Teachers confront half-empty classrooms

Teachers around the U.S. are confronting classrooms where as many as half of students are absent because they have been exposed to COVID-19 or their families kept them at home out of concern about the surging coronavirus.

The widespread absences have only added to the difficulty of keeping students on track in yet another pandemic-disrupted school year. In the nation’s largest district, attendance has been so low that New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Wednesday reversed an earlier pledge to keep children in schools and said he would consider allowing a return to some form of virtual instruction.

“This is really taking a toll on the learning. If you have three kids in your class one day and you’re supposed to have 12, you have to reteach everything two weeks later when those kids come back,” said Tabatha Rosproy, a teacher in Olathe, Kansas, and the 2020 national Teacher of the Year.

Some of the country’s biggest school systems report absentee rates around 20% or slightly more, with some individual schools seeing far higher percentages of missing students.

The schools in Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas, typically have 90% attendance, but that figure has dropped to 83%. In Seattle, attendance has averaged 81 percent since the return from winter break. Los Angeles public schools marked about 30% of the district’s 600,000-plus students absent on Tuesday, the first day back after the break.

In New York, about 76% of the city’s roughly 1 million public school students were in class Wednesday, with some schools reporting well over half of their students out.

Adnan Bhuiyan, 17, has at times been one of seven or eight students in classes that normally have 30 at the Bronx Latin School.