The Case for Schools as Centers of Care
School social workers like Samantha King have worked to connect families with food, rental assistance and other resources during the pandemic. She explains why that help needs to continue.
By Autumn Jemison
This profile is part of The Lost Year, a series documenting the stories of local K-12 students and educators as they return to in-person classes amid a pandemic. The series was written and recorded by fellows in our Spring 2021 Community Reporting Fellowship.
As the COVID-19 pandemic raged in New Orleans last spring, social worker Samantha King’s sole focus was helping families in her school community meet basic needs. King, director of student support at Encore Academy in the St. Roch neighborhood, juggled helping with meal distribution and connecting families to free COVID testing, rental support and other resources. There were a lot of unknowns, but it felt good to be able to connect people to what they needed, King said.
“It felt very urgent,” King said. “It was what needed to happen.”
She recalled one meal distribution day at Encore last April that happened to fall on the 5th birthday of a pre-K student named Tylor. King and other staff wore masks and sang the happy birthday song as they greeted Tylor and his family with meals, a birthday sign and a paper crown. Tylor’s teacher brought out one of his favorite Star Wars picture books from the classroom library for him to keep, a birthday ritual his fellow kindergartners got to take part in before the COVID-19 shutdowns.
“There was a feeling that a child’s birthday should still be celebrated, that they should still feel special,” King said. And so they celebrated.
Video taken that day shows Tylor grinning wide and standing tall with the paper crown balanced on his head. He waves to teachers and school staff from a social distance behind the school’s chain link fence and stretches his five fingers wide to show the camera his age.
Like many families in and around New Orleans, King said families at Encore already faced food insecurity, eviction and homelessness before COVID-19 reached the city. The pandemic intensified many of those traumas and inequities, and the strain on students and their caregivers, she said.
The early part of 2020 was all about making sure “caregivers had the tools they needed to adjust to virtual learning,” King said.
Prioritizing mental health
As Encore returned to in-person school in August 2020, the focus shifted to how students and educators themselves were coping. King and the mental health team at Encore advocated to make sure teachers and staff had opportunities for regular mental and emotional health check-ins during the school day.
“A teacher’s workspace is a student’s learning environment,” she said. “If the teacher isn’t doing well, we can’t expect the student to thrive.”
King noted Encore was fortunate to be able to hire another social worker and an additional counselor since 2019. During the pandemic, King and her team have been able to prioritize targeted supports like checking in with elderly caregivers. Her team is also in the process of creative additional resources for LGBTQ+ families, she said.
King described a mix of worry and excitement as the new school year started in mid-August. Encore started the school year in person, but switched back to virtual learning through Labor Day as COVID-19 cases again rose in Louisiana. Then Hurricane Ida hit, knocking out power and shuttering schools for more than a week. King is concerned the pileup of challenges will affect student attendance and increase the number of families facing job loss, eviction and food insecurity.
The case for restorative schools
Before serving in schools, King worked as a social worker at Bridge City Center for Youth, a juvenile detention center just outside New Orleans. Her experience there showed how important it is for schools to end practices like suspension and adopt restorative, relationship-focused approaches for helping students. The pandemic reinforced that need, she added.
King said it’s essential that schools continue to invest in making “school a more supportive and safe space for all students to get the education they deserve,” whether that’s handing out food or the tough, systems-level work of changing how students are disciplined. Children are dealing with so much right now, she said. School support needs to stretch beyond the walls of the classroom.
“I know it’s going to be hard, but we’ve been called to do this and it has to happen,” King said. “If we can do it this year, we can do it the next and more moving forward.”
Autumn Jemison is a Spring 2021 Community Reporting Fellow with Lede New Orleans. Jemison, a Nashville native, is studying film at Dillard University.
This story is available to republish under a Creative Commons license. Read Lede New Orleans’ publishing guidelines here.
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