Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource
Nothing about being a home-hospital teacher is normal.
A Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD) educator drives nearly 22 miles from one student’s home in Venice Beach to another’s in East Los Angeles — and another 20 miles to Maravista, schlepping tote bags with school supplies, books, plants and paintbrushes.
Each bag is dedicated to one of her students — from transitional kindergartners to high school seniors gearing up for graduation and new beginnings.
What her students have in common is illness, ranging from leukemia to eating disorders. And she is one of many teachers tending to their education at the one-of-a-kind Berenece Carlson Home Hospital School.
“In a student’s very, very trying times,” said the teacher who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from LAUSD, “no matter what kind of condition the student is in or has been diagnosed with, we become part of the students’ weekly or daily (life).”
Despite the work of dedicated instructors, Carlson has struggled for years with waves of instability, including the recent closure of its online program, which has deprived students who are ill of the individualized education they need.
In fall 2023, several teachers working at the school began raising alarms about Carlson’s online program, which they believe violated the state’s education code requiring home-hospital schools to operate in person.
They also claimed that the online option — the Carlson Home Online Academy, or CHOA — was a disservice to sick students and led to a range of alleged workplace violations.
Conflict between some home-hospital teachers and CHOA instructors mounted; teachers who taught online claimed CHOA enabled students to take more classes and stay on a better track to graduate.
But in July 2024, the Los Angeles Unified School District closed CHOA altogether, and the online program’s demise has left roughly 170 sick students and several educators unsure of where to go next.
Los Angeles Unified maintains they have made changes in keeping with California’s laws and that they have provided support to former CHOA families.
Learning at Carlson
Carlson is a temporary substitute for a traditional LAUSD education for students who are ill or in the throes of medical treatment to stay in school, sometimes over a period of several years. It also enables students to receive a more individualized education; teachers can meet students at home or in the hospital for roughly five hours each week.
“She really went above and beyond for both of us,” said Karina Rodriguez, the mother of one of the anonymous teacher’s students. “What she did for my daughter, she did for me. She’s my child.”
Classes usually focus on math and English — but sometimes extend to other subjects or topics that students are interested in.
And until CHOA was closed in July, students could also complete coursework online. The virtual option allowed students to mimic a more complete school day and take classes in more subject areas beyond math and English — keeping them on a better track to graduate.
Several CHOA teachers also used lessons from Edgenuity, an online learning platform. Kevin Byrd, who used to teach at CHOA, said the program allowed educators to support several students taking different subjects — say, biology, chemistry and health — simultaneously.
He also said the online program helped students build camaraderie among their peers.
“There was an understanding about the students, even in middle school, that we’re all kind of supporting each other,” Byrd said. “And just because we have this condition doesn’t really affect our ability to learn.”
But several Carlson teachers say the online academy and its educators’ reliance on Edgenuity is unfair to students who are dealing with more serious illnesses.
“I’ve had cancer,” said Lisa Robertson, who, since 2009, has taught in the homes of students from kindergarten through 12th grade. “There is no way I could have gotten up at 8 in the morning and sat through six hours clicking away at a computer.”
‘Lost in the system’: The lead up to CHOA’s closure
The Berenece Carlson Home Hospital School was established in 1970, and supported students’ learning either at their home or at the hospital where they received medical care.
In 1999, when the California Department of Education began tracking campuses by school type, Carlson was classified as a special education school, according to a spokesperson for the agency who said the Department of Education added a designation for home-hospital schools a decade later. LAUSD did not make any updates to Carlson’s classification at the time.
The district bolstered its more rudimentary tele-teaching offerings in 2018 and created CHOA to give “homebound students synchronous home instruction in a web-based classroom setting,” according to a district policy bulletin.
Roughly five years later, a group of home-hospital instructors started sounding alarms that the virtual program, CHOA, was illegal under California’s education code.
Citing a requirement that home-hospital programs operate in-person, the teachers claimed some LAUSD officials were aware of the program’s alleged illegality but maintained CHOA anyway.
They also claimed in emails to district officials that many students in need of in-person instruction were automatically funneled into the online program — and that more than 80 students went without adequate instruction for about two months.
“They tell families there’s no teachers available,” Robertson said, noting there were semesters where she was hardly assigned to teach any students.
“The families are dealing with the crisis of having a sick child,” she said. “And then, they’re lost in the system.”
At the same time, several home teachers were taking on their own workplace battles.
According to a job listing for Carlson for the 2017-18 academic year, home teachers’ salaries weren’t annualized. And several veteran home-hospital instructors joined forces to file a class-action lawsuit against the district last January on top of individual lawsuits that included allegations of unpaid wages and a failure to provide compensation for overtime.
“We had teachers that couldn’t pay their rent. We had teachers that had to get food stamps,” said David Steenhoek, a home-hospital teacher at Carlson. “It was bad.”
LAUSD would not comment on the teachers’ allegations.
And amid mounting pressure, LAUSD announced in April that it would close CHOA beginning in the 2024-25 academic year.
“Programming previously offered through the Carlson Home Online Academy (“CHOA”) was discontinued for the 2024-25 school year as CDE clarified that virtual instruction is not part of a home hospital program,” an LAUSD spokesperson wrote in a statement to EdSource. “Home hospital instruction is to be provided on an individual basis aligned with the hours set forth by law.”
Teachers providing in-person instruction said they started to receive annualized salaries for the first time since 2009, and the California Department of Education (CDE) classified Carlson as a K-12 school with a “Home and Hospital” program for the first time in its history on July 1, 2024.
‘Took a whole arm of our school’: the aftermath of CHOA’s closure
CHOA teachers caught a whiff of the program’s closure in late March. And they started a petition to keep it open that received more than 600 signatures.
“It’s good to have several options, especially for these students who need to be accommodated and have special circumstances,” said Byrd, who started the petition.
“The fact that the second-largest district in the country and the largest in the state is limiting an option for these types of students is really discouraging.”
Since CHOA’s closure, most of its former teachers like Rene Rances have become home-hospital teachers — but others have opted to leave Carlson altogether and teach elsewhere. Rances said he is considering leaving the district, too.
“It’s very, very demoralizing. … I’m talking to some of my friends who are principals at a continuation school,” he said. “If there are any openings … I’m going to go there.”
A spokesperson for LAUSD said in a statement to EdSource that CHOA families were informed of their new options “through letters, emails, phone calls, and several community meetings.”
Those options included Carlson’s home-hospital programs or enrolling at one of LAUSD’s Virtual Academy Schools.
But not all of these options have provided resources that students need, according to Carlson’s counselor, Tammy Koch. She confirmed that some students left — only to be referred back to Carlson.
“We had students that sometimes can’t handle a full course load. … Sometimes, I have students taking three classes. Sometimes, they took four,” Koch said. “But you don’t have that flexibility at Virtual Academy. It’s just not the same.”
