From technology to learning loss to mental health, covid’s impact on education still felt today

Wayne Walters can still recall the enormous logistical challenge of handing out thousands of paper packets of classwork to Pittsburgh Public Schools students in 2020.

The covid-19 pandemic had taken hold in the region. Schools closed buildings, students were left to learn online, and educators scrambled over how best to teach.

In the Pittsburgh Public Schools, the second-largest school system in the state with more than 21,000 students, at least 7,500 pupils did not have adequate technology at home to attend classes virtually.

As mask-clad parents shuffled through socially distanced lines to pick up school-provided meals for their children, they exchanged completed worksheets for new assignments.

“We were in a space where I think people viewed the activity of educating students as very scripted, very normalized, very structured, very predictable,” said Walters, an assistant superintendent at the time who was elevated to superintendent in 2022. “And then we had this disruption.”

With the help of a donation of 7,000 laptops from a coalition of Pittsburgh-based technology companies, nonprofits, universities and local government officials, the district ditched its paper method and leaned into virtual instruction. It also purchased about 24,000 laptops, tablets and internet hot spot devices for students and staff from 2020 to 2021, using nearly $3 million of the district’s budget and more than $5 million in federal funding.

“It was a steep but quick learning curve that we all had to adapt to,” Walters said. “And here we are, five years later.”

The pandemic forced the district into the virtual-teaching world, one of the lasting effects the pandemic has had on K-12 education.

Schools adapt to digital age

Platforms such as Google Classroom have become standard practice for posting assignments, holding exams and conducting virtual lectures, but in the fall of 2019, many of Jeannette City School District’s veteran educators were just learning about the technology.

The timing could not have been better, Superintendent Matt Jones said.

“Because we spent so much time on it from August to March (of 2020),” he said, “the rollout for us (during covid) was very easy because it was familiar and fresh on their minds.”

Remote learning also became the norm in 2020. Now called Flexible Instruction Days, the option is still used by districts in the event of inclement weather, law enforcement emergencies, public health concerns and school building damage.

School districts are continuing to advance how they use technology in the classroom as teachers compete with smartphones and social media for student attention.

New Kensington-Arnold School District this school year purchased five pairs of Apple’s Vision Pro devices — headsets that blend digital content into the user’s physical line of sight.

It is the first district in the country to partner with Apple to adapt the technology to an education setting, said Superintendent Chris Sefcheck.

“I’m very proud of the fact that we’re kind of ahead of the curve on innovative practices, not just in the area, but we’re a national player,” he said. “We hope that other people take what we’re learning and build it up even better.”

‘Learning loss’

Educators lament the “learning loss” that occurred during the pandemic — and is still felt today.

Take, for example, fourth grade students, who were preparing to enter kindergarten when the pandemic hit.

The average math and reading scores for those students are each 6 points lower than the fourth grade class of 2019, according to a 2024 report by the National Center for Education Statistics. The drop in scores corresponds with a 6% drop in the number of fourth graders who achieved a proficient or higher score in math and reading across the five-year span.

The center’s data is based on representative samples of test scores from students in public schools, whereas the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests and Keystone Exams are administered to students in every public school in the state.

For PSSA tests administered in spring 2024, about 57% of fourth grade students in Allegheny County and 58% in Westmoreland County scored proficient or higher in English. In math, about 54% of Allegheny fourth graders and nearly 53% of Westmoreland fourth graders achieved that mark. Numbers from 2019 were not available.

At Jeannette, teachers are working to fill the learning gaps, particularly for middle school students who were in first and second grades when the pandemic hit.

“You are learning to read up until Grade 3, and then from Grade 3 on, you’re reading to learn,” said curriculum director Shelley Muto. “They lost that whole ‘learning to read’ — all of that background knowledge and all of that understanding.”

Although the long-term impact of learning loss is unclear, a study by the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research projects it could lead to cuts in students’ future earnings in the workforce.

The study estimates that without corrective action, students who experienced learning loss during the pandemic could see a 1.6% — or $19,400 — decline in lifetime earnings. When factoring the 48 million students enrolled in public schools during the 2020-21 school year, this equates to a loss of $900 billion.

At New Kensington-Arnold, the greatest learning gap — based on a drop in PSSA scores — is seen among the district’s fourth grade students, Sefcheck said.

The district launched after-school tutoring programs in the past year for students at Roy A. Hunt Elementary and Valley Junior-Senior High School, which draw more than 60 students combined per session.

The initiative, launched by the district’s teachers, may improve a recent rise in state test scores, although the program’s precise impact is still unknown. An average of 40 students per grade level fell within five points of achieving their first proficient score on PSSA and Keystone tests last spring.

Students must earn at least 1,000 points on the PSSA to achieve a proficient score or at least 1,500 on the Keystone exam.

“We’re pretty confident that this year will be a big year for us — the biggest year we’ve had in a while,” Sefcheck said.

Students seek mental health support

Despite the bump in academic performance, New Kensington-Arnold teachers and school counselors still are seeing students grapple with the switch from a flexible online learning routine back to a traditional classroom schedule.

“It takes time to get over those things,” Sefcheck said, “and a lot of the behaviors manifest in acting out or the opposite — completely withdrawing.”

About 37% of more than 7,700 U.S. high school students who responded to a 2022 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study reported experiencing poor mental health during the pandemic.

Since then, New Kensington-Arnold has hired three new school counselors certified to support students’ academic and social-emotional development.

Now, the district has one counselor each assigned to kindergarten, first and second grade, and third through sixth grade. Three serve the district’s seventh through 12th grade students.

One of the new hires, Graycen Vitale, started at Valley Junior-Senior High School in the fall of 2023, assisting the district’s ninth and 10th grade students. It’s her first school counselor job since earning her master’s degree from Duquesne University in spring of 2023.

“Parents are often like, ‘They just haven’t been the same since covid’ or ‘Covid affected my kid,’” she said. “They feel that the problem started after covid, from being off that long.”

Some days, Vitale struggles to make time for a lunch break, meeting with up to 50 students. Addressing mental health concerns has become a focal point of her job. She assessed three students for suicide risk on one February day alone, she said.

“Every day, it’s something different that we’re facing and just making sure that students are safe, whether they’re presenting with suicidal ideation or they’re cutting (themselves) or other things like that,” she said.

A former college lacrosse player, Vitale encourages her students to pursue sports, clubs and after-school activities.

“I think that during covid, they didn’t experience all that stuff and they got sucked into technology and social media,” she said. “I would say that’s probably one thing that we’re still seeing.”

Future of public schools

The pandemic forced educators to reevaluate how they teach and assess students — particularly surrounding standardized testing, said Gennaro Piraino, superintendent of the Franklin Regional School District.

“In one way, of course we hated that period of time when kids were online and isolated and we were dealing with things like social distancing,” he said. “But the reality is it allowed us to make some transformations in the learning process for kids — the learning experiences to make it more engaging, to make it more interactive, to have kids engaged in real-world problem-solving and project-based learning.

“Those are all the types of things that were lost prior to the pandemic because of the focus on testing. I view that time since the pandemic as transformational.”

As school systems like Franklin Regional shift value from standardized tests toward career preparation, Piraino said he is not worried about the statewide drop in math and reading scores.

“People would say, even with the PSSAs, ‘Kids who don’t pass the (language arts test) can’t read.’ That’s not true,” he said. “There are so many literary devices that are being assessed … that it’s not really telling you ‘Can a kid go out into the world and read functionally for work?’ The answer to that is yes. But do they all need to know onomatopoeia? Probably not.”

In recent years, Franklin Regional has seen an uptick in the number of students taking classes at local career and technical centers.

Up to 80 students in the district’s senior class — which typically consists of 280 to 310 students — complete internships with local businesses in a given academic year. Piraino said he values those workforce preparation experiences above a high state test score.

Walters, the Pittsburgh Public Schools superintendent, predicts the focus on individualized learning and career preparation isn’t going anywhere.

“They (will be) stepping into jobs that we probably don’t know exist at this point,” he said, “but we have to be able to give them the strength, the capacity, the grit to enter that space with confidence and competence.”

Looking back, curriculum director Muto is proud of how Jeannette rolled with the punches of the pandemic.

“I really was hopeful that after it was all said and done, we could look back and say, ‘We just kept on going’ and there would be no learning loss and all of the covid talk,” she said. “But we felt it. We still felt it even though we tried to keep open and do what was best for everybody.

“It changed us. It changed us as a society. It changed our students. It changed everything.”