Vulnerable Students Thrown A Lifeline

Luke Austin was having trouble with his 5‑year-old daughter’s online lessons. He could log into the online classroom but then got stuck; in 40 years as a cook, he has not needed to use computers.

A SWAT team from the public schools swung into action.

Austin was calling his daughter’s mother during her work hours to get impromptu tech lessons until he reached out to Monica Arroyo of the New Haven Public Schools’ Office of Youth, Family and Community Engagement.

Austin’s daughter, Yvonne Michelle Austin, is one of around 3,700 students whom YFCE has identified as particularly vulnerable during the Covid-19 pandemic. YFCE has been calling and texting with students’ families to find out what they need and connects them to those resources.

Some students are homeless. Some are refugees or undocumented immigrants. Some are in foster care or are not attending class as regularly as they should.

“Someone on the executive team said, ​‘We are on the virtual front lines of some of the hardest cases of life that students and families are dealing with,’” recounted YFCE Chief Gemma Joseph Lumpkin.

Arroyo helped Austin learn how to use Yvonne’s software and connect to school tech support. Now Yvonne gets online every weekday for her classes with Bishop Woods School, Austin said.

“I’m bald-headed, and I would probably be pulling my hair out” if not for YFCE, Austin said.

Covid-19 has slashed the income of the Austin household too. Austin lost his cooking jobs when the restaurants and bars he worked for closed. They plan to hire him back if they reopen after the pandemic. If not, the Chili’s Grill & Bar near his house in East Haven is interested in hiring him.

The situation leaves Austin as a stay-at-home dad relying on Yvonne’s mother’s part-time salary.

He has embraced his new role. He works on Yvonne’s multiplication tables with her. On Saturday, Austin and Yvonne blew bubbles outside. Both were wearing masks, including a special small mask made especially for her.

The Callers

Only about one-third of the YFCE students participate in online learning five days a week. About 29 percent have reported not going online at all during the week.

Joseph Lumpkin keeps track of figures like these on Google Drive, where the 50 to 60 people on her team log the results of their phone calls to families. They ask questions about how families are faring, whether they are staying home and whether anyone in their household is sick.

Joseph Lumpkin works from her kitchen with her team leaders, especially Dropout Prevention Coordinator Charles Blango, to keep the department running virtually.

The Independent sat in on one of these Zoom meetings, in which family resource center coordinator Lysie Rodriguez described a phone call to a family. Late into the call, the mother revealed that her husband was sick.

Rodriguez learned that the illness was not Covid-19 but diabetes. His blood sugar levels were dangerously high.

Rodriguez helped the family call 911 and get him to an intensive care unit. She then served as a translator and mediator between the doctors, the father and the mother. She reported to fellow YFCE staffers that he was still in the hospital but his condition was improving, according to her most recent daily call.

Another staff member, Kermit Carolina, spoke to the team from his car after visiting a student rumored to be involved in several auto thefts. He talked with the young man and his mother through the window of their family home and explained that the police department wants to work with the school system to keep him out of jail. Carolina now has the teen’s phone number. He plans to continue to follow up to give the student whatever support he needs.

The success of the department partially relies on the trust each staff member has built with families. Austin called Arroyo to help him overcome tech hurdles because the family already had the YCFE staff member’s number on speed dial.

The team has also gotten specific training from nonprofit Clifford Beers on how to do social work by phone.

Joseph Lumpkin’s biggest takeaway from the training was to remember to breathe and release stress between calls. She has to support families through their hardships while she is working in a much more stressful environment than usual, where the boundary between work and life with her two young children has dissolved.

Minutes after Joseph Lumpkin explained this insight, the end of her 2 year-old daughter’s online class prompted a full-volume meltdown.

“I know, you don’t want to say goodbye to your friends. Blow a kiss,” Joseph Lumpkin cooed to her daughter. And got back to work.

The Families

Giorgio Bruno is 25 and the English-speaking representative of his family. So his was the number Arroyo called when Bruno’s niece, Aurora, had not logged into her elementary school classes.

Arroyo helped Aurora find the right link to join her class. Then she called back later to ask more about how the family was doing.

Bruno revealed that his brother and parents were all out of work and that the family was running out of food. Bruno delivers groceries to pull in the only income among the two households.

Bruno said that Arroyo called him four or five times in 10 minutes. Within 30 minutes, Arroyo’s coworker Sergio Rodriguez was downstairs with a bag of food and a $50 gift card to Stop & Shop.

It’s part of Joseph Lumpkin’s strategy of providing both emergency assistance and connecting families to longer-term supports like food banks.

To Bruno, the psychological support and knowledge that someone cared enough to listen was almost as important as the aid itself.

“Immigrant families feel that they have nobody to talk to, nobody that would understand,” Bruno explained.

Bruno immigrated from Naples, Italy to the U.S. first. His family followed, turning Bruno’s American dream into near reality. Except that some family members are undocumented and have no safety net to fall back on in crises.

“They don’t technically exist,” Bruno said.

Bruno still has family members in Italy. He recently learned that one, his uncle, has terminal brain cancer. With coronavirus exacting a heavy toll on the country, his uncle’s illness is not a priority for hospitals, Bruno said.

Bruno said that it has been unbearable knowing that both Covid-19 and immigration status bar his family from visiting his uncle.

But his family made it out of a tough city alive, he said. In difficult times with little food, pizzas feature prominently on their dining tables.

“We stay home and we bake. We’re from Italy. We were taught when you don’t have anything to eat, you make something out of nothing,” he said.

It also helps to have some ingredients, dropped off by the local school system.

“I don’t know how we could have made it if we didn’t have people in our community that think about the people nobody thinks about,” Bruno said.