At first, it was supposed to last just a few weeks. Mayors and superintendents around the country announced schools would shut temporarily to halt the spread of a deadly virus that had officially been named “COVID-19” on Feb. 11, 2020.
Many school districts hustled to get laptops and other devices to students and shifted learning online, even as educators warned that remote education would exacerbate inequalities.
Then schools stayed shut — through that spring, and, in many districts around the country, through much of the next school year as well. When students and teachers did return to school buildings, they often did so masked or only part time, with protocols about distancing, and fears swirling for their health.
Today, more than five years after Covid arrived on U.S. shores, the pandemic’s toll on student learning lingers. The billions in aid that the federal government spent to help students recover had some modest impact, but students are still behind where they would have been academically. During the pandemic, behavioral problems and mental health issues surged, leading schools to invest in counseling and social and emotional programs, which they’ve had to scale back as federal money has dried up. Some kids never went back to school at all.
The pandemic left other marks too. School closures triggered anger that led to the rise of parent groups including Moms for Liberty. Much of the Moms for Liberty agenda, including book bans and anti-trans advocacy, has been embraced by the Trump administration, in the form of executive orders and Office for Civil Rights investigations into diversity, equity and inclusion programs and related work. School choice programs, which gained steam during Covid, are also a key part of Trump’s education agenda.
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The pandemic also contributed to teacher dissatisfaction, although fears of a mass exodus of teachers, along with other worries, such as plunging high school graduation rates, have not materialized. The child care system, already under severe strain, was hit by a wave of closures, though more programs have stayed open than were predicted under the most dire scenarios. Persistent staffing shortages, exacerbated by Covid, continue to plague the sector.
This winter, we checked in with educators, parents and students to whom we’d spoken early in the pandemic to learn how their lives have changed. One mom told us that Covid permanently stunted her child’s education, darkening her family’s entire outlook. A student said that the pandemic temporarily derailed her studies but ultimately set her on a path to become a mental health professional. Educators talked about how federal pandemic relief money helped, but not nearly enough, and how they try to repress memories of that year and a half on Zoom, behind masks — and on edge.
We want to hear your story about pandemic education — share it here.
These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
The parent
In the first weeks of the pandemic, JoAnna Marie Van Brusselen, of San Francisco, was terrified that the lockdown and remote learning would undo her fifth grade daughter, Iolani, who was born with several serious medical conditions including hydrocephalus and cerebral palsy. Five years later, Van Brusselen says her worst fears were realized, and the pandemic extinguished her daughter’s excitement about learning and aspirations for the future. — C.P.
Van Brusselen: That first year of remote learning, we ended up with a broken computer, broken chairs — she was frustrated and angry. Her anxiety was through the roof. She missed most of the end of that fifth grade year. Her stress triggered seizures that she hadn’t had in a long time. One day after school we ended up having to call 911. I had said let’s go to the marina and watch the airplanes land, and as soon as I got her in the car she started seizing and foaming at the mouth. We ended up in the hospital; it was terrible. And then they stayed on the computer her first year of middle school, in sixth grade.
They went back in person in seventh grade, and that wasn’t great either. People were masked, and Iolani has some speech challenges, and her voice was muffled. It was very frustrating and it really impacted my child. She missed maybe a third of that seventh grade year. She is not the same person she was before the pandemic. She has a psychologist, a psychiatrist, she’s on antipsychotic medication. She’s a sophomore now, about to turn 16. Academically she is stuck at a fifth grade level. I always wanted to shoot for the stars with her, she is such a trooper and warrior, but at this point all I want is for her to feel OK. She has not felt OK since fifth grade.
I know no one expected the pandemic, but schools weren’t prepared at all. Now in IEPs [Individual Education Programs for students with disabilities] they put an emergency plan, but they should have had that then. Our world is constantly changing, there are always things happening, there are fires and all kinds of stuff. I know all of us were scrambling to figure it out, but these are big systems. They should have been more prepared.
I just want my little girl back.
Read how my story began: Parents of kids with disabilities worry coronavirus quarantine will mean regression
The first-year college student
Sophie Fogel, now 22, made the tough decision to leave her New York home and attend college during the fall of 2021. Her first semester at the University of Pittsburgh left her feeling isolated and discouraged. Fogel took all her classes online, ate meals alone in her dorm and didn’t attend a single football game or party. After finals, she packed up her belongings and took a leave of absence. Today, though, she’s back in school, on track to graduate, and credits the pandemic for giving her career direction. — L.W.
Fogel: I decided not to do any more online classes, so I went home to Brooklyn. I got a job at Whole Foods — a whole nother experience in a pandemic. Honestly, it was pretty depressing. Overall, my freshman year was not only difficult in terms of my schooling and going home and living in tight quarters, but it was also difficult in terms of my mental health. I relied heavily on my family and my therapy, and it actually shaped what I want to do with my life. After that semester, I went back to Pitt the next fall and things were getting better. Classes were back in person, and I joined a sorority and clubs. I made great friends. I got to go to sporting events, and I even became a tour guide. I feel like I got back what I lost.
I’ve been here ever since, and I’ll be graduating this spring and then getting a master’s degree in social work: I want to do clinical therapy. I’m super glad I went back and gave it another try. I think the whole experience showed me that you can learn a lot about yourself despite being miserable, and that you are capable of bouncing back better than you think.
Read how my story began: Isolated in dorm rooms or stuck at home, some freshmen wonder if college is worth it
The middle schooler
In fall 2020, Anuar Suarez, now 17, started seventh grade with the goal of earning grades good enough to qualify him for one of the Philadelphia public school system’s selective high schools. But he hated remote learning, and struggled. Today, Suarez is an 11th grader at a magnet high school, though not the specialized school he’d hoped to attend. He is debating what he might do after graduation, and reeling from the recent death of a close friend. — C.P.
Suarez: I ended up at a normal public high school, Franklin Learning Center. I felt amazing, because I was going to a new school to meet new people. Everyone had a crush on me in those first few weeks, and I had my first real girlfriend. I had a 3.2 GPA. But things got hard sophomore year when I broke up with my girlfriend. I dropped down to a 2.9 GPA, and I’ve been trying to get it up ever since. On Sept. 2, my friend committed suicide. I am still trying to heal, but for the first two months, I cried every day. I miss him more than anything. He was my childhood best friend, but I’ve also had two other friends pass away. My first high school friend got shot in his back and died, and another friend from childhood also committed suicide.
I don’t really know if I should go to college. I want to go because I could be an architect or an interior designer. But I also don’t really feel like I should go because I could be an electrician or work in HVAC. My mom works in construction, and I grew up around that. I had a gentlemen’s group last year where they talked about dual enrollment through the Community College of Philadelphia, and I might do that to get some credits.
I feel like I became more of a homebody because of the pandemic. Sometimes I feel like staying in my own bubble I created in my head is better than going out and living in the real world. The pandemic definitely set a tone. It gave me an idea that life would be hard. But I still didn’t know it would be this hard or this hurting.
Read how my story began: How four middle schoolers are making it through the pandemic
The superintendent
Lisa Grant took the helm as Centralia School District superintendent just weeks after the coronavirus shuttered schools across Washington State. Five years later, she remains in that job, observing the same problems with student behavior she noticed at the beginning of the pandemic. She said that ESSER — the roughly $200 billion that Congress sent to K-12 schools to help during the pandemic — enabled her district to provide more mental health and social and emotional support to students. Yet test scores haven’t improved as much as Grant would like, and the money, which for Centralia schools totaled $14.8 million, expired last September. — N.M.
Grant: Teachers went on Zoom and kids weren’t learning in the same way. It didn’t work, and then we came back with all those goofy formats. We all of a sudden had all these behaviors, and teachers were using the same instructional and behavior management tools, and they just weren’t having the same result.
We’re really focused on student climate and culture and behavior, because we’re continuing to see behavior since Covid. We need to give teachers and kids the supports they need around that.
[With the ESSER money], it was hard not to spend some of your federal funds on personnel. We contracted with [three] mental health support specialists because we needed them, but then we knew that we couldn’t keep them. So we kept one, and we’re funding that out of [a local property tax] levy. We could use all three, but we just couldn’t afford it.
On ESSER, are we seeing it in our academics? No. But were we able to do some things where I think things would be much worse if we hadn’t done them? Yes. Now, I honestly think we needed more time. Some of the impacts that we’re seeing out of Covid … we’ve seen an increase in suicidal ideation among kids. We’ve seen poor mental health. We’ve seen larger behaviors, especially among younger students, but all kids. We put things in place very intentionally and continue to, using extra funds. We bought our social-emotional curriculum, and we paid for five years because we knew we couldn’t afford it otherwise. We fund behavior specialists. In the beginning we used ESSER dollars, and now we’re shifting some of that onto the levy. That helped us stabilize behaviors and we still need them. That’s where I wish the funding had been extended.
Read how my story began: A year in the life of a small-town superintendent shows the federal bailout won’t be enough
The principal
In 2020, Andrew Lukov was in his seventh year as principal of Southwark School in Philadelphia. The pre-K-8 school — which serves a predominantly low-income student body, including many English learners — had been steadily improving, even becoming something of a destination for its dual-language program. When Covid arrived, Lukov worried about the well-being of his teachers and students and that it would reverse his school’s gains. Five years later, Lukov still leads Southwark — and he says Covid is a distant memory that he tries to forget. — C.P.
Lukov: Once the pandemic was done, I just wanted it over. Even to the point where I was at a meeting and they were showing us a video of a classroom, to give feedback for the teacher. One of the videos was of virtual learning. Even just watching that — it was almost like PTSD. Not real PTSD, but a sense of, “I don’t ever want to go back to that.” I have sort of repressed those memories.
Academically, it hit some students harder. There are definitely grades where you look at the data today — like those who were in kindergarten or first grade, the early literacy grades — and it had an effect. In terms of wellness, we still do a lot of social-emotional work. But we did that before the pandemic, too.
We had some teachers make life decisions to get out of education, or move abroad. In terms of enrollment, our numbers are back up. The morale is positive. To some extent people have moved on. We have to teach kids how to read, we have to worry about their safety. There are so many things to worry about. I just can’t lament the pandemic.
Read how my story began: How four middle schoolers are making it through the pandemic
The college senior
Vasiki Konneh, 26, was a physics major and a senior at Colby College in Maine when Covid hit. He worried about finishing his toughest classes online while living back home in New York with five family members in their two-bedroom apartment. And with his dad out of work, he wondered how his family would pay the bills. But Konneh graduated and now works in sales operations — and his family recovered economically. Still, the pandemic left him feeling that the country’s social systems are profoundly fragile and shook his sense of stability. — M.K.
Konneh: I was having a very hard time getting through my homework without the same kind of support that I had while I was on campus, but my professors were extremely accommodating. My linear algebra professor was meeting with me every single morning to work through the exam packet. I think it was also just a reflection of the way people were coming together to support each other during a very scary time.
Aside from the fact that the work was extremely difficult, the state of the world, all of that was also weighing on me, subconsciously, and I think it had an influence. It was not just as simple as me doing the assignment and submitting it. There was just so much uncertainty.
I lived in Woodside, which isn’t far from Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. And not to be morbid, but I remember the just constant sound of ambulance sirens, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. So that left an imprint on me.
No one knew how they were going to find a job after we graduated. My college put out a call to alumni and parents to ask whether they had jobs or internships, and that’s how I found out about the internship at GitHub. I applied and I got it, and it was a really great experience. That really started me on my current career path — I work with sales teams, or business teams and their vendor and technological systems, to help them grow. I also have a side gig in photography — mostly portraits.
It was a scary time, and I think that it definitely instilled in me being appreciative and valuing what’s around me and not always thinking about what I don’t have — I think about what I do have. I think it also revealed to people how much empathy we can extend to each other, how much community matters. Because what we have, first and foremost, we have each other, right? That’s something I walked away with.
Read how my story began: How do you manage college online — quarantined with eight people?
The child care owner
Shemonica Flemings, of Austin, Texas, took out $78,000 from her savings and a $10,000 loan to open her child care program, Katie’s Place, named after her daughter, in July 2018. But state child care subsidies never covered the true cost of providing care for the children enrolled, many of whom had behavioral disabilities. A year into the pandemic, Flemings made the difficult decision to close the program’s doors. It was one of 16,000 child care programs to shut down between late 2019 and early 2021. Flemings now works as a behavior analyst, a career she has felt drawn to since college, and plans to open two programs in the coming years for people with autism, in part inspired by her daughter, who is autistic. — J.M.
Flemings: We needed a new building, and trying to navigate the drop in enrollment plus the expense of changing location, I couldn’t see a way to make it work. The rent prices, oh my gosh, they made my eyes water. It just became extremely expensive.
I want to be a BCBA [board certified behavior analyst]. I had already completed a course sequence many years prior. I’m spending a lot of time learning now.
When Katie was in [an ABA, or applied behavioral analysis] clinic, she was miserable. It was the environment … nothing on the wall, just a table pushed against a wall, a behavior tech sitting next to her. I want more of a concept where everything mimics a natural environment. If we’re working on functional living, self help, daily living skills, what would that look like in a home?
The timeline is to actually start looking at where I’m going to reopen the center and find funding. I want to introduce it, even if it’s a small number of kids, next year. I want anybody who says, “This model will work best for my child,” to have access to it. How can we make sure the environment is warm and inviting?
My second vision is for a rural ABA program. Many older adults are not able to access services [for autism]. Focusing on that self-advocacy component, that is crucial for that population. How to communicate, how to seek out leisure opportunities and engage, they don’t often have access to those opportunities and don’t always have skills to be able to go to those environments. I want to open that up for them.
I still keep up with quite a few of the kids who were with me, especially the ones who were with me from opening until we closed. We try to get the kids together twice a year for a reunion. The pandemic, those hardships that occurred, that kind of propelled me in this direction. Had those barriers never been put there, I wouldn’t have gone back to that vision for ABA. The pandemic pushed me back toward my first love.
Read how my story began: Her child care center was already on the brink — then coronavirus struck
The first-year teacher
The last few months of Caitlin Mercado’s senior year of college were corroded by pandemic shutdowns, erasing some of the time she would have spent learning how to teach in-person. When Mercado, a 2020 graduate of the University of Maryland, now 27, launched into her teaching career a few months later, online, it was a miserable start. Even veteran teachers at her Montgomery County, Maryland, public school were struggling to make sense of how to educate students who appeared as boxes on a screen. Mercado observed other teachers quitting. Five years later, she has a very different outlook — and no longer ranks her first year as the hardest. It was difficult, but other years have been, too, for entirely different reasons. — N.S.
Mercado: This year, I added a calming corner to my classroom. It has a rug, pillows, a small desk, a timer and a chart that outlines for the kids what they should do: Get comfortable. Pick a strategy. Feel calm and return to class. The school district really wants kids to have a space where they can take a moment. Over the past two, three years, I think calming strategies have been a huge thing in schools. The last three years we’ve talked about what do you do when you’re upset? Are you in a Green, Blue, Yellow, Red zone?
I now use it myself: Let’s think for a moment what’s going on. If there is a kid that’s having a particularly hard time, and they crumple up a piece of paper and start pounding their desk … as a first-year teacher you think, “This kid is being defiant.”
As a seasoned teacher you might want to go over and say “What’s wrong? What made you do that?” It could be so many different things. I have just learned to pause and meet them where they’re at. It’s worked 99 percent of the time.
I enjoy the lifestyle more than I thought. I have set work hours. I don’t have to spend hours staying after school unless I have a meeting. There’s still stuff you have to take home and do at home. It’s pretty manageable. There are breaks and time to be with family. I still dance a few times a week.
I want to be here at school. [The students] are so enjoyable.
When I look deep down on it, I do love teaching.
Read how my story began: These would-be teachers graduated into the pandemic. Will they stick with teaching?
The college student-mom
Five years ago, Annisha Thomas, 40, wondered how she could possibly keep it together. As a single mother working toward her college degree and waitressing at a Waffle House, she struggled to study while managing remote learning for her two children. Thomas told her teachers and advisers at Nashville State Community College that she couldn’t possibly continue. But they wouldn’t let her quit, and offered her the support she needed to carry on. Today, Thomas has a college degree and a stable job, and just bought her first home with her fiancé — four bedrooms and a hot tub. — L.W.
Thomas: Looking back, that was one of the hardest times of my life, but it also motivated me. I stayed in school and got my degree, but I also kept working at Waffle House. They offered me a position as a manager, but I knew my break would come, and it did, when I met the CEO of Apartment Insiders. He asked if I’d ever thought about real estate and said he would mentor me.
It ended up being the best decision of my life. I kept working at Waffle House to keep an income, but once I got my real estate license, I quit and went in headfirst. I just needed to walk away and take a chance and start something new. I’m lucky. I found something that I love, and I’m super good at — helping people find apartments. In my first year, I made $70,000. And I’m making enough money to hire a tutor for my daughter, who lost a lot of ground during the pandemic and is just now catching up.
Read how my story began: Long before coronavirus, student parents struggled with hunger, homelessness
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CarolineP.83 or via email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
This story about education five years later was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
