Reporter Danyelle Khmara's Fave Five of 2020

Around Christmas last year, my colleague Patty Machelor got a tip that students were leaving their neighborhood school due to new ownership at an apartment complex jacking up the rent. Through our reporting, we found out that low-income families were being forced out of their homes by huge rental increases combined with a lack of affordable housing. We knocked on many doors to find families that were affected and visited schools to see how young students were being affected. Although this story is a year old, it’s still worth a read today, as a lack of affordable housing continues to be a prevalent issue in Tucson and throughout the country.

— Danyelle Khmara

Rocio Villa’s plans were foiled last spring when the apartment complex where she lived on Tucson’s southwest side suddenly increased the rent $250 per month.

Villa had become a single mom a couple of years earlier and was training for better work, but she still needed to pay for a final skills test.

With the increased housing costs, she found herself deciding between groceries and utilities. The family even tolerated living without electricity for a while because she couldn’t afford food if she paid all her bills.

The new job as a medical assistant was on hold as she tried to figure out how to stay put — and to help her kids see out the end of the school year.

Rising rents in Tucson are forcing a number of Tucson families, like Villa’s, to relocate. And when these families have to move, their children often have to switch schools, disrupting their educations.

Read the full story here.

In April, I began hearing about how disappointed the high school seniors were about missing out on prom and graduation because of the coronavirus. When my editor suggested I write this story, I wasn’t feeling it. These ceremonies felt trivial to me compared to the devastation and despair the pandemic was creating. But talking to the teens in this story totally changed my mind. It makes me tear up even now remembering how the class of 2020 described not just a loss of tradition but the loss of closure — the inability to say goodbye to their friends, their teachers and essentially their childhood. 

— Danyelle Khmara

Tessa DeConcini and her friends joke about going to prom many years from now with their future sons.

They’re referring to a joke circulated on Twitter long before anyone heard the word coronavirus. Photos of sons taking their moms to prom because the women missed out as teens.

“That Twitter trope fits in a more comedic and sad way now,” says the University High senior. “We are experiencing something that nobody else, not our parents or our grandparents or anybody else, is going to experience in the same way because we’re missing all of these super-significant milestones.”

The coronavirus pandemic has closed public schools across Arizona for the rest of the school year. Tucson’s class of 2020 headed to spring break a few weeks ago not knowing it would be their last time on campus. They’re facing the prospect of no prom, no graduation ceremonies and no saying goodbye — an abrupt ending to 13 years of schooling.

Read the full story here.

As public school districts in Tucson were spending millions to get online devices and internet connection to thousands of low-income families, the small business loans were awarded as part of the federal COVID-relief package. Numerous charter schools that were awarded COVID-relief funding for public schools also received these loans, unavailable to district schools. Some private schools also received the loans although public school districts were required to relinquish millions from their own COVID-relief funding to these very same private schools. This story was especially important because it was one more example of the inequities that exist between private and charter schools and the district schools, which serve far higher numbers of children with special needs and students from low-income families. 

— Danyelle Khmara

Tucson-area private and charter schools have collected millions in federal coronavirus relief loans not available to public district schools despite the fact that a number of them also qualified for emergency stimulus funding.

The Paycheck Protection Program loans, meant to help small businesses avoid layoffs during the COVID-19 crisis, don’t have to be paid back as long as the funds are used for payroll costs, interest on mortgages, rent and utilities, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration.

However, charter schools don’t have the level of financial impact that many small businesses do because they continued to receive taxpayer funding throughout the crisis, said Dave Wells, research director with the Grand Canyon Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

“Since the schools were already held financially harmless, they weren’t really in a position where they expected they were going to lay off people anyway,” Wells said.

Read the full story here.

In my work as education reporter, I talk to teachers day in and day out. Before the pandemic, I knew that teachers’ work wasn’t confined to the classroom, and schools did more than educate kids. But once the pandemic hit, schools became a literal lifeline and teachers essential workers, making sure students and their families had food, computers, health care, electricity in their homes and numerous other necessities. This story laid bare the lack of infrastructure to support vulnerable families and the fact that teachers and schools are perhaps the only ones ready and willing to hold children’s lives together.

— Danyelle Khmara

Sheree García grabs her cloth mask and drives across town. When she gets to her students’ homes, she lowers the back of her truck so they can grab a home-built computer and a goodie bag.

The Wright Elementary School teacher packed up coloring books, crayons, mini workbooks from the dollar store and Smarties candy.

While Tucson’s largest school district, Tucson Unified, has worked to supply portable devices for all of its families in need, Chromebooks for García’s students didn’t arrive until the sixth week of school closures. And García just couldn’t wait that long.

Like teachers across Tucson, García takes it upon herself to use personal connections and her own money to ensure her students have necessities, from computers for remote learning to food in their cupboards.

Amid the coronavirus shutdowns, Tucson educators have created a grassroots support system to supply families in need with essentials.

Read the full story here.

Like my story on teachers forming a grassroots system to support families in need, this story with my colleague Patty Machelor again highlights the lack of support for vulnerable children and families, which existed before the pandemic but has only become more apparent and devastating. With kids unable to be physically in school five days a week, teachers aren’t spotting signs of neglect and abuse the way they would in person. As teachers’ calls to the Department of Child Services are down, calls from police finding children in dangerous situations are up. And while over 1,000 kids, in Tucson alone, have completely fallen off schools’ radar, there is no official mechanism to check on or find these children, putting that job largely on the backs of schools and teachers.

— Danyelle Khmara

A Tucson teacher calls 911 after a student on Zoom flashes what appears to be a handgun.

Another teacher realizes that her young student and a sibling had been fending for themselves as their single mother was bedridden with COVID-19.

Then there’s a parent with several children struggling with online school who says the district keeps calling, and it’s starting to feel like harassment.

Meanwhile, local police are finding more children and teens in the mix when they answer domestic violence calls, investigate drug cases and fatal drug overdoses.

These are just a few glimpses at what the coronavirus pandemic has wrought in the lives of Tucson’s vulnerable families, children and teens. The Arizona Daily Star conducted an online survey of about 150 teachers and parents to learn what they are seeing and experiencing.

It’s unclear what’s happening in the lives of well over 1,100 young people who never show up for online school or only attend sporadically. While numbers from the Vail and Tucson Unified school districts were not provided for this news article, the combined total of students unaccounted for in Tucson’s seven other major school districts is at least 1,160, with some students missing since last spring.

That number increases dramatically if students who attend school very sporadically are included.

Read the full story here.