08.08 Formerly Policy IJA, School Counseling (2004); amended by Resolution No. 200-24,
He wanted to focus on issues students cared about. Then the crises began.
Sami Saeed first got a glimpse last summerof how intense his term would beas the student representative of Maryland’s largest school district. Protesters were flooding Montgomery County’s school board meetings to call for the district to let families opt out of storybooks featuring LGBTQ characters.
“Is this normal?” he recalled asking others on the board. Long-serving memberssaid they could not recollect a protest of that magnitude.
Saeed, 18, said it was the start of a year that was marked by seismic crises. In addition to the calls for an opt-out policy, the school system also faced scrutiny for its handling of employees’ reports of misconduct after The Washington Post reported a middle school principal was promoted while he was under investigation for sexual harassment. Several administrators left, including former superintendent Monifa B. McKnight, which led to asearch for a new system leader.
It was a big shift from his original plans for the term. Coming in, Saeed thought he would focus on top issues for students like school lunches, mental health, safety and curriculum. But most of the year, he said, he was dealing with one administrative fallout after another — while still going to classes at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville and listening to students.🌸
“I’ve done more crisis management than I have educational policy, which is something I never thought I would say by the end of this,” he said in a recent interview after his term ended July 1.S
Montgomery County has had a student representative since 1978, according to its website. Maryland allows student school board members voting rights, though that has been challenged in court. In Montgomery, student members can vote on most issues save for negative personnel actions, like a termination or other disciplinary measure. They can vote on personnel action involving the superintendent.
Saeed gaves peeches and participated in Q&A sessions with students while campaigning for the board seat. He was one of two finalists for the role, and then was elected by the school system’s middle- and high-schoolers in April 2023.
Lynne Harris, an at-large member on the school board, said Saeed came to each meeting as a “coequal member.” He showed up regularly well-informed and he was often one of the first people to speak.
“He was really fearless in being a full member, but he was always so incredibly excited and optimistic,” Harris said. “His year as [the student member] was the hardest year the board has had to deal with … but you would not know from seeing the way he served.
The debate over the opt-out policy early in his term was challenging, Saeed said.
Several Muslim and Christian families protested the school system’s decision to disallow opt-outs for books with LGBTQ characters, arguing it violated their religious rights under the First Amendment. Saeed recalled that he was going to a board meeting to speak about financial literacy. But after seeing the protests, he decided to instead speak in favor of the district’s decision. He spoke of how students had “overwhelming support for this measure” and argued that the books cannot be opted out of.
Right after, several protesters pulled him aside to persuade him of their viewpoint. Saeed said it caused a huge internal conflict. His dad is Muslim and his mom is an atheist, but he said they let him make his own decision about his religious identity. He is not Muslim, but he explained that many people assumed he was because he is Arab. When he disagreed publicly with the protests, he said he felt like he was betraying people in his own community.
“It was incredibly uncomfortable because I felt like, ‘Am I not being true to who I should be — to what my heritage is?’ But I need to stand with my principles,” he said. “But that was really a struggle, because I felt like I came into my role and I already let a whole group of people down before I even started.”
The district was in tumult again a few weeks later after The Post reported that a middle school principal, Joel Beidleman, was promoted last year despite being the subject of six teachers’ complaints. (Beidleman has denied many of the allegations.) He was warned in an email about a potential issue with a staff member, but learned the details from The Post’s reporting. Several investigations followed, and district and school board members also were admonished by the county council. The school system is now reworking its protocols and polices to address issues raised.
“It was so tough. Some of the things I was learning were so troubling,” Saeed said. “I had to go to a student meeting or something with a big smile on my face. The students would be talking about the same problems that they were talking about during my campaign, but my head is somewhere else.”
He said McKnight’s resignation in February was one of the most stressful periods of his term. Because it was a personnel issue, he said he can’t share what happened, and has never even talked to his parents or any of his friends about it. But at the time, he was panicking. He said the situation caused him sleepless nights and he worried about getting gray hairs.
Still, he tried to carve out time to focus onother issues, like school safety and security,something that touched him personally. Back in 2022, Saeed said he was targeted in a shooting threat that was posted online but that investigators later determined was not credible. His high school has had students come into the building with guns.
In October, Saeed successfully proposed a school safety resolution that would mandate the school system expand a student ID pilot program, implement a strategy to increase monitoring bathrooms and target substance use in schools. The measure called for the district to give an update in April. But when the time came, he learned little progress had been made on the request, he said.
“That was a huge, huge, huge let down,” he said. “I was shocked that the urgency was not there, because you’re dealing with kids’ lives.”
He said he met regularly with school officials on the issue. Now,six high schools have installed vape detectors this past school year, and the school system plans to use money from a legal settlement with JUUL to install them in all high schools.
And even amid all the upheaval this past school year, Saeed was able to accomplish one of his biggest goals: changing the district’s homework policy. The changes — including language that would encourage teachers to avoid assigning homework over the weekends when possible — were unanimously approved by the school board in June.
In his final meeting last month, Saeed voted to hire Thomas Taylor as superintendent. He said the hire was like “striking gold,” pointing to Taylor’s history as a graduate of Montgomery County schools. Taylor immediately stuck out to him during the interview process, and he is confident that Taylor cares about the students.
In his final speech, Saeed characterized becoming the student member of the board as one of the best decisions he’s made — along with deleting Twitter.
Worker burn out is common current experience. Teachers, nurses, doctors, people working in businesses and organizations feel burdened by stresses and pressures. A general malaise results. Many leave positions and the workforce. Others “work to rule” — doing the absolute minimum. Pandemic complicates the problem as more people become accustomed to working from home and resist regular office hours and restrictions. Such burnout often results more from lack of meaning and purpose than from overwork and external pressures.
Volunteer fatigue and burnout are less visible and rarely publicized. Nevertheless, volunteer fatigue is a significant social problem. Fewer people volunteer to assist our agencies and organization that provide the social capital to improve social health in our communities.
Our current ethos emphasizes individualism, anonymity and identity groups. The emphasis on individualism is commonly identified and described in the media. As everything moves faster, long-term commitments become rare. Many individuals and families distance themselves from worksites to nearby cities for many reasons, one of which is freedom from unappreciated intrusions in their personal affairs, which leads to greater social isolation — what Harvey Cox described as attractive in the ‘secular city.’ Identity groups support activities that benefit the ingroup and only incidentally benefit the entire community.
Economic changes and heightened expectations regarding finances and status result in smaller families with both parents working full time. Fifty years ago, one parent’s labor could provide a ‘living’, so that it was dire poverty that demanded both parents have jobs. Also, women faced difficulties finding professional positions. Extracurricular activities of children have increased dramatically creating burdens on ragged parents. No wonder less time exists for them to engage in volunteer activities.
Generational differences exist regarding volunteering and charitable contributions.
Data from the Lake Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University confirm that older people donate more and volunteer as long as they are able in larger numbers than younger and middle-aged adults. The elderly faithfully volunteered in the past, but fewer able-bodied peers support them even as needs increase. It is easier to burn out and give up. Thus, unless more younger people are inspired to contribute and volunteer, the future of many of our helping organizations is bleak as financial and social capital gradually fades away.
Unfortunately, individualism results in fewer people joining social organizations that sponsor needed social services in our community. Churches that in the past have inspired and organized people to volunteer local non-profit organizations are declining in membership, especially of younger generations. These organizations rely on volunteers to provide services directly to the members as well as to help others. We face a deficit of inspiration. The focus of some has changed from local challenges to national and global foci. Fortunately, many elderly are relatively secure financially and continue to fund local organizations they previously served as volunteers. Such financial support enables the organizations to hire paid staff to do work previously donated by volunteers. One hopes that economic downturns and decline of pension income will not reduce that to a trickle.
No easy solution exists for volunteer fatigue and the decline of charitable contributions and volunteer service. Two avenues to improve prospects for the future are: (1) Volunteer for some service to the community. Everyone, including recently retired persons, can find additional meaning, satisfaction, friendship and joy in helping others in the community. (2) Support those organizations that sponsor volunteer activities, and especially support those that provide inspiration for charitable contributions and volunteer service. Thereby, perhaps we can reduce the dangers of volunteer fatigue in Montgomery County.
Raymond B. Williams, Crawfordsville, LaFollette Distinguished Professor in the Humanities emeritus, contributed this guest column.
MCPS teacher resignations, retirements up 38% in past school year
More than 1,000 Montgomery County Public Schools teachers resigned or retired in the last year, a 38% increase from the year prior, according to district data.
Between Sept. 1, 2021, and July 7, 2022, 1,070 MCPS teachers resigned or retired, compared to 775 during the same time period the prior year.
With a teaching workforce of about 14,000, the number reported this school year equals about 7.6% of the total, over the course of the year. There was not a surge in resignations or retirements at the end of the year, MCPS data show, but rather slightly larger totals most months.
Jennifer Martin, president of the Montgomery County Education Association, the union that represents teachers, said there are “real problems on the horizon” for MCPS if the staffing problems are not addressed.
Martin cautioned about the expected increase in resignations and retirements in May, at the time saying about 800 teachers had said they intended to leave the district.
Concerns about teacher burnout increased as stressors caused or exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic escalated over the past year, such as addressing missed learning during online classes and also a rise in behavior and mental health problems among students, as well as losing planning time to cover classes for absent teachers.Advertisement
Teachers held a handful of protests and other events throughout the school year, urging the district to compensate them for extra work and do more to hire staff members to fill vacancies.
MCPS spokesman Chris Cram said there were 393 teacher vacancies in MCPS as of July 7. One-third of the openings were for special education teachers. At the end of June, a shortage of special education teachers forced about 175 students in a summer program to move to a virtual model at the last-minute.
It was difficult to convince many educators to take on summer courses because they need time to “recharge,” Tomas Rivera-Figueroa, MCPS supervisor in the Office of Recruitment, said in an interview last week.Advertisement
“We’re finding that to be a difficult task this year because teachers want to take the time, and they don’t want to be working, and they want to regenerate which will hopefully alleviate some of the tension and we’ll see them stay in the profession,” Rivera-Figueroa said.
There were an additional 422 open support staff positions, which include jobs such as bus drivers, food service workers and office staff. Some bus routes to summer school programs have not been able to run in the past week due to a shortage of drivers, according to notices posted on the MCPS website.
The pandemic has caused new recruitment challenges, Rivera-Figueroa said, but largely just “accelerated what was already an issue.”Advertisement
“We were already in crisis when it came to certificated teachers entering the profession — that was already a trend five or six years in the making of our schools of education becoming smaller and smaller,” Rivera-Figueroa said. “So there aren’t as many young people that are interested in becoming teachers as there once was and I think that the pandemic caused more of those young people to reevaluate their situation.”
MCPS has broadened its recruitment efforts in recent years beyond the immediate local area, realizing that the pool of qualified candidates across the country is shrinking, Rivera-Figueroa said.
Madeline Hanington — an MCPS recruitment specialist, former MCPS Teacher of the Year and Milken Educator Award winner — said the district recently created an “internal referral program” for employees to recommend people who are interested in working for MCPS.Advertisement
MCPS has invested in both in-person and virtual job fairs and events, and drill down into online analytics that show demographics about who’s visiting recruitment webpages.
Still, Rivera-Figueroa and Hanington said they can’t be certain all of the current vacancies will be filled when classes resume at the end of August.
“I wish I could tell you guaranteed we’re going to fill this all up and it’s going to be great,” Hanington said. “But we’re working hard and we’re going to do our best.”
MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Va. – This article is part of “Solutionaries,” our continuing commitment to solutions journalism, highlighting the creative people in communities working to make the world a better place, one solution at a time. Find out what you can do to help and subscribe to our Solutionaries channel on youtube.
Taking care of our mental health is just as important as our physical health and a letting students and staff take mental health days is paying off in one local school system.
“I think it’s always hard to be the first school division to do something, whether that’s across the country or in the state,” said Brenda Drake, director of communications for Montgomery County Public Schools.
Students and staff at Montgomery County Public Schools can take mental health days. It just counts as a sick day, which is an excused absence. The policy started in 2019 after students pushed for the change.
“There is no tracking or anything that they can just say they were out they were ill, and that is all that it takes to use a mental health day,” said Drake, who said these days can be used for a variety of things. “Stress, overwhelm, feeling like you just need a little bit of a break to really assess a situation, whether it’s school related or work-related or not. These mental health days allow for that break to happen so that we can all be at school or at work being our best selves.”
She says there’s no way to track how many mental health days are being used because of the way it’s reported, but it is helping connect families with resources.
“When a parent indicates that it was a mental health reason, whether a diagnosed condition or not, then the school is able to follow up with the family,” said Drake.
10 News checked in with several other local school districts and no one else we talked to has mental health days students can take.
“School for kids is their job and sometimes they need to take a step away from their work just like we need to take a step away from our work,” said Jamie Starkey, who works for Family Service of Roanoke Valley.
The organization provides mental health services, at a time when there’s a growing need and not enough providers.
“Mental health days are planned time away, to step away from your normal responsibilities, to intentionally reconnect and rejuvenate your mental health,” said Starkey. “I think a lot of times with kids, we sort of minimize the fact that they really know themselves best and allowing them to take a mental health day really is just us listening to them telling us what they need.”
She says no matter how young your child is, if they’re showing stress, they may need some time away.
“If a kindergartener seems extra tired or irritable, or doesn’t want to go to school one day and you think, ‘Are they just manipulating me?’ Maybe they just need the day,” said Starkey, who adds it doesn’t have to be an entire day.
It can be an afternoon or an hour.
“Maybe you let them go in late, maybe it’s a tardy, maybe it’s breakfast with mom before they go to school or, whatever the case may be that allows them that opportunity to just take a breath and reconnect,” said Starkey. “I think if we can reduce the stigma around mental health, and just look at mental health as health, then it helps kids to realize that everyone has these experiences and these struggles. It keeps kids from being other or disconnected from people because they feel like they’re doing something, or feeling a way that’s different from someone else.”
In Montgomery County, these mental health days are working.
“We’ve been able to connect some students who were flying, kind of right under that radar of things that we might normally look out for, and we were able to get them the help that they needed. That’s what this is about at the end of the day,” said Drake.
A school counselor checks in with the student when they get back to school to see how they’re doing and if there are resources they can provide.
There are some limitations. If a student is out for more than three days the school may require verification.
If a mental health day doesn’t feel like enough, Starkey says to talk to your doctor because you may need more help.
“If you’re sick, you go to the doctor. If you have a mental health challenge, then you seek someone to help you with that. Not addressing your mental health can be detrimental. It can result in physical stress, it can show signs of wear and tear on your body,” said Starkey.
You can see Jenna weekday mornings at the anchor desk on WSLS 10 Today from 5-7 a.m. She also leads our monthly Solutionaries Series, where we highlight the creative thinkers and doers working to make the world a better place.
Shannon Salter aimed to turn all the seniors in her high school civics class into voters. Her task has never been harder.
Story by Greg JaffePhotography by Michelle GustafsonJune 29, 2024 at 6:00 a.m.ShareCommentAdd to your saved storiesSaveHuman read|Listen30 min
ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Shannon Salter checked the results of an online poll that she gave each year to her high school civics students. One of the questions asked whether they would support lowering the voting age to 16.
“Everyone said no,” Salter told her students in late April. “That has never happened before. So, I am dying to dig into why.”
Salter, a 53-year-old White woman, stood at the front of the classroom. Her students, Black and Hispanic teenagers drawn from Allentown’s working-class neighborhoods, were arrayed around her. All were seniors. Most were weighing whether they will become first-time voters in the fall when the presidential election could come down to their state, Pennsylvania.Story continues below advertisement
One student complained that social media had polluted his peers’ minds with misinformation and fried their attention spans. “A 16-year-old nowadays — that’s not old enough,” he said. “There’s no maturity or knowledge there.”
Another, who had spent much of the coronavirus pandemic living with his mother in an abandoned building, talked about the social and emotional damage that the restrictions had inflicted. “As kids, we’ve become way more social distanced,” he said. Some of his classmates were so isolated that they barely spoke to anyone, he added. Surely, they weren’t qualified to choose the next president.
Like most civics teachers, Salter wanted her students to believe that their voices and opinions could shape the nation’s future — that their participation in politics was essential to improving their country, their neighborhoods and their lives. A big part of her job, as she saw it, was persuading her students to vote.
SHANNON SALTER, TEACHER
Salter, 53, chats daily with students, including J’livette Baez, 16, at Building 21. For some seniors, November’s election will be the first that they can vote in.
Whether young voters will turn out to vote in November is one of the essential unknownsof the upcoming presidential election. In 2020, nearly 50 percent of the population between the ages of 18 and 29 cast ballots, one of the highest levels since the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1971, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. Those young voters — particularly young voters of color — were critical to President Biden’s victory.
So far, polling suggests that young voter turnout in 2024 may not match 2020’s rate. In April, only 41 percent of Black people 18 to 39 told a Washington Post-Ipsos poll that they were certain to vote this year, down from 61 percent in June 2020.
The poll mirrored what Salter was seeing among her students, whose interest in voting had been hobbled by poverty, racism and two aging presidential candidatesseemingly far removed from the world of a struggling Allentown teen. “I’m pushing against more pessimism than I ever have before,” she said.
And so, on this morning, she decided to hit her students with a blast of idealism in the form of a clip from “The West Wing,” the television dramafrom the early 2000s that Salter called her “happy place.”
How we reported this story
Washington Postreporter Greg Jaffe made six trips to Allentown, Pa., starting in late April and attended 17 civics classes at Building 21 high school to document how young people think about politics and America’s democratic system.
Salter’s classroom filled with the sound of the show’s stately theme. On a screen at the front of the room a teenager in a suit was badgering the president’s communications director to rethink his position on teen suffrage. “I’m going to be drinking the water and breathing the air after you’re long gone, but I can’t vote to protect the environment,” the young man said.
Minutes later, the young advocate waschallenging the president at a packed White House news conference.
Salter hit the pause button and the students in her classroom picked up the debate, unmoved by the earnestness of their fictional counterpart. Their memories of politics began with the bitter 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and included the U.S. Capitol riot two months after the November 2020 election.
To these students, American politics was an ego-driven, aimless mess. Adding younger, less-mature voices to the toxic mix would only produce more chaos and disappointment, they said.
After class, a few of the students congregated around Salter’s desk, continuing the argument until Salter realized that they were running late for their third-period classes. She shooed them on. Salter hadn’t changed any minds, not yet.
But she still had more than a month to go before the end of the term to convince her students that their participation in American democracy was worth it. She had no idea how hard a sell that would turn out to be.Story continues below advertisement
Turning ideas into action
Salter teaches at a public high school called Building 21, housed in an old banking call center just beyond the edge of Allentown’s urban core.
The eastern Pennsylvania city, which once helped powerAmerica’s industrial revolution, had undergone a transformation in recent decades. Its factories had given way to sprawling e-commerce warehouses. Today, more than half of its 125,000 residents — many of whom came from New York City in search of cheaper housing — are Hispanic.
Salter arrived at the school in 2015, when it opened asan alternative to the city’s two big, underperforming high schools. Building 21 wasn’t much to look at. It didn’t have athletic fields or a gymnasium. On sunny days, gym class was a badminton net strung up in the school’s cracked asphalt parking lot. The classrooms were windowless.
To Salter, though, the school and her civics class sat squarely on the front line of a nationwide battle to save American democracy. Public school is one of the few American institutions where people from all sides of the country’s political, social and cultural divides still come together. In her view, it was the place where a new generation — the most diverse in the country’s history — could learn the skills needed to revive America’s creaking system of self-governance.
Salter played a role in shaping civics curriculums nationally through iCivics, an educational nonprofit organization founded by former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and the Educating for American Democracy initiative, a coalition of 300 historians, political scientists and education leaders. Her Allentown classroom was the place where she sought to put those groups’ lofty ideas about voting and democracy into practice.
BUILDING 21
The school’s students live in Allentown’s less-wealthy voting districts. Clockwise from top left: Alexander Cardona, 18, helps J.J. Morales, 18, into the suit for Fuego, Building 21’s mascot; Brylee Gold, 15; and Doh Nay Kaw, 16, and Morales, now out of the mascot suit.
One of the students she thought she could win over was Bryan Sticatto, the senior who had spent much of the pandemic living in an abandoned building.
Bryan was one of the stars of the school’s Ethics Bowl team, in which he debated issues such as the morality of mining precious metals or the use of semiautonomous robots in war. “I’d be shocked if Bryan doesn’t end up becoming a voter,” Salter said in late April.
Shedidn’t see the other forces — outside of her classroom and the school — that had played an even greater role in shaping Bryan’s views of the country and his place in it. One of the biggest was his experience during the pandemic, when he and his mother lived in a house that lacked heat and water.
Deep Reads
There were other families living in the two-story building, Bryan said. So he and his mother fashioned privacy screens out of cardboard boxes. Today, when Bryan recalls that period of his life, he talks about the loud music that played late into the night, the drinking and the fights.
He remembers the bucket he used to take “bird baths,” the hours he spent alone watching YouTube videos on his phone and the two jobs his mother worked so that they could escape.
At the time, she was only earning $12 an hour, $3 less than he made last summer at a local amusement park. “You can’t even afford a good meal at McDonald’s at that wage,” Bryan said. The experience left him believing that he shouldn’t dream too big or expect too much.
It was a lesson his mother reinforced over pizza one evening this spring after school. She had just finished her shift caringfor people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.Her pay, thanks to a recent raise, was now $17 an hour, enough to afford a clean apartment in which Bryan has his own room. But the extra money still didn’t cover rent in a decent neighborhood, she said. A day earlier, the police had booted her car and she had borrowed $400 so that she could pay the parking fines she owed and make it to her job.
BRYAN STICATTO, 17
Bryan, a senior in Salter’s civics class, said his views have been strongly influenced by his difficult experience during the coronavirus pandemic.
“The system just doesn’t work,” Bryan’s mother said. “It’s literally meant to keep us down.”
Bryan’s mother had last voted in 2012, when she cast a ballot for Barack Obama, but she had no interest in voting this year.
“I have no hope,” she said.
In school, Bryan listened as his civics teacher talked about how hard some Americans, particularly Black people, had fought to earn the right to vote and how they had used their new power to improve their lives. In an early May class assignment, Bryan argued in favor of extending voting rights to felons in states where they were currently denied.
“How can you put someone back into society and then tell them that they are not allowed to vote to change it — that their voice doesn’t even count?” he asked.
But when Bryan considered whether he would vote in November,the first election he’ll be eligible, the loudest voice in his head belonged to his mother. Neither Biden nor Trump seemed like candidates who understood or cared about his life, he said. Neither was likely to make itmaterially better.
“I don’t think my rent is going to get any cheaper. I don’t think jobs are going to get any better,” he said. “So, honestly, I don’t really care.”Story continues below advertisement
A system worth saving?
Salter knew her experience of America and its democracy was starkly different from that of her students. She had spent her high school years in Singapore, a prosperous and clean city-state, where her father was an executive with a big, U.S.-based company. After college in the United States, she worked in marketing, married a computer programmer, and then returned to school to become a teacher, a job that would give her time at home with her two children.
Now, her children were grown. Her marriage had ended a decade earlier in divorce. Home was a townhouse in a newish suburb, carved from farmland,about an hour south of Allentown.
Most mornings, she passed time on the drive to work listening to left-leaning podcasts. The view through her windshield spoke to the anger and disillusionment in the country: An “Arrest Trump” flag was followed a few hundred yards later by a “Make America Great Again” banner. A “Taylor Swift 2024” flag stirred in the wind across the street from a yellow sign that warned: “Today’s Illegals Are Tomorrow’s Democrats.”
Salter said she tried to bring an “optimistic patriotism” to class. She had seen American democracy work for people with “privilege” like her, she said. She wanted to teach her students the rules that would give them access to that same system.
One of her most meaningful moments as a teacher came the day after Trump won the presidency in 2016. Salter arrived at Building 21 and found two dozen students lined up outside her classroom desperate to talk about what had just happened. Most were old enough to remember Obama’s groundbreaking victory in 2008, which seemed, in the moment, to symbolize America’s overcoming the stain of slavery and racism. They had been expecting to wake up to another historic moment — the country’s first female president.
Many students felt betrayed by their country and fellow citizens. Several were the children of immigrants — some of whom were undocumented. They worried that their parents were going to be deported by the incoming president’s administration.
Salter reassured them, saying that nothing would happen imminently and that there were laws and processes that would protect them and their families. The anger and shock they and millionsof other Americans felt fueled a surge in activism that dominated Trump’s term — the Women’s March, the March for Our Lives protests of gun violence, the Black Lives Matter protests.
In 2024, Salter’s students saw American democracy through a different prism. They were fifth-gradersin 2016 when Trump defeated Clinton, andfreshmen when rioters, inflamed by Trump’s disproved allegations of election fraud in his loss to Biden, stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Now, Trump and Biden were headed for a rematch, with both insisting that the foundations of the republic could be irreparably harmed should the other guy win.
Salter was determined to convince her students that as damaged as American democracy might be, it was still a system worth saving.
Two years earlier, she had persuaded the Lehigh County elections office to hire high school students as Election Day poll workers. The county had an urgent need for Spanish speakers that her students could help fill.
Building 21’s students could benefit, as well. Salter knew that many of their parents didn’t vote because they weren’t citizens or because they had lost faith in politics. She hoped that working the polls would make her students feel more invested in the country’selections. She also believed it would help them see through Trump’s repeatedly disproved allegations of voter fraud.
VANESSA-LUSIANNE BELONY, 17
Vanessa was a poll worker for Lehigh County during Pennsylvania’s April primary. For a class assignment, Vanessa created a proposal to increase voter turnout.
This year, one of Salter’s student poll workers was Vanessa-Lusianne Belony.
“How did yesterday go? What did you notice?” Salter asked her the day after Pennsylvania’s April 23 primary.
“There were a lot of White people,” Vanessa replied.
She told Salter that she could probably count the number of Black voters she saw “on both of her hands.” There were even fewer Hispanic and Asian voters, she said. Most of the 250 people who came through her polling place — located in an old banquet hall — were in their 50s or older.
Vanessa, 17, lived with her parents, grandparents and four siblings in a modest two-story house a short distance from downtown. Her mother and father — a nurse and long-haul truck driver — emigrated from Haiti more than two decades earlier and spoke often of moving back home.
Vanessa, who grew up speaking Creole and English, was born in the United States. But lately, she said she felt more Haitian than American, and she wasfilled with doubts about the country where she lived.Story continues below advertisement
One of her earliest childhood memories was of the police stopping her father as he was leaving a store in Allentown. “I remember being terrified. I was so confused,” she recalled. Vanessa said it seemed as if the police officer was using his power to intimidate her father “for no reason.”
The experience continued to resonate in the years that followed as she watched demonstrators flood Allentown — and dozens of other American cities — to protest the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
Salter asked if she thought she could work to help fix the problem of American policing through voting or activism. “It’s been like this forever, like, since the country’s founding,” Vanessa replied. “If it hasn’t changed now, I doubt [it] … It feels like a systemic thing.”
The relatively small number of Black people who had turned out to vote in the primary had surprised and disappointed Vanessa. But it also didn’t fuel a determination to vote when she turns 18 or drive a desire for greater civic engagement. Instead, she said it left her feeling alienated.
“I don’t think I’ll ever feel that I belong in this country,” Vanessa told Salter before heading off to her next class.Story continues below advertisement
Empty desks, distracted students
The toughest students for Salter to reach were the ones who weren’t there because they rarely made it to her 9 a.m. class. She was supposed to have 12 students, but most days only six or seven showed up.
During the 2022-2023 school year only 54 percent of Building 21’s students were classified as “regular attendees,” down from about 80 percent before the coronavirus pandemic, said Jose Rosado Jr., the school’s principal. This year,the number rebounded, withabout 74 percent of the students attending regularly.
But students still struggled to make it to morning classes. Several of Salter’s students worked after-school jobs that kept them out until 10 p.m. or later. One student worked on the cleanup crew at the PPL Center, Allentown’s downtown arena, and didn’t get off some nights until 4 a.m. He told Salter that he had been working since he was 12 and landed a job washing dishes on the weekend at a cafeteria-stylerestaurantnear Allentown’s mall. “I lied about my age,” he said. “I don’t know why they believed me.”Story continues below advertisement
Other students had simply fallen out of the habit of making it to school on time. Instead of demanding they come to class, Salter worked with them during their free periods or after school. “I’ve only got one shot to convince a 17-year-old of the benefits of our democracy,” she said. “I’d rather they learn social studies than die on the hill of insisting that they show up in my room on time.”
In early May, Salter’s class studied the factors that tended to drive or suppress participation in presidential elections. The students discussed why turnout dropped precipitously in 1820, when James Monroe effectively ran unopposed for the White House, and why it spiked to about 80 percent in 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected amid rancorous division over the future of slavery in America.
Bryan oftenspent class reading Japanese manga novels on his phone or playing chess on his school-issued laptop. Some days he rested his head on his desk. Vanessa paid attention but rarely participated in class. The other students didn’t appear any more excited or engaged by the material.
Salterblamed some of the students’ apathy on this election’s uninspiring choices. Her students knew Biden from memes and short videos showing him slipping on the stairs of Air Force One or appearing to walk into a bush. They saw Trump as loud, profane and largely focused on helping the rich.
Salter envisioned her classes building to an exercise that she hoped would drive home the importance of voting no matter the candidates’ appeal. She had worked with a geospatial data analyst at Lehigh University to map 2016 voter turnout in more than 50 Allentown voting districts. The plan was to have students compare their district’s turnout with wealthier, Whiter and better-maintained parts of the city.
YEIMY LORENZO, 17, AND JINESSA GONZALEZ, 18
From left: Yeimy and Jinessa are seniors learning about the benefits of civic engagement; Jamalia Torres, 18, chats with Yeimy and Jinessa in Building 21.
In early May, Salter was helping a couple of seniors who rarely made it to school before 10 a.m. — Yeimy Lorenzo and Jinessa Gonzalez — catch up on their work. She decided to try the assignment out on them before she unveiled it to the full class. The two seniors noticed that voter turnout in Allentown’s wealthier west side, which has big green parks and wide, tree-lined streets, typically averaged nearly 80 percent.
Jinessa then zeroed in on her voting district, a couple of miles north of Building 21, where turnout in 2016 was less than 40 percent and the roads were full of potholes.
“This is why our shit is so shitty!” Jinessa exclaimed.
“Tell me more,” Salter replied.
“When you vote, that’s when [the politicians] look at you more and stuff,” Jinessa said. “And look at us. We aren’t voting.”
Salter was delighted that her students had made the connection. “I want you to bring all of these awesome ideas to class tomorrow,” she told them.
The next morning, a rainy Friday, only four students showed up for class; neither Yeimy nor Jinessa was among them. The students were restless and distracted. Salter directed their attention to the high voter-turnout rates in Allentown’s wealthier and Whiter western districts.Story continues below advertisement
“What do you know about the west side?” she asked, brightly.
“I didn’t even know there was a west side to Allentown,” one senior replied.
“I don’t go outside, man,” Bryan added, dully.
“It’s nicer,” Vanessa finally volunteered.
The class proceeded fitfully. “What’s going on?”she snapped at Bryan. “Why can’t you keep your head off your desk?”
Then class ended. There were two weeks until the end of the term. A frustrated Salter told the students that they would try to wrap up the lesson on Monday. The same exercisehad succeeded in previous years with other Building 21 students, she said. But, clearly, something had changed.
“What’s not working here?” she asked herself. “What’s messed with my students?”Story continues below advertisement
A new approach
The following Monday, after the students had settled into their desks, Salter asked them to put away their phones and laptops.
“Something happened in my life over the weekend, and it immediately made me think of you all,” she told them. She pulled up a picture from a few years earlier of her sitting in a restaurant in Washington with two white-haired men.
“The two older gentlemen I’m sitting with are my two high school social studies teachers,” Salter said. “In fact, I would describe them as the two voices that kind of sit on my shoulders, whisper in my ear and tell me, ‘Do better for your students.’”
She told them that Bob Dodge, who was seated to her right in the photo, had died of a brain tumor over the weekend.
“Whoa,” one of the students replied. For the first time all semester, everyone’s eyes were fixed on Salter.
Dodge had taught her that if she wanted her students to fall in love with history, then she needed to “be a storyteller,” she said.This was the mistake she had been making. “I realized that I hadn’t been doing enough storytelling with you,” she told her students.Story continues below advertisement
So, she began to tell them a story that she hoped might finally persuade them to become voters. It started with a 1963 photo of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon B. Johnson sitting together in the White House. Johnson wanted to move forward with his War on Poverty, but King insisted that the push for voting rights in the South should take priority.
Salter then skipped to 1965 and photos of Alabama state troopers attacking civil rights marchers as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way from Selma to Montgomery — a day that became known as Bloody Sunday. “Look at the pictures carefully,” she said. “Are these protesters being treated humanely and decently by the police?”
“There’s Black people on the floor!” one student exclaimed.
Salter focused in on Amelia Boynton, a foot soldier in the civil rights movement, whom the troopers were beating unconscious. Just five months later, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which cleared away many of the barriers that blocked Black people from voting in the South. Salter knew that most of the students in her class were more worried about their economic well-being than voting. So she ended her story with a chartthat showed how the passage of the Voting Rights Act had helped open thousands of good-paying state and local government jobs to people of color.
JALIUS DEJESUS, 17
Jalius was moved when Salter taught his class about civil rights protesters beaten by law enforcement officers in the 1960s.
Jalius DeJesus, 17, sat cross-legged on top of his desk. He and Salter had grown close over the semester; sometimes, Jalius would drop by her office just to chat.
After graduation, hewas thinking of going to trade school to learn how to be a plumber or an electrician. As for voting, he wasn’t interested. Politicians, he said, seemed more focused on their personal well-being and their party than the good of the country.
Now Jalius, who had been moved by Boynton’s bravery and sacrifices at Selma, had a question for Salter. “What argument do you have if I feel guilty for voting for somebody who I thought was going to do good but didn’t?” he asked. “I’d rather just not vote.”
“Sometimes, you’re going to kick yourself,” Salter replied. But it was still worth trying. Jalius hadn’t committed to voting in November, but at least he seemed to be considering it. The students drifted off to their next classes. For weeks, they had seemed distracted and disengaged. Salter felt that she had finally found a way to grab their attention.Story continues below advertisement
Time for a choice
For their final assignment, Salter asked her students to presenta proposal to increase voter turnout and an answer to the most important question of all: Were they going to vote?
Bryan, soaking wet from a heavy storm that hit as he was walking to school, focused on the need for more voter education in middle and high school. Some students learned about politics and the importance of voting from their parents, he said. Bryansaid hedidn’t have that opportunity. He and his mother were too busy trying to survive.
The other students listened quietly or fretted over their presentations. Bryan began to walk back to his desk. “So, what are you going to do?” Salter asked. “What are the chances that you show up on Election Day?”
He was going to register but didn’t plan to vote, he said. He was waiting for a candidate who deserved his support.
BUILDING 21
The school is in a town that has been transformed — factories have given way to e-commerce warehouses. Clockwise from top left: Keane Carrington, 17, prepares to play flag football; Alisha Peña, 15, talks to Promyse Swift-Ford, 16, in between classes; and students play badminton.
Vanessa suggested that a better, more diverse set of candidates might boost turnout.When she thought about voting, her mind went to a bridge that she passed over on her way home from school. Beneath it was a stream, a grassy bank and a homeless encampment. “We need to fix homelessness. We need to fix poverty. Inflation is crazy. Gas prices are crazy,” she said. “I think that’s part of the reason why people don’t vote.”
She thought of Boynton and the marchers beaten at Selma. “We, as Black people, fought so hard for this chance to vote. … We came from such inspiring and amazing people, and it feels like we’re here stuck in the dirt, not able to find a way out of it,” she said. “How would voting even begin to change that?”
In the fall, Vanessa plans to attend Temple University’s campus in Tokyo. She isn’t going to be old enough to vote, but even if she were, she didn’t think she would participate. “I feel like it’d be a matter of which choice isn’t as bad as the other,” she told the class.
Jalius proposed getting rid of the two-party system, which he said fed politicians’ “egotistical tendencies” and inhibited cooperation. More humility and compromise, he argued, would lead to more progress and higher voter turnout.
But like Bryan and Vanessa, he didn’t plan to vote. “I don’t consider myself well-versed enough,” he said.
In all, nine of Salter’s 12 students completed their final presentations. Only four said they planned to vote in November’s election. None seemed particularly enthusiastic.
Salter was disappointed by the final tally. She had underestimated the damage the pandemic had wrought on her students’ learning and social development, she said. She hadn’t fully grasped the ways in which the last decade’s angry and divisive politics had filled them with a deep mistrust of government and the collective wisdom of their fellow citizens.
But she didn’t feel that she had failed. All of her students had described voting as important. They hadn’t entirely quit on the idea of democracy — even if many of them were choosing not to take part. Eventually, she told herself, some issue would energize them, or some politician would inspire them. They would find a reason to have their say.
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