Lingering symptoms
Pandemic remote learning has ended, but a look at one school shows a continued effect on students
TSAN FRANCISCO here’s chaos all around as Am’Brianna Daniels takes her seat in math class, stares at her paper and tries to catch up. Classmates are chattering, checking their phones, not paying much attention to the teacher at the whiteboard, who is trying to prod his pre-calculus students to describe the difference between the red and the blue graphs on the screen in front of them.
Am’Brianna briefly tries to ascertain what her teacher is talking about, then turns back to the paper in front of her, work left over from a few days ago that she still needs to finish. The noise surrounding her is distracting, but she’s behind and scrambling.
That Am’Brianna is working hard on assignments is a victory in itself, a return to normalcy and an improvement over last winter, when she all but dropped out of Burton High School, brought down by depression and a broken laptop. She and her classmates are thrilled — or maybe relieved — to be back for their senior year of high school.
But the damage wrought by over 18 months away from classrooms lingers at Burton, a high-poverty school in a high-wealth city, overlooking the whole of San Francisco from a hilly peak in the southeast corner of the city. Burton — the students who rely on it and the teachers who power it — is a study both in joy and in enduring trauma, a place where everything seems normal, but nothing is quite as it should be.
It’s a transition underway all over the country this fall, but especially in urban school districts, such as San Francisco’s, that barely reopened for in-person school last year. In an ironic twist of the pandemic, students like Am’Brianna, who arguably need school the most, got the least of it. Now they are trying to recover.
At Burton, there aren’t enough teachers or substitutes, so teachers are forced to cover classes they know nothing about. The wellness center sees a regular rotation of students who need a few minutes alone or time with a counselor. More students are tardy than ever before. Administrators keep breaking up fights in the hallways, sometimes over dumb stuff, like when a boy hit other kids over the head with condoms he got from the wellness center.
For students like Am’Brianna, the stakes are enormous. High school is her ticket to college, and college is her way out: out of poverty, away from a mother who she says she fights with and who causes her enormous stress. The past year has only complicated her exit plan.
“My main goal,” she says, “is to get out of California.”
Throughout the many months of remote school, Ryan Yu longed to pound his snare drum — a real drum, not the drum pad in his bedroom that served as a dull substitute. He longed to practice alongside the rest of the Burton High School Marching Band, with the loud metronome keeping time.
Pre-pandemic, Ryan’s whole world was friends, drums and sports. When that all was suddenly take away, he found himself spending hour after hour online — not just at school, but deep into the night, playing video games with his friends over the text, voice and video app Discord, an app that allows friends to play together.
It caught up with him. In August of 2020, he started to notice a ringing in his ears that would not go away. His doctor said it was tinnitus. His ears may have been damaged from the drumming, or maybe it was ear phones day after day. The ringing was always there. A few nights lying in bed, the ringing so loud he could not sleep, Ryan wondered whether he wanted to keep living.
“I was just like, it could be easier to just, like, take myself out,” he said.
He still hears the ringing. It’s loudest when the room is quiet: when he’s taking a test, or doing classwork or trying to go to sleep. It’s still there, loud and constant. The difference now is Ryan knows he wants to live.
Now he finds joy in small things.
At the start of the day, he meets his buddies in the cafeteria, where they crowd around a circular table and scarf down the free breakfast, cracking jokes. As the hallways fill with students changing classes, Ryan finds his girlfriend, Faith, and they walk through the crowded hallways hand in hand, sharing a light hug before parting to their respective classrooms. And during band class, he pounds his drum, leading the percussion section.
“I felt, like, free, if that makes sense,” he said.
Another day at Burton, Am’Brianna overslept and arrived one morning with just enough time to stow her lunch in her third floor locker and rush to English Literature before the bell. Unlike last year, she’s enrolled in regular English, not Advanced Placement, so instead of analyzing Othello through racial, feminist, Marxist and historical perspectives, she’s in a class where The Handmaid’s Tale is read out loud for the students.
It’s just one on a list of impacts that might be rightfully pinned to the pandemic. Last semester, Am’Brianna virtually dropped out of school, not showing up for classes for weeks at a time. This year, she didn’t want to push herself too far or too fast. Am’Brianna is also not enrolled in AP Government. Eirik Nielsen, who teaches the class, blames the pandemic for that, too.
Nielsen taught Am’Brianna AP World History during her sophomore year, when in March 2020, school abruptly shifted online. Am’Brianna struggled that spring, battling computer failures and spotty WiFi. She made it to the AP test, scoring a 2 on the five-point scale. Nielsen, a veteran history teacher, believes she would have scored at least a 3, which is passing, had school been in person. Am’Brianna figures she did all right given that her Wi-Fi went out in the middle of the exam.
During her junior year, Am’Brianna pushed forward with a challenging schedule, including AP English Language and Composition. The first semester was going reasonably well when, just before Halloween, her laptop fell and the display was broken.
A few weeks later, she got sick with a high fever, shakiness, headaches. By January, with the start of another semester stuck at home, she had grown depressed and stopped going to school almost completely.
“I knew I had no way to get the work done,” she said. “I couldn’t leave the house. I had no social interaction.”
At school, she was used to hugging everyone she knew, and she knew a lot of people. Now it was “24/7 with only my family,” she recounted, and a litany of conflicts with them, big and small. She lives with her mom, her grandmother and her great-grandmother, who at age 96, struggles with dementia. Am’Brianna was often responsible for watching over her.
Her AP English teacher, Victor Zao, saw signs of intense anxiety and burnout in Am’Brianna. She would miss weeks of class, then show up. He’d talk to her about how to bring her grades up, and “then she’d be gone again.” Calls and emails from Zao and her counselor made little impact on her mental state. Her grade in English was D for the third quarter. By April, she reengaged, and Zao justified a B for the semester.
By then, she had recorded 40 days absent in AP English, 36 in Ethnic Studies and 35 in U.S. history.
For her senior year, Am’Brianna opted out of AP English and AP Government. If school had been in person last year, Nielsen said, he believes Am’Brianna would have come into senior year with a stronger academic record. When it came time to recruit students for his AP Government class, he would have given her the hard sell. He said he would have told her, “I need Am’Brianna’s voice there in my class because a lot of these kids, we’re going to be talking about political issues. They need to hear your voice.”
Told this, Am’Brianna laughed. Would Nielsen have succeeded? “Probably,” she said.
Junior year left Jonathan Tran feeling more responsible than ever for the people he lives with: the single mom who raised him, the grandmother he confides in and the 4-year-old sister he is determined to create a better life for.
The family spent the pandemic on a virtual 24/7 lockdown, his mother terrified that one of her kids, or maybe her frail and aging mother, would catch the virus. For Jonathan, staying inside was stifling and damaging. A lack of exercise and a poor diet left him with elevated cholesterol, something he’s pretty sure a teenager shouldn’t have. Now he’s back at Burton, powering through one AP course after the next, applying to elite colleges, simultaneously terrified that he will be admitted and move far away, maybe across the country.
On a recent Monday night, Jonathan sat on the edge of a couch at College Track, a college preparatory program that offers tutoring and counseling aimed at low-income, first-generation students who live in the Bayview-Hunter’s Point area of the city, where Burton High School sits. He was trying to fill out his federal financial aid form by himself, and the section where he has to select colleges to receive the form was stressing him out. He thinks he should apply to elite colleges in the East — Yale, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania were in his head. But the idea of leaving his family filled Jonathan with anxiety.
Parents were invited for the session, but his mom couldn’t make it. So, with her 2020 tax form in hand, Jonathan started to make his way through the application.
Glancing down, he saw Line 1, “wages, salaries, tips.” When the coronavirus pandemic hit, the nail salon where his mom works shut down, and her wages for the year totaled $4,975.
His mom, Linda Hong, was scared too. She came to the United States from Vietnam with her family when she was 10 years old and dreamed of someday becoming a nurse. She had to drop out of college to work but hopes for more for her three children.
“I’m proud of him,” she said one afternoon, and tears started to fall. She knows she cannot afford to pay for college. “He told me it’s expensive,” she said. “I just feel proud and kind of like emotional because I’m worried that I mess up his dream.”