The deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history at the time, the fire spread at the rate of 80 football fields a minute at its peak, scorching the hearts and minds of the people who live there, especially the children.

That’s why the Butte County Office of Education sent trauma-informed arts educators into the schools, to help students cope with their fear, grief and loss. Buildings can be repaired far more quickly than the volatile emotions of children scarred by tragedy. Long after the flames died down, the heightened sense of fragility that often follows trauma lingered.

“The people displaced from Paradise were suffering from acute trauma, running for their lives, losing their houses and being displaced,” said Jennifer Spangler, arts education coordinator at Butte County Office of Education. “This county has been at the nexus of a lot of impactful traumas, so it makes sense that we would want to create something that directly addresses it.”

Even now, years after the conflagration, many residents are still healing from the aftermath. For example, the county has weathered huge demographic shifts, including spikes in homelessness, in the wake of the fire, which have unsettled the community. All of that came on the heels of the 2017 Oroville dam evacuations and longstanding issues of poverty, drug addiction and unemployment, compounding the sense of trauma.

“Butte County already had the highest adverse childhood experiences (ACES) scores in the state,” said Spangler. “We’re economically depressed, with high numbers of foster kids and unstable family lives and drugs. I think the fire was just another layer, and then Covid was another layer on top of that.”

Theater’s healing nature

Chris Murphy is a teaching artist who has worked with children in Paradise public schools as well as those at the Juvenile Hall School. He believes that theater can be a kind of restorative practice, helping students heal from their wounds in a safe space.

“Arts education is so effective in working with students impacted by trauma because the creative process operates on an instinctual level,” said Murphy, an actor best known for voicing the role of Murray in the “Sly Cooper” video game franchise for Sony’s PlayStation. “All arts are basically a way to tell a story and, as human beings, we are hard-wired to engage in storytelling as both participant and observer. A bond of mutual respect and trust develops among the group as they observe each other’s performances and make each other laugh. Over time, the environment takes on a more relaxed and safe quality.”

Another teaching artist, Kathy Naas, specializes in teaching drumming as part of a social-emotional learning curriculum that helps students find redemption in the visceral call-and-response rhythms of the drum circle.

“Trauma is powerful and is connected to something that occurred in the past,” said Naas, a drummer who is currently performing with a samba group as well as a Congolese group based in Chico. “Drumming occurs in the present moment and engages the brain so much that fear,  pain and sadness cannot break through.”

Not just ‘natural’ disasters

To be sure, the use of trauma-informed arts ed techniques goes beyond natural disasters. Many arts advocates believe that these techniques can help children cope with myriad stressors.

“Now more than ever, these cycles of traumatic events, they just keep coming,” said Spangler, who modeled the Butte program after a similar one in Sonoma County in the wake of the devastating 2017 Tubbs Fire.

Children who have experienced trauma may experience negative effects in many aspects of their lives, experts warn. They may struggle socially in school, get lower grades, and be suspended or expelled. They may even become involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice system.

“An individual who has been impacted by trauma, especially ongoing toxic stressors like a home environment with addiction, neglect or abuse, develops a brain chemistry that is detrimental to cognitive function … essentially locking the brain in a fight-flight-freeze cycle,” Murphy said. “With this understanding of what the trauma-affected student is going through, I use theater arts to disrupt the cycle.”

It should also be noted that delayed reactions are par for the course when dealing with post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD), experts say. Some children will show their distress readily, while others may try to hide their struggle.

A mental health crisis

Coming out of the pandemic, the healing power of the arts has been cast into wide relief as public health officials seek tools to grapple with the youth mental health crisis.

“Music can, in a matter of seconds, make me feel better,” said U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy during an arts summit organized by the White House Domestic Policy Council and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). “I’ve prescribed a lot of medicines as a doctor over the years. There are few I’ve seen that have that kind of extraordinary, instantaneous effect.”

Drumming can help build empathy, Naas says, because it allows for self-expression but also encourages a sense of ensemble, listening to others and taking turns.

“Drumming is a powerful activity that creates community,” said Naas. “What I notice about drumming with children is that students become excited, motivated, and fully engaged at the very start. They reach for the rhythms and begin exploring the drums right away.”

Fighting the isolation

Arts and music can nurture a visceral feeling of belonging that can help combat the isolation that often follows a tragic event, experts say. This may also provide some relief for those grappling with the aftershocks of the pandemic.

“The truth is we are all dealing with hardships associated with the pandemic and with learning loss, and we know that the arts, social-emotional learning and engagement can create a healing environment,” said Peggy Burt, a statewide arts education consultant based in Los Angeles. “Children need to heal to develop community, develop a sense of belonging and a sense of readiness so that they can learn.”

The families of Butte county know that in their bones. Trauma can fester long after the emergency has passed, after the headlines and the hoopla. Turning tragedy into art may be one way to heal.

“I’ve seen it over and over in these classrooms, the kids quiet down, they’re calm, they’re focused,” said Spangler. “You can see the profound impact the arts have on the kids every day.”

To be sure, the child care sector has long been marked by a brutal economic tug-of-war. Most families can’t afford the skyrocketing high cost of care, while many child care workers can’t survive on their pay.  Note that child care for a baby in Alameda County cost about $20,000 a year in 2021, for example. Now consider that the average child care worker makes about $13 an hour. Raising awareness of this predicament is the goal of events like the upcoming Day without Child Care, when many providers nationwide close down and speak out about the issues.

“Child care is a textbook example of a broken market,” as Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen has put it. “The free market works well in many different sectors, but child care is not one of them. It does not work for the caregivers. It does not work for the parents. It does not work for the kids. And because it does not work for them, it does not work for the country.”

The pandemic has deepened the preexisting child care crisis, shuttering nearly 16,000 child care centers and raising the costs of operation for those that remain in business. Inflation also means everything from masks to snacks costs more than it did before, experts say, while many workers have fled to higher-paying jobs at Starbucks and Target, straining the system further.

Amid the ongoing crisis, the Biden administration initially proposed an ambitious plan for federally subsidized child care that got shot down in Congress. Now he’s pushing several smaller fixes including requiring semiconductor manufacturers that are lining up for a helping of nearly $40 billion in new federal subsidies under the CHIPS and Science Act to provide child care for their workers.

“The pandemic … made it even clearer just how hard it is for millions of working- and middle-class families to provide care for their families,” Biden said last month. “It’s not just how important the care economy is to the entire economy, it’s when people have to leave the labor force or can’t enter it in the first place because of caregiving responsibility, they can’t fully participate in the economy, and that drags down the whole nation’s productivity and growth overall.”

Many laud this strategy for creating more affordable child care options by enticing corporations into providing coverage for their employees.

“Innovative ideas like the CHIPS Act are what we need to begin to address the child care crisis that is generations in the making,” said Gina Fromer, president and CEO of Children’s Council of San Francisco. “Semiconductor industry groups and even leading CEOs are coming out in support of the program’s effort to tie workforce development to child care, citing the need to re-engage the 2 million women that left the workforce during the pandemic to care for family members.”

However, others warn that tying child care to employment instead of treating it as a public good, like K-12 education, risks leaving millions of struggling families out of the loop. Think health care. When you lose your job, you also lose your coverage, as do your kids. These people say it should be the government’s role to oversee vital social infrastructure.

“Kudos for a creative idea, but isn’t the child care system complicated enough without now adding a health care-styled system to layer on top?” said Scott Moore, head of Kidango, a nonprofit organization that runs many Bay Area child care centers. “Another downside is shifting the responsibility from government to business.”

Biden also recently issued an executive order directing federal agencies to find ways to make child care cheaper and more accessible. White House officials have described it as the most sweeping effort by any president to streamline the delivery of child care.

However, some suggest that the strategy of privatizing some of the high costs of child care may prove to be a more practical move.

“Biden’s push on chipmakers to expand their own child care centers as they recruit new workers may prove more consequential,” said Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley. “The president could double down and press for similar provisions within the $1.2 trillion in infrastructure projects — benefiting a variety of energy, bridge-building and construction firms — all of which employ parents with young children.”

While many child care advocates believe that universal early education should be the gold standard, some suggest economic and political complications may make that goal hard to achieve.

“Early education advocates must continue to push our local, state and national leaders towards the ultimate goal of universal child care for all. That should be our end game, period,” said Fromer. “But, as with any large-scale socioeconomic change, it has been and will continue to be a long, hard battle to get there. In the meantime, what may feel like short-term, incremental steps have proven to be real solutions.”

Another key issue is how to lift child care workers out of poverty while simultaneously making care more accessible. The child care industry, a workforce with a significant number of women of color, has long been burdened by poverty wages.

“Early childhood teachers work with children during their most formative years of development and growth,” said Moore, “yet they are the lowest paid in a low-pay profession.”

Others warn that maintaining a high quality of care is the bottom line. Simply expanding access to child care or lowering its costs is not enough to give children the head start they need in early childhood.

“One concern: We don’t want to expand the number of new child care slots with static funding,” said Fuller. “This would erode the quality of teachers and raise class size in pre-K programs. The long-term benefits of child care only materialize with high-quality programs.”

Only 42.1% of third-graders can read at grade level on the state’s latest Smarter Balanced test, down from 48.5% in 2019, a more than 6% percentage point decline. Disadvantaged third-graders fared even worse. The number who met the standard fell 7% percentage points from almost 37% in 2019 to 30% in 2022. Also troubling is the fact that the children who were in third grade in 2019 are now in sixth grade, and only 45.1% of them can read at grade level, suggesting that they’re not catching up.

“The COVID disaster led to the biggest drop in the amount of schooling available to our children,” said Tim Shanahan, a nationally renowned literacy expert and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chi­cago. “The number of lost and reduced days, the number of lost teacher days, makes this unprecedented.”

Since reading is a cornerstone skill that builds a foundation for all future learning, any drop in reading skills is detrimental. Amid the backdrop of the pre-existing literacy crisis, however, this plunge in third-grade reading skills has some experts sounding the alarms and calling for swift action from the state while others say it’s less of a five-alarm fire and more of an ongoing failure to teach reading effectively.

“It’s long past due that California leaders declare these results proof of a statewide emergency,” said Mark Rosenbaum, the lead attorney in the groundbreaking 2017 lawsuit known as the Ella T. case that blamed the state of California for the deepening literacy crisis, “stop scapegoating children and teachers, and take responsibility for getting already marginalized students the academic and social and emotional supports they need to catch up now. Nothing less than their futures and the future of this state hang in the balance. It’s a matter of getting all of our children to tomorrow.”

The scores may be brutal, others suggest, but they’re far from shocking. Some experts view this uproar over falling test scores as a distraction from the sobering fact that the system was broken long before the pandemic, in terms of teaching kids to read.

Nothing new

“The scores change nothing. This isn’t new,” said Lakisha Young, founder of Oakland Reach, a parent advocacy group that has made great strides in teaching reading during the pandemic with parent and caregiver tutors in a virtual hub. “It was a catastrophe the day before the scores and it’s a catastrophe now. The pandemic has highlighted just how bad we’ve let our public education system get.”

For Jessica Reid Sliwerski, a former teacher who founded an online reading tutorial company, consistently lower test scores are a warning that the system needs an overhaul.

“Crummy scores pre-pandemic are indicative of a system that simply does not teach kids to read — a problem that persisted throughout the pandemic and still persists today,” said Sliwerski, a former teacher and CEO of Ignite Reading, a Zoom-based reading tutorial. “It is literally as simple as that. We do not as a nation hold our school systems accountable to ensuring that every single child is given equitable access to evidence-based instruction by a teacher who is highly trained and supported.”

Given the significance of third grade as a milestone, the year in which children must pivot from learning to read to reading to learn or quickly fall behind, all experts agree this may be a dire predictor. Children who can’t read well by third grade are also more likely to drop out of school, research suggests. That’s why the stakes are so high in a state where fewer and fewer children become proficient readers.

“The drop in reading proficiency is deeply troubling,” said Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at the University of California Berkeley. “Strong reading and oral language skills are pivotal throughout elementary school and beyond. Verbal and engaged kids draw warm responses from teachers; reading enters children into a world of facts.”

Heartbreaking setbacks

Amid this unsettling context, many are pondering how likely it is that these children will be able to bounce back. Reckoning with the scope of the issue, what Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has characterized as “heartbreaking” academic setbacks, may be the key. A grave sense of urgency is required, experts say, lest these reading declines permanently steer children off course. Parents should press for schools and teachers to reject business as usual.

“This is a time for schools and families to step up and make sure that their children are receiving as much high-quality instruction focused on key learning areas as possible,” said Shanahan. “We can address this problem successfully, but it will need to be a priority in communities — it won’t just happen.”

Many suggest high-dosage tutoring as a remedy, but despite a wealth of COVID relief funding from federal and state governments, school district officials say they are struggling to find tutors amid a crippling teacher shortage even as they grapple with the hardships of pandemic life such as a spike in absences and student misbehavior.

In light of a national push to reform reading instruction, experts say that evidence-based practices steeped in how the brain learns to read, such as structured literacy with its methodical approach to phonics and other basics, should be a part of the academic recovery plan.

A school’s improved scores

Some districts are already reaping the benefits of this data-driven approach. At Joshua Elementary, a high-poverty school in the Lancaster school district, for example, a new structured literacy curriculum has paid off. The school’s third grade scores have improved from less than 3% of students meeting or exceeding standards to almost 11% doing so. Palo Alto Unified, an affluent Bay Area district, also saw gains after switching to a structured literacy approach. In 2022, 77% of third graders there meet or exceed standards, a 2.6-point increase from 2019.

“We absolutely believe the work we did with the science of reading made the difference,” said Lorraine Zapata, the principal at Joshua, one of 70 low-performing schools that received Early Literacy Support Block (ELSB) grants as part of the 2020 Ella T. settlement.

Of all the block grant schools, Leonard R. Flynn Elementary in San Francisco saw the biggest boost, going from almost 11% of students meeting the standard to 34% doing so. Among the settlement schools, 32 improved while 36 declined. Even that split is considered notable given that the schools were selected for the extra funding because they had among the lowest reading scores in the state in 2019.

“It’s great news,” said Becky Sullivan, the literacy expert at the Sacramento County Office of Education who is overseeing the block grant program. “If the lowest schools in the state can show gains under the conditions we’ve had the last two years, it’s definitely a win.”

However, some experts say how children are taught makes a difference. Most California school districts are not using curricula rooted in structured literacy, which includes phonics. Most districts are using balanced literacy to teach reading. This popular approach stresses the joy of reading while using controversial techniques such as memorizing “sight words” and looking at visual clues like pictures. It also lacks enough phonics and other fundamentals, experts say, to ensure that most kids read fluently.

By contrast, structured literacy, which stresses vocabulary and comprehension as well as phonics and phonemic awareness (identifying sounds), may better meet the needs of most students, experts say. Structured literacy builds on decades of exhaustive scientific research.

“We’ve seen significantly better results,” with one approach than the other, “so why not go there?” said Young, of the Oakland parent group, who has implemented a science of reading-based approach with impressive results. “You can have a great philosophical debate when it’s not your kid’s life on the line.”

Many also note that while all children are vulnerable to reading struggles, families of means can pay for the help they need. Cash-strapped families, hit hard by rising inflation, don’t have that option. But, as the state’s test scores show, reading scores dropped statewide among students from every racial/ethnic group and economic status. Taking English learners out of the mix, test scores dropped from 56.85% to 50.14%.

“It is bleak news on a large scale, especially for low-income children,” said Seena Hawley, who runs the Berkeley Baby Book Project, an affiliate of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. “Parents with the resources to do so buy their children tutoring outside of school, and, voila, those children learn to read.”

Like a natural disaster

The key to reckoning with a crisis of this magnitude may be to treat it like a natural disaster, a hurricane or a fire, some say. Shanahan says that the losses can be mitigated as long as the response is as substantial as the disaster.

“In the past, such disasters have been localized and for shorter durations,” said Shanahan. “Experience from those kinds of interruptions to schooling tells us that we can regain all or a great deal of that lost ground by increasing the amount of teaching going forward and improving the quality and intensity of instruction. That will be tougher this time because of the scope of what has happened.”

The sixth graders, some fear, may be at the biggest disadvantage because not only do they lack reading skills, but they have also lost out on the knowledge they could have been acquiring for the last three years. Even if it were possible to wave a magic wand and teach them to read instantly, it wouldn’t make up for the loss in cognitive development they might have had.

“The sooner a child learns to read, the sooner they can build knowledge and vocabulary and thus have stronger comprehension,” said Sliwerski. “The longer it takes, the poorer they get in terms of vocabulary and comprehension. It’s not impossible to make up for lost ground, but it is really hard, and our system is not designed to help older kids close gaps.”

Given the depth and scope of the problem, experts say, California’s lack of a comprehensive literacy strategy that aligns with the research will impede any real progress.

State education officials must be held accountable, some say, because they may never have access to as much funding as they do today given the unprecedented amounts of state and federal aid going to districts to help children reclaim the learning they didn’t get during the pandemic.

A wake-up call

“There is a difference between throwing money at people and actually leading,” said Don Austin, superintendent of Palo Alto Unified. “If our state wishes to elevate early literacy, it should stand prominently as the undisputed top priority goal.  Anything less than top billing is an indication that early literacy is simply another topic on a list.”

However, others warn that mandating structured literacy may not work, given the long and thorny history of debate about reading in this country. Unless feet get held to the fire in some way, they fear, children will continue to fall behind.

A statewide scorecard for early literacy that generates interest among students, teachers and families, Austin suggests, might help fuel awareness and achievement.

“A sense of competition,” he said, “could drive a focus to identify top performers and best practices to replicate.”

Certainly, for many parents, these grim test scores are a wake-up call that the time for the state to take charge is now. It’s not fair to put the burden of figuring out how best to teach reading on teachers and families.

“More students are struggling than before, and I think the state should take a strong role in promoting the highest-quality instructional methods for assessing students’ struggles and helping them catch up,” said Esti Iturralde, a Bay Area mother of two whose daughter struggled with reading until Iturralde began tutoring her at home. “It’s not right to expect each school district to independently research and implement the best instructional methods. They have a lot on their plates.”