It goes without saying that COVID-19 has had an enormous impact on students. Children from the most vulnerable communities—low-income, foster, unhoused and special needs students, as well as English language learners—have been most affected. Among the struggles students have faced are a lack of broadband access, falling behind in their studies and difficulties with mental health.
In the country’s second-largest school district, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), a new fund is looking to help them address those problems. An initiative of Great Public Schools Now, the L.A. Education Recovery Fund is a multi-year initiative offering financial support to local nonprofits that will address learning loss and mental health issues among students from the most impacted communities.
The fund’s steering committee is made up of philanthropists, civic leaders and representation from LAUSD, including Deputy Superintendent Pedro Salcido. Its collaborative partners are LAUSD, the Greater LA Education Foundation, the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles, the California Community Foundation, LA84 Foundation, LA Tech Cares, and Earn, Learn, Play.
The idea for the Recovery Fund began to take shape in the fall of 2020, when staff members of Great Public Schools Now noticed a lack of attention being paid to the COVID-driven educational crisis.
“We weren’t talking about the missed learning, the loss of instructional time, and the ripple effects of that in students,” said Dr. Ana Ponce, executive director of Great Public Schools Now. The organization is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that invests in schools, organizations and initiatives that work to “catalyze excellence” in public schools. It was developed by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and receives additional funding from the Keck Foundation, the Walton Foundation and the Gates Foundation.
Noting the pandemic’s impact on students, Ponce said, “We began conversations with a couple of folks and tried to figure out how we could organize and bring folks into this conversation to really solve through what might be the long-term consequences of the missed learning and the loss of instructional time…for students in L.A.”
Great Public Schools Now proceeded to conduct data analysis, and, in March 2021, published a report titled “Educational Recovery Now,” which called on LAUSD to develop a transparent recovery plan for the district. Great Public Schools Now simultaneously began raising money for what would eventually become the L.A. Education Recovery Fund. The fund’s first anchor donors were Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw through their Hearthland Foundation. Other major donors include the Ballmer Group, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Len Hill Charitable Trust, and Lois and Richard Gunther.
First steps
For its first initiative, the Recovery Fund partnered with LAUSD to offer elementary and middle school students from low-income communities a chance to attend a free summer program in 2021. It invested about $6 million in 77 organizations. Approximately 30,000 children attended these summer camps, which were located at LAUSD schools, charter schools and community-based nonprofit sites.
Last fall, the Recovery Fund awarded an additional $1.5 million in grants to 10 nonprofits to support 5,500 students. The focus there was on organizations that work with disengaged students and undocumented students, as well as organizations bringing college advising to communities.
The 10 organizations that received this funding were artworkxLA, the Children Youth and Family Collaborative (CYFC), the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), EduCare Foundation, Latino Equality Alliance, No Limits for Deaf Children and Families, School on Wheels, SoCal CAN, Speak UP—Cultivating Young Black Excellence (CYBE), and Team Prime Time.
Since then, the fund has expanded its grants to a total of $1.6 million and funded a total of 20 nonprofits. It also invested an additional $400,000 to address staffing needs of nonprofits that provide after-school programs for students.
LAUSD schools closed on March 13, 2020. They reopened on August 16, 2021. In the Better Great Public Schools Now report, Ponce explained, “Reopening alone does not address the recovery needed. It isn’t about making up but making whole, because that is what our children deserve most.”
“Grief, anxiety and depression”
Although we won’t know the pandemic’s full effects on students for years to come, preliminary data suggests that large numbers of students will need additional academic and social-emotional support.
The Educational Recovery Now report highlights the efforts and progress made by school staff to weather the challenges of the pandemic and to engage students virtually, but acknowledged that students need more.
“No school system can do it alone, nor should they be expected to. The full educational recovery of Los Angeles students must be a collective effort,” the report states. It goes on to describe two major impacts on students: trauma and missed learning.
“There were job losses. There were wage losses. There were health issues. There were deaths. There were childcare issues, just a number of issues that hit low-income communities and students of color disproportionately hard,” Ponce said.
The report found that in the spring of 2020, about 40% of LAUSD middle and high school students were either disengaged or absent from classes. In the fall of 2020, more than 13,000 middle and high school students were consistently disengaged, and an additional 56,000 did not actively participate on a daily basis.
Students who were the most disengaged were from communities that have been historically underserved by the educational system, including Black and Latino students, English learners and students with disabilities.
Earlier this year, the California Department of Education published data reflecting the fact that more than 60% of Black, Latino and economically disadvantaged students who took standardized tests did not meet standards in English language arts, and a full 80% did not meet math standards.
Mental health experts have expressed concern about the impact school closures had on students. According to the Educational Recovery Now report, children suffer from loneliness and isolation, and are more likely to experience depression and anxiety. A separate report from Pew Charitable Trusts found that even after students returned to school in person, they continued to struggle with mental health issues.
“The grief, anxiety and depression children have experienced during the pandemic is welling over into classrooms and hallways, resulting in crying and disruptive behavior in many younger kids and increased violence and bullying among adolescents,” Pew found. “For many other children, who keep their sadness and fear inside, the pressures of school have become too great.”
A long road to recovery
This isn’t the first public-private partnership launched to address Los Angeles students’ needs during COVID. Other collaborations include a 2020 team-up between philanthropists, corporations and California state education officials to close the digital divide by providing students with access to computers and high-speed internet.
“Our biggest hope is that we can actually support organizations to touch more of the constituents of their communities. What we need right now is for our kids to feel seen, to feel heard, to feel like we are investing in them and that we acknowledge the experiences and the trauma they have suffered,” Ponce said.
The Recovery Fund is currently backing projects to provide tutoring for students who are unhoused, bring college advisors to students living in public housing, and to provide language support and hearing therapy to students who are hearing-impaired.
“We need to respond to this education crisis with urgency, and we need to support our district partners and school system leaders to navigate this process,” Ponce said. “This is not going to be a one-year recovery; it’s going to be a three-to-five, maybe 10-year recovery path forward.”
