Operation: Covid Recovery
Unprecedented. For two years now, this is how we’ve described the global Covid-19 pandemic. So much about the world changed overnight, and our collective quest for a “new normal” has been slow and inconsistent. This is certainly true for America’s public schools - whose students have learned virtually, then masked, socially distant, or (repeatedly) quarantine-disrupted.
But while “how” kids experience education is new - “who” our school systems leave behind is very much the same. Race, language, and wealth remain stubborn dividing lines between which of America’s students are set up for success, and which will flounder, fail, or disappear entirely.
Yes. Disappear. When schools pivoted to virtual learning in 2020, 3 million students left public education - a phenomenon that disproportionately impacts low-income students. In urban districts like ours, where a majority of our student body is economically disadvantaged, the impact of this national trend is alarming. Our district enrollment dropped by nearly 2,000 students between 2019 and 2022. (source)
We could take this conversation a dozen different directions (and over time, we will) - but in today’s Deep Dive, we focus on the ways we see these pandemic trends playing out in RPS: How has the pandemic impacted attendance? What supports do students need as a result? And how has (or should) RPS implemented responsive policy and programming? Let’s Discuss!
Where did the students go?
When teachers and administrators across the country went in search of their missing students, they often found them “providing child care for young siblings; others were working low-wage jobs to help support their families financially during the pandemic.” (Source) In a world of sporadic illness and uncertain paychecks, both of these “solutions” make perfect economic sense. Either students needed to step into a caregiver’s shoes to earn money to feed their families, or those students needed to step up their supportive roles at home so that other family members could do so.
Now, with constant supply chain disruptions, soaring gas prices, and record corporate profits driving up the cost of everything from rent to family dinner - there’s even more pressure for low income families to sacrifice student’s hours of education for their immediate earning potential. Better to miss a math test than risk becoming part of devastating eviction statistics. (Related reading: “58% of Virginia households fear eviction in the next two months, up from 28% in the fourth quarter of 2021.”)
Where some students reported working 20-30 hours a week pre pandemic, 30-40 hours became the norm. Students who entered the workforce were less likely to graduate, and far less likely to pursue higher degrees after graduation.
Younger students are not spared from these economic pains. Often, it means that they’re on their own (or dependent on other siblings) to get to the bus stop on time. There is no back up plan to get them to class. Even virtually, elementary students were less likely to successfully navigate and manage the technology than middle and high schoolers. Nationally, K-7 students were the most likely to be chronically absent or disenroll from public school:
As we can see from this April 2021 presentation, RPS enrollment and absences reflect the national trend. Here’s the data from one elementary school:
“It also was common to find kids of all ages who lacked adequate internet access or academic support at home.” (source) This phenomenon is known as the Digital Divide and - once again - disproportionately impacts low-income households. Heading into March 2020, it’s estimated that “as many as 16.9 million children lacked home internet access, and 7.3 million children did not have a computer at home.” (source)
These gaps in education access and attendance lead to another problem public educators are noting across the country: failure & frustration. Missed instructional time shows up in the gradebooks as nearly twice as many “Fs” beside student names - which is understandably demoralizing. One teacher told Chalkbeat: “Everyone has basically said: ‘I didn’t understand [the material] at first, and then I gave up…They’re frustrated and they don’t know how to express that.”
In everything I’ve shared above, access, attendance, and academic success really reflect a nationwide systemic failure. Teachers and administrators need more than a can-do attitude to do right by an entire generation of pandemic students. They need a national strategy to build out the social safety net so that families aren’t - for example - choosing between stable housing, or their child graduating on-time and pursuing the advanced degree of their choosing.
But, we’re in RPS land. We can only control what we can control. So what policies have we adopted, or should we put in place, to chip away at this problem that is much bigger than our meager budget? Our students need supports that:
Reduce missed class time
Make schools a welcoming environment
Meet students where they are
Address Resource Inequities
Reduce Missed Class Time
Address Absenteeism - As Chief Engagement Officer, Dr Shadae Harris reported to the board in March: “Attendance is an engagement issue.” RPS staff knocked on the doors of 1,000 students, worked with families and caregivers to create individualized care plans, and reduced chronic absenteeism by 10% since January. Some schools, like Reid Elementary (whose statistics are seen in the pie chart above), reported a 17% drop in absences. Our district saw success at every level of outreach, engagement, and intervention - illustrating the power of nurturing relationships with students and their families. We need to recognize the success of school leaders, social workers, liaisons, drop-out prevention specialists, and always be asking for more funding so we can build up staff in these positions.
Provide Reliable Transportation - Our superintendent reports that we have consistently been short about 25 bus drivers this year. This burden means students experience longer waits, longer routes, and missed class time. Our staff shortages reflect both a national and a local problem, with many drivers citing pandemic-related concerns about filling these vacancies. As we reported last week, RPS increased driver pay, and now leads the region in bus operator compensation. We hope this strategy proves successful!
Provide Free or Affordable After-school Care (& Transportation!) - This important wrap-around service not only builds bonds between students and their schools (more on that below), but it provides older siblings an accessible alternative to missing their own class time to care for younger students. RPS provided free after school services when it resumed in-person instruction in the fall of 2022, and would likely continue to do so if the 2022-23 budget supported this important service.
Make Schools A Welcoming Environment
Meet Students' Basic Needs - Once we get students in schools, we should offer a welcoming environment to keep them there. One article I read suggests wrap-around services, like free meals, can be really effective strategies. Unfortunately, national policy appears poised to undermine this effort. Waivers that brought free meals to at-risk students are set to expire, and there is insufficient republican support to extend them. Local groups, like Communities in Schools, are already at work increasing student access to fresh grown foods. Now, more than ever, you should consider donations to organizations like theirs - or other area food banks - which have struggled to meet demand.
Offer Trauma-informed Care -Kids under stress (and really, what pandemic child isn’t?) typically respond by either lashing out, or shutting down. Neither of which are constructive to an academic environment. We need to build up our army of counselors, social workers and interventionists to help ready our students for successful learning, and ease the added social-emotional burdens on teaching staff. When students do act out, we need to implement thoughtful consequences, crafted through a restorative lens, that minimize lost instructional time. Our sincere hope is that, in addition to these steps, our school board will reverse course and hire the Chief Wellness Officer they reluctantly budgeted for, and this cabinet member can lead the charge in developing and implementing these trauma-informed policies.
Meet Students Where They Are
Tutoring - Piggy-backing on the suggestion above - tutoring “often produces the sort of caring relationships that make students want to come to school.” It also offers targeted academic intervention and assistance, resulting in improved grades and student confidence. This is a necessary antidote to the frustration noted above that perpetuates student absences. Once again, we have to shout out the amazing advocacy work in RPS. We’re hearing exciting news from our friends about a targeted after-school tutoring program for hispanic and immigrant students, and hope to share more details about it in the LIEP deep-dive we have in the works.
Virtual Options - Absent an overnight national or state-wide pivot in the persistent, pandemic-inflamed economic disparities in our society… the reality is, schools need to offer more ways for students to access their education. Virtual learning may be just the solution for student-caregivers, who need to be home to pickup or drop off siblings at the bus stop. It may also be a more reasonable accommodation for students for whom unreliable or inconsistent transportation is a barrier, or who face any number of other challenges to in-person instruction. We’re excited for the evolution of the Richmond Virtual Academy, whose scope is growing in the upcoming 2022-23 school year to cover instruction for grades 6-12.
Flexibility - Night school, trade school, duel enrollment: there are a variety of ways that RPS keeps students on track to meet their academic goals while offering the flexibility to do so on an accelerated time line, or while earning a pay check at the same time. We plan to do deep dives on all these topics too, and commend the district for their responsiveness to the various needs of their students!
Address Resource Inequities
Grow the Budget - Really, all of the programs and instincts that RPS has for their students’ academic recovery are only as good as the funding they receive to pull them off. We need something to the effect of $11 million to tackle the trade school renovation of the Altria warehouse. Realistically, we need way more than 30 staff members to fully staff a robust virtual Academy. We need the funding to provide substantial, satisfying meals to hungry students. We just need more, and our current budget doesn’t support all the worthy initiatives that would benefit our students. We are losing significant state funding for the same at-risk students who need the most resources to recover from the negative academic impacts of the pandemic. This problem is bigger than RPS, and well beyond the sphere of influence of the parent advocates of KidsFirst. Our plea - my plea - is to research and carefully consider what candidates you vote for, and show up to the polls like equitable education in this country/state/district rely on it. Because it very much does.
Technology Equity - It is incredibly important that the RPS leadership work collaboratively to close the aforementioned “digital divide,” and offer hot spots and chrome books to students as-needed. Really, in the modern age, no academic offering - virtual or otherwise - can be equitable without holding children harmless for their access to devices and reliable internet. We should absolutely inform policy and distribution programs around the chrome book audits credible findings, but also commend caring staff who braved the uncertainty of the early days of a global pandemic to offer our children doorstep-drop off of chromebooks and hot spots they’d have likely “disappeared” without.
That’s it for now. We’ll be back on Wednesday with another addition of board watch. Sign up for our newsletter to get a reminder when it’s available, or follow along with our live-tweet of the meeting. I’m sure there will be much to discuss!
