On March 13, 2020, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf called for schools in his state to shut down due to COVID-19. At first it was for ten business days. Then it was for some more. Then the end of the school year was lost; it just slipped away. Finally, it was “maybe we’ll be able to go back to buildings in the fall of 2020,” which also didn’t happen.
Guidance from state and federal authorities might be helpful, but there, again, trust has been eroded.
Here in rural Pennsylvania, the impact of the pandemic followed its own peculiar trajectory. The total number of cases in Venango County, where I live, was just eighty-eight between March and September 2020, according to local news accounts. By October 15, the case number had almost doubled. By December 1, it was 1,000. At the beginning of the summer, there were 4,095 confirmed cases and 100 deaths in a county of about 50,000 people.
The advice that came from the state and federal government was largely unhelpful. “Stay locked down in your home” made little sense in a place where you can step out your door and walk fifteen minutes without seeing a soul. “Shut down all inessential businesses” seems pointless if your business is a staff of three people who are all related. And former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s Trump-backed insistence that all schools should unilaterally reopen last summer was not very helpful, either.
In rural areas, people are already easily spread out and distanced. But we also love our high school sports and our church services, and we are not always very trusting of the government. So for a year and a half, schools have been feeling the tension between getting back to normal and making responsible choices. They’ve pinballed back and forth from open buildings with restrictions, to a hybrid model, to half-days every other day, to being fully virtual.
All this has meant chaos for teachers and families.
Students line up by class on colored dots in the school gym to wait for their rides after dismissal at Wesley Elementary School in Middletown, Connecticut.
Administrators made decisions at the last possible minute, waiting to see what the most current conditions would be. Teachers spent hours preparing different versions of lesson plans, knowing that only some of them would be used. Parents scrambled to make child care arrangements. Facilities didn’t necessarily match up—this school is open, that school is closed; the day-care center is closed, but the school is open.
Virtual teaching was a problem because a significant number of rural families have no Internet connection; many teachers had to create another option that involved making phone connections with parents to deliver packs of paper copies of lessons.
Teachers had to either plan ahead for several possible scenarios, knowing some might never be used, or scramble to plan lessons and materials quickly. Students were bounced back and forth, keeping them from developing the kind of rapport with teachers that helps a school year run smoothly.
Meanwhile, teachers had other issues to deal with: how to follow current protocols. How to deal with students’ families—or colleagues—who did not take any of this seriously. How to take care of their own families. And how to handle the avalanche of staffing problems that can occur due to post-exposure isolation.
There were dozens of possible responses to the crisis, and all of them seemed bad. As one principal told his school board as it considered whether to reopen, “There’s no easy answer. I’m riding the fence, too. Are we digging a ditch educationally? Yes, but we could be digging a ditch to put somebody in.”
For many teachers, in Pennsylvania and across the country, this summer has been about trying to recover, regroup, and recapture some sense of normal. Just about every teacher I talk to about returning to school this fall uses the word “normal.” And yet there is lingering concern that we may not get there.
“I am excited for things to seem a little more normal in the classroom,” says Stacy Garcia, an English teacher at Franklin High School in Franklin, Pennsylvania. “I hope conditions are safe enough for students to remain in-person learning for the entire year.”
Jami Lyons, a social studies teacher at Franklin High, agrees: “I am hopeful that some semblance of normalcy will be seen in the fall. Am I a little apprehensive about continued issues? Yes. Do I think this will be completely ‘normal’? No.”
Much of the coming year is riding on factors beyond most teachers’ control.
An elementary school student has his temperature checked by a thermal scanner as he enters the school building.
“Learning loss” has been pushed as a major issue for the fall, mostly by people who don’t actually work in schools. For teachers, learning loss will not be one of the biggest issues of the fall. Teachers will do what they always do as the school year begins; they will use an assortment of formal and informal assessments to determine where their students are academically. Teachers know that many students didn’t get the usual background from their previous year, and will adjust their expectations accordingly.
Teachers will also watch for students’ social and emotional development, because they know the last year and a half has been rough. This is an area where rural and small-town teachers may have an advantage, because they know the community, the people, and often the families of their students. But all teachers are aware that many students are a bit raw and jangled after last year.
Then there is, of course, the virus itself. A summer’s worth of variants spread through the unvaccinated population may force some districts to face a new COVID-19 reality. The public is getting used to living without a pandemic; a district that announces that students are supposed to mask this fall is likely to hear from some cranky parents.
Matt Gustafson, an economics teacher at Franklin High School, is trying to stay optimistic. “I’m hopeful that our district can do better at being ahead of the challenges the pandemic might create instead of feeling like we are always just responding, at the last possible minute,” he says. But his district’s track record on this isn’t great, and he’s “already been told that I’ll have a class of thirty-five next year in my already overloaded thirty-desk classroom.”
Some school districts have built trust over the past eighteen months. Some have burned through the little they had. Some have put policies and procedures in place, and then ignored them when outbreaks actually occurred. Others have paid lip service to safety measures, but failed to fully implement them.
Teachers also have concerns about what teaching will look like. Some cities and states have mandated that all public schools must be in person, but Pennsylvania was offering public virtual schools long before the pandemic hit. Pennsylvania is a highly profitable playground for cyber schools, which are paid based on the cost of educating a student in a bricks-and-mortar school, and not the actual costs of virtual schooling. They are also highly ineffective; not one cyber school in Pennsylvania has ever made passing scores on state evaluations.
Most public school districts have created their own virtual schools, both to have more control over the academic program and to mitigate the loss of funding to the cyber schools. Enrollment in those virtual programs increased dramatically, testing the capacities of those district programs.
In some cases, teachers have been assigned virtual teaching duties for part of their day. In others, the virtual school program has been farmed out to vendors who handle some or all of the virtual school program. Nobody really knows what virtual enrollment will look like in the fall, or what effect it will have on teaching jobs. Managing it is one more issue that rests on trust and cooperation between administration and staff.
Guidance from state and federal authorities might be helpful, but there, again, trust has been eroded. And most solutions have to be local.
A small town moves to the rhythm of its schools, and for eighteen months those rhythms have been jangled and jerky, like a radio switching stations every thirty seconds. Students and their parents are concerned about academics, but also about football and basketball seasons, about prom, about a graduation ceremony fully open to the whole community. The pressure is enormous to put these markers of a normal year back in place. But some teachers and families are leery of just how much safety will be sacrificed to create a normal year.
At the same time, the same folks who have been demanding that their children not be subjected to the “tyranny” of masks in school are now energized to root out any telltale signs of critical race theory in local schools. Schools are already dealing with real major issues; in some communities, they must deal with manufactured issues as well.
There has been concern about a teacher exodus, but the actual numbers don’t show an uptick in teacher departures. A RAND survey from early 2021 found that one in four teachers said they were considering quitting, primarily due to pandemic job stress. That may sound alarming—RAND says that previous years turned up a figure of one in six.
But other surveys have actually shown worse numbers pre-COVID-19. Phi Delta Kappa International runs an annual survey of teachers; in August 2019, it found that 50 percent of all U.S. teachers had “seriously considered” leaving teaching in the previous few years.
“I felt like I was being experimented on,” said one Louisiana-based teacher who left the classroom. And that was certainly a common thread for teachers. In many communities, there was a certain callousness that did not go unnoticed, an insistence that teachers were public servants and should just get back to work so that everyone else’s life could get back to normal.
In too many conversations, official guidelines of “teachers and students can go back to school buildings once appropriate safety measures are in place” were shortened to “teachers and students can go back to school buildings.”
Still, when asked about the fall, one teacher told me, “I’ve never looked forward to going back more than I do right now.” That sentiment has been echoed in dozens of talks with educators, as has “I think students and staff expect to be back without restrictions, but I think we’re going to be in for a rude awakening.”
Kelly Zerbe is an elementary school teacher in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and a dance teacher at a private studio who usually spends her fall choreographing community theater productions, but not this year. “This past school year was very tough . . . and we haven’t been told much about the upcoming year. Although I’m optimistic, I’m worried about taking on too much at the start of the school year.”
But perhaps Amanda Greene, a second-grade teacher in Pennsylvania’s Cranberry Area School District (and, incidentally, my wife), put it best: “I dread going back. Also, I am really, really excited about prepping room decorations and lesson materials.”
Excited. Exhausted. Apprehensive. That’s how many teachers are feeling about facing the new school year.