Cate Guilfoyle, a senior at Allderdice High School, learned of Pittsburgh Public Schools’ gifted program when she was in second grade at Colfax K-8. Many of her peers attended the district’s Gifted Center at Greenway, once a week, to participate in accelerated hands-on courses. 

Uneven Scales
As PPS contends with a difficult budget season, PublicSource explores the balance of resources and its effects on students’ futures.

“There was a huge stigma around, like, everyone that went there was super smart,” she said. 

Guilfoyle was evaluated and identified as a gifted student a few years later. Like others, she attended the Gifted Center, which she believes offered more resources than Colfax. With that, Guilfoyle said, she also saw immediate disparities in her classroom. 

On the days when she and her classmates bussed off to the Gifted Center, she said, “Greenway would look like all white kids and then all of Colfax would have only African American kids.” 

The district’s Gifted and Talented program offers unique opportunities for students who are identified as “high-achieving.” However, students of color are highly underrepresented among students who are identified for the program. 

As the district works through a strategic planning process with a focus on equity, at least some board members say the time is right to rethink approaches to gifted education. 

Of the 18,650 students enrolled in the district, 1,315 were identified as gifted in 2022-23, according to the district’s enrollment dashboard. Of the students identified as gifted, 16% were Black and 66% were white. Black students make up 51% of the district’s student population. 

Schools with a higher share of economically disadvantaged students also had a lower percentage of students identified as gifted. Of all students with a Gifted Individualized Education Plan [GIEP], only 23% were economically disadvantaged, while districtwide, 70% of students are economically disadvantaged.

Statewide, 3.3% of all students were identified as gifted, according to the 2017-18 data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Less than 1% of Black students were identified. Studies have shown that gifted programs do not necessarily improve student reading and math scores. 

PPS spokesperson Ebony Pugh said the district follows state guidelines when evaluating students for gifted education, but did not substantively address questions about racial disparities in the program.

State laws contribute to disparities

State regulations define gifted education as individualized and specially designed instruction, delivered under a GIEP. 

Per state law, a “mentally gifted” student must demonstrate an IQ of 130 or more or

• Test at a year or more above achievement level 
• Show a high rate of retention in learning new skills 
• Demonstrate early skill development 
• Show expertise in one or more academic areas.

Advocates say, the definition of “gifted” may be a key driver of the inequitable access to the district’s gifted program.

James Fogarty, executive director of A+ Schools, a nonprofit supporting PPS in addressing equity issues, said key measures such as IQ, which is impacted by socioeconomic factors such as poverty and structural racism, skew the pool of gifted students. 

“It seems as if the current system … developed at the state policy level, lends itself towards identifying students as gifted as those who are also not economically disadvantaged,” he said.

Many students from low-income families are underrepresented and excluded from gifted programs because they do not have opportunities for enrichment and learning experiences outside school in early childhood, said Kristen Seward, associate director of Gifted Education Resource Institute [GERI] at Purdue University.

She said if students don’t have access to enrichment opportunities in early childhood, then they will not test high by the time they get to third grade, when kids are usually tested for gifted education.

Accelerated learning for the ‘gifted,’ free day for others

All gifted students in PPS – apart from those at Dilworth and Grandview where gifted instruction is offered on-site – go to the Gifted Center at Greenway every week, where they participate in project-based, accelerated courses. 

Beatrice Kuhn was in fourth grade at Colfax when she was identified as a gifted student. Once every week, she would go to the Gifted Center, where she took classes ranging from forensic science to ceramics.

“I took various art classes and those were really fun,” she said. “It was a very different environment.”

Kuhn’s friend, Alina Weise, also got evaluated in fifth grade but was not identified as gifted. She and others stayed at Colfax while their peers went to the Gifted Center. 

“I just felt down about myself. I started to feel like I wasn’t smart enough or wasn’t as high of a level as my peers were, especially my close friends,” she said. 

On days her classmates went to the Gifted Center, those remaining at Colfax were usually given a “free day,” where they could catch up on any previously assigned work, Weise said. 

PPS did not respond to inquiries about assignments for students not identified as gifted on days their peers are at the Gifted Center.

Kipp Dawson, a retired teacher from Colfax, taught at the school from 2005 to 2018. She said delivery of instruction for students who stayed behind on gifted days varied at every school and with every principal. 

For a part of her tenure at Colfax, those students were provided an enrichment day where they brought in artists to teach classes such as poetry, writing or painting T-shirts. However, most time was dedicated for students to prepare for standardized tests. 

“That was a day in many cases of dull, rote, uninspiring work,” said Dawson. 

Allyce Pinchback-Johnson, a founding member of Black Women for a Better Education, said apart from overidentifying white students as gifted, the district also misidentifies students because of inherent biases and standardized testing. 

“It’s just a very narrow and limited definition of giftedness,” she said. “We already know what the outcomes are going to be, based on just the racial distribution of how students fare on those tests that we know that it’s not a reflection of them as students as much as it’s a reflection of the bias that exists.”

Gene Walker, district board president, said the Gifted Center creates barriers for students by sending some kids there and leaving others behind. “I think we sometimes do ourselves a disservice by creating opportunities to segregate.”

The Gifted-to-AP pipeline

At Allderdice, Guilfoyle noticed the same disparities in her honors and Advanced Placement [AP] classes that she saw between Colfax and the Greenway Center. 

“I feel like Allderdice is very segregated in many ways,” she said. “I walked in my first AP class, and there were no African American students.”

Similar to gifted education, Black students are underrepresented in AP courses. A total of 1,660 students in PPS enrolled in at least one AP class in 2023. Of those, 29% were Black and 54% were white. 

Pinchback-Johnson said the overidentification of white students as gifted sets them up for automatic consideration in high school AP and Centers for Advanced Study classes.

“I view it as just a form of segregation,” she said. 

She added that white families use their social capital to get access to the district’s magnet programs.

The district’s arts magnet, CAPA 6-12, has one of the highest rates of students identified as gifted. This year, 31.5% of the student population at CAPA was identified as gifted. Neighborhood schools, such as UPrep Milliones and Westinghouse, have less than 4% of their students identified as gifted.

Advocates seek systemic changes

Nielsen Pereira, director of the Gifted Education Resource Institute [GERI] at Purdue University, said the district could implement models like total school cluster grouping to reduce inequities that might be caused by sending students to a gifted center. The model involves training teachers to identify students and implement gifted education strategies with all students in a school. 

Under the model, every teacher would be able to provide gifted education, and gifted students would be placed alongside other students instead of visiting a separate classroom or a gifted center. 

Fogarty said the district needs to think about fostering inclusivity and creating in-house gifted education supports, such as those at Dilworth and Grandview. 

“Setting kids aside and not providing support services that allow them to be fully inclusive, is problematic, whether it’s for a student with disabilities or a student with academic gifts,” he said.  

Walker said instead of referrals from parents or teachers, the district should implement universal testing to ensure that all students have an equal opportunity to be identified as gifted and eliminate any personal and systemic bias. 

The district rolled out a pilot program in 2018 to screen all second-grade students in six PPS schools for gifted identification. It’s unclear what, if anything, came of that.

Walker said he’s keen to keep the dialogue moving. 

“I think it’s going to take more than policy change,” he said. “It’s going to take attitude change, it’s going to take priority change.”

Lajja Mistry is the K-12 education reporter at PublicSource. She can be reached at lajja@publicsource.org.

This story was fact-checked by Delaney Adams.

The post Inequitable enrichment: How Black and low-income students are largely left out of Pittsburgh’s gifted program  appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Every Friday, at 1:53 p.m., Sha’Ron Kennedy helps his classmates at Pittsburgh Public Schools’ Langley K-8 prepare bags filled with food. First, he slips in some instant noodles, and then he adds green beans, corn and tomato sauce. Sometimes he also adds breakfast oatmeal and fruit. 

Once all bags are prepared, Kennedy leads the students to different classrooms. 

At each class, they knock on the door saying, “Blessings in a backpack!” then deliver the bags to other students. 

Kennedy is a seventh-grader in Langley’s autistic support class where he volunteers to work in the school’s Blessings in a Backpack program. The program is part of Langley’s community school model, providing food for students experiencing food insecurity. 

PPS Langley is one of nine schools in the district that are designated as community schools. Unlike traditional neighborhood public schools, the community public school model focuses on providing services that support the neighborhood’s needs by involving parents and other community members. They often partner with local businesses and organizations and have an integrated focus on learning opportunities, health and fulfilling basic needs. 

The pandemic reinforced the importance of community schools, when schools needed to meet a range of needs outside the classroom. The Coalition for Community Schools estimates there are about 5,000 community schools in the country. 

Outside the city, Communities in Schools of Pittsburgh-Allegheny County [CISPAC] is helping districts build community schools across the region. Last year, they began implementing the full-service community school model across eight school districts in Allegheny County. 

Community schools across Pittsburgh serve as hubs of the neighborhoods in which they operate. Many go far beyond delivering instruction and offer resources such as food, clothing and after-school programs with a focus on mental health and reducing violence in the community. 

A spreading model with federal friends

Although the model is relatively new for Pittsburgh-area schools, community schools have, over the past two decades, reported successes in states including Texas, Florida, Ohio, California, Maryland and Minnesota.

In Cincinnati for example, all schools became community schools following a policy passed in 2001. From 2006 to 2015, research showed that the achievement gap between Black and white students in the Cincinnati school district decreased from 14.5% to 4.5%. In the Minneapolis area, the Brooklyn Center Community Schools saw district-wide behavioral references cut in half in the first five years as a community school system.

On Nov. 28, the Biden-Harris Administration announced almost $74 million in grants for full-service community schools in Idaho, Missouri, New Hampshire and Ohio. The next day, senators from Ohio, Maryland, New York and New Mexico introduced The Full Service Community School Expansion Act of 2023, which is a comprehensive bill aimed at helping more public schools implement the wrap-around services of a full-service community school model. 

The long-term success of community schools depends on consistent funding, according to Jennifer Kotting, communications strategist for The Partnership for the Future of Learning, a national network dedicated to supporting public education.

“It’s really ongoing [funding] that is needed to maintain a really strong set of possibilities in each community school,” Kotting said. 

Duquesne: Reducing violence through conflict resolution

CISPAC’s full-service community school approach stands on four pillars: integrated student support, expanded and enriched learning opportunities, active family and community engagement and collaborative leadership.

School districts such as Sto-Rox, Duquesne and Pittsburgh are hoping the community schools model will help students deal with trauma stemming from violence in their neighborhoods.

Duquesne has partnered with the University of Pittsburgh’s Just Discipline Project [JDP] to reduce exclusionary discipline practices in schools. Instead of resorting to suspensions, which have been linked to the school-to-prison pipeline, the project aims to offer more holistic solutions.

For a school to be selected for the Just Discipline Project, it must show high disciplinary action numbers. 

Currently, JDP is partnered with 20 schools around the Pittsburgh area, including Sto-Rox and PPS Langley. At most schools, they employ a full-time restorative practice coordinator who is available all day, much like a traditional teacher. 

At Duquesne, Molly Means, a restorative practice coordinator, leads a classroom group of middle schoolers to become leaders in training. The students learn restorative justice ideas and lead healing circles in younger classrooms. 

She said Duquesne’s desire to increase restorative practices makes it a good fit for the project. 

“It’s a unique opportunity for kids in the school districts that we’re in to get to be part of a leadership program, to get to learn about mediations, to get to learn about community building from such a young age,” said Means. 

Dae-Mere Johnson, an eighth grader at Duquesne and part of Means’ group of Leaders in Training [LIT], said the violence and shootings around the community impact his mental health and that of his peers. 

Johnson said he feels he and his fellow LITs are helping other — especially younger — students by sharing the conflict resolution skills they’ve learned.

“Sometimes they need help,” Johnson said. “I feel like when we come into the classroom, it’s helpful. It calms them down.”

Whether through leading healing circles for younger classrooms or helping students resolve conflict at lunchtime, Duquesne Superintendent Sue Mariani said, the leaders in training are helping to shift the school’s culture from a punitive approach to a restorative one. 

Bridget Clement, executive director of CISPAC, said often there is tension in schools where there is a majority of economically disadvantaged, Black and brown students and mostly white administrators.

“We have teachers that are afraid of the students and administrators that are afraid, and this comes out a lot because they don’t understand how to best engage students that are traumatized,” she said.

To avoid overidentifying Black and brown students for discipline, Duquesne teachers present data on students displaying at-risk behaviors, such as attendance or discipline issues, to a team of school counselors, teachers and administrators who work together to determine the best course of action for a student, said middle school Principal George Little.

Duquesne’s community school model emphasizes student mental health supports, through an approach known as social and emotional learning. 

“We have students who experience significant trauma,” Mariani said. To address that, educators focus on “making sure a kid feels safe, whether it’s emotionally or physically before they can even learn.” 

Duquesne has a full-time therapist from Auberle, a social service agency, available to students during the day. 

Langley: Meeting community needs, addressing burnout

Other than a Family Dollar that sells eggs, milk and some dried goods, Sheraden, where Langley is located, does not have a grocery store. 

“It’s a food desert,” said Keysha Gomez, founder of H.O.P.E. for Tomorrow, a community partner at Langley. In addition to in-house programs such as Blessings in a Backpack, community partners including H.O.P.E. and 412 Food Rescue work together to send kids home with food every day after school. 

Gomez said because public schools lack resources, it falls on standalone organizations such as H.O.P.E. to raise money through grants and fund-raising.

“Finances are a big problem,” she said. 

Mike Dean, Langley’s community school site manager, said they try to provide basic necessities not only for students but for the community outside of the school. 

“If someone wanted to come out and needed something at that moment, it is the understanding that Langley is the hub for this community,” he said. 

Outside of the food pantry and a free clothing store, Langley also offers a boxing program, a dental cleaning and hygiene camp each fall and summer, and lifestyle classes. The school has also worked with the city to install a stop light on Sheraden Boulevard. 

Nationwide, teachers have left the teaching profession and experienced higher levels of stress and lower morale after the pandemic, as reported by Chalkbeat. Former PPS teachers have said that burnout preceded the pandemic. 

Kathy Monti-Trievel, a Langley alumnus and now a teacher at the school, thinks that the shift to a community school model in 2017 has eased some of the burden. Having community partners bring in extra resources such as food and clothing — things teachers previously had to provide alone — has helped, she said. 

“I think community schools allow there to be healthy boundaries for teachers and staff to do their craft, which is to teach, deliver instruction,” said Sarah Armenti, a social worker and Langley’s family and community engagement coordinator. 

Sto-Rox: Expanding community, reducing absenteeism

Sto-Rox Superintendent Megan Marie Van Fossan said she would like to see more providers in their school buildings. She said the district is facing staffing challenges in teaching and health care services. Not having full-time nurses in the buildings also contributes to truancy issues in the schools, she said.

Fully 72.3% of students were chronically absent, missing more than two days of school a month for any reason, in the Sto-Rox Junior Senior High School in 2021-22. 

Van Fossan said the district is working on social-emotional skills and conflict resolution to solve violence issues that contribute to truancy and drop-out.

Duquesne’s Mariani said she believes the community school model has played a major role in supporting the return of eighth graders, who came back to the Mon Valley city in 2022 after almost a decade of being educated in neighboring districts. When it comes to the district’s goal to reopen the high school — closed in 2007— Mariani said she hopes to use a similar model. 

Sonya Gooden, a school board director for Duquesne and a family advocate at Duqusene’s Head Start program, said she feels the lack of a high school disrupts community bonds for older children.

“With the closing of the high school, bringing it back will again make a wholeness of the community because currently we’re split up between different cities,” Gooden said. “Once you get to 13, 14, you’re away from your friends and it takes away from the center of the community which the district represents.”

La’tresha Dean, the director of the Boys and Girls club at Duquesne and a parent in the district, said that while she believes the community school model at Duquesne is making a positive impact, its leadership and goals need to be consistent for community members to put their full trust into the school.

Building trust in the community

Many of Duquesne’s school staff are community members and alumni. Little said that established interpersonal relationships between staff and students give the district leaders a better understanding of students’ needs and help parents and families feel more comfortable confiding in staff and seeking out help.

“By having so many people from the community in the building it helps us understand what’s going on in the community … around guns, drugs, domestic issues — we hear about it,” Little said.

Clement said sometimes parents who have had bad experiences in school do not want to engage with their children’s school. CISPAC accordingly works to engage parents through their community school model. 

“We need to have more of that family infusion so that the teachers and the administrators who maybe aren’t on the ground have a better understanding of what the community is dealing with on a day-to-day basis,” she said. 

Another way Duquesne is keeping parents in the loop is through its Parents As Allies organization that focuses on supporting parent needs and engagement — both for their children and for themselves. Last year, Duquesne held a career and resource fair where parents could find mental health resources and professional development opportunities.

Through community and parent engagement, LaQuandra Bennet, Duquesne’s CISPAC site manager, says the long-term goal of the full-service community school model is to equip parents and the community with the resources to help their children on their own.

“We want to empower families when it comes to their student’s education,” Bennet said. “We want to make sure that … the things we’re bringing in are able to continue and that is going to be with the help of the families.” 

Lajja Mistry is the K-12 education reporter at PublicSource. She can be reached at lajja@publicsource.org.

Tanya Babbar was an editorial intern at PublicSource and is a junior at the University of Pittsburgh.

This story was fact-checked by Erin Yudt. 

The post Going beyond instruction, community schools serve as ‘hubs in the community’ appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

A few months prior to my 20th birthday, as I was waiting and hoping that my younger brother would wake up from his cancer-induced coma, I found out I had been accepted at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia.

Since age 16, I had been working at a Giant Eagle to help support my family. Neither of my parents had bachelor’s degrees and there were zero expectations in my house that I’d go to college. I figured that if I didn’t go to college soon, I’d never get the hell out of that stock room and away from the chronic back pain it inflicted. I had applied to the only two colleges I knew anything about, WJU (now Wheeling University) and the later-discredited Art Institute of Pittsburgh, intending to enroll at whichever accepted me first, if either of them did.

I had missed nearly 115 days in high school, some of which were due to an emergency medical condition greatly worsened by doctors’ refusal to listen to my mum or me, resulting in an amputation. Other times I skipped because of how I was treated at school. I’d been tardy nearly 95 times, had countless detentions, and graduated with a 2.07 GPA and a 470 on my SAT.

A school staff member used to tell me that my “kind of people don’t go to college” and most of my peers at my suburban, Catholic high school either ignored me completely, called me and my family “poor white trash,” or mocked my appearance and heavy Pittsburgh accent. All throughout high-school, I was called lazy, stupid and ignorant by other students and even by several teachers. When I showed up for school, I’d sometimes deal with it by sneaking a swig of booze or popping Valiums that my mum gave me.

Fifteen years after that acceptance letter from WJU came through, I’m a data analyst, dedicated to understanding and addressing poverty, segregation, affordable housing and community violence.

On the way, I’ve developed a clear understanding that white poverty tends not to come with the additional, deep racism-based challenges that often come with Black poverty – though white poverty can be similarly grinding in places like rural Appalachia, the deep rural South and parts of the Rust Belt. But that understanding didn’t happen overnight. I’ve learned that while racial disparities are stark on their own, they’re often intertwined with class and other identities. 

Given this, when policymakers work to address challenges like poverty, they must be aware of the ways race, class, gender and other identities intersect so that they can tailor solutions to address the different challenges that tend to be experienced by different groups — including low-income white people.

A poor kid’s response to ‘white privilege’

My parents moved us from Carrick to Brookline when I was little, in hopes of keeping us away from gun violence. They sacrificed what little money they had, “robbed Peter to pay Paul,” and had us kids write letters pleading for financial aid to the Catholic bishop of Pittsburgh to attend Seton La Salle High School in Mount Lebanon. They wanted us to be safe and get a Catholic education, and had concerns about us going to Brashear High, which was Brookline’s Pittsburgh Public Schools feeder school.

Still, I didn’t always feel very safe at Seton or in my own home during much of high school. My parents did, and do, many loving things for me but also repeated the cycles of abuse they themselves were exposed to. Outside of the bullying and isolation at school, I was exposed to significant trauma in my home. As a result, our house was frequently visited by police. 

Police also had a tendency for following me around stores and harassing me. Once, an officer even kicked in a stall door that bashed into my head when someone falsely accused me of doing drugs in a carnival bathroom.

When the time came to start at WJU, my Pell Grant and other financial aid left a few thousand in tuition to pay. Around the same time, my dad lost his job and never regained full-time employment. We only hung on to the house because of Obama’s unemployment extension, my mum’s disability and my younger brother’s Supplemental Security Income from having cancer. But they didn’t have anything to help me, so I asked the priest who baptized me at the now-closed Saint Canice in Knoxville to lend me the money, and he did. My dad and brother dropped me off at WJU with a single pillow, my guitar and one backpack full of clothes.

Adapting to being a college student was hard at first. I spent the first few weeks trying to collect unemployment from the just-closed Giant Eagle where I had worked, and hearing about the problems at home on my flip phone. Academically, I didn’t know what paragraph breaks were, so my first submitted essay was a single wall of text. I went through college without a computer. 

But I made lifelong friends immediately. The son of an unemployed electrician, I felt included among classmates who were the sons and daughters of coal miners and tradesmen. Many of the professors were from Appalachia and cared deeply about first-generation college students. I had a bed again (my mattress at home got maggots, so I’d been sleeping on the floor) and a meal plan, which meant I didn’t have to worry about food stamps running out or having to steal food from Giant Eagle to eat lunch.

Given my life experiences and how hard (and lucky) my road to college was, when a middle-class white student in my psychology class said something like, “white people don’t experience real poverty,” I pushed back. And when they then told me to “check my white privilege,” I could barely keep from blurting out: “What the fuck did you just say?” Comments like that initially made me allergic to conversations about privilege.

Blaming poor people for poverty

I was slightly above, at or below the poverty line from birth until age 29, so my understanding of the advantages of being white came slowly and through meaningful exposure to people with different perspectives and life experiences.

It came through self-reflection on what I’d seen in my own life, a growing understanding of what many of my poor Black peers faced, and, importantly, an intersectional and non-shame-based approach to conversations about privilege and the history of discrimination in the United States. 

This all culminated in a major belief change in 2014, when I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations,” which affected me because it was coming from a Black man who grew up poor and reflected data, plus experiences, that connected with mine. 

Building off much of the existing research cited in Coates’ essay, Opportunity Insights of Harvard released a landmark study on race and income mobility. It found that when accounting for race, class and gender, poor Black and Indigenous Americans had significantly lower average incomes in adulthood when compared to their poor white and Asian peers, and poor Latinos fell somewhere in the middle.

While the study shows that lower-income people of all races tend to do worse than their peers of the same race who did not grow up in poverty, it also makes clear that class alone doesn’t explain gaps between the outcomes of poor children of different races. The study proposed two primary factors: racial bias against Black people and the neighborhood context in which low-income Black children tend to grow up. 

Here in Allegheny County, 73% of poor Black families reside in our higher need census tracts, along with 22% of poor white families and 14% of poor Asian families. Poor white and Asian families mostly reside in lower-need working-class and middle-class neighborhoods, unlike their poor Black peers.

As I wrote in a previous essay for PublicSource, our neighborhoods look the way they do because of the causes (structural racism) and consequences of persistent racial and economic segregation, in addition to the massive impact of deindustrialization. While I grew up poor, I did so primarily in a low-poverty, working-class, relatively safe neighborhood. Most of my poor Black peers are disproportionately exposed to concentrated poverty and gun violence and I strongly argue we cannot ignore them. Exposure to gun violence may be one of the most important factors that explain why neighborhoods matter in affecting life outcomes.

Despite being low-income, and after moving us from rental to rental, my parents were able to get a mortgage for our house in Brookline, an easier lift because they are white. Government programs kept the family afloat. Additionally, attending a college like WJU and meeting mentors there who held me to high expectations and supported me undeniably helped me eventually rise out of poverty. While the classism I faced throughout middle and high school was challenging (and would have been even harder if I was poor and Black), getting to attend a low-poverty school was still of huge benefit to my social mobility. 

While it took tremendous efforts to go from lifelong poverty to middle-class researcher, I rose out of poverty not because I worked any harder or was any smarter than poor peers, but because I was exposed to enough protective factors and got lucky at various points in my life.

With all this context in mind, I still think it’s important to talk about and understand white poverty in its own right and in a way that doesn’t invalidate and dismiss its challenges, especially in the current political reality. 

In my experience, politicians on the political right — from former poor people like Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance to generationally wealthy people like Donald Trump — tend to exploit poor white people when they are politically useful, but otherwise demonize them and do little to address poverty. And people on the political left tend to acknowledge the systemic drivers of poverty for every marginalized group except poor white people, but at least they tend to support the social safety net more broadly. 

Recent research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that social liberals, when prompted to reflect on white privilege, had reduced sympathy for poor white people and were more likely to blame them over external causes for their challenges. Liberals showed higher levels of sympathy for other poor groups. On the other hand, conservatives expressed low levels of sympathy for all low-income people. My experience is that neither political conservatives nor liberals tend to look at the very real external causes of white poverty. They blame poor white people for supposed personal failures.

Addressing learned biases and better understanding privilege, call for an intersectional approach that acknowledges how different, intersecting identities shape our experiences and outcomes. If a conversation or research study doesn’t minimally include the intersecting realities of race, class and gender, then that conversation or research is insufficient and incomplete. Just as poor Black people tend to experience additional hardships to those experienced by upper-income Black people, being poor and white is incredibly distinct from being upper income and white, so looking at race alone is not enough.

There also is a lack of understanding of the volume of white people who experience poverty. Here in Allegheny County, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the white poverty rate in 2022 was 8% and the Black poverty rate was 31%, which reflects the realities of structural racism. At the same time, there are more poor white people in the county than any other group: more than 73,000 poor white people and around 43,000 poor Black people. Nationally, most poor people are white, with over 17 million white, non-Hispanic people living in poverty. 

Policymakers have to understand the full scope of poverty and how it intersects with race to properly address disparities across groups and serve all those in need. 

Closely intertwined with the enduring reality of racism in America is the enduring reality of classism, reflected in the slur “white trash.” As documented in Nancy Isenberg’s book “White Trash,” people coming to the New World from England during the colonial era weren’t primarily escaping religious persecution and the monarchy, but rather shipped over because British elites saw America as a trash bin for England’s poor when starvation, incarceration or war didn’t dispose of them.

Surrounded by populations of white people brought over as indentured servants and Black people transported into slavery, wealthy whites, terrified of a united rebellion, have exploited the construct of race to divide and control poor people since the colonial era. According to Isenberg, the general landlessness of America’s white rural poor, meanwhile, led to a series of slurs that are still openly used to this day: waste people, redneck, hillbilly, white trash, clay eater, cracker and trailer trash, as just some common examples. Given how often I still hear them used, they seem to be considered acceptable, even on the political left. 

Throughout America’s history, poverty has been wrongly viewed as hereditary, not the result of structural barriers. As part of the eugenics movement of the early 1900s, forced sterilization was used to control “undesirable” populations, which included women of color and poor white women. And while discriminatory voting, housing, lending and land use laws throughout U.S history took clear aims at disenfranchising Black people, they also impact poor people of any race, though not equally.

Such thinking has seeped into political discourse on all sides, with poor white people viewed as part of a group of deplorables. Even today, most of the discourse on the 2016 election results blames poor and working class white people for the election of Donald Trump, even though exit polls show he was mostly elected by middle- and upper-income white people.

Statistical truths, individual experiences

In 2022, West Virginia — where my classmate had denied white poverty — was 90% white and the third-poorest state. Its second-poorest county, McDowell, is 90% white and has the state’s highest suicide rate, America’s highest opioid overdose rate among counties according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the nation’s lowest county life expectancy, the latter statistic on par with Iraq. 

Here in Allegheny County, most Black people live in our higher-need neighborhoods, which is not true of any other racial or ethnic group. At the same time, there are nearly as many white people in our higher-need neighborhoods as Black people — around 76,000 white people and around 82,000 Black people. While need is most concentrated in our Black neighborhoods,  there is also high need in mixed-but-majority-white neighborhoods in Pittsburgh’s South Hilltop, McKees Rocks and steel towns throughout the Mon Valley. These are neighborhoods where low-to-moderate-income people of different races are exposed to challenges like gun violence,  pollution, economic isolation, food deserts, transportation barriers and more, a fact that may get overlooked. 

I was poor or near poor from birth until about six years ago, when I landed my career as a researcher after graduating from Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College (an aggressive culture shock for me given that two-thirds of students come from the top fifth of the income distribution). Despite my own economic mobility, the consequences of poverty and trauma still impact me to this day. I also have had to deal with years of people invalidating my experiences or demonstrating a lack of empathy toward poor white people. 

This approach didn’t work in teaching me about the reality of racism, and it doesn’t help build coalitions across race and class to abolish structural racism, classism and other forms of discrimination. But exposure to intersectionality and approaches that combine empathetic listening with highlighting our shared humanity did and do work, and as a result, I’ve dedicated my adult life to addressing the causes and consequences of persistent racial and economic segregation.

We need to recognize and separate statistical truths from individual ones. One should never assume what someone’s life experience is without getting to know them. Individual experiences can and do stray from statistical averages. If someone has a bias or a lack of understanding about how intersecting identities tend to shape outcomes, we should educate in a way that acknowledges these identities and expose people to these ideas in ways that are effective, not confrontational.

We should care about eradicating poverty for people of all races, with an understanding that individuals from different groups tend to require different levels of support, given the reality of structural discrimination. To do that, we need diverse anti-poverty coalitions across race and class, not silos. 

Nick Cotter is a researcher with Allegheny County and the creator of the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Project. He can be reached at pittsburghneighborhoodproject@gmail.com. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author alone. This piece does not reflect official views of the Allegheny County Department of Human Services. You can follow the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Project here.

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Falaknaz Paiwandi came to the Oakland Food Pantry in search of fresh vegetables and halal meat. 

The 56-year-old father of four fled Afghanistan with his family after the Taliban seized power there in 2021. They left their home in Parwan — a rural province north of Kabul — for a New Jersey military base, where they joined thousands of Afghan refugees awaiting new lives in American cities. 

They settled in Pittsburgh a few months later, but are finding it hard to afford food here. Paiwandi, a veteran of U.S.-backed Afghan armed forces, can’t work because he was injured in a car accident. His 23-year-old son, a laundromat worker, is the family’s sole earner. His wages are nowhere near enough to feed his parents and siblings. 

“It’s too expensive and we’re not able to buy food for ourselves,” said Paiwandi, speaking in Dari through an interpreter. “That’s why we’re having a plan to get food from the food pantry.”  

He selected apples, carrots, walnuts and mangoes, among other produce items. But he couldn’t have his pick of protein: There was no halal beef or chicken that day, so he took the salmon that pantry staff offered him.  

About 30 Afghan families visit the pantry each month, according to Community Human Services [CHS], the nonprofit that runs it and offers other supportive services. Their needs highlight gaps in Pittsburgh’s charitable food system, which is struggling to keep pace with high demand and changing demographics in the region. Staff at food banks and pantries say more people with limited English proficiency are seeking food assistance. And few pantries offer halal meat — a crucial macronutrient for Paiwandi and other followers of Islamic dietary law. 

CHS is trying to fill those gaps. It uses interpreters to communicate with people facing language barriers. It stocks the kind of fresh produce and grains that are staple foods in many countries. And it offers halal meat as much as its budget allows. 

Staff said their efforts drew more refugees and immigrants to the pantry. High food prices and the end of pandemic-era food benefits are driving demand, too. Nearly 2,800 people used the pantry in the last fiscal year — a 77% increase from fiscal year 2022 that brought more traffic to the neighborhood and generated backlash from residents. 

“We’re trying to be really good neighbors while also serving the community,” said Chief Executive Alicia Romano. “It’s been a really tough balance.” 

Growing needs and rising tensions 

To get the food they need for the week, a pantry participant must first maneuver through the tight streets of South Oakland. If they’re new to Pittsburgh and unfamiliar with traffic laws here, they might park in a fire lane or permit-parking spot for residents.  

It’s happened often enough to create conflict with neighbors, some of whom called police to report participants who illegally parked near the pantry, or blocked traffic on Lawn Street while loading food into their cars. Pantry Program Manager Mattie Johnson once had to defuse tension when a group of neighbors confronted participants outside the pantry to complain about the disruption near their homes.   

Police who arrived to enforce traffic laws were unprepared for the language diversity at the pantry. Johnson said an officer “made this one big announcement” in English, which many participants couldn’t understand. When staff used interpreters to make sure everyone got the message, “it kind of clicked to her, you know, what was going on here.” 

More refugees have resettled in Allegheny County in recent years, according to data provided by the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services. It partnered with resettlement agencies to bring 746 people here in 2023 and 822 in 2022 — up from 174 in 2021. The historic high is due to people fleeing conflict and instability in countries such as Ukraine, Afghanistan, Venezuela and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, said Dana Gold, chief operating officer of Jewish Family and Community Services [JFCS], one of four resettlement agencies in the region. 

Research shows they’re at risk for food insecurity after they arrive — especially if they face language barriers, which can lead to fewer job opportunities and difficulty enrolling in food assistance programs. 

It’s why food pantries should develop “linguistic and cultural competency” to serve them, said Ha Ngan (Milkie) Vu, an assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University who studies food insecurity in refugee and immigrant populations. That means stocking “culturally appropriate foods” and hiring staff with the language skills to communicate with participants. 

The CHS team stepped up on a recent afternoon as people from Ukraine, Afghanistan and other countries walked through the pantry doors. 

An Arabic-speaking volunteer helped new participants with the intake process. Interpreters from Larimer-based Global Wordsmiths — who speak rarer languages and dialects like Dari and Pashto — were a phone call away. An assortment of fresh produce, dried legumes and canned goods was stocked on the shelves. And non-English-speaking participants could point to signs on the wall — of a lamb, pig, cow, turkey and fish — to choose cuts of meat.  

There were problems to solve, too. Staff placed signs and cones around no-parking zones, and have expanded pantry hours to keep the flow of traffic moving. 

Romano attended a November meeting of the Oakcliffe Community Organization, which represents residents of the South Oakland enclave, to announce the changes to neighbors who complained.  

Johnson said neighbors who called police to “intentionally ticket” vulnerable participants aren’t helping. She described the plight of a low-income woman who stayed away from the pantry for weeks after she was fined $50 for a parking violation.  

“It’s affecting the people that are already here to receive help, and who need it the most — especially her,” she said. “And I felt so bad because there was nothing we could do.” 

Elena Zaitsoff, vice president of the Oakcliffe group, declined to comment on behalf of residents. She said CHS leadership is welcome to keep attending meetings to update the community. 

Johnson hung a large sign near the pantry entrance that reads “Welcome” in 17 languages. After clashes with neighbors and a recent xenophobic comment from one participant to another, she wanted refugees and immigrants to know “that they can come here [and] we're going to try to accommodate their needs … as much as possible.”    

One of her biggest hurdles? Sourcing halal meat, which is expensive and hard to find in the charitable food system. 

Working toward a charitable food system for all 

Halal is the Arabic word for “permitted.” 

It applies to anything that’s allowed under Islamic law, but it’s most often used to describe food, said Asma Ahad, the director of halal market development at IFANCA, an Illinois-based halal certification organization. 

An animal must be slaughtered by a Muslim using the proper method, which is considered more humane, according to IFANCA guidelines. Pork isn’t allowed, so Muslims typically eat halal beef, lamb or chicken. Suppliers avoid cross-contamination with non-halal foods.  

“We see more halal-specific diets than anything,” said Johnson. 

But the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, which supplies local pantries, hasn’t consistently offered halal meat. Johnson pulled up its online ordering form on a December afternoon. It allowed her to select kosher foods — eaten by followers of Jewish dietary law — but not halal ones. 

“I feel like our halal families are coming in every week and we have to constantly give them fish, fish, fish,” she said. “... I don’t feel like it’s fair” that Muslims who come to the pantry can’t choose from a wide array of meats.  

“I don’t think it was intentional,” she added.

It “definitely” wasn’t, said Erin Kelly, director of partner and distribution programs at the food bank. “Our inventory is constantly changing.” 

A food bank spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement that partner food pantries have “low demand” for halal beef and chicken because it’s more expensive. “Thus, we tend to not keep as big of a supply” in our warehouse. But it keeps some halal meat offsite for partners who need it and encouraged pantry staff to reach out when they can’t order the items online.

“We will work with CHS and other partners that serve similar populations to ensure they have the resources to serve their community,” said the spokesperson. 

Johnson asked the food bank for halal products in November. It responded to her request the day after PublicSource asked it questions about its halal inventory. She said the food bank offered to add halal chicken to its next delivery to the pantry.

A majority of food-insecure Muslims require or prefer halal foods, according to a poll by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a Michigan-based think tank that studies American Muslims. Ahad said food banks and pantries are “slowly” realizing they need to do more, “but there’s still not an understanding of … why doing it right and doing it on a regular basis is critical.” The problem needs to be recognized at the federal level “so it can trickle down,” she added. 

Advocates want to expand the list of halal and kosher foods available through The Emergency Food Assistance Program, a federal program which buys healthy foods and partners with states to distribute them via food banks and pantries. They’re pushing for more equity in food stamps, too.    

In the meantime, a handful of pantries in the region will keep trying to plug the holes in the system. Some are struggling to keep up with demand. 

The Islamic Center of Pittsburgh runs a delivery-based pantry that offers halal meat sourced from local butcher Salem’s Market and Grill. The sign-up system filled up in a day this month — a record since it started posting the forms online a few years ago.

“I was shocked to see this,” said Pantry Manager Issam Abushaban. “That goes to show you how many people are in need and how desperate the situation is.” 

He’s seen more families from Syria and Afghanistan at the mosque lately. “We tend to be a comfort zone for people who need help when they come from other places,” he added.  

The Squirrel Hill Food Pantry, run by JFCS, is one of the few pantries in the county that’s open five days a week. It’s built up a network of suppliers — local and in New York — to keep shelves stocked with kosher and halal foods. Refugees often receive their first supplemental foods from the pantry, which sources culturally appropriate produce for them such as tomatillos, plantains and mangoes. Staff said they tend not to use canned goods.   

“We’ve been doing this a long time,” said Gold, the JFCS executive. 

But there’s still more to learn: “We were buying the wrong kind of lentils” for Afghan families, she said.  

CHS secured a $51,000 grant from McAuley Ministries last month to buy halal meat and other foods. It’s awaiting the funds, searching for a local supplier and keeping a dedicated halal freezer ready.  

Paiwandi, the father of four from Afghanistan, will be glad to have some options. 

“We just want to have food which is halal for Muslims,” he said. “Chicken, cow and fish meat.” 

If you need food assistance, dial 211 or find resources here.  

Venuri Siriwardane is PublicSource’s health and mental health reporter. She can be reached at venuri@publicsource.org or on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, @venuris.

This story was fact-checked by Delaney Adams. 

This reporting has been made possible through the Staunton Farm Mental Health Reporting Fellowship and the Jewish Healthcare Foundation.

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HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania will need to spend at least $5.4 billion to close the gap between rich and poor school districts, according to a long-awaited report approved by a divided panel of policymakers Thursday.

The report was backed by Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration and won near-unanimous support from legislative Democrats who served on the Basic Education Funding Commission.

It recommended changing the formula Pennsylvania uses to fund public schools to reduce year-over-year fluctuations in poorer districts’ state funding, while also calling for increased investments in school construction and an expansion of the education workforce.

It passed the commission 8-7.

“I think we’ve at least laid out a blueprint now, where within five years … we’ll be able to say we have or have not made progress, and here’s what we need to continue to do,” said state Rep. Mike Sturla, D-Lancaster, who co-chaired the commission.

The Basic Education Funding Commission — which consisted of six Democratic legislators, six Republican legislators, and three members of the Shapiro administration — was reconvened last spring to address a landmark state court ruling that found Pennsylvania is unconstitutionally underfunding poor school districts.

Any change to the way the commonwealth funds education will need to win support from the Democrat-controlled state House, Republican-controlled state Senate, and Shapiro, a Democrat.

Alongside the Democratic-authored report that passed the commission, Republicans authored their own. It failed to pass in a 6-6-3 vote, with Shapiro’s representatives abstaining.

Common ground exists. Both major parties agree the state must rewrite its education formula to stabilize poorer districts’ annual funding. Policymakers in both parties also agreed that all 500 districts should receive at least as much state funding as they did in the 2023-24 fiscal year, which would prevent deep funding cuts in districts currently losing population.

Both reports also highlight school construction, teacher recruitment, and reforms to charter school payments as areas of agreement.

But in a divided General Assembly, the increased spending favored by Democrats who control the state House will likely require policy concessions to appease the state Senate. The Republicans who control that chamber support alternatives to public schools, including a taxpayer-funded voucher program.

Threading the needle between the two stances will require compromise, which has been elusive in the past year.

Adequate funding, or student choice?

In the Democratic-authored report that ultimately passed, lawmakers based their $5.4 billion goal for new spending on “adequacy targets” — the bar at which they believe districts are serving students at an acceptable level.

This measure sets a baseline amount of per-student spending, then adds in additional spending based on a district’s student body and factors like poverty and level of English proficiency. If a district spends less than the resulting number, it is missing its adequacy target, the report said.

Commission members wrote in the Democratic report that this measure was drafted in response to feedback during hearings across the commonwealth.

“Many criticisms of the current formula centered around the idea that it allocates what is available instead of determining what is needed to meet the needs of districts,” the authors wrote.

They added, “Out of PA’s 500 school districts, 387, or 77%, have an adequacy gap.”

In addition to the proposed $5.4 billion infusion — which would be doled out to districts over seven years — the report says the state should implement a mandatory, annual $200 million increase in school funding to account for cost increases. While education funding has routinely increased in recent budget deals, the exact number has been the subject of backroom haggling between top policymakers, which creates more uncertainty for districts.

Where to find the money to fund increased state spending remains an open question — and a top GOP concern.

Some public education advocates, including leaders of a major state union, want to tap the state’s now-flush rainy day fund, sitting at about $6 billion.

“We have the means and responsibility to give our students and educators the world class education system they deserve right now,” Arthur Steinberg, president of the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement Thursday. The union represents educators and other support staff in urban districts.

Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg — an attorney with the Public Interest Law Center, which represented plaintiffs in the initial school funding case — said the fact that the Democratic proposal includes a concrete funding target is a big deal.

“The timeline is very long and the number is lower than we proposed,” he said. “We’ll try to convince the governor to get that number up, but we also know this is a really serious, meaningful first step.”

Republicans’ plan mirrored Democrats’ in that it adjusted the funding formula to protect shrinking and poor districts from big funding shifts.

However, legislative Republicans said they did not want to suggest a dollar amount, arguing instead that the number should be decided during budget negotiations later this year.

“Never have you seen this commission — or for that fact, really any other commission — offer that specific dollar recommendation,” said state Sen. Kristin Phillips-Hill, R-York, the Republican co-chair of the commission, after Thursday’s meeting. “We respect the General Assembly, the governor, and the process and believe that we will see this come to fruition in the next budget process.”

The Republican-introduced report that failed to pass the commission called for lowering pension costs, consolidating districts to reduce duplicative costs, and creating a taxpayer-funded voucher program to cover private school tuition for students in public districts with low test scores.

“Comprehensive solutions, not funding alone, are required to ensure all school districts have the resources necessary to supply students with comprehensive learning opportunities that meet 21st century academic, civic, and social demands,” the GOP report stated.

The more GOP recommendations that are adopted in a final deal, “the easier some of the other conversations around the dollars will become,” said state Rep. Jesse Topper, R-Bedford, the ranking Republican on the state House Education Committee.

The next steps are in the hands of Shapiro, who will deliver his annual budget address in a little less than a month.

Members of the administration are “the ones that are going to be making a budget proposal here soon,” Sturla said. “They’re the ones who are going to be pushing part of this. They’re one of the biggest seats at the table.”

In a statement Thursday, Shapiro said he looked forward to his speech as a starting point, noting the report included a number of his priorities, such as increased spending on mental health and school construction.

“We must approach this responsibility with hope and ambition — because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to do right by our kids, to fund our schools, and to empower parents to put their kids in the best position for them to succeed,” he said.

‘Thorough and efficient’

The Pennsylvania Constitution requires the General Assembly to “provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of public education to serve the needs of the Commonwealth.”

In a lawsuit filed by the Philadelphia-based Education Law Center and Public Interest Law Center almost a decade ago, six districts argued the state’s formula for funding schools failed to meet that standard and discriminated against students based on their location.

Pennsylvania uses two formulas to decide how much state money to send to each school district, one of which is generally seen as outdated and inequitable. The other, which accounts for poverty and the number of students learning English, was designed in 2016 in light of the lawsuit.

Only new money appropriated by the legislature moves through the so-called “fair funding formula.” At the moment, that represents roughly a quarter of the $7.8 billion the state sends directly to school districts to support K-12 education.

After receiving state funding, districts are left to pad out much of their budgets through property taxes, which vary widely and tend to disproportionately burden poor areas.

Lawyers for the General Assembly, which until last year was completely controlled by Republicans, spent years trying to have the case thrown out, arguing that the issue was not within the court’s jurisdiction and that the new funding formula had rendered the case moot.

That effort failed, and Commonwealth Court heard oral arguments in the case for 13 weeks between November 2021 and February 2022. Judge Renee Cohn Jubilier, who was elected as a Republican, delivered an 800-page decision a year later siding with the schools.

She stopped short of identifying any one solution, instead writing that changes do not need to be “entirely financial. The options for reform are virtually limitless.”

“All witnesses agree that every child can learn,” wrote Jubelirer. “It is now the obligation of the Legislature, Executive Branch, and educators, to make the constitutional promise a reality in this Commonwealth.”

Last fall, the commission held 11 hearings across the commonwealth, from Pittsburgh to Hazleton to Hanover, collecting testimony on Pennsylvania’s education system. But as policymakers listened in to craft the final report, debates over education policy drove the Capitol’s contentious year.

Legislative Republicans, who control the state Senate, have focused on structural changes to public education, such as expanding vocational education, while offering alternatives through private schools. For instance, the state Senate passed a budget bill last June that included $100 million in public money for private school vouchers.

Shapiro has shown support both for public and private education.

As attorney general, his office filed a 2022 brief in favor of the districts’ arguments for more state funding. His first budget spent more than $10 billion on K-12 education, a new record, and included funding for special education, school meals, student-teacher stipends and vocational education.

But Shapiro, to the consternation of public school advocates, has also repeatedly said he backs using tax dollars to fund private school vouchers.

Should the legislature and Shapiro fail to find common ground, the state could end up back in court.

At a news conference in early January, PA School Works, a coalition that includes the Education Law Center and other public education advocates, argued that addressing the ruling will cost at least $6.2 billion.

They called for a $2 billion down payment within the coming fiscal year, with the rest spent over the following four years. That number, advocates noted, doesn’t include needed spending on school building repairs or pre-K.

“We are prepared to go back to court to defend the rights of those families,” Deborah Gordan Klehr, executive director of the Education Law Center, said at the news conference.

Spotlight PA’s Katie Meyer contributed reporting.

BEFORE YOU GO… If you learned something from this article, pay it forward and contribute to Spotlight PA at spotlightpa.org/donate. Spotlight PA is funded by foundations and readers like you who are committed to accountability journalism that gets results.

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Sara Innamorato laid out a new administration priority yesterday, allocating $500,000 to a pilot program for subsidizing child care in one of her first big moves since taking office.

The new Allegheny County executive said the region faces an “urgent crisis” in child care while announcing the funds during a tour of the Shady Lane School daycare center in Point Breeze North.

Innamorato said thousands of local families may be unable to afford care for their children in the absence of government help, which could pull parents out of the workforce and hamper economic growth.

“Child care is such a priority of my administration,” Innamorato said. “…The work will not stop today.”

The $500,000 boosts an existing county program that subsidizes child care for families making twice to three times the federal poverty level who also meet work or education eligibility requirements. The program – Allegheny County Child Care Matters – began in April 2022 using $5 million in American Rescue Plan Act [ARPA] funds allocated by the federal government to prop up day care services. 

So far, the program has subsidized care costs for 356 children. This week’s top-up will usher in 28 more who make up the current wait list, leaving some leftover funds for an unspecified number of additional children. The administration believes as many as 15,000 children may fall within the eligibility bracket.

Experts say high operational costs and staffing shortages prompted by low pay and high stress have strained the child care sector since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Pennsylvania now has nearly 600 fewer facilities than in 2020, with a net loss of 18 in Allegheny County.

The county established the Department of Children Initiatives [DCI] in 2021 to shore up an industry reeling from the pandemic and got to work distributing relief funds directly to care providers. Out of that later flowed the Child Care Matters program in conjunction with the Early Learning Resource Center.

While some child care professionals, such as Shady Lane Executive Director Lindsey Ramsey, say DCI has helped day care centers stay afloat, others in the industry are concerned the gaps remain wide and fear what may await when federal funds dry up.

DCI had spent less than a third of its $20 million ARPA-funded startup budget as of December, and must divvy out the remainder by the end of 2024 or return it to the federal government. 

Innamorato yesterday emphasized she appreciates the scale of the challenge and is committed to applying county resources to solutions.

“We are going to be meeting with businesses, nonprofits, our state and federal government and the foundation community to discuss a more unified and holistic approach to subsidized childcare for working families in Allegheny County and support the provider workforce,” she said.

“It is not just an issue for young families. It’s an economic issue for our whole county.” 

Correction: A previous version of this story mischaracterized the income qualifications for the Child Care Matters program.

Jamie Wiggan is Deputy Editor at Public Source. He can be reached at Jamie@publicsource.org.

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Lindsey Ramsey became an aide in an infant room at a child care facility as a 19-year-old single mom looking for work so she could afford diapers for her daughter. Never having thought about entering the sector, she learned how to care for children from a group of passionate caregivers.

“I had no idea what I was doing,” said Ramsey, 34, now the executive director of Shady Lane School in Point Breeze North. “But we had a wonderful group of educators who helped uplift new people entering the field … and they taught me how to change diapers and be a mom … I started to fall in love with early childhood education.”

The pandemic, though, exacerbated a multitude of underlying problems that had long haunted the care industry, such as high costs for parents and low wages for employees, according to child care advocates and providers. Now some child care practitioners are anticipating crisis.

While Congress injected $39 billion into child care through the American Rescue Plan Act [ARPA], it didn’t address underlying problems in child care infrastructure. 

More than half of that funding ended in September, igniting fears over a mass closure of child care facilities dubbed the “child care cliff.”

While the end of federal funds will not lead to wholesale closures, Cara Ciminillo, executive director of Trying Together, an Allegheny County-based child care advocacy group, said the decline of providers will continue if long term funding is not brought in.

Despite the mounting challenges, Ramsey said caring for the community and her love of childhood education keep her working in the field.

“I’m driven by equity, because it is so important that we are elevating those who don’t have the resources, who don’t have enough to be able to succeed and thrive in life,” Ramsey said. “Having access to early childhood [care] early on, is one of the leading contributing parts to human development. So I consider it to be a key component to equity, and that’s why I am rooted and stuck here.”

Ramsey is one of many child care providers in Allegheny County who shared concerns with the Pittsburgh Media Partnership. They fear that affordable and accessible child care could take major hits without new funding and government resources. 

Pennsylvania shuttered 2,189 child care programs from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic to June 2023, Emily Neff, Trying Together’s public policy director, said in an email. And even with new facilities opening, the net loss was 597.

Neff said 181 child care programs permanently closed in Allegheny County from 2019 through November of this year for a net loss of 18 in the county.

Diane Barber, executive director of the Pennsylvania Child Care Association, partly blames the closures on high operational costs of facilities and rapid staff turnover that occurred throughout the pandemic.

Barber said utility bills rose over the pandemic, compounding bills for child care providers and families. 

As the pandemic dragged on, employees at child care facilities across the state left for better-paying — and often easier — positions in public schools or even at retail locations, Barber said. And when the pandemic wound down, they didn’t return.

“I’ve heard this not once, I’ve heard this multiple times, that [a new child care staff worker] will show up and they’re gone by lunch because this is just not the job that they thought it was going to be,” Barber said. “They thought they were gonna play with kids and that’s not what it’s all about.”

Ramsey, who worked at Shady Lane as an educator before the arrival of COVID-19, returned as an administrator in the midst of the pandemic, while a budget deficit and record low enrollment prompted talk of closure.

Ramsey said Shady Lane received more than $200,000 in federal funds through the county to expand its programming for young children to accommodate eight new infants and 10 new toddlers. The grants sat on top of additional federal funds it used to subsidize employee wages.

“And that’s what really saved us,” Ramsey said of the Allegheny County grant. “We had a long infant-toddler waitlist. That gave us the ability to open more classrooms.”

How one of the county’s youngest departments distributed ARPA funds 

Allegheny County allocated $20 million of its $380 million ARPA allotment to organizations providing or advocating for child care under the designation “Healthy Childhood Environments,” according to the county ARPA spending dashboard. 

The county established the Department of Children Initiatives and assigned it to administer ARPA funds in December of 2021 following the recommendations in a report from the Allegheny County Children Fund’s working group.

So far, the department has disbursed a little over $6.1 million across 25 child care providers, advocacy groups and a consultancy firm, according to Mathew Singer, the chief of staff at the Allegheny County Controller’s office.

Rebecca Mercatoris, the department’s executive director since its inception in 2021, said the first goal when allocating the money was to build the capacity of existing part-time and full-time child care providers. 

Federal spending deadlines stipulate the county needs to allocate the remaining $13.9 million to organizations during 2024 and distribute it within two years.

Mercatoris said since the department’s establishment, it’s focused on mapping out the problems impacting child care in Allegheny County. Now, it’s trying to solve them. 

Minimal funds and shrinking staff make a ‘bad combination’

Mercatoris said one of the biggest problems facing child care — one described by many providers and advocates — relates to its business model. Parents across demographics need affordable child care to get back to work, while private child care providers need to turn a profit to retain staff and keep slots for children open. 

“I think one of our largest challenges is around family access and affordability and being able to support families in meeting their child care needs while also ensuring providers have the funds they need to be able to hire great staff and be able to keep them with them,” Mercatoris said.

Despite a constant demand for child care, there’s not enough people staying or going into the workforce due to low wages. This, coupled with a lack of financial support on the county, state and federal level, makes for what Ramsey describes as a “bad combination” that providers can’t keep up with. 

“[Providers] don’t want to price gouge families because they know families can’t afford it,” Ramsey said. “So in turn, they are taking the loss and this loss has impacted the sector to the point where we’re at the brink of collapse.”

According to Ramsey, even after the mandatory shutdowns ended, many facilities couldn’t open because all of their staff either had left for higher paying jobs or their older staff couldn’t come back to work due to risk of exposure to COVID. 

“People started to realize that they had to increase their wages to get people to come back to work there,” Ramsey said. “So those mom and pop centers and nonprofits struggled financially because they were having to raise wages with money that they didn’t have.” 

The Bhutanese Community Association of Pittsburgh [BCAP] provides free after-school programs to families and students in the Brentwood area, but had to close down a program it started in 2019 at Concord Elementary School.

Khara Timsina, BCAP’s executive director, said BCAP will need more funding to continue to operate its after-school and summer programs into next year.

Deborah Gallagher, the director of the Council of Three Rivers American Indian Center Early Head Start program, said it’s become increasingly hard to find people who are both interested and qualified to continue working in early child care facilities.

Gallagher oversees both COTRAIC’s Early Head Start program in Hazelwood and the partnerships the program has with several other day care centers.

According to Gallagher, Head Start and Early Head Start received ARPA funding in 2021 and 2022, some of which covered quarterly bonuses for staff. But when the bonuses stopped, Gallagher lost staff. Now she is paying “hefty substitute fees” for subs from a staffing company called Childcare Careers.  

“Parents can’t find care because we can’t find people,” said Gallagher, noting that if facilities had the funds to find and train people the industry would pick up. 

‘I’m just trying to get good care for my kid’

Parents said issues of affordability and long wait lists existed long before pandemic-era staffing shortages added to their woes..

For Shawna Ramsey, 28, of Baldwin Borough, the high cost of child care pushed her out of her career. 

A mother of three, Ramsey – who is not related to Lindsey Ramsey – said she had her first child while in college. In nursing school, she said she couldn’t find a child care facility with an open spot, let alone a facility that matched her budget stretched thin by student loan payments. 

She became a nurse, had another child and then a third — but her nursing salary remained the same. She carried a surrogate child to pay for her student loans, and ultimately decided to leave the nursing field to focus on motherhood.

“I think it’s really interesting that [child care] costs so much when workers get paid so little,” Ramsey said. “Private owners seem to be profiting off of people in need.”

The Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, estimates that it costs the average family in Pennsylvania $987 monthly to keep one infant in child care. A median child care worker in Pennsylvania would have to spend more than half of their earnings to put their own child in infant care.

After serving in the Navy, Liz Sterrett, was wrapping up her degree and looking for a child care spot for her 3-year-old daughter. She found a facility that would let her do janitorial work in exchange for a spot, but after college she had to start paying $600 a month — a cost she can’t wrap her head around six years later.

“I’ve had to shape my life and career around the fact that I cannot afford child care by myself,” said Sterrett, 37, of Bellevue. “No matter how much I scream and shout and cry, it doesn’t become affordable.”

Sterrett’s current employer lets her work from home several days a week, saving her hundreds a month in child care. She said it’s not ideal, and her now 9-year-old daughter has “several meltdowns because I can’t give her my full attention,” but child care is still a luxury she can’t afford. 

“Access to child care is absolutely abhorrent,” Sterrett said. “There is no reason why I should be struggling … I am not living some fancy metropolitan lifestyle. I’m just trying to get good care for my kid.”

‘Band-Aid on a historical problem’

While funding initiatives like ARPA sought to help facilities that took a hit during the pandemic build back their staff and resources, providers point to broader inequities that contribute to the issues they are facing.

“[ARPA] was not enough, because it was a Band-Aid on a historical problem,” Lindsey Ramsey said. “The historical problem is that the field was never invested in enough because the work isn’t valued and that has further snowballed into an issue of staffing … of the field not looking attractive enough to join, of programs not being able to truly reflect the true costs of the work that they’re doing.” 

According to Ciminillo, the average hourly wage for a Pennsylvania child care employee is $12.43 — not enough, but hard to raise because doing so would increase the cost of tuition for parents.

“We’re competing for folks and we’re not being successful because we can’t get the wages up and it’s because we don’t have a larger government investment in the system,” Ciminillo said.

Ciminillo described the child care system as already “very fragile” prior to the pandemic given that providers were not compensated, valued, appreciated or invested in enough. 

Lindsey Ramsey added that historically women, especially women of color, are the ones who provide child care, which she said is likely the reason why there seems to be less focus on funding the field. 

Maria Manautou, a former worker at a child care center in Pittsburgh, said better pay would be the fast route to alleviating staffing issues.

“If you have two jobs, and the one offers you … $15 and you’re not having that kind of stress and then the one offers you $12 and you’re stressed all day, then you can see how people end up picking something different,” Manautou said.

Ciminillo said the federal government and local communities began to realize how much they needed child care once – after the initial weeks of shutdown in 2020 – essential workers needed to get back to work but couldn’t do so without care. 

 To build a sustainable future child care sector, Ramsey is calling for  a “change and shift in the narrative of how we are looking at the early childhood field.” 

“At a federal level, there needs to be policy put in place for true equitable wages that reflect the level and importance of the work that’s being done,” Ramsey said. 

Calling on Congress: Providers say short term funding is not enough

Barber said short-term funding initiatives like ARPA only address problems in the child care sector as they arise, failing to address the underlying problems.

She compares the influx of short-term funding to building with Jenga blocks that keep moving around.

“Then we know how that game ends, right?” Barber asked. “Everything falls apart.”

Ciminillo said Allegheny County needs to establish a recurring revenue stream to support early learning and out-of-school programming. And for that to happen, she said local officials must hear their constituents’ demands.

“Each of us, no matter our position, no matter our age, no matter whether we have children or not, play a role in affecting young children, their families, and their caregiver’s lives,” Ciminillo said. “So it’s just so important that everybody show up and use their sphere of influence in support of that.”

Democrats in Congress introduced legislation in September to supplement child care funding by distributing $80 billion over five years when ARPA expires.

According to a press release announcing the legislation, this funding request would support more than 220,000 child care providers nationally that serve a total of more than 10 million children. It has not yet received a vote.

U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, D-Aspinwall, and U.S. House Minority Whip Katherine Clark, a Democrat from Massachusetts, toured La Petite Academy, a new child care facility at Pittsburgh International Airport, earlier this month and spoke about the issues plaguing child care and what they deemed as largely partisan opposition to potential solutions.

Clark said that without Republican support, she’s “not very optimistic” Congress will be able to get the $16 billion in supplemental funding passed.

Deluzio, a father of three and member of the Congressional Dads Caucus, described the “death spiral” child care providers enter when they’re forced to increase rates to retain staff but, in turn, price out families, which lowers their revenues. It’s a problem, he said, that can only be resolved through federal support of the child care industry.

“This is about lowering costs. This is about giving folks the ability to work and earn and be part of society,” Deluzio said in regards to the $16 billion funding request, “The federal government’s got to be there to help strengthen [the child care sector], invest and ultimately bring down costs for people.”

Still, several child care advocates say even ambitious fixed-term funding initiatives won’t solve the structural problems plaguing the sector.

“This can’t be a one-time funding,” Lindsey Ramsey said. “This has to be funding that is ongoing [and] sustainable, that’s built into government policy.”

Correction: Shady Lane School is in Point Breeze North. An earlier version of this story included an incorrect neighborhood.

Betul Tuncer and James Paul are students at the University of Pittsburgh. They completed fall internships with the Pittsburgh Media Partnership. Tanya Babbar, a student at the University of Pittsburgh, and Erin Yudt, a student at Point Park University, completed fall internships with PublicSource. Juliet Martinez is managing editor of The Homepage, a community newspaper serving Greater Hazelwood and surrounding neighborhoods.

The post ‘Band-Aid on a historical problem’: Child care providers expect slow collapse of sector without long-term aid appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Mario’s family was kicked off Medicaid this year. 

Beechview Points of Pride
PublicSource maps and chronicles the strengths of diverse communities

When he reported a new income source, he learned that his family — including his two children — no longer qualified for health insurance through UPMC for You, a Medicaid managed care plan. 

And buying marketplace coverage is out of the question: Most plans would cost him up to $300 per family member. That works out to more than $1,200 per month — a cost he can’t afford on top of his mortgage and other expenses. 

“It’s too much money, you know?” he said, shaking his head.  

PublicSource is withholding Mario’s last name because he comes from a mixed-immigration status household. His daughters, 13 and 5, were born in the U.S. They’ve been without health insurance for most of the year. 

Despite their lack of health coverage, Chelsea, his eldest daughter, was sitting on a doctor’s exam table. Mario had brought her to a mobile clinic in Beechview for a free COVID booster and exam for her school health record. 

The best part of their experience? The doctor attending to Chelsea, Dr. Diego Chaves-Gnecco, is a Spanish speaker. Mario — who knows English, but prefers to speak his native Spanish — was able to directly communicate with a provider about his daughter’s health. 

“It’s just better because he speaks in my own language,” he said. “I feel comfortable,” he added, gesturing to his daughter. “I think she feels comfortable as well.” 

Asking questions and advocating for yourself or your loved one is an essential part of receiving healthcare. Some take it for granted, but it’s a process that many people with limited English proficiency, including many immigrants, struggle with. 

Experts say it’s hard for non-English speakers to navigate the byzantine American healthcare system — especially if they’re used to universal coverage in another country. And if they’re undocumented, they won’t qualify for public health insurance in Pennsylvania without proof of a serious health condition. The state excludes at least 10,000 undocumented children from its Children’s Health Insurance Program, according to an estimate by child advocates. 

In Beechview, doctors from Salud Para Niños — a bilingual pediatric clinic at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh — have teamed up with staffers from local nonprofit Casa San José to provide primary care to uninsured kids. Many travel from all over Western Pennsylvania to access the free, bilingual and bicultural pediatric care they bring to the South Hills neighborhood that’s become a hub for Spanish-speaking people in the region.

An ‘invisible’ community  

Every Tuesday, a mobile medical van pulls up outside Casa San José on Broadway Avenue. It was parked across the street from the nonprofit’s office on a rainy morning in November. 

Described by staff as “the care mobile,” the van is operated by Children’s Hospital, but was paid for by the Pittsburgh Penguins Foundation and the Ronald McDonald House Charities. It has a tiny nurse’s station, two cheerfully painted exam rooms, and a patient waiting area in the style of a four-seat arrangement on a passenger train. 

There was enough room to accommodate the team of four — Chaves-Gnecco, a nurse and two drivers — working that day. They attended to several families with children, who arrived for their appointments between 9 a.m. and noon. 

There was Alba, who moved to Beechview in February from Santa Marta, a city on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. She brought her 11-year-old son, Edward, who has asthma, for a check-up and free inhaler supplied by the clinic. Joselyn arrived next with her son, Justin, 8, who needed childhood immunizations. Chelsea was the last patient on the schedule.

PublicSource is withholding their last names to protect patient privacy.

Chaves-Gnecco is the driving force behind the operation. He’s a pediatrician from Bogotá, Colombia who came to Pittsburgh for specialty training in the late 1990s. He planned to leave after a year, but changed his mind and did a pediatric residency at Children’s Hospital, choosing a track that would help him understand the social and environmental factors that drive health outcomes. It was training that would prepare him to serve communities of color like his own, which he described as “invisible” in the region. 

There are more than 13,000 Latinos in the City of Pittsburgh and more than 31,000 Latinos in Allegheny County, but “you’re still hearing that there are no Latinos” here, said Chaves-Gnecco. That’s partly because the county lacks traditional barrios — a term for American neighborhoods with concentrations of Spanish-speaking immigrants, he said. The group makes up just 2.5% of the county’s population, compared to Los Angeles County’s 49%, according to census data. 

But it’s an important and fast-growing population, he added. Latinos in the county grew by more than 80% between 2010 and 2020 — far more than the 2% total population growth, according to a county report. Latinos here also tend to be younger: Just 7% are 65 or older, compared to 19% of all people in the county.   

Chaves-Gnecco founded Salud Para Niños — “Health for the Children” — to meet the healthcare needs of those young people. It opened more than 20 years ago as a bilingual clinic at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood. He was helping a lot of kids, but wasn’t reaching the undocumented ones, some of whom, he said, “will never qualify” for subsidized health insurance under current Pennsylvania law. 

“And that’s kind of sad because that’s not the case for other states,” he said, pointing out that California, Washington and others have expanded coverage to include undocumented people. 

Immigrants and people who face language barriers are more likely to be uninsured and less likely to seek primary care, said Drishti Pillai, the director of immigrant health policy at KFF, a San Francisco-based health policy research organization. Without access to preventative services, they might develop a health condition that goes untreated for a long time, which could lead to a trip to the emergency room.  

“By then the situation could likely have gotten much worse, much more expensive to treat, and it theoretically could incur more costs to the healthcare system,” she added.

To keep that from happening to uninsured kids, Chaves-Gnecco and his team took the care mobile to Beechview in early 2020,  just as the world was shutting down to prevent the spread of COVID-19. That year, Salud Para Niños cared for more uninsured kids than ever. Now the program does about 360 uninsured patient visits per year. 

‘Linguistically affirming care’ for families 

“Oh, no!” yelled Justin, the third-grader, when he spotted the nurse carrying a tray of syringes toward him. 

Rose Wise laughed over Justin’s antics in the exam room. A longtime pediatric nurse at Children’s Hospital, she loves her shifts on the care mobile because “it eliminates the barriers to healthcare,” including cost, transportation and language barriers. 

Justin and his mother, Joselyn, are uninsured. She had been taking him to a low-cost clinic in Squirrel Hill, but heard from staffers at Casa San Jose that a Spanish-speaking doctor was treating kids right where she lived in Beechview.

That day was Justin’s first appointment with Chaves-Gnecco, who gave him a physical and caught him up on his vaccinations. He told Joselyn in Spanish that her son was healthy and in good shape to play sports at school. She plans to bring Justin back to the care mobile. 

“Thanks to this type of clinic, we have the possibility to access a doctor,” she said, speaking through Chaves-Gnecco’s translations. “This clinic is very valuable for the community. It’s very important.” 

Joselyn and Justin’s experience is what pediatrician and assistant professor Dr. Maya Ragavan calls “linguistically affirming care.” It creates a safe, supportive environment in which patients and their families can express their identities. Affirming care started as a framework for treating LGBTQ+ patients, but it can be applied to immigrants, people of color and other marginalized groups.  

Ragavan speaks Spanish and occasionally treats patients on the care mobile. She’s also a health equity expert whose research shows that affirming care can help improve health outcomes for immigrants. Too often, families don’t get that kind of care, she said, adding that it’s bad practice to expect family members to interpret for their loved ones. That leaves the burden on the family to advocate for a certified interpreter. 

Chelsea, Mario’s daughter, said she had to translate for her parents in other healthcare settings. 

“That’s really hard and really unfair,” said Ragavan. “… It’s the healthcare system that does that [to immigrant families].”

Chaves-Gnecco, on the other hand, built a system that ensures families receive affirming care “from start to finish,” she said, from a Spanish-speaking scheduler to fully translated health manuals. 

“I love the way that he can communicate with my parents,” Chelsea said. “Anything that I shouldn’t [have to] know to explain, he explains it for them.” 

Non-Spanish-speakers are also welcome at the care mobile, which is equipped with a tablet that provides virtual interpretation services for more than 100 languages, said Chaves-Gnecco. And the team is working with community partners like Casa San José to better accommodate Latinos whose first language is indigenous — a growing population here, according to a county report. 

A trusted community partner

Across the street from the van, Constanza Henry was helping people who were crowding into Casa San José’s tiny lobby. Some had only been in the U.S. for one week, she said. 

Henry is Casa San José’s community health and wellness coordinator. She works with providers to hold free clinics in or near the nonprofit’s office. Her efforts helped bring vaccines, mammograms and primary care to adults and children in Beechview.

Nearly a third of immigrant adults said a community health center is their usual source of healthcare in a recent survey. That jumps to about two-fifths among immigrants who are uninsured, undocumented or have limited English proficiency, said Pillai, the KFF researcher. 

Of all the doctors who donate their time to Casa San José’s programs, only the ones from Salud Para Niños can speak Spanish, said Henry. She often has to translate for patients and providers at the other clinics. It’s why Chaves-Gnecco is one of the most beloved doctors in the community, she added, and in such demand that he sometimes has to turn patients away. 

“It’s also very frustrating, not having all of the resources you would like to have,” said Henry, an immigrant herself from Mexico City. “Or just thinking that in our countries, if you go to the dentist, they won’t charge you so much and they will help you immediately.”  

Chaves-Gnecco said Colombia provides healthcare to immigrants, refugees and unhoused people. He dreams of universal coverage in the United States — of a system that doesn’t punish uninsured children.  

“It’s no secret to anybody that if you don’t have health insurance in this country, sometimes you might end up losing your car … [or] your home,” he said. “That is a really huge problem. And I feel that we should do better for our community in general, for all Americans … and provide health insurance for everybody.”

Back in the care mobile, the team wrapped up with Mario and Chelsea.  

Wise, the pediatric nurse, said Chelsea could have her pick from the clinic’s supply of blankets. She chose a cozy-looking fleece one in a butterfly pattern. It shielded her as she climbed down the clinic’s steps and stepped out into one of the coldest, wettest mornings this fall.   

The locations and hours of operation for Salud Para Niños can be found here in English y aquí en español. 

Correction: Tom Skemp’s name was misspelled in an earlier version of this story.

Venuri Siriwardane is PublicSource’s health and mental health reporter. She can be reached at venuri@publicsource.org or on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, @venuris.

This story was fact-checked by Ladimir Garcia. 

Translation by Zulma Michaca, a bilingual professional living in Riverside County, Calif., with family ties in Pittsburgh. She can be reached at z.michaca123@gmail.com.

This reporting has been made possible through the Staunton Farm Mental Health Reporting Fellowship and the Jewish Healthcare Foundation.

The post In Beechview, a free bilingual clinic cares for children of immigrants appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

A la familia de Mario le quitaron Medicaid este año.

Beechview Puntos de Orgullo
FuentePública (PublicSource) mapea y relata las fortalezas de comunidades diversas.

Después de que él reportó una nueva fuente de ingresos, descubrió que su familia – incluyendo sus dos niñas – ya no calificaba para seguro médico a través de UPMC Para Ti (UPMC for You), un plan que administra servicios de Medicaid.

Y es impensable comprar cobertura médica del mercado: La mayoría de los planes le costarían hasta $300 por cada miembro de la familia. Eso sería más de $1,200 al mes – un gasto que no puede solventar encima de su hipoteca y sus otros gastos.

“Es demasiado dinero, ¿sabes?” él dijo, sacudiendo la cabeza.

FuentePública (PublicSource) está reteniendo el apellido de Mario porque él viene de un hogar con estatus migratorio mixto.  Sus hijas, de 13 y 5 años, nacieron en EE. UU. Ellas no han tenido seguro médico durante la mayor parte del año.

A pesar de no tener cobertura médica, su hija mayor, Chelsea, estaba sentada en una mesa de examinación médica. Mario la trajo a una clínica móvil en Beechview para un refuerzo gratis contra el COVID y un examen médico para su expediente escolar.

¿La mejor parte de la experiencia? El doctor que asiste a Chelsea, el Dr. Diego Chaves-Gnecco, habla español. Mario – habla inglés, pero prefiere hablar en su español nativo – pudo comunicarse directamente con un proveedor acerca de la salud de su hija.

“Simplemente es mejor porque habla en mi propio idioma,” él dijo. “Me siento cómodo,” agregó, gestionando a su hija. “Creo que ella también se siente cómoda.”

Hacer preguntas y abogar por ti mismo, o abogar por tus seres queridos, es una parte esencial de recibir atención médica. Algunos lo subestiman, pero es un proceso con el que batallan muchas personas con dominio limitado de inglés, incluyendo muchos inmigrantes.

Dicen los expertos que es difícil para que las personas que no hablan inglés naveguen el bizantino sistema americano de salud – especialmente si están acostumbrados a cobertura universal en otro país. Y si son indocumentados, no califican para seguro médico público en Pensilvania sin prueba de una condición médica seria. El estado excluye al menos a 10,000 niños indocumentados de su Programa de Seguro Médico Infantil (Children’s Health Insurance Program), de acuerdo con un estimado de defensores de menores.

En Beechview, los doctores de Salud Para Niños – una clínica bilingüe pediatra en el Hospital Infantil de Pittsburgh UPMC (UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh) –se unen con personal de la organización sin fines de lucro local Casa San José para brindar atención médica a niños sin seguro médico. Muchos viajan de todas partes del Oeste de Pensilvania (Western Pennsylvania) para acceder la atención médica pediátrica gratis, bilingüe, y bicultural que traen al vecindario de South Hills y que se ha hecho un centro para personas que hablan español en la región.

Una comunidad ‘invisible’

Cada jueves, un camión médico móvil llega a la Casa San José en la Avenida Broadway. Estaba estacionado al otro lado de la calle de la oficina de la organización sin fines de lucro una mañana lluviosa de noviembre.

Descrita por el personal como “el camión que cuida” (“the care mobile”), es dirigido por el Hospital Infantil (Children’s Hospital), pero fue pagado por la Fundación Pingüinos de Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh Penguins Foundation) y la Casa de Caridades Ronald

McDonald (Ronald McDonald House Charities). Tiene una pequeña estación de enfermeras, dos cuartos coloridos de examinación, y una sala de espera para pacientes con el estilo de un tren con asientos para 4 pasajeros.

Había suficiente espacio para acomodar al equipo de cuatro — Chaves-Gnecco, una enfermera, y dos conductores — que trabajaban ese día. Ellos atendieron a varias familias con niños que llegaron a sus citas entre las 9 a.m. y el mediodía.

Estuvo Alba, quien se mudó a Beechview en febrero desde Santa Marta, una ciudad en la costa caribeña de Colombia. Ella llevó a su hijo de 11 años, Edward, que tiene asma, para que le hicieran un examen médico y le dieran un inhalador gratis suministrado por la clínica. Joselyn llegó después con su hijo, Justin, de 8 años, que necesitaba vacunas infantiles. Chelsea fue la última paciente programada.

FuentePública (PublicSource) retiene sus apellidos para proteger la privacidad de pacientes. 

Chaves-Gnecco es la fuerza impulsora detrás de la operación. Él es un pediatra de Bogotá, Colombia, que vino a Pittsburgh a finales de los años 1990 para un entrenamiento especializado. Él tenía planeado irse después de un año, pero cambió de parecer e hizo una residencia pediátrica en el Hospital Infantil (Children’s Hospital). Este nuevo camino le ayudaría a entender los factores sociales y ambientales que afectan a la salud. El entrenamiento le preparó para atender a las comunidades minoritarias como la suya, que él describió cómo “invisibles” en la región.

Hay más de 13,000 Latinos en la Ciudad de Pittsburgh (City of Pittsburgh) y más de 31,000 Latinos en el Condado de Allegheny, pero “todavía se escucha decir que no hay Latinos” aquí, dijo Chaves-Gnecco. En parte, eso es porque no hay “barrios”– un término en inglés que designa vecindarios americanos con concentraciones de inmigrantes que hablan español, él dijo. Este grupo representa sólo el 2.5% de la población del condado, comparada al 49% del Condado de Los Ángeles, de acuerdo a datos del censo.

Pero es una población importante y que aumenta rápidamente, agregó. Los Latinos en el condado crecieron por más del 80% entre el 2010 y el 2020 – mucho más que el crecimiento de 2% del total de la población, de acuerdo con un informe del condado. Los Latinos aquí también suelen ser más jóvenes: sólo el 7% tienen 65 años o más, comparado con el 19% de toda la gente del condado.

Chaves-Gnecco fundó Salud Para Niños — “Health for the Children” — para atender las necesidades médicas de esos jóvenes. Empezó hace más de 20 años como una clínica bilingüe en el Hospital Infantil (Children’s Hospital) en el vecindario de Oakland en Pittsburgh. Estaba ayudando a muchos niños, pero no conseguía llegar a los niños indocumentados, algunos de los cuáles, según dijo, “nunca calificarán” a seguro médico subsidiado, bajo la ley actual de Pensilvania.

“Y eso es algo triste porque ese no es el caso en otros estados,” él dijo, destacando que California, Washington y otros han ampliado su cobertura para incluir a personas indocumentadas.

Los inmigrantes y las personas con barreras lingüísticas tienen una probabilidad más baja de tener seguro y buscar atención médica, dijo Drishti Pillai, la directora de pólizas de salud para inmigrantes en KFF, una organización basada en San Francisco que investiga pólizas de salud. Sin acceso al servicio preventivo, pueden desarrollar una condición médica y estar mucho tiempo sin recibir tratamiento, lo que puede convertirse en un viaje a la sala de emergencia.

“Para entonces, la situación puede haber empeorado, se hace mucho más cara de atender, y en teoría podría implicar más gastos para el sistema médico,” agregó.

Para prevenir que eso les pase a niños sin seguro médico, Chaves-Gnecco y su equipo llevaron el camión que cuida (“the care mobile”) a Beechview a principios del 2020, justo cuando el mundo se cerraba para prevenir el contagio del COVID-19. Ese año, Salud Para Niños atendió a más niños sin seguro médico que nunca. Ahora el programa provee alrededor de 360 visitas al año a pacientes sin seguro médico.

‘Atención lingüísticamente afirmativa’ para las familias   

“¡Ay no!” gritó Justin, de tercer grado, cuando vio que la enfermera venía hacia él con una bandeja de jeringas.

Rose Wise se reía del numerito de Justin en el cuarto de examinación. Una enfermera pediatra por mucho tiempo en el Hospital Infantil (Children’s Hospital), a ella le encantan sus turnos en el camión que cuida (“the care mobile”) porque “elimina las barreras a la atención médica,” incluyendo el costo, la transportación, y las barreras lingüísticas.

Justin y su madre, Joselyn, no tienen seguro médico. Ella lo había llevado a una clínica de bajo-costo en Squirrel Hill, pero supo a través del personal de Casa San José que un médico que habla español atiende a niños en Beechview, justo donde ella vivía.

Ese día era la primera cita de Justin con Chaves-Gnecco, quien le hizo un examen físico y puso sus vacunas al día. Le dijo a Joselyn en español que su hijo estaba sano y en buena condición para jugar deportes en la escuela. Ella planea traer a Justin al camión que cuida (“the care mobile”) en el futuro.

“Gracias a este tipo de clínica, tenemos la posibilidad de tener acceso a un doctor,” ella dijo, hablando de las traducciones de Chaves-Gnecco. “Esta clínica es muy valiosa para la comunidad. Es muy importante.”La experiencia de Joselyn y Justin es lo que la pediatra y profesora adjunta Dr. Maya Ragavan llama “atención lingüísticamente afirmativa.” Crea un ambiente seguro y favorable donde los pacientes y sus familias pueden expresar sus identidades. Atención afirmativa empezó como un marco de atención para pacientes LGBTQ+, pero se puede aplicar a los inmigrantes, a las personas de color y a otros grupos marginalizados.

Ragavan habla español y ocasionalmente atiende a pacientes en el camión que cuida (“the care mobile”). También es una experta de la equidad de salud cuyas investigaciones demuestran que la atención afirmativa puede ayudar a mejorar los resultados de salud para los inmigrantes. Con mucha frecuencia las familias no reciben ese tipo de atención, dijo, agregando que es una mala práctica esperar que miembros de familia traduzcan para sus seres queridos. Eso deja la carga a la familia de abogar por un intérprete certificado.

Chelsea, la hija de Mario, dijo que ella tuvo que traducir para sus padres en otros establecimientos de atención médica.     

“Eso es muy difícil y muy injusto,” dijo Ragavan. “…Es el sistema de atención médica el que le hace eso [a las familias inmigrantes].”

Por otra parte, Chaves-Gnecco construyó un sistema que asegura que las familias reciban la atención afirmativa “de comienzo a fin,” dijo ella, desde programar las citas en español, hasta proveer manuales de salud completamente traducidos.

“Me encanta cómo él se puede comunicar con mis padres,” dijo Chelsea. “Cualquier cosa que yo no sepa explicar, él se lo explica.”

Aquellos que no son hispanohablantes también son bienvenidos al camión que cuida (“the care mobile”), ya que está equipado con una tableta que provee servicio de interpretación virtual en más de 100 lenguajes, dijo Chaves-Gnecco. Y el equipo está trabajando con socios comunitarios como Casa San José para adaptarse mejor a los Latinos cuyo idioma primario es una lengua indígena – una población creciendo aquí, de acuerdo con un reporte del condado.

Un socio comunitario de confianza

Al otro lado de la calle donde estaba el camión, Constanza Henry ayudaba a la gente que se amontonaba en el pequeño vestíbulo de Casa San José. Algunos solo llevaban en EE. UU. una semana, dijo.

Henry es la coordinadora de salud comunitaria y bienestar en Casa San José. Ella trabaja con proveedores para ofrecer clínicas gratuitas dentro o cerca de la oficina de la organización sin fines de lucro. Su esfuerzo ayudó a traer vacunas, mamografías y atención primaria para adultos y niños en Beechview.

En una encuesta reciente casi un tercio de los adultos inmigrantes dijeron que un centro médico comunitario es su fuente habitual de servicio médico . Eso sube a casi dos-quintos de inmigrantes sin seguro médico, indocumentados o con dominio limitado de inglés, dijo Pillai, la investigadora de KFF.  

De todos los doctores que donan su tiempo a los programas de Casa San José, solo los de Salud Para Niños pueden hablar español, dijo Henry. Ella frecuentemente tiene que traducir para pacientes y proveedores en otras clínicas. Esta es la razón por la que Chaves-Gnecco es uno de los doctores más queridos en la comunidad, ella agregó, y con tanta demanda que a veces tiene que rechazar pacientes.  

“También es muy frustrante, el no tener todos los recursos que quisieras tener,” dijo Henry, ella misma inmigrante de la Ciudad de México. “O solo pensando que, en nuestros países, si vas al dentista, no te van a cobrar tanto y te ayudarán inmediatamente.”

Chaves-Gnecco dijo que Colombia provee servicios de salud a los inmigrantes, refugiados y personas sin hogar. El sueña con cobertura universal en Estados Unidos – con un sistema que no castigue a los niños sin seguro médico.

“No es un secreto para nadie que si no tienes seguro médico en este país, a veces terminas perdiendo tu carro … [o] tu hogar,” dijo. “Es un gran problema. Y pienso que debemos hacer lo mejor para nuestra comunidad, para todos los americanos … y proveer seguro médico a todos.”

De vuelta al camión que cuida (“the care mobile”), el equipo terminaba con Mario y Chelsea.

Wise, la enfermera pediatra, le dijo a Chelsea que podía llevarse una de las cobijas de la clínica. Ella escogió una que se veía cómoda y parecía ser de lana con un diseño de una mariposa. Se cubría con ella mientras bajaba los escalones de la clínica y dio un paso hacía una de las mañanas más frías y mojadas del otoño.

Las ubicaciones y las horas de operación de Salud Para Niños están disponibles aquí en inglés y aquí en español.

Venuri Siriwardane es una reportera en FuentePública (PublicSource) de la salud y la salud mental. Puede ser contactada en venuri@publicsource.org o en X, la plataforma anteriormente conocida como Twitter, @venuris.

Los hechos de esta historia fueron revisados por Ladimir Garcia. 

Traducción de Zulma Michaca, profesional bilingüe experta viviendo en el Condado de Riverside, Calif., con familia en Pittsburgh. Para contactarla: z.michaca123@gmail.com.

Este reportaje ha sido posible por la Beca de Investigación Staunton Farm Reportando Salud Mental (Staunton Farm Mental Health Reporting Fellowship) y la Fundación Judía de Servicios Médicos (Jewish Healthcare Foundation).

The post En Beechview, una clínica bilingüe gratis atiende a hijos de inmigrantes appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

As a teenager, Fernanda wanted her time in college to be like what she saw in movies. She wanted to attend a big university – one with name recognition – and live in a dormitory. She achieved that dream in 2015, but because she is undocumented, the experience came with a hefty price tag. 

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At least 18 states have passed legislation allowing some undocumented immigrants to access state financial aid, which many citizens rely on to pay for college. Pennsylvania, however, is not one of them. The state legislature also has not advanced bills that would provide eligible undocumented residents with in-state tuition at public institutions, which can reduce the cost of attendance by thousands. 

No matter where they live in the U.S., undocumented students can’t access federal financial aid. These barriers are significant and can make higher education inaccessible to others like Fernanda, advocates say.

Fernanda, 26, who asked to withhold her last name due to her immigration status, graduated from the Pennsylvania State University in 2018. But she finished with $84,602 in debt from private loans, which often have higher interest rates and fewer borrower protections than federal options. The South Hills resident said she pays off about $700 a month but has hardly made a dent in her debt, which totaled $78,181 in December.

Still, she deeply values her college education. 

“Everyone has unlimited amounts of potential, but it’s resources that actually keep us from achieving that potential,” she said. “If you’re undocumented, and you’re 19, just graduated high school, what are your real options? Do you go into school, get in debt? That is, of course, if the school that you’re applying to even accepts you.”

In recent years, some Democratic state lawmakers have sponsored legislation that would definitively allow eligible undocumented immigrants to access in-state tuition or aid through the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency. The bills have languished, without votes, in the House of Representatives or Senate. 

The changes would impact a tiny share of Pennsylvanians – an estimated 3% of the population were not citizens as of 2022 – but some lawmakers and advocates believe the state also stands to benefit from them.

They assert that expanding access to undocumented immigrants would support the economy, particularly as the state is projected to lose about 5% of its traditional working-age population between 2020 and 2030. They argue that it will also boost college enrollment, given that the state’s college-going population is projected to shrink. 

Beyond the potential economic benefits, “The whole idea that we should not let kids go to college or make it harder for students to go to college is patently absurd,” said Rep. Peter Schweyer, D-Lehigh County, chair of the House Education Committee. 

Tuition equity is important to Casa San José, a local nonprofit that serves and advocates for the Latino community. Between 2021 and early November of this year, the Beechview-based organization had nine meetings with state legislators to advocate for undocumented residents to receive in-state tuition and state financial aid. As of 2022, about 34% of the state’s foreign-born population was from Latin America. 

“We’ve really played the argument of, you know, enrollment is going down,” said William Reeves, the former community policy organizer with the nonprofit. “Being able to have a more inclusive process for all residents within the state, regardless of immigration status, could ensure that even more adults could return back to school.”

“I think we’ve created good connections solely through this issue, to raise awareness around this issue. And a lot of legislators did not even know this was an issue, to be honest,” he said.

Beechview, a neighborhood in the city’s southern reaches, saw its Hispanic or Latino population increase by around 75% from 2010 to 2020, according to census data compiled in 2021 by The University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research. That was one of the largest increases among Pittsburgh neighborhoods. 

The landscape in Pennsylvania

At least 24 states allow eligible undocumented students to receive in-state tuition, according to Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. Pennsylvania lacks a statewide policy on the matter, but at least one public institution says it offers the discount in some cases. 

In 2021, undocumented immigrants made up about 1% of all Pennsylvania college students.

At Pennsylvania’s state-related universities, policies determining in-state tuition qualifications are generally prohibitive. Pitt states that refugees, asylees, green card holders and those with an approved I-140 or I-130 may be eligible. Temple University considers non-citizens generally ineligible. Lincoln University assumes non-citizens without immigrant visas are ineligible but allows them to refute that classification “with clear and convincing evidence.”

Penn State’s website states the university will consider undocumented immigrants eligible if they meet certain residency requirements, which include attending a Pennsylvania high school for four years. But spokesperson Lisa Powers indicated in a statement such cases are a rarity.

“Non-citizens are classified as international students,” Powers wrote. “The University’s policy is to offer in-state tuition solely to Pennsylvania residents who meet the extensive Pennsylvania residency requirements. While there are a limited number of instances where students without visas might be eligible for Pennsylvania resident tuition, these cases are exceptions rather than the rule.”

The university charged out-of-state students $38,651 in the 2022-23 academic year, without financial aid, while in-state students were charged $19,835.

Fernanda applied to Penn State after first being granted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals [DACA], a federal program offering protections to qualifying undocumented residents. The university intended to charge her out-of-state tuition, but she was able to receive the in-state discount after she and her father provided an admissions official with documents proving her residency.

The sticker price for in-state students at Penn State’s main campus was $18,828 during the 2017-18 academic year, Fernanda’s senior year. She received a few small scholarships from the university and graduated a semester early, she said, but needed to borrow for the vast majority of the cost. 

“I was just so young and naive, and my parents didn’t know anything, either, that we were just like, ‘OK, well, we’ll just get a loan,’” Fernanda said. “So, I signed with Sallie Mae and got huge interest, a huge loan for that first year of college, and had to do that every year.”

Despite the cost, Fernanda said her years in college were some of her best. She majored in international relations and Spanish, with a minor in Latin American history. Learning about those subjects was a “gift,” she said, as her high school hadn’t exposed her to them. She also enjoyed her classes in anthropology, philosophy and psychology. 

She got involved in student organizations, too, serving as president of the university’s UNICEF chapter and secretary of a club focused on women in politics. Her roles showed her “what it means to be an active citizen and participant and what it means to be an advocate for those who are marginalized,” she said. 

Progress stalls in Harrisburg

In April, a bill that would definitively allow eligible undocumented immigrants to receive in-state tuition at public institutions was referred to the House Education Committee, which Schweyer, a Democrat, now chairs. The bill — like a similar proposal introduced during the prior legislative session — has not received a vote. 

And in February, state Sen. Judith Schwank, D-Berks County, and other elected officials introduced a similar bill. The legislation was co-sponsored by Democratic senators Jay Costa, Wayne Fontana and Lindsey Williams, who represent Allegheny County. The bill was referred to the Republican-led Senate Education Committee, where it has sat without a vote. 

Republican control of the legislature and a lack of bipartisan support – influenced by the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has pervaded national politics in recent years – have prevented progress, Schweyer and Schwank told PublicSource. Republicans, who tend to support more aggressive responses to illegal immigration, controlled the House from 2010 to 2022 and currently control the Senate. 

“This incredibly dehumanizing rhetoric and policy that’s all over the United States – Pennsylvania’s not immune to that. But it’s really only coming from one side of the aisle, and it ain’t coming from my side,” Schweyer said. 

But Rep. Jesse Topper, the Republican chair of the House Education Committee, said he would be “perfectly fine” with a university choosing to offer in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants – he doesn’t believe the state should mandate it. “I believe that they’re in the best position to make that decision,” he said.

“We are required, as a state and as a constitution, to ensure that each child has access to high-quality K-12 education. That requirement does not exist for higher education,” Topper said. “We definitely need to support our institutions to make sure we’re supporting our workforce, we’re supporting families where that is a choice on their part. But it is a choice.”

Topper added that he is not anti-immigrant and does not espouse such rhetoric. He believes that immigration reform is needed to make achieving citizenship easier, but he said that issue is separate from tuition equity. “The other side of the aisle thinks that government intervention is the solution for everything, except, apparently, enforcing [immigration laws].”

With progress stalled for now, Schweyer said that he and advocates have instead prioritized issues that they believe are most likely to pass in the Senate – and that reflect the immigrant community’s greatest needs. 

Casa San José in Pittsburgh, for example, met with legislators 74 times between 2021 and early November to push the state to allow undocumented residents to obtain driver’s licenses. While tuition equity would profoundly impact the community, Casa San José has not prioritized the issue recently because of the organization’s limited resources for advocacy, Reeves said.

Julio Rodriguez, political director of the Pennsylvania Immigration and Citizenship Coalition, said that the battle in the legislature over funding the state-related universities has further complicated matters. It’s difficult to advocate for expanded access to in-state tuition when the universities are unsure they’ll receive enough funding to offer the discount at all, he said. 

And the allocations have been politicized in the past, with House Republicans initially attempting to block Pitt from receiving its funding in 2022 unless the university halted its fetal tissue research. Support for undocumented immigrants may be another lightning rod. “The universities are very cautious about risking their funding overall,” Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez is encouraged by Schweyer’s leadership of the House Education Committee and believes that legislation on this issue will pass if the Senate flips Democratic in 2024 or 2026. Schweyer is also optimistic about the future, but he said that he and other supporters must reach across the aisle.

“I haven’t run many bills at all – I don’t know that I’ve run any – that have been straight-up 100% passed just by Democrats,” Schweyer said. “It’s going to be a lot of education. It’s going to be a lot of work.”

Reeves said the organization has garnered bipartisan support for tuition equity, noting that legislators on both sides can be skeptical about supporting undocumented immigrants. He said that providing testimonials to legislators has been helpful, but he added that more data on the impact of these policies is needed to convince lawmakers.

“We want to ensure that, instead of it being conveyed as a partisan issue, that this is a necessity that could benefit all residents of Pennsylvania,” Reeves said.

Life after college

Ultimately, Fernanda graduated from Penn State and now has a full-time job as a recruitment manager. Though her debt forces her to be hyper-aware of her spending and budgeting, she’s been able to pay for her car and housing and “have a full life,” she said. 

But she’s frustrated that Pennsylvania hasn’t made tangible progress on tuition equity, thus failing to build a bridge for others in her situation who might want to broaden their opportunities and perspectives. 

“My perspective on everything shifted in college,” she said. 

“My mind was really formed and shaped, not only intellectually and academically, but also in the people that I met – people who were international students, people who grew up in different parts of the country, and people whose stories were similar to mine, or different to mine.” 

Emma Folts covers higher education at PublicSource, in partnership with Open Campus. She can be reached at emma@publicsource.org.

This story has been fact-checked by Ladimir Garcia.

Translation by Zulma Michaca, a bilingual professional living in Riverside County, Calif., with family ties in Pittsburgh. She can be reached at z.michaca123@gmail.com.

The post Undocumented but undaunted, young immigrants aim for degrees but get few breaks on costs appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.