The floor of Jen Grady’s classroom at Mattie Washburn Elementary School in Windsor was shaking ever so slightly.
On the plush grid of her multicolored carpet, 10 pairs of feet landed with rhythmic muffled thuds. As the first graders hopped, they sounded out the letter R, a tricky consonant for many 6- and 7-year-olds.
But the movement, mimicking a rabbit, held a clue, Grady reminded them. “It’s a developmental thing,” she explains. “They want to say, ‘er.’”
As a reading intervention specialist who has spent 19 years at the K-2 campus, Grady’s job is to help struggling students meet California grade-level standards in reading and writing. This year, that work — as it has been for many teachers across Sonoma County — has been an unsettling game of catch-up.
“We struggled choosing who was going to get the spots” in her classroom, Grady said. “Because so many of them needed it. Because so many of them are behind.”
The return of nearly all of Sonoma County’s 66,450 public school students to classrooms in August was hailed as a pandemic milestone. As a group, they had been stuck at home and consigned mostly to online instruction since March 2020. The time away for most was far longer than most of their Bay Area peers — the result of stubbornly high local COVID-19 case rates and local public health guidelines that were among the most conservative in the state.
Now, more than halfway through their first school year back, educators know more about the steep toll of the pandemic: 2021 graduation rates, year-end and interim assessments and student surveys offer new insight. Still, the early snapshots have not answered larger questions about the fallout for a generation of children.
In Sonoma County, the pandemic compounded academic woes from repeated disasters — wildfires, floods and power outages — that have canceled weeks of instruction across many school districts since 2017. COVID-19 has further challenged school workforces already stretched by turnover.
The pandemic’s impact has been far from even. Some of the hardest hit communities include Latino students and those from lower-income families, those with parents who have no work-from-home option, foster and homeless youth, and students with disabilities, local and state data show.
“Some of the struggles are those that would have always existed,” said Kitu Jhawar-Terris, a veteran therapist who oversees a local team of school-based counselors. “But now we’re turning the lens, focusing (on) and understanding more of what challenges and struggles students are experiencing.”
Signs of trouble — academic and behavioral — have been different this year: Students and educators describe eerily silent classrooms filled with children hesitant to speak up; first and second graders who struggle to hold a pencil correctly; and, on many campuses, a marked increase in referrals to the principal’s office.
Parents of young children fret about the setback in foundational learning, while older students worry about having less time to make up learning loss.
“I think, historically, the kids that did OK are going to continue to do OK,” said Rhianna Casesa, a professor in Sonoma State University’s elementary education department. “The kids that historically didn’t do OK even pre-pandemic — so, you know, our students of color, our emergent bilinguals, our students from low socioeconomic backgrounds — they will continue to not be OK.”
Silent classrooms, missing students
For the first few months of the year, Jeanelle Payne was unsettled by the silence in her history classes at Montgomery High School. Students talked little, if at all. She asked fellow teachers if they were experiencing the same thing.
They were, said Payne, a 17-year classroom veteran. Students were struggling to break down large assignments into small tasks or were not working well with partners or groups. Many teens were reluctant to participate in class discussions.
That has improved a bit, and students have begun to open up and interact more. But still, it’s as if some of her students “fell into their screens and they haven’t come out yet,” she said.
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