When former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee issued a six-week shutdown in March 2020, students in Spokane had a day to prepare before moving to what was supposed to be a brief period of virtual learning. Six weeks quickly became the rest of the school year and much of the next.
High school seniors didn't get to go to prom or to celebrate graduation at the First Interstate Center for the Arts with their peers like previous classes. Though Spokane Public Schools immediately began handing out food for students in need who relied on the breakfast and lunch they receive at school, the loss of in-person learning and access to resources was difficult for many students.
Many kids lost out on the social interaction that's vital to their development, says David Crump, director of mental health services at Spokane Public Schools.
"They missed the sense of community that a school brings. They missed out on the interpersonal relationships with caring and loving staff and adults that can kind of provide support outside of the home, and they missed out on the social and emotional interaction as you normally develop," Crump explains. "I truly believe that ... face-to-face dynamic learning really helps kids."
Washington Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal says the pandemic proved the efficacy of in-person learning over virtual learning.
"If we learned one thing from the pandemic it's that even if you had the best technology setup in the world, students should not be independently in front of screens for six hours a day trying to navigate their learning," Reykdal says. "Human connection matters. Teachers are always going to be the core of this thing."
Though Crump says some students thrived in an online learning environment, most suffered from "screen fatigue."And while the pandemic affected students of every grade level, Crump says some in transitional periods felt the impact more than others.
"We had two groups that I saw that were impacted the most, and that was the littles that were never in school, and then all of a sudden when they [started] they were in second or third grade," he says. "Then there was the group that was in fifth and sixth grade, and when they came back they started high school. They missed the whole middle school, which is a fun, beautiful, transitional, chaotic time of life."
Although the pandemic was a catalyst for many of the social issues kids are dealing with today, Spokane Public Schools Superintendent Adam Swinyard says the trend of isolation and disengagement in students has been around since the iPhone was released in 2007.
"We started to see some of the manifestations of that through chronic absenteeism and mental health issues, and we saw that trend building," Swinyard says. "Unfortunately, the pandemic then introduced itself, and those trends just accelerated beyond what we could have ever imagined. As awful as the pandemic was, I think it has forced us to confront with a greater sense of urgency this trend of disengagement that we're seeing amongst youth."
Teachers and counselors in the district have worked to ensure students are caught up to where they should be, socially and academically, since they returned to the classroom at the beginning of the 2021-22 school year, but it can still be a challenge. Though there's been growth since the return to in-person instruction, students have yet to surpass pre-pandemic achievements.
For example, in the 2018-19 school year 45.2% of students who took Washington's Smarter Balanced Assessment (grades 3 through 8 and grade 10) in the district met state standards for math, according to the state superintendent's annual school report card. In 2020-21 that dropped to 28.2% of students in those grades, then grew to 36.1% in 2023-24.
"Although there was certainly learning loss, the elasticity of learning and the ability for kids to recover from an academic standpoint was not as severe as what got promoted in the national narrative," Swinyard says. "Kids are pretty resilient, and the kids that were behind in reading, we were catching those kids up, and they have recovered reasonably well, although there's still work to do. I think what deteriorated faster than what we ever imagined, and what is much more difficult to repair, is norms."
Students are struggling to get ready at home, and they're struggling to make it to school on time. Some are even having trouble getting enough sleep to be ready for their first class. This has caused the levels of chronic absenteeism to skyrocket without a clear way to actually address it, Swinyard explains.
According to the state superintendent's office, 17.1% of students were considered chronically absent in 2018-19 — i.e. they missed more than two days per month. By 2023-24, 32.3% of students in the district were chronically absent.
"When those routines got fractured, those family norms got fractured, I think what we found is you don't just put those back together. It's not like sitting down with a kid and showing them how to do two-digit multiplication," Swinyard says. "If you looked across the country, you would see chronic absenteeism continuing to be a huge concern. [Chronically absent students] are still coming, but they're missing a lot of school along the way, more than they ever have, and that is impacting them still." ♦
