While many students have bounced back from their school experiences during the pandemic, a significant number have not, said Skokie School District 68 Superintendent James Garwood, who designated March as “Thank a Teacher Month” to give the teachers who are working hard to support those kids a boost.
Garwood noted that a survey of students and parents found that 50% of students and parents felt the effects of the pandemic were neutral, about 25% felt they were positive and about 25% said they were negative. Students in that last group are struggling with behavior, mental health, socio-emotional and academic issues, he said, and both teachers and the district’s strategic plan are addressing their needs.
“While the medical crisis aspect of the pandemic has waned substantially from where we were two years ago, our teachers will be the first to tell you that we are still far from normal,” he wrote in an email to the school community.
“For students, the lingering impacts of the COVID experience are academic performance, mental health and behavior, and social-emotional wellness.”
Even before the pandemic, when teachers reach about March during the school year, they’re typically exhausted, and the extra effort they’re putting in helping students bounce back from the pandemic has made them more so, Garwood said, explaining that’s the reason a morale boost for them was needed.
“Teaching is harder than it’s ever been, and burnout is a real thing,” he added.
“That 25 percent that we’re primarily concerned with, academically, we’ve started to see student growth bounce back,” Garwood said. “Where we’re seeing some challenges still is sometimes student’s self regulation, their ability to control their emotions. It’s a small number of students, but it’s certainly more students than we saw previous to the pandemic with sometimes emotional outbursts, a hard time controlling their emotions, so I think that is probably causing more stress than the academic portions.”
Students, who spent up to two years learning remotely over Zoom, missed out on socialization and key milestones like transitioning grades, said Matt Tomenillie, a seventh grade special education teacher at Old Orchard Junior High and co-president of the District 68 Education Association. When students came back, they also needed to adjust to new school experiences like how to use their lockers, as well as combating habits learned during remote learning like eating and leaving their desks whenever they wanted.
“Kids are more easily emotionally dysregulated and require a little more time and patience and understanding from everybody to help them get regulated again and get back in the swing of things,” Tomenillie said. “I think a lot of kids are relearning those unwritten rules that they already knew, but they just hadn’t been reinforced. Now everybody’s in reinforcement mode of ‘this is what school’s like again. This is what it’s like in-person.'”
Joe Ruffner, a parent and president of the District 68 Board of Education, said each student responded to the challenges of the pandemic differently. He and other parents are excited that their children have been able to socialize more since the return to school, since that was a challenge earlier in the pandemic.
“It’s not a stunted development, it’s just a different development in how we address each other, how we interact with each other. Being forced to be responsive through a screen has definitely shaped how they communicate with each other,” Ruffner said. “We’re definitely seeing the ramifications of that, and it’s something that we’re countering as parents.”
Behavioral issues aren’t the only challenges schools are facing. As schools across the country continue to face the teacher shortages that accelerated during the pandemic, District 68 is no exception, often facing a short supply of substitute teachers. To combat this, the district has raised its rates for subs and tried to recruit more.
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“They were in short supply before COVID, and COVID made that probably exponentially worse,” Garwood said.
While Garwood said the district’s full-time teachers aren’t leaving the profession at as high a rate as seen across the nation, the district has seen an impact on staffing. When there aren’t enough teachers or subs, sometimes teacher aides or teacher-certified staff get pulled into the classrooms.
“I know some school districts, it’s at a crisis level. Here, it’s not a crisis level, but we’re definitely seeing a difference,” Garwood said.
The district approved a new strategic plan in December to address some of the academic, socio-emotional and staffing challenges born out of the pandemic, Garwood said. The efforts included hiring more staff, including specialists who work with kids who need academic or behavioral interventions, using pandemic relief funds. Teachers have received socio-emotional professional development, and for students, after-school clubs have resumed. The district has been working on implementing restorative practices for dealing with behavioral issues, Garwood added.
“People are recognizing that trauma comes from all sorts of places,” Garwood said, “and so we’ve been working with our therapists and working out this training on how do we respond when staff members or students go through traumatic experiences, how do we support them?”