Supporting Students Who Got Left Behind
Ms. Simpson is a 7th grade life science teacher at a middle school in rural Alabama that serves a high-poverty student population. Due to the COVID pandemic, her school decided to shift to an online format following spring break 2020. However, many of her students did not have access to technology or reliable internet at that time, which limited their ability to access lessons or attend live virtual instructional sessions. As a result, Ms. Simpson estimated that she was able to interact with only 20 percent of her students during a typical virtual school day, and for only 20-30 minutes at a time.
[I couldn’t assign] much work because of connectivity issues with families and those sorts of things. So we would meet with our kids, and we would try to do a meeting with them if we could, and we worked through email the best we could.
Because of the disparity in technology access, the school decided to freeze student grades for the rest of the school year. Ms. Simpson had already covered most of the essential life science standards, so she focused on engaging her students with a series of shorter ecology lessons during the remainder of the year.
We pretty much just froze everybody’s grades where they were, and it was really just to keep kids from falling too far behind. . . . Luckily, we had covered most of our standards by that point and were just left with some ecology type things. So, it was just something they could do in 20-25 minutes, and we moved on.
The 2020-21 school year began in a hybrid format where students attended school in person two days per week and were online the other days. Unfortunately, technology access continued to be a problem in the district, and many of Ms. Simpsons’ students still were not able to participate in science lessons that occurred virtually. Compounding this problem were the vast numbers of students who had to quarantine at home due to illness or exposure.
So many kids were out. I mean, I had some kids that were quarantined four and five times just from contact. Once one kid would get sent home, then it was like half of your class was sent home. We still had to simplify things because the kids who were sent home on quarantine once again may not have had internet access.
Ms. Simpson made it a priority to cover the content standards she deemed most critical and reteach concepts that students missed out on during the previous school year. In addition, she simplified her instruction to better fit with the hybrid format.
So we started out with the hybrid, and the problem was trying to keep kids at the same pace. We really had to go back and reteach the most important concepts—characteristics of living things, cells, cell structures—so we could move on in the year with everything else. . . . So, we just tried to streamline and stick with the basics, and that’s hard. There were no labs, really no hands-on activities. So it was really more of some notes, some online interactives, some videos, and those types of things.
Although it was very difficult to deliver science instruction during this time, Ms. Simpson felt it was her responsibility to teach about COVID. She and her students talked about a number of topics, including hygiene basics, virus reproduction, and virus resistance. As a result, she felt like her students took a greater responsibility for their own health and the health of others.
I think a lot of kids did experience impacts, because a lot of my kids, being low income, have a lot of family members with a lot of health issues. They don’t eat well. There’s a lot of obesity. There’s a lot of diabetes, those sorts of issues. So, I think that did impact them on them realizing how their actions could help their family members as well.
At this point in the pandemic, Ms. Simpson also noticed that a lot of her students were struggling academically and emotionally.
It was mentally exhausting for a lot of them. I have noticed that I have an exorbitant amount of kids with mental health issues. I think the quarantining, the being at home, the not being able to interact, the stress, has made it much, much worse for my kids. We also had more than 150 kids that were failing multiple subjects out of 800 kids.
Ms. Simpson dedicated herself to supporting her students during the 2020–21school year in any way she could. However, this sustained effort was both exhausting and time consuming.
It was immensely exhausting. And I’ll be honest, the kids were so needy and clingy. For a lot of them, because of the kids I teach, coming to school is where they get fed two meals a day. For a lot of our kids, school’s their safe place. So emotionally, psychologically, it was very exhausting because the kids are just so needy, wanting hugs, even though you weren’t supposed to, but they just really needed it, or needed to talk to an adult they felt safe with. And then I would come home, and I had my own fifth grader to deal with and a farm and a husband. There really was no downtime.
The 2021–22 school year brought some pre-pandemic normalcy as students returned to school in person. However, the effects of COVID persisted as students struggled with learning loss and engaging in appropriate social interactions.
There’s a lot of behavior issues that I feel like are a consequence of the pandemic. These kids’ social skills are lacking. They are emotionally behind. They have not had full, consistent school years, so they emotionally have not grown like they would in a normal school year.
Further, COVID continued to impact families within the school community more broadly. The pandemic placed enormous stress on parents who worked long hours to provide for their children on meager incomes and led to some families being torn apart.
I’ve had a lot of kids that have been pulled from the home and put in a safe place because of the pandemic.
Reflecting on these incredibly difficult years, Ms. Simpson noted how important teachers were in providing students with stability in their lives, especially during ever-changing and uncertain times.
Just seeing how much the kids really do need their teachers and love their teachers, and realizing that we are their stability. We are their role models for what “normal” looks like. . . . Helping kids to build social skills, building kids up who’ve been beat down. . . . Being able to build them up and let them see that they can be successful and that they are worthwhile and smart. That one helps a lot at the end of a long day when the kid just smiles and is so happy, and they’re so proud of themselves that they’ve accomplished something, because they’ve been told they can’t.
