COVID’S LASTING CHAOS
Examining the pandemic’s continued effects on public schools in Hampton Roads
Helen Pryor remembers the day in March 2020 she and everyone else at Chesterfield Academy was abruptly told to go home to wait out the coronavirus outbreak.
It would last for a few weeks, everyone thought. Teachers and students had to find places at home to set up computers and figure out a host of new online programs and teaching resources. Worksheets were sent home. Teachers set up Zoom classes. Districts had to determine how to get computers and Internet access to students who didn’t have them.
But it wasn’t an outbreak, it was a pandemic. Three years ago this week, COVID-19 was declared a national emergency, and governors across the country, including Virginia’s Ralph Northam, ordered schools closed. Today, schools, students and parents are still sorting through what happened and finding ways to help students catch up. The effects can be seen in virtually every part of public education — student achievement, morale, behavior, staffing.
The early chaos of the pandemic is long gone, but the overwhelming consensus among education experts and families is that the lasting effects in each of these areas can be factored into what has been termed learning loss.
Hard decisions
At the beginning, some families were ready to hunker down, but there were hard decisions to make about their children’s education. Would they homeschool, accept virtual learning or push to return things to normal?
Melissa Suer’s son was slated to start kindergarten in fall 2020. But after the single mom weighed her options, she decided to hold him back a year.
“Virtual kindergarten just wasn’t
going to work,” said Suer, who lives in Newport News.
Because of her son’s summer birthdate, she had the option to wait a year, and she kept him at a private in-person preschool. She felt virtual kindergarten would have done more harm than an extra year of preschool.
Tamping down on the spread of COVID-19 also was the focus of public health officials and schools in those early months, when vaccines were not available and treatments were scarce. Hampton Roads schools scrambled to find the best ways to keep kids learning while buildings were closed.
As remote learning and hybrid models continued, some students were able to adjust and excel. But some fell further behind.
Rodney Jordan, a Norfolk School Board member, compared the situation to a race. For the students already a lap or two behind, the pandemic widened the gap because of disparities in resources such as technology access and home environments suitable for virtual learning.
Now it is about setting clear, measurable goals to address “unfinished learning,” because to Jordan, how long the impacts of the pandemic last depends on the decisions leaders make now.
“It’s about children,” is something he firmly believes.
Continuing his race analogy, Jordan said if a 6-minute mile is students reaching proficiency, then school leaders need to think of themselves as coaches and figure out what students need to meet and exceed that “6-minute goal.”
Working on a state task force with the Virginia School Board Association, Jordan remembers telling school leaders early that the pandemic shouldn’t be used as an excuse to lower academic standards. If the goal prior to the pandemic was to have students running a 5-minute mile, that should still be the goal, because “that’s what I would want for my child,” Jordan said.
Significant losses
The disruptions of the pandemic have led to widespread learning loss across Virginia and the country. Results from the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed drops in the average scores of fourth and eighth grade students compared with 2019. In Virginia, only 38% of fourth graders scored at proficiency or above on their math tests, compared with 48% in 2019. The percentage of fourth graders scoring at proficiency or above in reading also dropped, from 38% in 2019 to 32% in 2022.
Eighth grade average scores also dropped in math and reading from 2019 to 2022.
Data also shows losses at the local level. This fall, a Stanford education professor and Harvard economist released the Education Recovery Scorecard, a map that shows how many years of learning the average student in each district has lost since 2019. The project is a compilation and analysis of national assessment scores as well as local standardized test scores for third through eighth grade students in many states, including in Virginia.
The project reports changes in test scores in grade-level equivalents, with one grade equivalent (1.0) representing about one school year — or nine months — of learning. Statewide, Virginia lost about eight months (-0.92 grade equivalents) in math learning and more than five months (-0.63) in reading.
The analysis shows that in Hampton Roads, some students have lost nearly two years of instruction in math.
Newport News and Portsmouth students fared the worst in math, losing nearly two years. Norfolk and Hampton students lost more than a year, and Virginia Beach and Chesapeake students lost about seven months each.
The districts fared somewhat better in reading, with all but Portsmouth showing a loss of less than one year’s worth of instruction.
In 2021, the General Assembly directed the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission to look into COVID’s impact on education across the state. Its report, released in November 2022, found that reading and math SOL scores declined the most in school divisions across the state that remained in virtual learning longer.
However, these divisions are rebounding now that they are back to in-person learning. The report stated that by spring 2022, there was just a 1 or 2 percentage point difference in SOL scores between school divisions that remained in remote learning longer from those that returned to in-person sooner.
Early literacy takes a hit
In Hampton, officials note that the greatest learning gaps have been in kindergarten through third grade.
“We know that foundational literacy skills for early learners are important to growing students who are able to read fluently and comprehend text, and that a virtual learning environment is not an ideal setting for all students when it comes to building literacy skills,” said John Caggiano, Hampton’s deputy superintendent of curriculum, instruction and assessment.
“Students who are currently in grades 1 through 4, for example, missed in-person learning opportunities in reading during their formative years to build these important skill sets.”
Jessica Bradley, owner of an online academic coaching business based in Virginia Beach, has also observed an increase in clients seeking tutors for early literacy skills.
Bradley, a former teacher who started her business five years ago, said before the pandemic, said most of her clients were upper elementary and middle school students. But in 2021, she started getting calls from parents of kindergarteners and first graders.
“The high need that we’re seeing is the loss in phonics and phonemic awareness,” Bradley said.
She says she’s noticed some of her clients seem to have memorized sounds incorrectly, and perhaps masks or a computer screen prevented teachers from being able to catch the mistakes.
Lorraine Conant, an English teacher at Bayside 6th Grade Campus in Virginia Beach, notes that writing has “always been a weakness,” but she has seen it get worse. She would ask them to write a sentence, for example, and there wouldn’t be proper capitalization; or she would ask for a paragraph and get a sentence. It seems to her as if the students were suddenly not able to remember parts of speech or how to use a comma.
Writing and reading specialists and new reading programs have been brought in to try to bridge these gaps. New activities to get students to practice saying words out loud and help with reading comprehension seem to be helping, she said.
Another thing that has helped is bringing in an elementary level reading program that takes students back to the basics. Conant said it goes back to phonics and is “very elementary.”
“Overall, we did see growth in our students last year,” Conant said.
Observations from the classroom
Katelyn Ritenour, a fourth grade teacher in Chesapeake, said she has had to re-teach skills and fill in gaps.
“Fourth grade is a huge year for math,” said Ritenour. “In math, we start doing double digit multiplication, and that’s something that really suffers if students don’t know their multiplication facts well.”
Those multiplication facts, traditionally known as the times table, require a lot of practice, which is difficult to do virtually, Ritenour said. “There are websites, of course, but if you’re not using them consistently, it doesn’t help you build the fluency with the facts.”
So Ritenour and other teachers find themselves having to fill in the gaps. But the struggle, she said, is that the standardized tests fourth grade students have to take have not changed, “which means I still have to teach them everything that I had to teach as a fourth grade teacher.
“None of that has changed. There’s really no way to make any of it shorter. So where do I get the time to catch them up?”
Contributing factors
Aside from virtual learning being difficult for many students, other factors contributing to learning loss include inconsistent delivery of instruction, attendance problems, staffing shortages, quarantines and a rise in mental health concerns, school officials said.
Mary Margaret Gleason, vice chief of mental health services at Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters, said more children are experiencing mental health challenges, making learning that much more difficult.
“We know that most mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, PTSD, ADHD especially, all impact concentration,” said Gleasonm, a child and adolescent psychiatrist. “And concentration is one of those key ingredients for learning.”
Mental health challenges also make teaching more demanding, Gleason said. Teachers are now asked to learn skills that weren’t necessary before.
Students who did not have home environments conducive to virtual learning was another problem, officials said.
An analysis from Stanford and Harvard showed that poverty also affected learning loss. In 2019, Newport News and Portsmouth — the two area districts that experienced the worst learning loss — have close to 80% of their students receiving free or reduced meals, a metric used as an indicator of poverty.
None of it is new either, Jordan said. The pandemic might have exacerbated many of the problems, but they have always been there for students of color, from low-income families and living in rural communities, he said.
“I think the pandemic