Many students hesitant to go back to school
Pauline Rojas’ high school in San Antonio is open. But like many of her Texas classmates, she has not returned and has little interest in doing so.
During the coronavirus pandemic, she started working 20 to 40 hours per week at Raising Cane’s, a fast-food restaurant, and has used the money to help pay her family’s internet bill, buy clothes and save for a car.
Rojas, 18, has no doubt that a year of online school, squeezed between work shifts that end at midnight, has affected her learning. Still, she has embraced her new role as a breadwinner, sharing responsibilities with her mother, who works at a hardware store.
“I wanted to take the stress off my mom,” she said. “I’m no longer a kid. I’m capable of having a job, holding a job and making my own money.”
Only a small slice of U.S. schools remain fully closed: 12% of elementary and middle schools, according to a federal survey, as well as a minority of high schools.
But the percentage of students learning fully remotely is much greater: more than one-third of fourth and eighth graders and an even larger group of high school students. A majority of Black, Hispanic and Asian American students remain out of school.
These disparities have put district leaders and policymakers in a tough position as they end this school year and plan for the next one. Even though the pandemic appears to be coming under control in the United States as vaccinations continue, many superintendents say fear of the coronavirus itself is no longer the primary reason their students are opting out.
Nor are many families expressing a strong preference for remote learning.
Rather, for every child and parent who has leaped at the opportunity to return to the classroom, others changed their lives over the past year in ways that make going back to school difficult. The consequences are likely to reverberate through the education system for years, especially if states and districts continue to give students the choice to attend school remotely.
Teenagers from low-income families have taken on heavy loads of paid work, especially because so many parents lost jobs. Parents made new child care arrangements to get through the long months of school closures and part-time hours and are now loath to disrupt established routines.
Some families do not know that local public schools have reopened, because of language barriers or lack of effective communication from districts.
Experts have coined the term “school hesitancy” to describe the remarkably durable resistance to a return to traditional learning. Some wonder whether the pandemic has simply upended people’s choices about how to live, with the location of schooling — like the location of office work — now up for grabs.
But others see the phenomenon as a social and educational crisis for children that must be combated — a challenge akin to vaccine hesitancy.
“There are so many stories, and they are all stories that break your heart,” said Pedro Martinez, the San Antonio schools superintendent, who said it was most challenging to draw teenagers back to classrooms in his overwhelmingly Hispanic, low-income district. Half of high school students are eligible to return to school five days a week, but only 30% have opted in. Concerned about flagging grades and the risk of students dropping out, he plans to restrict access to remote learning next school year.
“I don’t want to keep opening up this Pandora’s box,” he said.
In March, half of Black and Hispanic children and two-thirds of Asian American children were enrolled in remote school, compared with 20% of white students, according to federal data. While most district leaders and policymakers believe that the classroom is the best place for children and teenagers to learn, many are hesitant to apply pressure to families who have lived through a traumatic year.
An added complication is continued opposition to full-time, in-person learning from some teachers and district officials, with unions arguing that widespread vaccination of educators, and soon teens as well, does not eliminate the need for physical distancing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to advise 3 to 6 feet of distancing in schools. In that context, students who opt out create the space necessary to serve students who prefer to be in person.
At the same time, remote learning is a staffing challenge for districts.
In some, like San Antonio, it is common practice for teachers to instruct remote and in-person students simultaneously, through a live video stream from the classroom to students at home. In others, such as New York City, unions have resisted having teachers do both at once, making it difficult to fully staff classes.
And in New York and several other cities where many teachers have received medical accommodations to work from home, some students inside classrooms have been asked to log in to remote learning platforms to interact with teachers in other locations, leading families to conclude that there is little benefit to being inside the building and driving opt-out rates higher.
Districts that offer remote learning next school year could contract the work out to stand-alone online schools, freeing their own teachers to return to buildings.
But for many months, some education and children’s health experts have warned about the social and academic consequences of extended remote learning.
“It’s not acceptable that we have a two-tier education system where white kids go to school in person disproportionately and students of color disproportionately go to school online,” said Vladimir Kogan, a political scientist at Ohio State University.
Kogan’s research has found that parents are more likely to feel hesitant about in-person learning if their children’s schools were closed for a longer period, which was most likely to be the case in the liberal-leaning urban districts that serve large numbers of nonwhite students. The hesitancy was caused less by fear of the virus than by messaging from school districts about whether in-person learning was safe and desirable, Kogan found.
Many governors, mayors, school boards and superintendents are debating whether families should continue to have the option of virtual schooling in the fall. One survey of educators found that 68% expected their systems to offer remote learning options even after the pandemic ends.
As long as the option for remote school remains, direct outreach to families is the best way to lure students back to traditional classrooms, educators say.