FALLING BEHIND
During a year lost to the pandemic, many Hartford students are ‘spiraling’
Raquel Smith, who has five children in Hartford schools, estimates her kids have missed the equivalent of at least 3 ½ weeks of school this year. Poor internet access is mostly to blame for her family’s constant battle with remote learning. The wireless connection in her Hartford apartment can’t handle six people using devices for school and work. Her ninth grader has struggled the most, entering high school from behind a computer screen.
“She’s like, ‘This is too much. I can’t stand it. I wish all of this wasn’t even happening,’ ” Smith says.
In Hartford, a school district with 16,000 students in K-12, just getting children to class has been a struggle this year, either online and in person.
Hartford Public School students who live in the city missed an average of one in five days during the first semester, as the challenges of mostly virtual classes compounded the struggles of already-disadvantaged communities.
Data from the school district shows that distance and hybrid learning are not working for large swaths of the district, particularly at schools serving mostly students from surrounding neighborhoods. As of Jan. 22, more than 60% of students in those district schools were chronically absent, compared to about 30% of students attending Hartford magnets, which enroll heavily from the suburbs.
This year, nearly 50% of all students are considered chronically absent, and about 1,300 Hartford students were unaccounted for as of Feb. 4, according to the school board’s committee on family and community engagement.
To cope, Smith has tried changing internet providers, getting technicians out to her home and upgrading her plan, but the service still fails every day, booting one or more of her kids out of their virtual classrooms or preventing them from logging on at all. Four of her children receive special education and one, a high school junior, has autism.
“I was willing to sacrifice and make arrangements on other bills just to have that [upgraded internet] going for the kids, but it didn’t work anyways,” she says.
‘Spiraling into a depression’
Behind the missing students, there are other deep problems. More than half of high school students are not on track for graduation, 92% of eighth graders are below grade level in math and 75% of elementary school students are reading below grade level, according to the district.
Jessica Yennie St. Juste, a health and P.E. teacher at Classical Magnet School and a union officer, describes watching her students “spiraling into a depression.”
“Many students are spiraling and they don’t even realize it,” Yennie St. Juste, a vice president of the Hartford Federation of Teachers, told the Hartford school board. “The common descriptive word that I hear from my students is, ‘Miss, I’m tired. I’m exhausted.’
This is not physical exhaustion. This is mental exhaustion, which is far more complex to treat.”
At McDonough Middle School, more than 80% of students are chronically absent this year, the highest rate of any city school. Milner Middle and Weaver High also reported 80% of in-person learners were chronically absent, with participation among fully-remote learners only slightly better.
Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez said she doesn’t yet know how deeply education has been stunted by the pandemic or what resources will be necessary to help students recover. The first step will be assessing what the school system can do differently this summer.
In the past, the district hasn’t offered summer school for all grades, choosing to use its limited resources mainly for kindergarten through third grade and credit recovery for high school students.
“Where we are today is we know we’re going to need a K-12 program to start in the summer, but it is in its very early stages given that we have not had an opportunity to assess our students’ loss holistically,” Torres-Rodriguez said.
Mya Bowen, who chairs the education committee of the Greater Hartford African American Alliance, says the schools need to knock on the door of every chronically-absent student and find out what is keeping them from class.
A family crisis made Bowen truant when she was growing up in city schools in the 1990s. She was dismissed from Weaver High because of her frequent absences, though she now has her GED, multiple degrees from the University of Hartford and a job teaching at a community college in Massachusetts.
What she needed as a student was not a longer school day or year-round school but personal support, Bowen said.
“Addressing what the real influences are on the student’s ability or inability to log in and be present during class is the real issue,” Bowen said. “Although they say they are working toward a solution, we’re not seeing it in terms of tangible results.”
The district has spent the start of the semester fleshing out proposals to potentially extend the school day or year, at an estimated cost of $23 million-$34 million per year, depending on the model. The teachers union has already pushed back on the possibility of a longer instructional day.
The Hartford schools will receive $45.7 million from the most recent federal stimulus package — the most of any Connecticut district — to help pay for increased instruction in summer school and other interventions.
Remote learning created challenges
Torres-Rodriguez says the situation worsened primarily after the district transitioned its fully in-person learners to a hybrid model — two days per week in person, three remote — in mid-November. Students in grades 10-12 started the year in hybrid learning and went fully remote in November.
Those shifts created extra challenges for families, and meant that students struggling with remote learning had no option to return to class full time.
To try to stave off further learning loss, Hartford started offering live, virtual tutoring in November.
Tutors have held nearly 3,300 sessions since then, according to the district.
And starting in January, in-person learning hubs opened in community centers around the city to provide child care for up to 300 young students struggling with hybrid learning.
There are also things Torres-Rodriguez wishes people would keep in mind when they scrutinize this year’s drop-off in attendance and engagement and the initiatives Hartford is planning in response.
The district just completed a three-year school consolidation plan brought on by declining enrollment, budget constraints and years-old achievement gaps. Enrollment in Hartford schools is down 6% over last year and 25% over the past decade. State funding has been flat for even longer, and art, music and extracurricular programs have dwindled.
“Financial stability was a challenge for us pre-COVID,” Torres-Rodriguez said. “We had to engage the whole community to close 20% of our schools, and we just finished that while we entered a pandemic.”
In recent years, the district has tried to improve student engagement by paying a nonprofit to delve into student data, opening new student support centers, hiring more attendance specialists, and in 2019, paying rising ninth graders to attend summer school.
The last program, called Summer Bridge, had funding for 700 students but attracted only 290, according to the district. There was no summer school option for rising freshmen the prior year.
The district vowed to work on drawing more students to Summer Bridge in its second year, but the pandemic spoiled that plan.
Torres-Rodriguez said she knows teachers are already trying their best to engage students.
“We’re all just trying to hang in there, and I think we’re going to need so much more of that as we try to bring everybody back and try to re-imagine collectively what next year and beyond are going to look like,” Torres-Rodrguez said. “We’re not done yet. We’re still in this.”