Panhandle schools see drop in academic growth due to COVID-19 interruption

After a full semester back in the classroom, albeit off and on for many students, teachers and staff, schools finally have some data to review to see how exactly the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting their students’ academic progress.

In November, the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) released its findings in student testing data, covering 4.4 million U.S. students in grades three through eight. The report revealed that reading scores didn’t seem to take as much of a hit as math scores, which had about a 10% drop, although there were smaller gains than in previous years in both subject areas.

Multiple Panhandle schools have fallen in line with NWEA’s findings for the most part. Assessment directors at Scottsbluff, Gering, Alliance and Sidney public schools have all acknowledged a slight drop in academic performance gains. While the drop was predictable, for some schools, it wasn’t as bad as they feared it would be.

Scottsbluff curriculum and instruction executive director Mike Mason said Scottsbluff looked at data from students who had been affected by Hurricane Katrina to help prepare for the types of learning loss their school district might face due to the pandemic. He said it was helpful since the pandemic resulted in the cancellation of all remaining assessments for the 2020 spring semester.

Without data to review at the end of the 2019-2020 school year to look at academic improvement over the course of the year, many school districts were not quite sure where their students would be for fall 2020. Mason said that its often these spring tests that help determine who needs summer school or other support classes in the fall.

“It definitely impacted summer school, because we usually use spring data to decide who needs extra support, although our teachers are pretty good judges of the kids based on what they were doing in the class,” he said. “Then also, using that data to get those kids in to support classes right away, we didn’t have that.”

However, Mason said many Scottsbluff teachers were pleasantly surprised with how much students retained over the summer when they came back in the fall.

“Visiting with our teachers, anecdotally, you know, they were pretty positive as they started working with kids (about) how much information had been retained and where their kids came into the school year,” he said. “They felt like kids were picking up quickly and getting back into the swing of things.”

That did not mean there weren’t learning loss issues to address, though. Mason said the district worked hard in the fall to get NWEA Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) testing done as quickly as possible so they could address individual students’ academic needs right away to close the learning gap that COVID-19 would inevitably bring.

Other Panhandle schools were in a similar boat. Gering director of curriculum and assessment Kory Knight said the district also tried to get fall MAP testing done as soon as possible in order to have data on its students to help them close the gap.

“One of our priorities was to do NWEA MAP testing with our kids as soon as we could in the fall,” she said, “so that we could pull out the skills that students were able to retain and then start addressing and attacking the skills that they were showing weaknesses in from not being in person in the spring.”

The important thing to note, as Sidney curriculum and assessment director Sheri Ehler pointed out, is that these drops school administrators are talking about are not to say that students across the Panhandle and across the nation have not had gains in their learning.

The drops administrators are seeing are not in the knowledge itself that students are retaining, but in the amount of gains they are seeing compared from a grade in one year to the same grade in another year. In short, fewer students have met the projected, or expected, growth for their grade levels than in previous years.

“Students across the area have grown, it’s just clearly without the same educational experiences that we’re used to,” Ehler said. “It’s harder to meet the growth.”

While students are lacking slightly in their academic growth, the pandemic has pushed school districts to grow in other ways. Some school administrators believe that they will come out the other side of the pandemic better than before because of the challenges they’ve had to overcome.

“All in all, this is just a huge learning curve for not only school districts, but for families and the students involved in those families,” Knight said. “We’re just hoping to take away as many positives as we can from this experience and know that we’re better for it in a lot of different ways that we never intended.”

Mason echoed those sentiments and added that technology proved its educational value during this challenging year.

“I think everybody felt like, ‘Oh gosh, this technology is crazy,’ but now our teachers are really seeing the benefits of technology and how it can be used, not only with remote learners, but how it can be used in our face-to-face classrooms.”

Nevertheless, school administrators stand by the belief that online learning, while beneficial in keeping the schools running and students learning, is nowhere near as powerful as learning face-to-face. Of course, every individual student has his or her own way of retaining information, but for the most part, schools believe that the drop in academic growth signifies the importance of in-person learning.

“It’s always difficult to maintain student engagement when they’re not sitting right in front of you, and unless the student’s engaged, they’re not going to learn to their full capacity,” Alliance curriculum director Rita Moravek said.

Moravek added that teachers are still doing their absolute best, giving “Herculean efforts,” to give their students the best possible educational experience.

“To keep students in front of you engaged, at the same time keeping students who are on Zoom, who may be from multiple households, engaged is extremely difficult, and they have just been teaching their tails off,” she said. “I can’t say enough good things about these teachers.”

Now, as schools head into another spring semester that will inevitably be affected by COVID-19, they are at least equipped with updated data to help them address the academic needs of their students to close that pandemic gap from last spring.

“The takeaway for us is, really, focus on your essential learning and do it in an enriching way, so that you have multiple opportunities to practice and to become proficient in the situation of interrupted learning,” Ehler said. “The other takeaway is, we don’t teach content, we teach kids and really focusing on relationships as much as they can, first. … Even if you were appreciative before, our takeaway is we’re so much more appreciative getting to teach every day and getting to work with our students every day.”

*This article was originally published in the Scottsbluff Star-Herald on Dec. 31, 2020.