A three-paragraph article at the very bottom of page six in the March 2020 edition of Onteora’s high-school newspaper was handed out the day before most schools in New York State shut down. I was 14 and in my first year of high school.
I can’t exactly explain what it felt like on that last day. One emotion was strong among all others: happiness. Pure, unabridged joy. The promise of an elongated and early spring break came as a sigh of relief.
After the illusion of an “early spring break” faded, school transitioned into a virtual hellscape. Suddenly, school was checking into eight different classes a day for 15 minutes each.
Everyone coped with the isolation differently. Most of us turned to social media and pop culture for the sense of community we felt so far from. I developed an unhealthy obsession with playing Mahjong online.
Mental-health issues skyrocketed. Turns out that a teenager’s life being reduced to the Internet and their bedroom isn’t healthy. But it was more than that. Some students were living with higher-risk people, or even worse, struggling with immune system issues themselves, making the threat of Covid so much scarier.
Schooling didn’t stop. Teachers gave us extra time to complete work, There were very few assignments, No one really knew how to navigate online school.
Teachers were pressured to give extremely lenient grades, which made school much more difficult when it was in-person again. Despite the accommodations, student GPAs were dragged down by the online years. For some, it proved impossible to come back and catch up.
Hearing about how many thousands of new deaths there’d been in the past month made logging onto your eighth Google meet of the day feel irrelevant.
Confession: I never took geometry. I was meant to, somewhere in the blur of tenth grade, but I never really took it. A year and a half later, When I went to take the ACT (a standardized test some colleges require), a year and a half later, I was lost. I had missed half a year of algebra, the entirety of geometry, and was barely holding on in Algebra II. I had to teach myself geometry.
Even that was an advantage I had that many others didn’t. Some students won’t ever be able to recover the information that they missed out on through quarantine. These differences in support often fell along socioeconomic lines. The more resources you had, the easier it was to succeed. So much for educational opportunity being the great equalizer for all Americans.
Arrested development
Three years later, school life hasn’t really recovered. The first year back, last year, was my junior year of high school. I still felt like a freshman. Arrested development.
The seventh graders who ran through the school’s shared halls acted more like fifth graders. We had all missed an important part of emotional development, and we can’t know how that’ll affect us later in life. I can’t even imagine what kind of monsters will grow from the kids that missed out on preschool and kindergarten.
One extreme difference is club involvement and involvement with extracurriculars in general. During the majority of the pandemic, extracurriculars were almost completely eliminated. Today, membership in clubs, especially in the arts, is nothing like it was before. People got used to being alone.
School has become confusing for students and teachers alike. Teachers have had to find a balance between going easy on us after we missed a year’s worth of building-block lessons and keeping things difficult enough to be worthwhile. Handing out high grades like candy at a parade keeps parents and students happy, but it devalues the entire system.
I’m a senior now. I’ve lived my entire high-school experience through the rise and fall of the pandemic, Its impacts will continue. For my generation at least, education won’t ever really be the same.
Many of my teachers and peers are still struggling with health issues caused by the pandemic or mourning the loved ones they lost.
Maybe we shouldn’t be rushing to put the whole thing behind us. Perhaps it’s more important to stop and take stock of all that we lost. All that people continue to lose. The divides that existed before the pandemic have only deepened because of it. Our educational system – and our lives — can’t be fully mended if we refuse to acknowledge the contributing factors.
I’m pleased to say that I’m not the only one searching for the best way back to the educational performance New Yorkers used to take for granted. Some grownups realize the urgency of our present educational predicament, too.
New York state comptroller Tom DiNapoli seems to be one of them.
Spend well and quickly
“School districts must act quickly to take full advantage of available resources to help students that are most in need get caught up, before time runs out,” said DiNapoli on March 13.
New York was allocated over $15 billion in emergency education aid during the pandemic from the federal government, with $14 billion from three rounds of the Elementary and Secondary School Relief Fund (ESSER) assistance. This aid was aimed at elementary and secondary schools and must be obligated by September 2024.
Through January 2023, DiNapoli said, New York’s school districts have spent roughly only 40 percent percent of ESSER funds.
“The classroom disruptions caused by the pandemic have hurt New York’s students. Academic losses were greater for younger students, with fourth grade scores dropping more than the national average,” DiNapoli continued. “School districts must act quickly to take full advantage of available resources to help students that are most in need get caught up, before time runs out.”
How did New York State student performance suffer from 2019 to 2022? DiNapoli was blunt.
“New York’s losses in fourth grade math and reading scores were double the national average and exceeded 45 other states in math and 38 other states in reading. The average drop for fourth grade math scores (ten points) was so severe that McKinsey & Company estimated this learning loss to be the equivalent of nearly an entire school year.”
The governor’s state budget for 2023-2024 proposes $42.1 billion in combined state and federal education aid for the upcoming state fiscal year. That total is projected to decline, as the balance of federal pandemic relief funds must be obligated by September 2024. “This could be problematic,” DiNapoli warned, “if a significant portion of the relief funds is left unspent or is dedicated to programs with recurring expenses or if significant progress in academic recovery has not occurred.”
In other words, the school districts, which can’t even be depended on to spend the considerable federal money to which they’re entitled, must get their act together in a serious way. How does a state official put that message diplomatically?
“DiNapoli urged the State Education Department to provide school districts with guidance on best practices for spending of funds and encourage school districts to ensure funds are being used for evidence-based practices for students most in need.”
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