TOUGH YEAR FOR CITY’S SCHOOLS
After final day of class, it’s clear that challenges marked a rocky recovery from the pandemic
Monday marked the end of a tumultuous year for city schools — the first with full-time, in-person learning since COVID hit in March 2020.
The year was full of fragile victories and complex challenges — and more obstacles are still ahead for the nation’s largest school system. Here’s a look back, and forward, at some of the big issues that defined the past nine months for the schools and will shape the year ahead.
Academic and emotional recovery
After a year and a half of pandemic trauma and disruption, this school year was supposed to mark the beginning of recovery and a slow return to normalcy.
In many ways, that happened. School staffers and kids reveled in the chance to be together again and started rebuilding from some of the pandemic losses.
“What’s beautiful about this year is that she got to go in person to quite a bit of school,” said Lizzie Simon, the parent of a first-grader at the Neighborhood School in the East Village. “She had a birthday party for the first time in three years.”
Educators across the city dug deep to identify their students’ needs and find new ways to support them — but often faced steep challenges.
Despite a flood of new social workers and counselors, school employees reported an uptick in conflict and behavioral issues. The number of weapons turning up in city schools increased dramatically as teens reported feeling unsafe on their commutes, and some kids faced harassment from peers.
COVID-19
Even after the resumption of full-time, in-person learning, COVID-19 cast a long shadow over city schools — and debates over mitigation strategies continued to rage. Masks were required for K-12 students and teachers until March, and until earlier this month for kids younger than 5.
Unvaccinated parents are still barred from entering schools, and some administrators set cautious visitor policies that parents said made it difficult to maintain the same connection with their kids’ education.
“It still didn’t feel like a normal year. I never got to see the inside of either of my sons’ classrooms,” said Robin Lester Kenton, a Brooklyn parent of a second-grader and a fourth-grader.
Others, however, thought the city was too quick to scale back mitigation measures.
“I just don’t believe the strategy of refusing to provide any mitigations and letting students and staff get repeatedly and indefinitely infected is a safe one,” said Sarah Allen, a Brooklyn elementary school teacher and parent who has been vocal proponent of COVID safety measures in schools.
Attendance
One of the biggest impediments to academic, social and emotional recovery at schools this year was among the most basic: Getting kids to regularly come to class.
Attendance woes that increased during spring 2020 only worsened this school year, with roughly 37% of students on pace to end the year counted as “chronically absent” as of late April.
Families and experts said a complex mix of factors drove the higher-than-normal absences — but January’s Omicron COVID wave was a tipping point.
Simon said her daughter missed “something like 35 days because we yanked her out when the COVID numbers were bad.”
Enrollment and budget cuts
The challenges for the nation’s largest school system aren’t ending with the last day of the school year.
The declining enrollment that began before the pandemic — and accelerated dramatically during it — has turned into a significant long-term challenge, threatening to undermine the city school system’s fragile progress. Making matters worse, school budgets are traditionally tied to students registered for city schools — leaving those that have lost large numbers of kids now facing devastating cuts.
And while the city previously used federal stimulus money tied to the pandemic to shield schools from the full financial blow of the enrollment losses, Mayor Adams and the City Council recently passed a budget that mostly withdraws that support.
For some parents, the looming cuts overshadowed an otherwise celebratory occasion Monday.
“As I dropped off my daughter for her last day of kindergarten at her wonderful school, I couldn’t help feeling so disappointed in our city,” said Tamara Tucker, a parent at Public School 125 in Harlem. “After everything the teachers and staff have navigated over the last three years, these drastic budget cuts are a slap in the face.”