A correspondent

A truck carrying donations of flour makes its way to central Gaza. The absence of civil police has led to regular looting of aid trucks.

As more Palestinians in Gaza edge toward starvation, law and order is breaking down across the besieged strip.

Armed gangs are taking over the streets of Gaza City, fistfights and stabbings are commonplace in long queues for food, and the occasional aid trucks that arrive must brave mobs of looters. The chaos is taking many forms, and neither Palestinian nor Israeli forces are doing anything to stop it.

With Gaza on the brink of famine; children already dying of starvation, according to the United Nations; and aid supplies slowed by Israeli restrictions, the malnutrition death rate is expected to rise in the coming weeks. Also on the rise are desperation and violence.

“Hunger sometimes pushes people to the brink,” says Mohammed Abu Kmeil, a marketing executive and father of two living in Gaza City.

Violence has been spreading in Gaza since the Hamas-run government withdrew its local police force from the streets in the wake of an Israeli attack last month that killed 11 officers, including a senior commander, who were accompanying U.N. trucks carrying aid to northern Gaza.

The Israeli army, meanwhile, withdrew the bulk of its troops from Gaza in January, leaving fighting forces only in and around Khan Yunis in the south, and establishing only sporadic checkpoints and tank patrols elsewhere.

No police, no order

With neither Hamas police nor Israeli soldiers providing security, the Gaza Strip has fallen prey to generalized and often violent disorder.

Fistfights break out in dayslong lines at the few functioning ATMs in Rafah and Deir al-Balah; men carry knives and fight over aid. The Monitor has heard many accounts of individuals knifed for a bag of flour.

“Since when do we carry knives [to grab] a bag of flour or rice?” Yousri Al Ghoul, a writer in northern Gaza, posted on Facebook last week. “Everyone who carries a bladed weapon must be held accountable before they become a scourge.”

A correspondent

A large crowd waits outside an ATM in Gaza. Fights often break out in the dayslong lines to collect cash.

“Where are the Gaza police and the military forces?” Mr. Ghoul wondered. “Decisive control must be taken, otherwise the future will be grave.”

There is no sign of any such control. Gunshots ring out daily in Deir al-Balah, not from Israeli weapons, but from handguns wielded by local residents. Family disputes that escalate into fatal shootings are now a regular occurrence.

The only authorities on the streets these days are Gaza’s economy ministry monitors, dressed in black civilian clothes, who occasionally inspect markets in Rafah and Deir al-Balah to try to stamp out price gouging by pressuring vendors to sell their goods at normal prices.

In an attempt to fill the void left by the absence of the police, “popular protection” groups have formed in Rafah City, formed by local young men in masks, equipped with batons, who attempt to maintain security in markets.

Yet prices remain high, and looting is rampant.

Food – a life or death decision

The U.N. has attributed much of the looting of its trucks to “spontaneous distribution,” by which they mean displaced people, hungry and desperate, stopping trucks and helping themselves to aid before it can reach its intended destination.

But not only individuals are to blame, say local residents.

The bulk of the canned meats and tuna, flour, and other aid items make their way not to families in need, but to markets where they are sold at exorbitant prices, they point out. Rice and flour cost 30 times more than they did before the war. This suggests that organized, armed groups and profiteers are behind much of the trade, and are tightening their grip on northern Gaza.

“The main reason for the scarcity is that ... if aid does come in, it is stolen by force of arms by thieves and thugs,” says Mahmoud Mattar, an accountant in Gaza City.

A correspondent

Palestinian children in Gaza wait to receive food cooked by a charity kitchen amid chronic food shortages.

The lack of security has made searching for food a life-and-death decision in Gaza City, where the World Health Organization says that 1 in 6 children are malnourished, and that patients in hospitals are dying from dehydration and malnutrition.

Mr. Abu Kmeil, the marketing executive, recalls watching the arrival in his neighborhood of a convoy of aid trucks. “I knew I would not be able to get anything because attackers would target the trucks as soon as they arrived, and that they would be armed with knives,” he says.

“I witnessed scenes that filled me with fear,” he remembers. “People were falling over, and others were stepping on them. Some people were snatching bags from others.”

An incident on Feb. 29 highlighted the dangers of trying to find food. When desperate Gaza City residents mobbed one of several aid trucks brought in by local businesspeople in coordination with Israeli officials, Israeli troops opened fire on the crowd. Over 100 people died, either shot by Israeli soldiers or crushed in a stampede.

Flour a “precious treasure”

Airdrops by parachute can also be risky.

During a drop over Gaza City last week, the parachute on one of the heavy crates failed and the pallet crushed to death five of the hundreds of people amassed for a chance to collect some food.

As the five individuals bled to death, others raced to the other landing crates in the hopes of getting their hands on a bag of flour or a ready-cooked meal.

Others are more fortunate.

After two days without food, Abu Fady Ramadan, a 40-year-old house painter, last week finally spotted an airdrop parachute descending not far from his home.

He left his shelter and chased after the parachute as fast as he could, running nearly 2 kilometers, until he finally arrived at its landing site.

As dozens descended on the crate, he was able to pull away a 10-kilogram sack of flour and a small carton of children’s milk amid the scrum. “To me, they were like precious treasures,” he says.

Mr. Mattar, the Gaza City accountant, says he does not go to aid distributions or airdrops “because it is not safe” due to the chaos.

“I will not run after food drops or go at night and risk my life. I have a family” to take care of, he says.

Then Mr. Mattar thinks again. “But maybe I will have to, tomorrow. No one knows what hunger might do to you.”

Troy Sambajon/The Christian Science Monitor

Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski (center) speaks with reporters at a Monitor Breakfast in Washington, March 12, 2024. At left is Adam Bugajski, director of the Security Policy Department in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At right is Linda Feldmann, the Monitor's Washington bureau chief.

If the United States does not provide more military aid to Ukraine, it could end up paying in other ways – including, eventually, by having to deploy more troops in Europe.

That’s the view of Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, speaking to reporters at a breakfast Tuesday hosted by The Christian Science Monitor. Minister Sikorski was in town with both the president and prime minister of Poland – a rare joint visit to Washington to meet with President Joe Biden.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s two-year-old invasion of neighboring Ukraine has put NATO-member Poland in tough straits. The Poles have bulked up defense spending dramatically, absorbed more than 1 million Ukrainian refugees, and gone on a diplomatic offensive. 

“If we have Putin not in eastern Ukraine but on the border of Poland, then guess what will happen?” Mr. Sikorski said at the Monitor Breakfast. “If NATO is to remain credible, you will need more foreign troops in Poland, including American troops. So if you don’t want to send your people to Europe, the best thing is to defeat [Russia] in Ukraine.”

President Biden invited the top Polish leaders to Washington to mark the 25th anniversary of Poland’s accession to NATO membership on March 12, 1999. The expansion of NATO, following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, heralded a new era of mutual Western defense aimed at keeping the peace in Europe.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 turned that calculus on its head, leading Finland and then Sweden – just last week – to join NATO, now an alliance of 32 countries. 

A stalemate in the closely divided U.S. House has held up a $95 billion foreign aid package, including some $61 billion for Ukraine. Mr. Sikorski and Poland’s two top leaders – President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Donald Tusk – were due to meet Tuesday afternoon with congressional leaders as well as Mr. Biden.

In addition, the U.S. was expected to announce a new military aid package for Ukraine worth up to $300 million. 

Mr. Sikorski is an experienced hand at navigating Washington, having served before as both foreign and defense minister of Poland, and as chair of the European Parliament’s committee on U.S. relations. At the breakfast, he fielded questions on a range of topics, largely focused on Ukraine. 

Here is a video of our breakfast session with Mr. Sikorski.

The following excerpts are lightly edited for clarity.

Last week, you said that the presence of NATO forces in Ukraine was “not unthinkable.” Previously, French President Emmanuel Macron said he could not rule out the possibility of Western troops being sent to Ukraine. What do these controversial assertions accomplish? 

I think President Macron’s idea was to get President Putin wondering what our next move would be, to flip the logic if you like. I think President Macron feels that we’ve been deterring ourselves, that we’ve been a little too helpful to President Putin in saying what we will not do, leaving him in the security to proceed with his genocidal war. 

The French no longer have an empire, but they do have a global outlook – and they do think strategically, which I appreciate. And when you have this determined and vicious adversary, I think it’s useful to occasionally put him on the back foot. 

Does Mr. Putin waving the nuclear option concern you? 

As a country that is signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and doesn’t actually have nukes, of course it bothers me. But it has a history. When I was negotiating the missile defense agreement with the Bush administration, they were threatening us every other day, literally. So when I went to Moscow, I had to ask on live radio, “Russian generals, please threaten us with nuclear annihilation no more than once a quarter.” And you know what? They listened. 

The truth is that President Putin has found that nuclear weapons are actually very hard to use. I suspect China and India have read him the riot act to stop these threats. 

Pope Francis sparked outrage recently by suggesting that Ukraine have “the courage of the white flag” and negotiate an end to the war with Russia. Do the pope’s comments help or hurt the cause of a solution? 

I personally suggested to His Holiness that perhaps he should suggest that Putin should have the courage to withdraw from Ukraine, because that would end the war more surely. And it wouldn’t even require negotiation. 

How is Europe preparing for an America that is likely to be less oriented toward Europe? 

It’s only natural that Europe should take a bigger part of the burden of defending the West upon itself. And it should be done on both a national basis and on a European basis. The latest figures are that 18 out of the 32 NATO allies are now spending 2% of GDP [on defense]. Poland is spending well over 3% of GDP. 

Growing up in Senegal, it never crossed Ndeymour’s mind that she could become a silversmith. From what she had seen, soldering and shaping silver was hard, dirty work, and it was done exclusively by men. 

Then, two years ago, she felt obliged to do something else that she had never imagined for herself: flee an abusive partner. Pregnant and homeless, she found her way to a Dakar women’s shelter. And when the owner asked her to join a silversmith training program, she already knew she was capable of a new kind of life. She immediately said yes. 

Today, Ndeymour, who has asked to be identified only by her first name for her safety, works at Green Wave, a woman-owned jewelry store in the upscale Dakar neighborhood of Almadies. In a tidy green-walled workshop decorated with potted cactuses, she and six other women who survived domestic violence craft bespoke silver jewelry. They are reclaiming agency over their lives as they heal from their traumas together.  

“I realized that I can do what a man can do, and working here gave me a chance to show that,” she says. “I take pride in that.”

Power in creation

Ndeymour’s story is not uncommon in Senegal. One in 4 women of ages 15 to 49 have faced physical violence as adults or adolescents, according to Senegalese government statistics. In more than half of the cases, the perpetrator is their husband or partner. 

These women often have nowhere to turn to. According to the same statistics, two-thirds of women who survive violence never tell anyone about it or seek help. In many cases, they know their families would reject them for leaving their marriages – particularly when they have children – because doing so is seen as selfish. Meanwhile, although Senegal recently changed its rape law to make the potential punishment more severe, women’s rights advocates say many women remain fearful of reporting.

There are also few women’s shelters in Senegal, and women fleeing domestic violence often have little education and few formal job skills. This puts them at risk of becoming homeless, being forced into dangerous jobs like sex work, or having to return to the violent households from which they fled, says Harriet Batchelor, the British silversmith who runs Green Wave. 

Ms. Batchelor spent part of her career working with projects to fight domestic violence in Kenya, where she saw firsthand how important it was for survivors to enjoy continued social support and financial stability after leaving a shelter.

Meanwhile, on weekends she pursued her other passion, making silver jewelry.

When she moved to Dakar in 2020, Ms. Batchelor decided to merge her two professions by starting a silver workshop where the artisans would be survivors of domestic violence.

“There is incredible power in creation,” she says. There is “a sense of self-worth from creating something tangible.”

Andrei Popoviciu

Former French pharmacist Mona Chasserio created Maison Rose, one of the few women's shelters in Senegal.

To find women to train as silversmiths, Ms. Batchelor turned to a Dakar women’s shelter called Maison Rose. 

Located in a bustling neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, the famous “pink house” has housed thousands of survivors of gender-based violence since it opened in 2008. 

On a recent morning, a woman watched a group of toddlers crawling and tottering across the shelter’s rooftop terrace as laundry fluttered in the wind behind them. Meanwhile, on the ground floor, another group of women and children were painting, part of a workshop to help them overcome anxiety and trauma. 

Ndeymour, who is in her early 30s, arrived here in the fall of 2021, heavily pregnant. After she left her abusive partner, her mother had kicked her out too.

“I was a person with no hope about anything,” she says of herself then. “All my dreams were gone.”

Over the next nine months, she says the shelter slowly brought her back to life. She met women in similar situations to hers who had rebuilt their lives from the ground up, and they helped her find the strength to do the same.  

“You can see the transformation in [these women’s] eyes – they leave their baggage here,” says Mona Chasserio, the French pharmacist who founded Maison Rose. 

But women cannot stay at the shelter forever. After about six months, depending on their situation, Maison Rose asks them to move on. Many take cleaning jobs, one of the few professions in urban Senegal open to women without a formal education. On a salary of about $50 a month, however, the women often struggle to support themselves. 

Andrei Popoviciu

The silversmiths at Green Wave use thousand-year-old techniques to create jewelry, helping them overcome trauma.

“A family around a dinner table”

As her departure from Maison Rose approached, Ndeymour wondered where she and her newborn daughter would go next. Then Ms. Chasserio asked her if she was interested in joining a three-month silversmithing workshop run by Ms. Batchelor. 

Ndeymour jumped at the chance, especially because Ms. Batchelor was proposing a job at the end of the training. Her starting full-time salary at Green Wave would be five times what she could make as a cleaner, and she would earn more as she became more experienced.  

She learned all the stages of silversmithing, from designing to sawing, filing, soldering, and finishing. Now, Ndeymour works four days a week at the workshop and will soon manage it when her boss is away. 

For Ndeymour, the experience has been transformative in other ways as well. At Maison Rose, she met a young mother of three who had also fled an abusive partner. 

The two of them struck up a friendship, and when they moved out of the shelter to work at Green Wave, they pooled their wages to rent a small apartment together. They each alternated work with watching their children. Now, after almost six months living together and saving money, they are preparing to move again – this time to their own individual places. 

Ms. Batchelor says that Ndeymour and her other colleagues have taught her how powerful it can be to work through trauma collectively. She feels lucky to work in a place where people speak so openly about what they have survived. 

“Just like a family around a dinner table, there’s a strength of community that’s formed from sitting around a workbench,” she says.

For her part, Ndeymour says she will never look back. On a recent afternoon at the Almadies workshop, she gracefully filed a silver ring with surgical precision – a far cry from the way her hands trembled when she first started the work.

“I have become a solid wall,” she says. “I can’t be broken down or hurt now.”

It’s hard to describe Sufjan Stevens’ beloved 2005 album “Illinois” in a sentence. Even a paragraph – the next one included – wouldn’t do the 74-minute project justice. 

Thematically, the Prairie State’s history is but a starting point. In addition to touching on locales like Peoria and Decatur, figures like Frank Lloyd Wright and Carl Sandburg, and esoterica like the 1893 Columbian Exposition’s White City, the album’s tracks meditate on love, loss, liberation, Christianity, mystery, and self-discovery. Listeners will hear shades of rock, folk, jazz, electronica, and classical minimalism. Mr. Stevens performs on 20 instruments, ranging from oboe, saxophone, and recorder to banjo, organ, and accordion.

So it’s fitting that the new stage adaptation, “Illinoise” – which opened March 7 at New York’s Park Avenue Armory after a February run in Chicago – does just as much to step outside the lines. Director and choreographer Justin Peck puts expressive, allegorical movement at the center, while a dialogueless narrative he crafted with playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury leaves audiences considering the power of story and the trials of human connection. It is not quite a musical, not quite a ballet, not quite a concert – but an experience all its own.

There is, of course, a lot of “Illinois” (the album) to be enjoyed courtesy of the 11-piece band and three vocalists – but in a thoughtful reconfiguration that draws energy from its live performance. Composer and pianist Timo Andres, who arranged and orchestrated the score, also incorporates some expanded moments of instrumental ambience and soloistic flair.

Mr. Andres spoke to the Monitor about adapting “Illinois” for the stage. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Do you remember the first time you heard “Illinois”?

I remember it very well, actually. I was in my dorm room – I think it was my junior year of college.

I’d certainly heard Sufjan’s name. I hadn’t heard his music yet. It made a real impression because it didn’t sound like anything else I had heard. The sound, the actual timbres of the album, were very different from any other kind of pop music that I was listening to at the time. And it seemed to me to be very much in dialogue with a lot of the contemporary chamber music that my friends and I were listening to and writing. This idea that contemporary classical music and contemporary pop music could be in conversation with each other was a very new thing. 

Did you feel pressure to capture any of the magic of the original recordings?

Hugely. That was very much part of my goal – how can I take this beautifully unwieldy thing and make it, in any sense, practicable? And I love the original and I love the sound of it, the chamber music aspect of it and the variety of instrumental colors that are on the album.

I would never want to get rid of those things. Obviously, the sound of my arrangements does depart from the originals in certain ways, by necessity. But I think, for those people who know the album, they’ll find that more of it is familiar than not.

How did you go about finding an instrumentation that could approximate what was happening on the album?

It was really little by little. The first step was, I just listened through the album and every time I heard an instrument, I wrote it down. I have a long list of all the tracks on the album with all the instruments that I heard in there. ... It would have been a real orchestra.

So then it became a question of, how can we start to pare this down? How can we create some efficiencies here? Can we hire anyone who can play multiple instruments? What instruments can our singers play? ... So for example, instead of multiple trumpets just for a couple of moments. I have a trumpet and a French horn. And French horn is an instrument that actually does not appear on the original album. But that was something I added because I knew, from an orchestration standpoint, French horn is a Swiss Army knife. It can do so much and it can blend with so much. It can glue things together that wouldn’t otherwise mesh together.

Stephanie Berger

Byron Tittle, Christine Flores, Kara Chan, and Ricky Ubeda (front) perform in the new show “Illinoise” at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.

Do you think the vocalists in “Illinoise” are adding a new essence to Sufjan’s songwriting?

That was something that Justin [Peck] and I intended from the start. We didn’t want to try and find singers who would just sound like Sufjan, who would try to imitate anything, but rather people who would understand the world that these Sufjan songs exist in and then be able to give them their own spin. 

So yes, the three vocalists absolutely add layers of meaning, and they’re also, in certain ways, tied to the action that’s happening onstage with the dance. So you have different viewpoints depending on what’s happening and what characters are the focus of the scene. 

The freedom to try different songs and different vocal types and different ranges, transposing things as needed, alternating different verses of the same song between different lyricists, having three singers in unison where before it would have been one solo voice – these things absolutely change the context of the songs. But I think in every case where we’ve made changes from the originals, I’ve found that the songs themselves, the structures, the melodies, the lyrics, are more than strong enough to hold up to any changes that we would make.

Illinoisan fans have a unique attachment to the original album. I’m curious if you think “Illinoise,” the show, is saying anything new about the sound of Illinois, the place.

That’s an interesting question. What I will say is that there are certain moments on the album, some of the songs which have to do with state history and U.S. history, that resonate with me and I think will resonate with audiences in a way that they didn’t necessarily originally. 

For one thing, there’s so many lyrics on the album. The sheer quantity of words in some of those songs – you start taking it apart, there are three layers of lyrics going at one time. And those moments, as in “Come On! Feel the Illinoise!,” the zombies song [“They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back From the Dead!! Ahhhh!”], “The Tallest Man,” these songs carry a lot of historical weight and resonance, particularly having lived through the last eight years. So I listen to those lyrics in a different way than I once would.

Is there anything else that excites you about “Illinoise”?  

One of the particularly exciting things about the show, if you know and love the album – even if you’re of an age that you saw Sufjan and co. tour the album – there’s a lot of music on the album that was not originally toured, that was impractical to play live for a lot of reasons. ... It’s a work of maximalism. He did edit, because there’s a whole second album of bonus tracks and B-sides.

One of the really exciting things for me was to get to hear these things in a live context that may never have been heard that way. So not just the hits and the songs, but the strange in-between moments that make the album so special and make it flow in such a great way. So the opportunity to take one of my favorite albums and arrange it for live performance in an ideal way? That is thrilling, and it’s probably the only time that it will ever happen in my life.

It’s winter, it’s dark, it’s raining, and the temperature is stuck in the mid-40s. And that means that the good citizens of the Harborton Frog Shuttle are ready to roll.

Our shuttle has been helping amphibians cross the road for 10 years now, one plump pink frog at a time. But we are not the only amphibian taxi service in the country. In fact, anywhere frogs and salamanders are trying to cross treacherous pavement to get to their vernal pools – their spring mixer, where they hope to pair off, be fruitful, and multiply – there are likely to be humans trying to make sure they make it. It’s no wonder: They’re a compelling sight. A Mardi Gras parade has nothing on hundreds of yellow-and-black spotted salamanders marching across the landscape. They are gorgeous, and motivated, and heartbreakingly vulnerable. They have thousands of years of evolutionary heritage to uphold, and automobiles never figured into it.

There’s more than one website devoted to hooking up concerned citizens with volunteer patrols already underway. But it’s not as if all roads need monitoring all the time. There are certain migration routes the amphibians predictably take, usually from a forested area uphill to an established low-lying wetland. There might be a stretch of road to cross, or a much smaller cinch point. In some places, citizen activists have even succeeded in getting a road closed to traffic on particular nights in a particular season. Typically, only the first warmer, rainy nights in late March or in April are going to be frogful.

But that does not apply to the Harborton Frog Shuttle (motto: Where the ribbit meets the road).

We’re just north of Portland, Oregon. We don’t have a little country lane to patrol. We have a high-speed, four-lane highway, and we won’t be able to shut it down. And we don’t have a nice tidy window in early spring to worry about. We’ve got all winter.

Blame the damp and moderate climate hereabouts or the particular ardor of the northern red-legged frog, but our target species is ready to hop anytime between early November and the middle of March. And then it’ll need to go back uphill. Now we’re talking well into April.

It’s a lot to ask of volunteers. So we have a hundred of us signed up, and we have teams corresponding to every day of the week. If you’re on the Monday team, you’re expected to keep Monday evenings clear on your calendar. For over five months.

It’s not as though the beneficiaries of our efforts appreciate us, either. They do not. They have some very specific goals in mind, and none of them involve being suddenly bucketed with a bunch of other frogs and set on the floorboard of a Subaru. They flat-out don’t like us, and we are dedicated to making sure they won’t like us next year, either.

And some of those evenings, if truth be told, some of us find ourselves hoping for dry, cold, frog-free weather. We’re only human. Around the holiday season, which also lasts for months, it seems like no one has enough time. There’s too much to do. It doesn’t feel as good as it should. It’s stressful. 

In mid-December, there are still another dozen gifts to buy, cookies to bake, and holiday open houses to juggle. The frogs measure time differently.

They’re in a holiday spirit, though. There is nothing like a steady downpour in the dark to put a frog in a festive frame of mind. They’re not stressed; they’ve got everything all wrapped up already. The smaller males come down first. They’re going to stake out their portion of the swamp and practice their moves. Each one is certain he is exactly what the females want.

If anyone can roll her eyes, it’s a frog, but after a while, in the spirit of the season, the big females begin blooping down the hill too, bloated with eggs, and look over the prospects. They aren’t in as much of a hurry. No one wants to be first.

And the thing about it is they will do this without any regard whatsoever for the imaginary needs of frog shuttlers. You have plans for Thanksgiving? Frogs don’t care. You don’t have Christmas wrapped up? Frogs don’t care. You have your jammies and bunny slippers on and a sappy movie cued up and are just starting to think about making a bowl of popcorn and settling in for the night? Frogs don’t care.

It’s raining. It’s dark. It’s go time. And that’s the best thing frogs do for us. They pull us out of our time, our concerns, our petty obligations, our artificial schedules, and put us on Frog Time, when the air is fresh and the geese and owls and chorus frogs are in charge of music and the night might offer you 50 more plump, rubbery chances to do something for somebody that they won’t appreciate.

It’s a new year. Instead of trudging through winter, marking time, find a new time zone. Pacific Tree Frog Time! Mountain Chickadee Time! Daylight Saving Wildlife Time! Eastern Bluebird Time! Pay attention to their needs, and a lot of your own will fade away.

AP

An empty elementary school classroom is seen in 2021 in New York City.

The pandemic’s lingering impact on K-12 education – notably, a record absenteeism among students – has forced American educators to look hard at how they can better engage with parents. Nationwide gaps in student learning, one result of Zoom-only classrooms, still need urgent solutions. The usual home-school connections, such as parent-teacher meetings, are no longer seen as enough. Schools are even challenging a long-held assumption that some parents simply don’t care much about their kids’ schooling.

Money is pouring in to find fresh approaches. The federal government recently spent $83 million to support “family engagement” in public schools. California has approved new standards for teachers in shaping their relationships with parents. Teachers, for example, must examine their attitudes and biases about a family’s background, such as language, social status, or even homelessness.

Private philanthropy is backing different techniques. A survey last year by Grantmakers for Education found that 60% of education funders support efforts to help families become more involved in their children’s education. Half of those funders said they plan to give more for the cause.

Many successes in shaping a more sensitive school engagement with parents have resulted in at least one conclusion: “Families really care,” Elisabeth O’Bryon, co-founder of Family Engagement Lab, told Education Week. Her nonprofit helps school districts successfully include family engagement with curriculum.

A former school psychologist, Dr. O’Bryon said in an interview that parents clearly “want information about what their kids are learning and how they can help.” The changes can be as simple as requiring fewer apps for parents to download. Communication can be more fluid, such as using texting. Demands for in-person meetings can be more flexible. Home visits by teachers to establish better relationships can build trust.

A recent study found that schools that scored high on family involvement before the pandemic saw a 39% smaller increase in chronic absenteeism. Those schools also showed less decline in math and English. “With family engagement you see positive outcomes with behavior, motivation, high school graduation, so it’s really wide-ranging – the positive benefits of that engagement with their child’s learning,” Dr. O’Bryon says.

With an approach of giving and problem-solving, family engagement is a team effort well worth the buy-in from all sides. Parental love is there. It just needs better ways to blossom.

Editor's Note: The editorial has been change to give the correct full name of the Family Engagement Lab.