Silicon Harvest: Salinas schools expand their role to help kids from rent-burdened families

Silicon Harvest

Salinas schools expand their role to help KIDS from rent-burdened families Squeezed BY SPRAWLING TECH ECONOMY

By Anna Leah • Bay City News

Some of the fastest-growing rents in the country, partly driven by newcomers with more money, are squeezing schoolchildren in northern Salinas into overcrowded homes — and pushing their schools to provide an important lifeline for the children, their families and even the school’s own employees.

In many ways, that lifeline provides students with more than a standard curriculum, providing supplies and helping encourage ambition, build confidence and teach what community can mean.

In northern Salinas, one school district has roughly five times the percentage of homeless and inadequately housed students as San Francisco County, according to the state Department of Education. In some neighborhoods, public roads overflow with parked cars as apartment and trailer complexes fill well beyond capacity.

In striking contrast, multi-story, neutral-toned houses across a six-lane, walled road have airy green yards. Asphalt, concrete and hedges separate households that report income in the top and bottom 20%, according to the American Community Survey. Disparities like this have grown since tech workers and others brought new wealth from Silicon Valley.

The Santa Rita Union School District recently counted rising numbers of homeless students, 10 times higher in less than 10 years. Once documented, that change released state and federal funds to help district schools not only teach kids, but also become a place to wash clothes, pick up diapers and distribute food. With the supplies came new counselors, like Joseph Ruiz, who grew up in an agricultural community.

Ruiz said that sometimes kids need a walk with him, a behavior chart or more serious help. His familiarity with “ag families” helps, like knowing that parents work long days and can’t speak until well after school. He said that awareness feels like “a stepping stone, but definitely just knowing those little, tiny details, it can make an impact on how a student receives services. Because it starts with a family, right?”

Often harder to count than unsheltered families living on the street or in cars, over three-quarters of federally recognized homeless students double up on lodging.

Hundreds of families in the district share a single apartment. Some split a studio. Others pack up to four families into a single two-bedroom — sharing that space, plus a kitchen and bathroom, between as many as 20 people.

The district educates about 3,000 elementary and middle schoolers, many the children of parents who work in the surrounding agricultural fields. Over 40% of the students are learning English, and more than 70% qualify for free or reduced lunch programs. Students live squeezed by some of the sharpest rent increases in the country, between the surrounding houses for wealthier people and open fields.

One in four kids in the district qualifies as a “McKinney-Vento” student, referring to a federal act originally passed in 1987. The program lets families register for school without proof of residency, accelerates student evaluations, provides tutoring and after-school resources, trains teachers and helps families connect with social services, among other support systems.

Many of the McKinney-Vento students take advantage of the summer academy and Saturday classes to have a secure place stocked with attention, activities — and food.

‘Santa Rita family’ supports its own

The school helps more than just the children.

Susana Soto, a school clerk in the district and mother of two of its students, struggled for almost a year to find a place to live after someone bought the house she rented with her parents. She returned to Santa Rita Elementary, her previous school, to help with its summer academy. She said she relied on her “Santa Rita family” at work, adding “I don’t think I would be where I’m at today if it wasn’t for their support.”

On the last day of summer school, Soto bobbed through well-wishing colleagues, then jumped on one of the yellow school buses she monitors.

Students filled the playground, swinging and playing dodgeball. Santa Rita Elementary, a one-story complex with classrooms that open to the outside and a hive of breezeways, hosted the summer academy. Administrator Summer Prather-Smith said there was a waitlist to be one of the 400 students involved.

A music teacher strummed a guitar on the amphitheater steps. A dancer in a striped Central American skirt, fresh from an assembly, listened. Inside one of the classrooms, a visiting puppetry teacher with double hair buns and a hoodie encouraged children on floor mats to listen to one another.

Prather-Smith turned cartwheels with a girl in a hot-pink shirt. Past them, a teacher in his mid-20s with a hands-free microphone led a line of third-graders, keyed into the instructions he gave them from a small amplifier on his belt.

Before a change in the school’s administration, Santa Rita didn’t count many of its unhoused students, creating a barrier to assistance.

Prather-Smith recently returned to the district where she grew up. She began her teaching career at Santa Rita Union, then worked in migrant education for Monterey County, which encompasses Salinas. She came back to lead the district’s youth and community outreach.

She brought colleague Blanca Valverde with her. Together, they tried to understand why so many of their students were not counted as unhoused, an improbable result.

The answer, Valverde said, lay in a form. When Valverde began following up more rigorously with parents, she discovered discrepancies between their answers and reality. In one example, she wanted to know why a student who lived close to the school often arrived late. Visiting the address listed on their paperwork, she found the home empty. The family had been living in their vehicle.

Valverde said that simply checking a single box changed how she could help families. “Some parents are afraid if they’re doubled up, if they don’t have a place to stay, they think that they’re going to get kicked out of school,” she explained. “Not knowing that it’s the other way around. If you qualify under McKinney-Vento, we’re gonna make it easier for you.”

When families began accurately filling out the form, the roughly 2% of district students previously listed as unhoused rose to almost 25%. Counting the families allowed Valverde and Prather-Smith to grant families some relief from the need for documentation that many can’t provide. The administrators offer adult classes and necessities through the school resource center, where Valverde stations herself year-round.

Since they began focusing on the housing forms, Valverde said she has moved her McKinney-Vento paperwork from the original slim binders to 6-inch-thick ones.

Valverde used pandemic-era funds to help some families stay in the strip of low-lying motels nearby, walkable to the school and charging $100 per night.

The family living in their vehicle had not been able to save up enough for initial payments and months of rent to move into an apartment, Valverde said. She estimated that a 2-bedroom in the neighboring complex costs $2,300 per month.

Many other families pay around $900 for a single room, she explained, and such spaces are in high demand. Families will often split up, she said. Usually, the father will leave for seasonal work elsewhere while the mother stays with the children, so they don’t forfeit their living space.

“They don’t want to lose that room,” Valverde said. “They don’t want to come back to try to struggle to find housing.”

Fertile ground for growing rents

The rental classifieds website Apartment List calculated the increases in rents across the country from 2014 to 2019. They ranked Salinas’ rise as the steepest of any city — at over 50%.

Valverde explained that agricultural families began moving less since around 2016, becoming more reticent to follow the seasonal crops. This added to the crush on housing, which formerly lodged more migratory workers on a temporary basis, but which now needs to accommodate families year-round.

Monterey County hosts the school districts with the highest rates of unhoused students in California — some schools as much as 40%. The county leads the state. Organizers have long referred to the “Lettuce Curtain,” which divides farming communities like Salinas from the wealthier, salt-air-swept towns along the Monterey Peninsula. But Prather-Smith said that now new commuter communities, housing non-agricultural workers from the Bay Area, have appeared just outside the Santa Rita district boundaries.

Yesenia Ramirez saw a similar shift in her childhood home of San Jose — she watched housing for Silicon Valley workers replace the walnut trees and fruit orchards where she played. The way she responded may hold lessons for Salinas.

The daughter of migrant agricultural workers, she stayed in San Jose until the 1990s, when she was almost 30. Then, she gathered her strength to leave an abusive marriage. With her six girls, she began a new life in Sacramento.

“I remember wanting to change the world for her,” Ramirez said of her eldest daughter. “And I had no idea how to do that.”

In Sacramento, she noticed a disconnect between her daughter’s school performance and her abilities. Feeling unprepared because of her own lack of education, Ramirez went to the campus to advocate for her daughter. She met an educator and parent who helped her found an organization, Parent Teacher Home Visits.

The Sacramento-based group, now active in 29 states, sends pairs of teachers to meet with families that opt in. Crucially, Ramirez explains, guardians aren’t confronted with yet another letter about how their child falls short. The visits give the caretakers a chance to describe their ambitions for their child and what motivates them.

“My parents never went to my school, never,” Ramirez said. “The child gets to hear for the very first time that their parents have hopes and dreams for them. And that is very powerful. That is very powerful.”

A recent study by Johns Hopkins University found these visits corresponded with a reduction of roughly 20% in students consistently missing school. They also found statistically significant increases in math and language test scores.

“We, as migrants, sometimes come with the mentality of “I’m going to work as hard as I can,’” Ramirez said. She explained that she hopes to add the importance of education and choice to that mindset, while breaking down the intimidation some parents feel about engaging with the educational system. “We’re all here because we want better for our kids.”

Alma Loredo, a family organizer with Building Healthy Communities Monterey County, wants Ramirez’s program to come to Salinas. Her nonprofit organization works with Santa Rita and other local school districts to encourage educators to see students’ issues as they affect the whole child, address racism and encourage community involvement at school.

Loredo describes language barriers as one of the main obstacles in parental involvement. Indigenous families who don’t speak Spanish as a first language face additional hurdles. “The levels of confidence from the parents are so different. Indigenous families are more likely to be afraid to advocate or speak up and articulate their needs versus Latino families,” she said.

Loredo praised Santa Rita’s new Mixteco after-school program, which teaches children in a language spoken by Indigenous people in southern Mexico.

Loredo’s colleague, Alma Cervantes, said that small problems in young children can grow into disciplinary issues and missed school when those students enter middle and high school.

Analyzing data from the Department of Education, Loredo and Cervantes’ group found that unhoused students were among those suspended most often. The two women said that they have helped the county reduce suspensions by half since 2011, although those numbers have recently begun rising again since the COVID pandemic. The Central Valley, they found, leads California in suspensions. Among the unhoused, suspension rates have reached the highest rate in a decade.

Loredo also described students who failed virtual classes because they didn’t want to turn on their cameras. “They don’t feel comfortable sharing with their peers that they live with other families,” she said. “Self-esteem and all that comes with the whole child, it’s impacted because they need to share space with more than two families sometimes.”

‘You’re valued, you’re important’

Teacher Lazaro Perez cut through the playground of Santa Rita’s summer academy, asking each passing student how they were doing. His voice was amplified through his personal microphone. Students ran up to him, wanting a turn with his toy.

A new teacher, Perez said he focuses on letting his third graders know “‘you’re valued, you’re important. I care, I’m here.’ I feel like some of them, they never hear that.” He teaches them about making presentations and math games but said that one of his important lessons is not to compare one person’s difficulties with another’s.

Among student assignments, Perez said they keep journals and take turns sharing their entries. When they can’t express themselves, he encourages them to write down their emotions to tell him about them later. “They come to me for advice,” he said. “It’s a blessing because it’s like, they’re trusting me with their feelings.”

Summer Prather-Smith said that students came to Perez’s Saturday classes who miss classes during the week. Fast-talking, relentlessly upbeat Perez explained that children are more successful in school when they feel confident.

Aug. 6, a new school year began in the district. There is no relief to residential overcrowding on the horizon, but Santa Rita Elementary is reducing some of the pressure on its school space.

The district buses over 100 students to a new school, McKinnon Elementary. The recently constructed structure sits in the rows of green plants and spraying mist of a working field. The city plans to raze the farmland and turn it into housing, but perhaps not the kind these students need.

Summer Prather-Smith said the construction will mostly consist of single-family houses for commuters from Silicon Valley.

Still, she finds extra ways to bring relief to her students — like taking them on a field trip to see a play over the weekend.

“Especially if we’re talking about students who are doubled up or tripled up or unhoused, school is a safe space,” she explained. “It’s the place you’re going to have your basic needs met. We keep clothes and bathing materials on hand. So, for a lot of our families, it’s the time that we’re not in school that’s more worrisome.”

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