‘I can’t wait to go back to school’
Remote learning and the harm it has done to our kids
A year after the coronavirus shut schools and threw students into remote learning, students, teachers and pediatric experts warn of learning losses and rising anxiety among students.
When Rashayna Jenkins opened her report card and counted four Fs among her seven grades, her spirits sank beneath another wave of bad news.
Then she got the warning letter from Miami-Dade Public Schools. She was in danger of failing eighth grade and should return to the classroom immediately.
For Rashayna, and most students, remote learning from home during the coronavirus pandemic has been a dysfunctional euphemism. They are not learning. Or they are struggling to learn from behind the barrier of a computer screen in virtual school, an inadequate simulation of inperson school.
“I hate it,” Rashayna said. “It’s boring and you can’t focus. A lot of work is burying you all at once. At home, there are distractions, and you stay up too late at night.
“Some teachers don’t make the camera mandatory, so you aim it at the ceiling and go on Instagram and TikTok or take a nap. I did it, and my grades dropped,” said Rashayna, who has since returned to school at Mater Grove Academy and shored up her grades.
In the year since South Florida schools shut their doors to bar the first surge of COVID-19, disruptions to one of society’s sturdiest institutions have been profound. Not only have students and teachers been separated by the digital divide, but they will feel the ripple effects of learning losses for years to come.
Just as the pandemic has
disproportionately harmed the health of minority and low-income communities, it has widened educational inequities. And children, suffering from high rates of anxiety and depression, have been isolated from their peers at the precise time in their development when they need social interaction the most.
A return to the rhythms and rigor of regular school is essential to reversing the academic and emotional toll on what could be a lost generation of students, educational and medical experts say as districts hit the one-year mark coping with closures, reopenings, quarantines, hybrid classes and high numbers of absent or failing students.
“One of our top priorities must be getting kids back in school now that it is absolutely clear that the risks of staying home are higher than being in school, which science shows can be done safely,” said Dr. Jeffrey Brosco, pediatrician, professor of clinical pediatrics and associate director of the Mailman Center for Child Development at the University of Miami. “Kids are social creatures, and a chief value of school is social learning. They need it. They miss it. Who would have thought our kids would say, ‘I can’t wait to go back to school.’”
School closures combined with the reversion to online learning have created a public health crisis among young people, say doctors and educators, and Broward Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie’s alarming data proves it.
In his district of 204,000 students, sixth largest in the nation, where only 35 to 38 percent have returned to in-person school, he estimates that nearly 60,000 students “are struggling academically, socially and emotionally” and that 84 percent of those children are Black or Hispanic, 69 percent come from lowincome households, 34 percent are English-language learners and 25 percent have disabilities.
“I think that’s reflective of what’s happening with Black and brown communities across the country because of COVID,” Runcie said. “It’s the most vulnerable people being impacted to the greatest extent possible. These are kids that may have housing insecurity, food insecurity. They may not have conditions at home where they can focus on remote learning. They need to be in school.”
STARTLING NUMBERS FOR BROWARD, MIAMI-DADE SCHOOLS
In other signs of massive disengagement, the number of habitually truant students in Broward skyrocketed from 1,700 last year to 8,200 this year — a nearly 400 percent jump; the percentage of students who received one or more F’s by the end of the first grading period nearly tripled to 11 percent, and enrollment fell by 8,700, four times the normal annual decrease that is typically attributed to students’ movement to charter schools, Runcie said.
“Students will tell you that their relationships matter more than anything else,” he said. “Being able to connect with an adult in their lives can help keep them on track. Somebody they can confide in to deal with challenges they’re having. There’s no substitute for that.”
In Miami-Dade, the fourth-largest district in the country with 245,000 students in traditional public schools, Hispanics, who represent the majority of the system’s enrollment, lead the trend of about 45 percent returning to school, and that percentage is expected to rise, said Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. That follows a significant shift to at-home learning earlier in the school year, when students yanked in and out of school by virus outbreaks opted to stay home.
A higher percentage of Black, Hispanic and Asian students have chosen to continue learning from home compared to the 53 percent of white nonHispanic students who are back in the classroom.
Miami-Dade’s greatest concern has been with 10,000 missing students who never showed up for school and 10,300 onlineonly students identified as at risk of failing. From February last year to February this year, student enrollment in MiamiDade Schools is down a staggering 13,600 students.
Of the students the district expected to enroll but were unaccounted for, the vast majority either enrolled in private school or elsewhere, or left the county, state or country, Carvalho said. About 500 students remain missing, he said, and are most likely English-language learners whose parents moved and whose phones were disconnected.
The district sent letters in January to students
“not making adequate progress” and in danger of not graduating or being promoted to the next grade level and urged them to return to in-person school. Some weren’t logging on consistently and accrued excessive absences. The district made contact with 5,400, and of those, 3,600 have returned to the classroom.
“Many of these students are struggling not because of anything other than a disconnect of the modality that they’re in, which leads to current performance,” Carvalho said. “We believe based on the data that the game changer here is a combination of home circumstances that lead to a lack of supervision, inadequate monitoring and excessive absenteeism.”
Rashayna, 13, got the dreaded letter and went back to school last month. She was encouraged to go back by her older sister, Rashardra, 17, who has opted to continue online at Law Enforcement Officers’ Memorial High School because she would have to take Metrorail to get downtown and doesn’t want to risk exposing her family to the virus.
“I’m older and I’m making the honor roll online, but my sister was not understanding and retaining the work and couldn’t get extra help,” Rashardra said. “Many days she was crying out of frustration. For younger kids, there’s too much free time at home. In school, they get that push from teachers. She’d be in online class but doing other things, watching TV, on her phone. She fell off her routine.”
Irving Flood, a fourthgrader, went back to George Washington Carver Elementary at his mother’s urging after spending the first half of the school year online at home distracted by his 3-year-old sister and internet glitches.
“At first I was afraid of getting sick and coughing on my family, but I’m not afraid anymore,” he said. “I can concentrate better at school. I can see my friends. At home I had to change my sister’s Pampers and get her juice and she’d go on my computer to watch Mickey Mouse and Bubble Guppies and play games.
“My auntie was at our house going to online school in the living room. Sometimes the internet would freeze or go out and we couldn’t hear our teachers.”
But other kids have stayed home, often unsupervised while their parents are at work or unable to find a quiet, fully connected space to study, and school becomes an afterthought.
“Some of the report cards I’ve seen are horrific,” said Sylvia Jordan, who has been running the Barnyard community center in West Coconut Grove for 37 years. “Ronald, he’s one of our future scientists, I don’t know how but he got an F in science.
“For some kids, teachers just wrote a question mark instead of a grade: ‘Did not attend class enough days to assess.’”
LOSING THE STRUCTURE OF THE SCHOOL DAY
The Barnyard, like neighborhood schools, is a sun around which communities revolve, but COVID knocked them out of orbit. Lives were turned inside out by lockdowns, lost jobs, illness and death. Disoriented and disconnected, kids have been forced to navigate through a year of chaos.
“School provided structure and sanctuary,” said Barnyard Program Manager Daniel McElligott.
“Now it’s like these kids are feral.”
Several Barnyard regulars have been AWOL for months. Jordan shook her head when she talked about a boy named Malik.
“He should be in a gifted program. He made all sorts of things with Legos. He could name the planets and the dinosaurs,” she said. “But we heard his family was evicted and moved south. He showed up at our Christmas party. He told me he had not been attending school at all.”
Jordan and McElligott say screen addiction is a pandemic in and of itself among children and they fear their brains and personalities have been altered by COVID-driven dependency on computers and cellphones.
“The kids learning remotely don’t come in as much or when they do they are constantly on