high school essay about covid 19

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10 COVID-19’s Affect on Education, Specifically in High Schools

Melissa Kostecki

Introduction

Our country, The United States of America, has been heavily impacted by the global pandemic, COVID-19, in numerous ways. One major aspect of our country that has had to heavily adjust to these new safety protocols is our education system, specifically high schools. A typical day of high school no longer looks like a day from 8 am to 3 pm, with extracurricular activities following school to socialize. Now, high schools all around the United States have had to switch to virtual learning, to protect students’ and teachers’ health. This dramatic change in high schools has been challenging, but it has shown how strong our education system is. COVID-19 has challenged and modified the way high schools are now functioning by forcing online learning technology to advance rapidly, having to introduce and create new ways of learning, and adjusting the education system to the new norms of our society. This topic relates to STS because without the technology we have today, virtual learning would not be possible. Advancements in learning technology have allowed high schools around the world to function during this time.

Impact on Learning Technology in Secondary Education

To begin, a major part that high school systems have had to change is the learning technology being used to hold virtual classes. High schools and technology companies have had to figure out quickly what is needed to make virtual learning easy and available to all students. Holding virtual classes requires high schools to have various online learning resources to help students succeed and stay on track during this time. The main application used by most high school students is called Zoom . Zoom is an online communication application that is used to hold virtual classes. Teachers have many tools avail able on this application to help make virtual classes more interactive. Certain features that teachers enjoy include, “Many teachers take advantage of the Zoom feature that allows for recording conversations and saving chat transcripts so students can refer to them later” ( Lieberman 2). Zoom is an easy-to-use application that allows high school teachers to interact with students by sharing their screens with the class and viewing their students through web came ras. But, with most high schoo ls around the country using this tool, it has forced Zoom to advance its technology very rapidly so that it’s able to cater to the number of users that need it.

The rapid increase in Zoom users has challenged the application. Lieberman (2020) noted, “The surge of new users, including 90,000 schools and the rapid increase in users has also led to increased scrutiny of the security limitations” (1). Clearly, there has been a rapid increase in the number of high schools that are relying on this application, which has caused slight defects as Zoom continues to improve its system. But, without this technology, it would make learning online much more difficult and could cause some students to fall behind in school. Luckily, with learning technology advancements like Zoom, virtual learning is manageable and more interactive.

Creating New Technology to Make High School Learning Interactive

It is evident that high school students are concerned about their futures and they feel that what their school may be doing is not enough for them to stay on track. So, from this information, it’s evident that students’ futures may have to be put slightly on pause for them to get back on track. High schools around the United States should begin to implement online resources to help high school students stay on track with their goal of college. Resources can include how to study for standardized tests and faculty helping students with their college applications. As our education system continues to endeavor during this time, each day more and more new learning techniques continue to be implemented to help students. But, it’s evident that more needs to be done to make students feel prepared for the future during this time. As high schools continue to advance their online systems, more resources will likely be available to help students thinking about life after high school during this time.

Impact on High School Student’s Social Interaction & Mental Health

“This dramatic change in high schools has been challenging, but it has shown how strong our education system is.”

As our society begins to adjust to the new norms of our society of maintaining six feet apart from others, wearing a mask in public, and staying home if you’re sick, our interaction with each other has changed. A main part of the high school experience is interacting with classmates inside and outside of the classroom ( Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1). High school students are missing out on memories like prom, graduation, and sporting events. All of this uncertainty for when high school will return to normal has created a lot of anxiety and stress for students ( Kreitz 1). But, being in a global pandemic gives students the only option of dealing with this situation and creating solutions. High schools around the country have begun making solutions like, making their extracurricular clubs meet virtually. One high school in Texas has shifted their club fair to be virtual, so students still have the opportunity to stay in contact with peers and make new friends. A teacher Vivian Hernandez (2020) describes the importance of social interaction during this time, “When educators sponsor a student club, they’re building community, they bring students together, student clubs do not have to stop because of COVID-19, they may be more important now than ever” (1). Interaction with others will help make high school students feel less lonely during this time. High schools around the country are creating new ways to hold regular student sessions like this, which shows how high schools can come together to support one another. 

Luckily, thanks to the technology we have, high school students can easily learn from home. Without computers, e-textbooks, and online applications, it would be impossible to continue to go through the school year. And although students are missing the structure of the normal school day, this will only make high school institutions stronger for the future.  Dr. Michael Krüger, Coordinator of the International Education Management noted in an interview that despite the complexity of the new teaching and learning arrangements, he is surprised how focused everyone is and how much has been achieved. Krüger believes the lessons learned from these experiences will have a lasting impact on their teaching and help strengthen the educational system ( Wawa , 1). As an education system, all members of high schools have worked to strengthen their learning techniques and to adapt to the new norms of our society during this time. 

Connection to STS Theory

The topic of how education has changed in high schools across the country due to COVID-19 relates to the STS theory of social constructivism. Social constructivism describes that science & technology are importantly social, that they are always active, and that they do not provide a direct route from nature to ideas. The main aspects of this theory is seen throughout this chapter. The technology that has been created to make virtual learning easier and more engaging was shaped by teachers, students, and parents’ biases based on what they believed to be the best way of learning virtually. Also, science and technology are very active during this time and are constantly changing since as we begin to test new ways of learning, our high schools are learning what methods are efficient and what is not, changing them accordingly. Lastly, the technology being used is not an actual description of nature and is not displaying the normal techniques that would be used to teach high school students.

To conclude, COVID-19 has impacted the high schools around our country significantly. But, through the technology available to students, the education system has been able to reach new limits and introduce new ways of learning using virtual-technology that have never been used before. Now, new ways of learning will be implemented into school days when things go back to normal. Although there are rising concerns about students not performing as well or being prepared, high schools around the country have been able to adapt to a one of a kind situation and have been able to continue to teach through the learning technology that is available to our society. Students’ social interaction and mental health has also shifted during this time, but communities are coming together to support one another and create new ways to interact so that each student feels happy. COVID-19 has challenged and modified the way high schools are now functioning, by forcing learning technology to advance rapidly, having to introduce and create new ways of learning, and adjusting the education system to the new norms of our society. Through this global pandemic, we’ve seen how strong our education system in high schools really is.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Operating schools during COVID-19: CDC’s Considerations. ” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/schools-childcare/schools.html .

Chick, Robert C., et al. “Using Technology to Maintain the Education of Residents during the COVID-19 Pandemic.”  Journal of Surgical Education , vol. 77, no. 4, 2020, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1931720420300842.

Fox, Michelle. “Go to college or skip it? High school students face a new reality due to coronavirus.” CNBC, 24 Apr. 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/24/high-school-students-face-a-new-reality-due-to-coronavirus.html.

Hernandez, Vivian. “Creating Online Clubs for Students During Remote Learning.” Edutopia,  28 Sep. 2020, https://www.edutopia.org/article/creating-online-clubs-students-during-remote-learning .

Kreitz, Mary. “The Impact of COVID-19 on high school students.” Child & Adolescent Behavioral Health, 2020,   https://www.childandadolescent.org/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-high-school-students/.

Lieberman, Mark. “Zoom Use Skyrockets During Coronavirus Pandemic, Prompting Wave of Problems for Schoo ls .” E ducationWeek , 3 Apr. 2020, https://www.edweek.org/technology/zoom-use-skyrockets-during-coronavirus-pandemic-prompting-wave-of-problems-for-schools/2020/04  Accessed 4 Dec. 2020.

Wawa, Brenda. “COVID-19 and Higher Education: Interview with Dr. Michael Krüger .” Academic Impact, 2020,   https://academicimpact.un.org/content/covid-19-and-higher-education-interview-dr-michael-kr%C3%BCger .

“Woman in Pink Shirt Sitting by the Table While Smiling” by Julia M Cameron is in the Public Domain

“Photo of Child Sitting by the Table While Looking at the Imac” by Julia M Cameron is in the P ublic Domain

COVID-19: Success Within Devastation Copyright © 2020 by Melissa Kostecki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Covid 19 Essay in English

Essay on Covid -19: In a very short amount of time, coronavirus has spread globally. It has had an enormous impact on people's lives, economy, and societies all around the world, affecting every country. Governments have had to take severe measures to try and contain the pandemic. The virus has altered our way of life in many ways, including its effects on our health and our economy. Here are a few sample essays on ‘CoronaVirus’.

100 Words Essay on Covid 19

200 words essay on covid 19, 500 words essay on covid 19.

COVID-19 or Corona Virus is a novel coronavirus that was first identified in 2019. It is similar to other coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, but it is more contagious and has caused more severe respiratory illness in people who have been infected. The novel coronavirus became a global pandemic in a very short period of time. It has affected lives, economies and societies across the world, leaving no country untouched. The virus has caused governments to take drastic measures to try and contain it. From health implications to economic and social ramifications, COVID-19 impacted every part of our lives. It has been more than 2 years since the pandemic hit and the world is still recovering from its effects.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the world has been impacted in a number of ways. For one, the global economy has taken a hit as businesses have been forced to close their doors. This has led to widespread job losses and an increase in poverty levels around the world. Additionally, countries have had to impose strict travel restrictions in an attempt to contain the virus, which has resulted in a decrease in tourism and international trade. Furthermore, the pandemic has put immense pressure on healthcare systems globally, as hospitals have been overwhelmed with patients suffering from the virus. Lastly, the outbreak has led to a general feeling of anxiety and uncertainty, as people are fearful of contracting the disease.

My Experience of COVID-19

I still remember how abruptly colleges and schools shut down in March 2020. I was a college student at that time and I was under the impression that everything would go back to normal in a few weeks. I could not have been more wrong. The situation only got worse every week and the government had to impose a lockdown. There were so many restrictions in place. For example, we had to wear face masks whenever we left the house, and we could only go out for essential errands. Restaurants and shops were only allowed to operate at take-out capacity, and many businesses were shut down.

In the current scenario, coronavirus is dominating all aspects of our lives. The coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc upon people’s lives, altering the way we live and work in a very short amount of time. It has revolutionised how we think about health care, education, and even social interaction. This virus has had long-term implications on our society, including its impact on mental health, economic stability, and global politics. But we as individuals can help to mitigate these effects by taking personal responsibility to protect themselves and those around them from infection.

Effects of CoronaVirus on Education

The outbreak of coronavirus has had a significant impact on education systems around the world. In China, where the virus originated, all schools and universities were closed for several weeks in an effort to contain the spread of the disease. Many other countries have followed suit, either closing schools altogether or suspending classes for a period of time.

This has resulted in a major disruption to the education of millions of students. Some have been able to continue their studies online, but many have not had access to the internet or have not been able to afford the costs associated with it. This has led to a widening of the digital divide between those who can afford to continue their education online and those who cannot.

The closure of schools has also had a negative impact on the mental health of many students. With no face-to-face contact with friends and teachers, some students have felt isolated and anxious. This has been compounded by the worry and uncertainty surrounding the virus itself.

The situation with coronavirus has improved and schools have been reopened but students are still catching up with the gap of 2 years that the pandemic created. In the meantime, governments and educational institutions are working together to find ways to support students and ensure that they are able to continue their education despite these difficult circumstances.

Effects of CoronaVirus on Economy

The outbreak of the coronavirus has had a significant impact on the global economy. The virus, which originated in China, has spread to over two hundred countries, resulting in widespread panic and a decrease in global trade. As a result of the outbreak, many businesses have been forced to close their doors, leading to a rise in unemployment. In addition, the stock market has taken a severe hit.

Effects of CoronaVirus on Health

The effects that coronavirus has on one's health are still being studied and researched as the virus continues to spread throughout the world. However, some of the potential effects on health that have been observed thus far include respiratory problems, fever, and coughing. In severe cases, pneumonia, kidney failure, and death can occur. It is important for people who think they may have been exposed to the virus to seek medical attention immediately so that they can be treated properly and avoid any serious complications. There is no specific cure or treatment for coronavirus at this time, but there are ways to help ease symptoms and prevent the virus from spreading.

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An expert in plumbing is aware of building regulations and safety standards and works to make sure these standards are upheld. Testing pipes for leakage using air pressure and other gauges, and also the ability to construct new pipe systems by cutting, fitting, measuring and threading pipes are some of the other more involved aspects of plumbing. Individuals in the plumber career path are self-employed or work for a small business employing less than ten people, though some might find working for larger entities or the government more desirable.

Construction Manager

Individuals who opt for a career as construction managers have a senior-level management role offered in construction firms. Responsibilities in the construction management career path are assigning tasks to workers, inspecting their work, and coordinating with other professionals including architects, subcontractors, and building services engineers.

Urban Planner

Urban Planning careers revolve around the idea of developing a plan to use the land optimally, without affecting the environment. Urban planning jobs are offered to those candidates who are skilled in making the right use of land to distribute the growing population, to create various communities. 

Urban planning careers come with the opportunity to make changes to the existing cities and towns. They identify various community needs and make short and long-term plans accordingly.

Highway Engineer

Highway Engineer Job Description:  A Highway Engineer is a civil engineer who specialises in planning and building thousands of miles of roads that support connectivity and allow transportation across the country. He or she ensures that traffic management schemes are effectively planned concerning economic sustainability and successful implementation.

Environmental Engineer

Individuals who opt for a career as an environmental engineer are construction professionals who utilise the skills and knowledge of biology, soil science, chemistry and the concept of engineering to design and develop projects that serve as solutions to various environmental problems. 

Naval Architect

A Naval Architect is a professional who designs, produces and repairs safe and sea-worthy surfaces or underwater structures. A Naval Architect stays involved in creating and designing ships, ferries, submarines and yachts with implementation of various principles such as gravity, ideal hull form, buoyancy and stability. 

Orthotist and Prosthetist

Orthotists and Prosthetists are professionals who provide aid to patients with disabilities. They fix them to artificial limbs (prosthetics) and help them to regain stability. There are times when people lose their limbs in an accident. In some other occasions, they are born without a limb or orthopaedic impairment. Orthotists and prosthetists play a crucial role in their lives with fixing them to assistive devices and provide mobility.

Veterinary Doctor

Pathologist.

A career in pathology in India is filled with several responsibilities as it is a medical branch and affects human lives. The demand for pathologists has been increasing over the past few years as people are getting more aware of different diseases. Not only that, but an increase in population and lifestyle changes have also contributed to the increase in a pathologist’s demand. The pathology careers provide an extremely huge number of opportunities and if you want to be a part of the medical field you can consider being a pathologist. If you want to know more about a career in pathology in India then continue reading this article.

Speech Therapist

Gynaecologist.

Gynaecology can be defined as the study of the female body. The job outlook for gynaecology is excellent since there is evergreen demand for one because of their responsibility of dealing with not only women’s health but also fertility and pregnancy issues. Although most women prefer to have a women obstetrician gynaecologist as their doctor, men also explore a career as a gynaecologist and there are ample amounts of male doctors in the field who are gynaecologists and aid women during delivery and childbirth. 

An oncologist is a specialised doctor responsible for providing medical care to patients diagnosed with cancer. He or she uses several therapies to control the cancer and its effect on the human body such as chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiation therapy and biopsy. An oncologist designs a treatment plan based on a pathology report after diagnosing the type of cancer and where it is spreading inside the body.

Audiologist

The audiologist career involves audiology professionals who are responsible to treat hearing loss and proactively preventing the relevant damage. Individuals who opt for a career as an audiologist use various testing strategies with the aim to determine if someone has a normal sensitivity to sounds or not. After the identification of hearing loss, a hearing doctor is required to determine which sections of the hearing are affected, to what extent they are affected, and where the wound causing the hearing loss is found. As soon as the hearing loss is identified, the patients are provided with recommendations for interventions and rehabilitation such as hearing aids, cochlear implants, and appropriate medical referrals. While audiology is a branch of science that studies and researches hearing, balance, and related disorders.

Hospital Administrator

The hospital Administrator is in charge of organising and supervising the daily operations of medical services and facilities. This organising includes managing of organisation’s staff and its members in service, budgets, service reports, departmental reporting and taking reminders of patient care and services.

For an individual who opts for a career as an actor, the primary responsibility is to completely speak to the character he or she is playing and to persuade the crowd that the character is genuine by connecting with them and bringing them into the story. This applies to significant roles and littler parts, as all roles join to make an effective creation. Here in this article, we will discuss how to become an actor in India, actor exams, actor salary in India, and actor jobs. 

Individuals who opt for a career as acrobats create and direct original routines for themselves, in addition to developing interpretations of existing routines. The work of circus acrobats can be seen in a variety of performance settings, including circus, reality shows, sports events like the Olympics, movies and commercials. Individuals who opt for a career as acrobats must be prepared to face rejections and intermittent periods of work. The creativity of acrobats may extend to other aspects of the performance. For example, acrobats in the circus may work with gym trainers, celebrities or collaborate with other professionals to enhance such performance elements as costume and or maybe at the teaching end of the career.

Video Game Designer

Career as a video game designer is filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. A video game designer is someone who is involved in the process of creating a game from day one. He or she is responsible for fulfilling duties like designing the character of the game, the several levels involved, plot, art and similar other elements. Individuals who opt for a career as a video game designer may also write the codes for the game using different programming languages.

Depending on the video game designer job description and experience they may also have to lead a team and do the early testing of the game in order to suggest changes and find loopholes.

Radio Jockey

Radio Jockey is an exciting, promising career and a great challenge for music lovers. If you are really interested in a career as radio jockey, then it is very important for an RJ to have an automatic, fun, and friendly personality. If you want to get a job done in this field, a strong command of the language and a good voice are always good things. Apart from this, in order to be a good radio jockey, you will also listen to good radio jockeys so that you can understand their style and later make your own by practicing.

A career as radio jockey has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. If you want to know more about a career as radio jockey, and how to become a radio jockey then continue reading the article.

Choreographer

The word “choreography" actually comes from Greek words that mean “dance writing." Individuals who opt for a career as a choreographer create and direct original dances, in addition to developing interpretations of existing dances. A Choreographer dances and utilises his or her creativity in other aspects of dance performance. For example, he or she may work with the music director to select music or collaborate with other famous choreographers to enhance such performance elements as lighting, costume and set design.

Videographer

Multimedia specialist.

A multimedia specialist is a media professional who creates, audio, videos, graphic image files, computer animations for multimedia applications. He or she is responsible for planning, producing, and maintaining websites and applications. 

Social Media Manager

A career as social media manager involves implementing the company’s or brand’s marketing plan across all social media channels. Social media managers help in building or improving a brand’s or a company’s website traffic, build brand awareness, create and implement marketing and brand strategy. Social media managers are key to important social communication as well.

Copy Writer

In a career as a copywriter, one has to consult with the client and understand the brief well. A career as a copywriter has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. Several new mediums of advertising are opening therefore making it a lucrative career choice. Students can pursue various copywriter courses such as Journalism , Advertising , Marketing Management . Here, we have discussed how to become a freelance copywriter, copywriter career path, how to become a copywriter in India, and copywriting career outlook. 

Careers in journalism are filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. One cannot afford to miss out on the details. As it is the small details that provide insights into a story. Depending on those insights a journalist goes about writing a news article. A journalism career can be stressful at times but if you are someone who is passionate about it then it is the right choice for you. If you want to know more about the media field and journalist career then continue reading this article.

For publishing books, newspapers, magazines and digital material, editorial and commercial strategies are set by publishers. Individuals in publishing career paths make choices about the markets their businesses will reach and the type of content that their audience will be served. Individuals in book publisher careers collaborate with editorial staff, designers, authors, and freelance contributors who develop and manage the creation of content.

In a career as a vlogger, one generally works for himself or herself. However, once an individual has gained viewership there are several brands and companies that approach them for paid collaboration. It is one of those fields where an individual can earn well while following his or her passion. 

Ever since internet costs got reduced the viewership for these types of content has increased on a large scale. Therefore, a career as a vlogger has a lot to offer. If you want to know more about the Vlogger eligibility, roles and responsibilities then continue reading the article. 

Individuals in the editor career path is an unsung hero of the news industry who polishes the language of the news stories provided by stringers, reporters, copywriters and content writers and also news agencies. Individuals who opt for a career as an editor make it more persuasive, concise and clear for readers. In this article, we will discuss the details of the editor's career path such as how to become an editor in India, editor salary in India and editor skills and qualities.

Linguistic meaning is related to language or Linguistics which is the study of languages. A career as a linguistic meaning, a profession that is based on the scientific study of language, and it's a very broad field with many specialities. Famous linguists work in academia, researching and teaching different areas of language, such as phonetics (sounds), syntax (word order) and semantics (meaning). 

Other researchers focus on specialities like computational linguistics, which seeks to better match human and computer language capacities, or applied linguistics, which is concerned with improving language education. Still, others work as language experts for the government, advertising companies, dictionary publishers and various other private enterprises. Some might work from home as freelance linguists. Philologist, phonologist, and dialectician are some of Linguist synonym. Linguists can study French , German , Italian . 

Public Relation Executive

Travel journalist.

The career of a travel journalist is full of passion, excitement and responsibility. Journalism as a career could be challenging at times, but if you're someone who has been genuinely enthusiastic about all this, then it is the best decision for you. Travel journalism jobs are all about insightful, artfully written, informative narratives designed to cover the travel industry. Travel Journalist is someone who explores, gathers and presents information as a news article.

Quality Controller

A quality controller plays a crucial role in an organisation. He or she is responsible for performing quality checks on manufactured products. He or she identifies the defects in a product and rejects the product. 

A quality controller records detailed information about products with defects and sends it to the supervisor or plant manager to take necessary actions to improve the production process.

Production Manager

Merchandiser.

A QA Lead is in charge of the QA Team. The role of QA Lead comes with the responsibility of assessing services and products in order to determine that he or she meets the quality standards. He or she develops, implements and manages test plans. 

Metallurgical Engineer

A metallurgical engineer is a professional who studies and produces materials that bring power to our world. He or she extracts metals from ores and rocks and transforms them into alloys, high-purity metals and other materials used in developing infrastructure, transportation and healthcare equipment. 

Azure Administrator

An Azure Administrator is a professional responsible for implementing, monitoring, and maintaining Azure Solutions. He or she manages cloud infrastructure service instances and various cloud servers as well as sets up public and private cloud systems. 

AWS Solution Architect

An AWS Solution Architect is someone who specializes in developing and implementing cloud computing systems. He or she has a good understanding of the various aspects of cloud computing and can confidently deploy and manage their systems. He or she troubleshoots the issues and evaluates the risk from the third party. 

Computer Programmer

Careers in computer programming primarily refer to the systematic act of writing code and moreover include wider computer science areas. The word 'programmer' or 'coder' has entered into practice with the growing number of newly self-taught tech enthusiasts. Computer programming careers involve the use of designs created by software developers and engineers and transforming them into commands that can be implemented by computers. These commands result in regular usage of social media sites, word-processing applications and browsers.

ITSM Manager

Information security manager.

Individuals in the information security manager career path involves in overseeing and controlling all aspects of computer security. The IT security manager job description includes planning and carrying out security measures to protect the business data and information from corruption, theft, unauthorised access, and deliberate attack 

Business Intelligence Developer

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How to Write About Coronavirus in a College Essay

Students can share how they navigated life during the coronavirus pandemic in a full-length essay or an optional supplement.

Writing About COVID-19 in College Essays

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Experts say students should be honest and not limit themselves to merely their experiences with the pandemic.

The global impact of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, means colleges and prospective students alike are in for an admissions cycle like no other. Both face unprecedented challenges and questions as they grapple with their respective futures amid the ongoing fallout of the pandemic.

Colleges must examine applicants without the aid of standardized test scores for many – a factor that prompted many schools to go test-optional for now . Even grades, a significant component of a college application, may be hard to interpret with some high schools adopting pass-fail classes last spring due to the pandemic. Major college admissions factors are suddenly skewed.

"I can't help but think other (admissions) factors are going to matter more," says Ethan Sawyer, founder of the College Essay Guy, a website that offers free and paid essay-writing resources.

College essays and letters of recommendation , Sawyer says, are likely to carry more weight than ever in this admissions cycle. And many essays will likely focus on how the pandemic shaped students' lives throughout an often tumultuous 2020.

But before writing a college essay focused on the coronavirus, students should explore whether it's the best topic for them.

Writing About COVID-19 for a College Application

Much of daily life has been colored by the coronavirus. Virtual learning is the norm at many colleges and high schools, many extracurriculars have vanished and social lives have stalled for students complying with measures to stop the spread of COVID-19.

"For some young people, the pandemic took away what they envisioned as their senior year," says Robert Alexander, dean of admissions, financial aid and enrollment management at the University of Rochester in New York. "Maybe that's a spot on a varsity athletic team or the lead role in the fall play. And it's OK for them to mourn what should have been and what they feel like they lost, but more important is how are they making the most of the opportunities they do have?"

That question, Alexander says, is what colleges want answered if students choose to address COVID-19 in their college essay.

But the question of whether a student should write about the coronavirus is tricky. The answer depends largely on the student.

"In general, I don't think students should write about COVID-19 in their main personal statement for their application," Robin Miller, master college admissions counselor at IvyWise, a college counseling company, wrote in an email.

"Certainly, there may be exceptions to this based on a student's individual experience, but since the personal essay is the main place in the application where the student can really allow their voice to be heard and share insight into who they are as an individual, there are likely many other topics they can choose to write about that are more distinctive and unique than COVID-19," Miller says.

Opinions among admissions experts vary on whether to write about the likely popular topic of the pandemic.

"If your essay communicates something positive, unique, and compelling about you in an interesting and eloquent way, go for it," Carolyn Pippen, principal college admissions counselor at IvyWise, wrote in an email. She adds that students shouldn't be dissuaded from writing about a topic merely because it's common, noting that "topics are bound to repeat, no matter how hard we try to avoid it."

Above all, she urges honesty.

"If your experience within the context of the pandemic has been truly unique, then write about that experience, and the standing out will take care of itself," Pippen says. "If your experience has been generally the same as most other students in your context, then trying to find a unique angle can easily cross the line into exploiting a tragedy, or at least appearing as though you have."

But focusing entirely on the pandemic can limit a student to a single story and narrow who they are in an application, Sawyer says. "There are so many wonderful possibilities for what you can say about yourself outside of your experience within the pandemic."

He notes that passions, strengths, career interests and personal identity are among the multitude of essay topic options available to applicants and encourages them to probe their values to help determine the topic that matters most to them – and write about it.

That doesn't mean the pandemic experience has to be ignored if applicants feel the need to write about it.

Writing About Coronavirus in Main and Supplemental Essays

Students can choose to write a full-length college essay on the coronavirus or summarize their experience in a shorter form.

To help students explain how the pandemic affected them, The Common App has added an optional section to address this topic. Applicants have 250 words to describe their pandemic experience and the personal and academic impact of COVID-19.

"That's not a trick question, and there's no right or wrong answer," Alexander says. Colleges want to know, he adds, how students navigated the pandemic, how they prioritized their time, what responsibilities they took on and what they learned along the way.

If students can distill all of the above information into 250 words, there's likely no need to write about it in a full-length college essay, experts say. And applicants whose lives were not heavily altered by the pandemic may even choose to skip the optional COVID-19 question.

"This space is best used to discuss hardship and/or significant challenges that the student and/or the student's family experienced as a result of COVID-19 and how they have responded to those difficulties," Miller notes. Using the section to acknowledge a lack of impact, she adds, "could be perceived as trite and lacking insight, despite the good intentions of the applicant."

To guard against this lack of awareness, Sawyer encourages students to tap someone they trust to review their writing , whether it's the 250-word Common App response or the full-length essay.

Experts tend to agree that the short-form approach to this as an essay topic works better, but there are exceptions. And if a student does have a coronavirus story that he or she feels must be told, Alexander encourages the writer to be authentic in the essay.

"My advice for an essay about COVID-19 is the same as my advice about an essay for any topic – and that is, don't write what you think we want to read or hear," Alexander says. "Write what really changed you and that story that now is yours and yours alone to tell."

Sawyer urges students to ask themselves, "What's the sentence that only I can write?" He also encourages students to remember that the pandemic is only a chapter of their lives and not the whole book.

Miller, who cautions against writing a full-length essay on the coronavirus, says that if students choose to do so they should have a conversation with their high school counselor about whether that's the right move. And if students choose to proceed with COVID-19 as a topic, she says they need to be clear, detailed and insightful about what they learned and how they adapted along the way.

"Approaching the essay in this manner will provide important balance while demonstrating personal growth and vulnerability," Miller says.

Pippen encourages students to remember that they are in an unprecedented time for college admissions.

"It is important to keep in mind with all of these (admission) factors that no colleges have ever had to consider them this way in the selection process, if at all," Pippen says. "They have had very little time to calibrate their evaluations of different application components within their offices, let alone across institutions. This means that colleges will all be handling the admissions process a little bit differently, and their approaches may even evolve over the course of the admissions cycle."

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Writing about COVID-19 in a college admission essay

by: Venkates Swaminathan | Updated: September 14, 2020

Print article

For students applying to college using the CommonApp, there are several different places where students and counselors can address the pandemic’s impact. The different sections have differing goals. You must understand how to use each section for its appropriate use.

The CommonApp COVID-19 question

First, the CommonApp this year has an additional question specifically about COVID-19 :

Community disruptions such as COVID-19 and natural disasters can have deep and long-lasting impacts. If you need it, this space is yours to describe those impacts. Colleges care about the effects on your health and well-being, safety, family circumstances, future plans, and education, including access to reliable technology and quiet study spaces. Please use this space to describe how these events have impacted you.

This question seeks to understand the adversity that students may have had to face due to the pandemic, the move to online education, or the shelter-in-place rules. You don’t have to answer this question if the impact on you wasn’t particularly severe. Some examples of things students should discuss include:

• The student or a family member had COVID-19 or suffered other illnesses due to confinement during the pandemic.
• The candidate had to deal with personal or family issues, such as abusive living situations or other safety concerns
• The student suffered from a lack of internet access and other online learning challenges.
• Students who dealt with problems registering for or taking standardized tests and AP exams.

Jeff Schiffman of the Tulane University admissions office has a blog about this section. He recommends students ask themselves several questions as they go about answering this section:

• Are my experiences different from others’?
• Are there noticeable changes on my transcript?
• Am I aware of my privilege?
• Am I specific? Am I explaining rather than complaining?
• Is this information being included elsewhere on my application?

If you do answer this section, be brief and to-the-point.

Counselor recommendations and school profiles

Second, counselors will, in their counselor forms and school profiles on the CommonApp, address how the school handled the pandemic and how it might have affected students, specifically as it relates to:

• Grading scales and policies
• Graduation requirements
• Instructional methods
• Schedules and course offerings
• Testing requirements
• Your academic calendar
• Other extenuating circumstances

Students don’t have to mention these matters in their application unless something unusual happened.

Writing about COVID-19 in your main essay

Write about your experiences during the pandemic in your main college essay if your experience is personal, relevant, and the most important thing to discuss in your college admission essay. That you had to stay home and study online isn’t sufficient, as millions of other students faced the same situation. But sometimes, it can be appropriate and helpful to write about something related to the pandemic in your essay. For example:

• One student developed a website for a local comic book store. The store might not have survived without the ability for people to order comic books online. The student had a long-standing relationship with the store, and it was an institution that created a community for students who otherwise felt left out.
• One student started a YouTube channel to help other students with academic subjects he was very familiar with and began tutoring others.
• Some students used their extra time that was the result of the stay-at-home orders to take online courses pursuing topics they are genuinely interested in or developing new interests, like a foreign language or music.

Experiences like this can be good topics for the CommonApp essay as long as they reflect something genuinely important about the student. For many students whose lives have been shaped by this pandemic, it can be a critical part of their college application.

Want more? Read 6 ways to improve a college essay , What the &%$! should I write about in my college essay , and Just how important is a college admissions essay? .

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How Schools Survived Two Years of COVID-19

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Just over two years ago, before COVID-19 began killing 950,000 Americans and upending public education, Lauren DeNicola led her 9th grade biology students at Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School in suburban New Jersey through a new computer-based learning simulation.

The exercise was called ‘ Waterville .’ It was designed to teach children about complex systems. Farmers in a virtual town wanted more land to cultivate. But local fisherman worried about disturbing a nearby pond that hosted an annual bass-fishing tournament. Your job, DeNicola told the teenagers as she slid around her windowless classroom, crowded with kidney-shaped lab desks bolted to the tile floor, is to model scenarios in search of a solution that works for the farmers but doesn’t disrupt the delicate balance of algae, minnows, and smallmouth bass in the pond.

“All of us are going to gather data on all three of these organisms over time,” said the thirty-something teacher, then in her 13th year in the classroom. We’ll be explorers together, she added.

For a moment, it seemed as though the school district’s own carefully calibrated ecosystem was stable and secure. The project was exactly the kind of lesson favored by Scotch Plains-Fanwood Superintendent Joan Mast, hired just that summer to boost the creativity and critical thinking skills of the towns’ 5,500 students. It also showed why local parents like Suresh Srinivasan and Rema Suresh remained so loyal to the district and its educators, who had already helped launch their older son Rohan on to college and were similarly invested in helping their then-12-year-old daughter Saanvi pursue her passions, which ranged from astronomy to engineering.

“She made her own name very quickly,” Rema Suresh said. “Now, Rohan is known as Saanvi’s brother.”

Over the next two weeks, however, the first 41 Americans died from COVID-19. Another 1,600 tested positive. On Wednesday, March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic. The magnitude of what was unfolding hit Mast when she was forced to cancel an exchange program involving several students from Italy whose plane tickets had already been purchased. That Friday, students swarmed principal David Heisey inside the high school’s noisy cafeteria, thrusting their phones forward so he could see the social media posts from surrounding districts ordering all their schools closed. At nearby Park Middle, Saanvi and her classmates cheered when Scotch Plains-Fanwood announced it would follow suit.

It felt like a little vacation. Maybe the disruption would last two weeks.

More than 24 months later, everyone is still scraping and clawing to get back to what was. Scotch Plains-Fanwood is just one of the country’s 13,000 school districts. It is relatively wealthy and has borne just a sliver of the damage COVID-19 has inflicted on schools. But even the journey of the more fortunate helps illuminate an extraordinary era of loss and grief, anger and outrage, everyday heroism and surprising innovations—especially when combined with an analysis of more than two dozen surveys of America’s educators administered by the EdWeek Research Center since the outset of the pandemic. One of the earliest, administered online in March of 2020, found a public education system that had been punched in the mouth. Nearly all of the nation’s school districts were shuttering their physical buildings. More than half weren’t yet running online classes for all students. Principals and superintendents were frantically trying to buy hand sanitizer and deliver meals to hungry children.

65% of survey respondents said schools should focus on slowing the spread of COVID-19, even if it meant staying closed.

In Scotch Plains-Fanwood, Mast called a day of emergency meetings.

“What I remember was the rallying, everyone coming together,” the superintendent said. “People were just like, ‘OK, we’re going to change how we do absolutely everything.’”

The pandemic disrupts the public education ecosystem

A picturesque Victorian train station built in the 1890s offers a direct line from Scotch Plains and Fanwood into New York City, just 25 miles to the east.

The towns have well-tended ranch and colonial homes surrounding wide tree-lined streets. The public schools are consistently ranked among the top 10 percent in the state. For decades, the middle-class families who live here have marked time and progress through a series of cherished rituals, from first days of kindergarten to Friday night football games to graduation ceremonies on the field outside the high school.

All over America, though, those moments began disappearing when the pandemic took hold. During the spring of 2020, 77 percent of district leaders surveyed by the EdWeek Research Center reported that they’d done away with all class trips. Seventy-one percent said athletic events were canceled. Forty-one percent wouldn’t hold a prom. Instead, thousands of teachers and administrators were getting trained on how to provide grief counseling over Zoom.

The sting hit Scotch Plains-Fanwood when the high school’s production of Chicago was shut down mid-run. Sports, extracurriculars, and state tests soon followed. People in the towns watched in stunned disbelief as neighboring counties set up field hospitals and mobile morgues. For weeks and then months, students like Saanvi Suresh were stuck in their bedrooms, working alone on assignments that had been posted in Google Classroom. The district tried to boost morale by hosting a virtual crazy sock day and reimagining graduation as a motorcade. It wasn’t the same.

“If you had a joke to share, it was hard to do it,” Saanvi said.

The fallout soon exposed the underside of the public education system. Concerns about children “falling behind” spread nearly as fast as the virus, casting a harsh light on the deeply ingrained but often-unspoken American idea that schooling is a kind of race that some children will win and others will lose. In well-to-do enclaves like Scotch Plains and Fanwood, long home to the winners, a critical mass of families began to view the disruption of the established order as an existential threat.

“From March until June, there was a certain level of acceptance,” said Mast, the superintendent. “But when those losses started becoming felt, I think that’s when the emotion started coming out in the community.”

That summer of 2020, the district asked families what they wanted for the coming school year. Twenty-one percent hoped to keep their children at home. Thirty-six percent hoped for a return to in-person learning. Forty-three percent favored some kind of hybrid approach. The divide was mirrored in the EdWeek Research Center’s survey data, which showed that 52 percent of the nation’s educators wanted schools to physically re-open while 48 percent did not.

91% of survey respondents said teaching children to read remotely with digital materials was more challenging than in-person with print materials.

Absent clear guidance from federal, state, or county authorities, Mast and her team outlined a complicated plan to bring staggered cohorts of students back into Scotch Plains-Fanwood school buildings for a few days a week, four hours a day.

The first angry petition in support of full-time in-person learning appeared online three days later.

Tempers were still short a week later when the superintendent delivered more bad news.

Like other school systems around the country, Scotch Plains-Fanwood was clambering to implement a slew of new safety measures, from temperature checks to one-way hallways.

The district’s maintenance staff warned that the HVAC systems in the schools weren’t equipped to trap COVID-19 particles. Mast spent hours trying to decipher reports full of unfamiliar lingo about MERV-13 air filters and aerosol virus transmission. On August 13, Democratic New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy issued an executive order allowing schools to start all-remote if they couldn’t meet necessary safety requirements. The superintendent decided to err on the side of caution.

“I became fixated on how do I know that every room is a safe place to put students and teachers,” Mast said.

The resulting HVAC analysis and repairs ultimately cost the district more than $709,000. They also delayed the return to any in-person schooling by months. Furious parents escalated their protests from online petitions to an in-person rally outside the local middle school .

“Most of us chose hybrid. That choice was taken away from us,” one local mom told local news outlet TAPintoSPF .

Saanvi’s parents struggled to understand the anger.

“I can’t speak for other people,” Rema Suresh said. “But what I saw was teachers going above and beyond to keep students engaged.”

Still, by October 2020, the district had lost nearly 200 students. The district brought its youngest children back on a hybrid schedule, then quickly had to shut back down when 15 students and staff members tested positive for COVID-19 , causing 84 people to be placed into quarantine. Once again, the superintendent was scrambling, this time to cover teacher-less classrooms and coordinate the schedules of staff members who lived in neighboring communities dealing with shutdowns and quarantines of their own.

“The problem became more complex,” Mast said. “Not only was it more complexity in our system , but the interconnectivity with other local systems.”

By that point, however, some local residents were no longer willing to extend the district any grace. On December 23, 2020, parents filed a lawsuit seeking to force Scotch Plains-Fanwood schools to reopen for in-person learning.

“We have lost all trust in Dr. Mast and the Board of Education,” parent and plaintiff Danielle Wildstein told TAPintoSPF . “We want to preserve what’s left of the school year.”

A year of constant change, mounting exhaustion, and federal lifelines

Teacher Lauren DeNicola was one of thousands caught in the verbal and legal crossfire.

She lived in nearby Sayreville, N.J., just a mile from her childhood home, which her mom was terrified to leave because she suffered from an autoimmune condition. DeNicola also had a 3rd grader and preschooler of her own, both of whom demanded constant attention to make it through their own half-days of remote schooling.

“It was an emotional roller-coaster,” she said.

Still, DeNicola was a teacher at heart. After concluding that things weren’t going back to normal anytime soon, she spent the summer of 2020 taking an online course on remote teaching offered by an Australian university. She also spent hours in virtual professional-development sessions hosted by the Michigan Association of Biology Teachers and taking part in long discussions in a Facebook group for biology teachers.

“My personality is that I like to go into things very prepared,” she said.

She wasn’t alone. Teachers at Park Middle School arranged for remote students like Saanvi to do backyard photography shoots and virtual lab experiments on kinetic energy. They even created a new club called Enchanted Engineering. Saanvi sketched out designs for a flying hot-air umbrella, then used her new invention as a literary device to rewrite the ending of her favorite fairy tale.

“Cinderella longed to go back home, so she ran down the steps and reached for her umbrella,” she wrote. “The prince wondered who this maiden was and watched her walk—no…FLY off with her umbrella into the midnight sky.”

For all the bright spots, however, the burden of constant uncertainty kept growing heavier. The EdWeek Research Center found that thousands of districts were implementing a hodgepodge of remote and hybrid instructional models, many of which shifted from week to week throughout the 2020-21 school year.

U.S. School Learning Models, August 2020 - May 2021

Explore the interactive map . Courtesy of COVID-19 School Data Hub

The country also seemed to be splintering. Debates raged over whether to force teachers to work from their classrooms and students to turn on their laptop cameras and everyone to wear masks in school buildings.

All the while, instruction kept suffering. Eighty-six percent of educators told the EdWeek Research Center they were relying more heavily on software as a primary teaching tool. Eighty percent reported lower student engagement. Sixty-nine percent reported ongoing challenges with unreliable student Wi-Fi. Sixty percent said they were doing less small group and one-on-one teaching.

The problems didn’t stop when the calendar flipped to 2021. Scotch Plains-Fanwood finally brought middle and high school students back into school buildings on January 19. That same day, the district was hit with a cyberattack that shut down its computer network and caused schools to close for a day.

Amid the chaos, DeNicola prepared to teach the Waterville simulation for a second time. The logistical and technical challenges had multiplied by several orders of magnitude.

74% of survey respondents approved President Biden's call to get all schools back to full-time in-person learning within 100 days.

Some of her students were still learning entirely from home. DeNicola had to stand behind her desk for entire 77-minute periods to make sure they could see her on their computer screens. The kids in her classroom, meanwhile, sat surrounded by clear shields. They couldn’t share pencils or lab equipment, and they struggled to stay six feet apart because the lab tables were fixed in place. Even the 3,350 new iPads distributed by the district were a source of confusion. Many of DeNicola’s students were still using their personal laptops, creating a crazy technological stew for teachers to navigate.

When the lesson began, a significant chunk of the class was just silent black squares on DeNicola’s computer screen. The enthusiastic chatter from the year before was just a memory. Students clicked ‘run’ expecting to see an animation that showed the Waterville ecosystem evolving over time, allowing them to track changes in the number of algae, minnows, and smallmouth bass living in the pond as its oxygen levels fluctuated. Instead, a glitch caused an image of a giant blue fish to take over the screens of those using iPads.

“The whole idea of complex systems really hit me differently,” DeNicola said.

Mercifully, though, lifelines soon began to arrive. Congress allocated more than $190 billion to the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund, helping schools pay for tutors and cleaning supplies and millions of computing devices. The $1.8 million that came to Scotch Plains-Fanwood schools was quickly plowed into mental health supports, technology training, and a massive contact-tracing effort.

New vaccines also raised the nation’s spirits. By early April 2021, two-thirds of teachers and administrators told the EdWeek Research Center they’d been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. By the end of the month, that figure had shot up to 80 percent.

Still, life in America’s schools was hardly back to normal. Nationally, 92 percent of teachers said their job was more stressful than pre-pandemic. In New Jersey, 534 of the state’s 811 public school districts were still doing hybrid learning. At Scotch Plains-Fanwood High, Principal Heisey fought off despair as he watched masked teenagers march silently in single-file lines down the school’s one-way hallways, unsure how to connect with their friends in the somber new environment.

“We didn’t even serve lunch,” the principal said.

Saanvi Suresh was among those who elected to keep learning from home. From her bedroom, she helped convince the Scotch Plains-Fanwood STEAM Club to restart its Junior Solar Sprint program. She also used a Raspberry Pi microcontroller, an ultrasonic distance sensor, and computer code to create a musical instrument called a theremin, recording herself playing a haunting orchestra by waving her hands in front of the device.

“I realized how everything had to work together for the circuit to function seamlessly,” Saanvi wrote in a reflection essay for the project.

Finally, with 10 days left in 8th grade, she worked up the courage to step foot back inside Park Middle with her teachers. Saanvi said she’d never seen their legs before.

Just before the school year ended, NASA announced it would run a student competition called TechRise . Winners would get to design experiments to be tested on a rocket launched into suborbital spaceflight. After 14 months of exploring her own expansive internal world, Saanvi thought the idea of doing science in outer space made a strange kind of sense.

Applicants needed a sponsor from their school, but she wasn’t too worried. Even from afar, her teachers had never stopped investing in her.

“What made it amazing,” she said, “was that they were all so kind.”

Battered and bruised, schools struggle back to their feet

As the 2021-22 school year approached, the full scope of the academic damage caused by the pandemic started to become evident.

More than 100,000 American children had lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19.

Research studies also showed math and reading scores had plummeted dramatically since the onset of the pandemic. The declines were largest in schools serving a high number of low-income students. Millions of children had been disconnected from school or suffered major disruptions as they learned to read or speak English or master their multiplication tables.

Scotch Plains and Fanwood, where fewer than 1 percent of families live below the poverty line and all of the school district’s employees survived the pandemic, absorbed the blows better than most. Overall, the district’s students continued to make progress and score above the national average on a widely used benchmark assessment called MAP Growth.

With two parents who kept their jobs and no one in her family lost to COVID-19, Saanvi Suresh was especially lucky.

The good fortune continued when she received her 9th grade class schedule. Just like her older brother, Saanvi got DeNicola for biology. Her mother was thrilled.

“Just don’t ask her on the first day and scare her,” Rema Suresh advised when her daughter asked if the teacher might be a good sponsor for her NASA project.

Mindful of the advice, Saanvi waited until day three. She was still learning her way around the high school. But after a single hour watching DeNicola interact with in-person students, she was confident she would say yes.

“Even through her mask, I could see she was smiling,” the now-14-year-old said.

She and the friends she’d recruited to the project dubbed themselves the Space Gals. Then they set to work figuring out what astronauts need to grow plants in zero gravity. Less than a week before the November 3 application deadline, they had a breakthrough on how to prototype a new system that might someday support commercial farming on Mars.

“NASA is already trying to figure out how to use hydroponics,” their final proposal read. “Our plan is different. We have designed an irrigation system for outer space.”

DeNicola was blown away.

By that point, it seemed like Scotch Plains-Fanwood schools were returning to some semblance of normalcy. The number of positive COVID-19 cases in the district dwindled to nine, then seven. Even after the highly contagious omicron variant began sweeping the nation, the district was able to avoid another shutdown. With nearly all Scotch Plains-Fanwood students back to full-time in-person learning, the lawsuit filed a year earlier was dismissed just before Christmas.

“Everyone in the district wanted the same things those parents wanted,” said Mast. “If you sue for the sun to rise, eventually you will prevail.”

All over the country, public schools seemed to be slowly climbing back to their feet, even though the virus was still adapting and infecting hundreds of thousands of people per day.

Ongoing surveys administered by the EdWeek Research Center showed they still faced huge challenges. More then 40 percent of administrators said that principals or the superintendent in their district had been physically or verbally threatened over their COVID-19 responses. Finding substitute teachers, bus drivers, and paraprofessionals was often impossible. Two-thirds of respondents said student misbehavior was worse than it had been pre-pandemic. Student absentee rates remained high.

But educators also saw signs of healing in the little things.

“When you see the kids smelling the French fries, it’s just pure joy,” Mast said when hot lunch lines returned to the local middle school.

14% of survey respondents said their district had limited or shut down in-person instruction during the 2021-22 school year.

By that point, it was 2022. NASA was preparing to announce the winners of its TechRise challenge. DeNicola invited the Space Gals to watch the livestream with her third-period AP Biology students. When the words “Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School” appeared on the screen, everyone jumped from their seats and cheered wildly for Saanvi and her teammates.

Then, in mid-February, it was time for DeNicola to run the Waterville simulation for a third time.

The trauma of the past two years was still fresh. Every time the teacher’s phone buzzed, she felt a flash of panic that her kids’ school was announcing another shutdown or quarantine.

But DeNicola had also found a few silver linings. Along with the simulation’s designers, she’d tweaked the exercise to have students focus more on considering the competing perspectives of the different stakeholders in the fictional town. She also wanted to emphasize a set of broad scientific practices—how to develop theories, how to gather data, how to decide what’s true—that seemed more important than ever. And DeNicola especially wanted her classes to grapple with the reality that many real-world dilemmas don’t have a single “right” answer.

“It’s not about playing school,” she said. “It’s about how we can solve problems and make the best decisions possible with the information we have.”

On a chilly Wednesday afternoon, DeNicola’s freshmen sauntered past the new Medify Airx 2500 air purifier at the front of her room and found their seats. No one was in quarantine. Saanvi tugged at the sleeves of her grey NASA hoodie and pulled out her laptop.

As the class got to work, the lessons of the past two years appeared in small moments. Now at ease with a raft of new online tools, DeNicola showed the students how to pool their data and analyze it collaboratively in a shared Google Sheet. Then she offered the class a hard-earned new perspective.

“If one component changes, that can have an impact across the rest of the system,” she said. “But sometimes, even when there’s a change to an individual, that doesn’t mean the whole system is going to fail.”

Saanvi was part of the group tasked with modeling what would happen if Waterville allowed its farmers to cultivate all the land they wanted for themselves. When she hit ‘run’ to start the simulation, no giant blue fish took over her iPad. But as the virtual days in Waterville’s digital ecosystem flashed by, algae slowly began to overrun the pond, causing the minnow population to dwindle from more than 100 down to two, then one, then die out entirely.

When it was time for the students to make sense of what they’d observed, DeNicola was ready.

“What can we learn from this?” the teacher asked.

“It was really helpful in learning how to make a decision for a community,” Saanvi said later, referring to both the lesson and the incredible disruptions that forced the country and its public schools to rethink their priorities over the past two years. “Sometimes, you have to be more creative in the way you do things.”

Data analysis for this article was provided by the EdWeek Research Center. Learn more about the center’s work.

Maya Riser-Kositsky, Librarian and Data Specialist contributed to this article. Coverage of leadership, summer learning, social and emotional learning, arts learning, and afterschool is supported in part by a grant from The Wallace Foundation, at www.wallacefoundation.org . Education Week retains sole editorial control over the content of this coverage. A version of this article appeared in the March 30, 2022 edition of Education Week as How Schools Survived Two Years of COVID-19

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4 high school students talk mental health and how the pandemic changed them

Anya Steinberg

At this point in the pandemic, American teens have spent a significant chunk of their formative years isolated from friends and in fractured learning environments. More than 2 in 5 teens have reported persistently feeling sad or hopeless, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of high school students . Many who were already struggling with trauma or mental health problems before the pandemic were deeply affected by the prolonged isolation.

Shots - Health News

Kids are back in school — and struggling with mental health issues.

But young people have also shown grace and resilience as they dealt with the challenges of COVID-19. NPR spoke to four high school students who marked the pandemic's two year anniversary with a newfound sense of self, and big dreams for the future.

If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (en español: 1-888-628-9454; deaf and hard of hearing: 1-800-799-4889) or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.

Ruby, 17: "I left a toxic friendship, I explored myself more."

By the time the pandemic closed her school in March 2020, Ruby had already spent weeks trying to ignore her mom's warnings about COVID-19. Her mom is Chinese, and their relatives back in China had been updating her on the virus' spread since its early days. Ruby says when her spring break got extended, her mom told her: "Oh yeah, you won't be going back to school anytime soon."

At first, remote learning heightened a lot of the anxieties Ruby already felt about her Minnetonka, Minn. high school. She transferred there in the fall of 2019 and was struggling to feel like she fit in because many of her new classmates came from wealthier families. NPR isn't using Ruby's last name to protect her privacy.

Here's what schools are doing to try to address students' social-emotional needs

"It was just something I was worrying about constantly," she said. "I was afraid to even move in class. I was just, like, sitting there, and I did not move because I was so anxious about what they were thinking about me."

When school went online, Ruby, then a freshman, was self-conscious about showing her house on camera. She also had a hard time finding a quiet place to concentrate as her two siblings also switched to remote learning – she would often lose focus during Zoom class. During remote school, she says, "I didn't learn anything."

Ruby wasn't the only one. In the first several months of the pandemic, two-thirds of U.S. students in grades nine through 12 told the CDC reported difficulty completing their schoolwork.

One upside to remote school was that it put some distance between Ruby and a friendship that she describes as toxic.

"She was the only person I really knew, so I kind of felt safe around her," Ruby explains. "But at the same time, I didn't really feel so safe because the people who she hung out with were not my people."

Things changed for the better during Ruby's sophomore year, when her school transitioned to hybrid learning and she decided to leave that friendship. She started to nurture relationships with the three people who are now her best friends.

"I left a toxic friendship, I explored myself more." she says. "I would say [the pandemic] has definitely made me a stronger person."

Teja, 18: "The lack of structure just led to me becoming obsessive."

When her Seattle high school closed in March 2020, Teja's world started to disintegrate. Her jazz choir trip and swim practices were canceled, her clubs were confined to Zoom meetings and her entire life was condensed to her family's home.

Teja, then a sophomore, had been diagnosed with anorexia during her freshman year of high school and when the pandemic hit, she was in recovery. NPR isn't using her last name to protect her privacy around her anorexia.

"School was a huge motivator for me, for... staying on track for recovery because school is something I love. I love to learn. It's really important to me and that was only possible if I was eating," Teja says. "And then all of a sudden school was canceled."

Those early months of the pandemic were extremely destabilizing for Teja, and for other teenaged girls with eating disorders. The CDC found the proportion of emergency room visits for eating disorders increased among adolescent girls in 2020 and 2021.

It's time to screen all kids for anxiety, physicians' task force recommends

Teja relapsed, and her family noticed. After a difficult conversation with her dad about how she might have to go to the hospital, Teja called a friend who talked her down. "She was like, 'It's not fair to frighten you, but on the other hand, that is the reality.' "

She says the conversation was a wake-up call.

"I realized the only way I would be happy and have structure is if I created that for myself. So I made a schedule and I set goals," Teja says.

In the summer of 2020, she started going on daily walks with her dog, planning outdoor meetups with friends and writing music on a regular basis – all in addition to regular meetings with her psychiatrist. Eventually, she was healthy enough to attend outdoor swim team practices in nearby Lake Washington.

"It was a lot of fun to be back in the water again and be back with my teammates. So those things kind of helped ground me with why I wanted to continue in recovery."

But that grounding didn't last long. When remote learning continued into her junior year, in fall 2020, she says, "I just became really anxious about school in a way that I hadn't really been before."

"I'm very perfectionistic," Teja explains, "and the lack of structure just led to me becoming obsessive."

The things that usually brought her joy, like practicing with the jazz choir, didn't feel the same without her classmates singing by her side. "I think the primary thing was the isolation. There was no one to catch me from spiraling."

In the fall of 2020, Teja's anxiety was getting worse. That's when the seizures started – sometimes more than 10 a day. "I couldn't leave the house," she says.

Three weeks after her first seizure, she was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder called Functional Neurologic Disorder that can be triggered by things like anxiety, stress and trauma.

"That was a really, really hard couple of months because I couldn't do anything. You couldn't see friends without having seizures. My friends had my parents on speed dial for when I'd have seizures on Zoom."

She and her family had to go all the way to Colorado to find treatment in February 2021 – and the treatment helped. She started having fewer seizures, and this past fall, she returned to in-person classes for the first time since the pandemic started. She says being back at school has been strange, but good.

Demand for college peer counselors is booming. But training only goes so far

"On my first day of school, my schedule was messed up and I was like, this is such an unusual experience. Like, it's been so long since I've had an issue as small as like, 'Oh, my schedule's wrong.' "

Teja also got to return to some of the activities she loves most. She says getting back to some sense of normalcy has helped her recover from everything she went through during the pandemic.

"I was able to do a live production of Alice in Wonderland . And that, to me, was the first time I was like: It is important that I am here. Like, if I were to get sick and I couldn't be here, it would matter. And that was the first time in my high school experience that I felt that way."

Alex, 16: "I was asking myself, 'Am I a male? I don't look like the typical guy.' "

Pandemic isolation was a mixed bag for Alex, who lives in northern Minnesota.

On the one hand, the isolation worsened a lot of the struggles he was already having around mental health. Alex, now a junior, had been sexually abused in middle school, and was later diagnosed with anxiety, depression and PTSD. NPR isn't using Alex's last name to protect his privacy as a minor.

He hoped being quarantined at home would make him feel safer and less paranoid. But it didn't.

"Honestly, if anything, it made it worse," he says. He felt trapped, and he constantly worried his abuser would find him.

Sitting at home, Alex had a lot of time to think. He started to look deeper into questions he had about his gender identity. "I was asking myself, 'Am I a male? I don't look like the typical guy. I don't act like the other trans people I see online or in school,' " he recalls.

After months of contemplation, he began identifying as trans masculine.

Then, in spring 2020, at the end of his freshman year, he started seeing a new therapist via telehealth appointments, which he liked better than in-person therapy. He was able to do therapy from the safety of his bed. "You have all your comfort items right there."

It helped him open up in a new way.

"I kinda just started getting braver. I started expressing what I was feeling," he explains.

"It was like Jenga. Once one thing fell, everything else started falling. There was just kind of like word vomit."

In the fall of 2020, Alex started his sophomore year in-person, at a new school. "I was basically like, 'Look, it's a new start.' "

He reconnected with an old friend, who quickly became his best friend. "We're at the point where we could just sit in silence and one of us would randomly start laughing, and the other person would know what we're laughing at already," he says. They like to hang out and do each others' makeup – Alex enjoys cosplaying.

But recovery isn't always a straight line. In October 2021, Alex was hospitalized after attempting to take his own life. According to the CDC, in the first several months of the pandemic, 1 in 5 U.S. high school students had seriously considered attempting suicide, and 9% had tried to kill themselves.

How To Help Someone At Risk Of Suicide

Since his hospitalization, Alex has been working with his therapist on finding healthy coping mechanisms for processing his traumas, like "drawing, focusing on schoolwork and getting out into the community more."

Right now, he says he's doing "pretty good. I'm stressed, but I'm a high school student, so that's inevitable. I'm working on my trauma, but trauma processing is all your life. You just learn new ways to cope with it."

Daniela Rivera, 17: "I just lost all motivation"

Daniela Rivera enjoys learning, and she likes being in school – but not so much when she doesn't understand the material, which was what made school during the pandemic so hard for her. In March 2020, Daniela was in her freshman year of high school in Cottonwood, Ariz. At first, her school's remote learning option didn't include live instruction, just packets of optional work – which Daniela didn't do.

That fall, her school began using online lessons from an educational company. Daniela found herself alone in her room, clicking through hours of pre-recorded videos with no actual teacher.

"I didn't get a lot of things. I gave up completely," Daniela says. "Every day I'd just stay in my bed. I'd wake up...be on school in my bed and just get up to go eat."

Her motivation for schoolwork instantly changed. "I was behind in all my classes. I would play [remote learning] videos...and go out to the living room and talk to my mom while the video is playing. I come in, like, 30 minutes later and the video is still playing. I just lost all motivation."

"[The pandemic] got me into the mindset where, like, I'm just trapped in this house and I can't do nothing. And like, I have stuff I could do outside, but I just felt like I couldn't even open the front door."

According to the CDC , nearly 2 in 5 teens reported experiencing poor mental health during the pandemic. That's something Daniela struggled with, too. In the evenings, she would FaceTime her boyfriend, and they would talk about how the days were starting to blur together.

She had a part-time job as a hostess at a restaurant on the weekends, and that job made it hard to maintain her friendships because all her friends worked weekday shifts.

When her school started offering a hybrid option partway through the fall semester of her sophomore year, in 2020, Daniela was excited. But it wasn't the same. Her lessons were still the same pre-recorded videos. She would sit in a classroom all day, separated from other students by a row of desks, with a single teacher to supervise her as she watched from a laptop.

Being back in school didn't make it any easier to keep in touch with her friends – they chose to stay fully online so they could keep their jobs.

Caroline thought her daughter was doing OK with home learning. Then she got a note

"[I'm] definitely sad because they... went from being one of the closest people to me to becoming a stranger. I don't know how they are, I don't know what they're doing, I don't know what's happened in their life."

Things got better as school permanently transitioned back to regular, in-person learning in spring 2021. But returning to business-as-usual has made Daniela realize how much she changed over the pandemic. "I've always been a shy, quiet person. But I feel like even now, I'm quieter and shyer than usual."

She also noticed words don't seem to roll off her tongue as easily as they used to, especially when she's called on in class. "My fear of public speaking has gotten worse in all this because I haven't been, like, speaking out loud to anyone."

One thing she's grateful for: The past two years gave her time and space to get to know herself better. In pandemic isolation, she discovered that she loves to go fishing with her boyfriend, and she's now a big fan of indie music.

"I know who I am now."

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Best Education Essays of 2021: Our 15 Most Discussed Columns About Schools, COVID Slide, Learning Recovery & More

A full calendar year of education under COVID-19 and its variants gave rise to a wave of memorable essays in 2021, focusing both on the ongoing damage done and how to mitigate learning loss going forward.

While consensus emerged around several key themes — the need for extensive, in-depth tutoring, the possibilities presented by unprecedented millions in federal relief dollars for schools, the opportunity for education reimagined — there was far less agreement on whether to remediate or accelerate, which health and safety measures schools should employ, even how dire the shortage of teachers and school staff really is. 

From grade-level standards and hygiene theater to lessons from the Spanish flu and homeschooling, here are the 15 most read and buzzed-about essays of 2021:

Analysis: Focus on Grade-Level Standards or Meet Students Where They Are? How an Unintentional Experiment Guided a Strategy for Addressing Learning Loss

Learning Recovery: What’s the best way to support learning recovery in middle-grade math? Should schools stay focused on grade-level standards while trying to address critical learning gaps as best as they can? Or should they systematically address individual students’ unfinished learning from prior years so they can ultimately catch back up — even if that means spending meaningful time teaching below-grade skills? As educators and administrators wrestle with those questions as they prepare to return to school in the fall, contributor Joel Rose offers some guidance inadvertently found in a study of Teach to One , an innovative learning model operated by New Classrooms Innovation Partners, the nonprofit where he is co-founder and CEO. That research found performance in schools with accountability systems that focused on grade-level proficiency (and thus prioritized grade-level exposure) grew 7 percentile points, while those that operated under systems that rewarded student growth (and thus prioritized individual student needs) grew 38 points. While the study was never intended to compare results across schools in this way, the stark difference between the two groups could not be ignored. Math is cumulative, and the path to proficiency often requires addressing unfinished learning from prior years. For the middle grades, administrators and policymakers would be wise to question the grade-level-only gospel as they begin to plan students’ educational recovery. Read the full analysis . 

Lessons from Spanish Flu — Babies Born in 1919 Had Worse Educational, Life Outcomes Than Those Born Just Before or After. Could That Happen With COVID-19?

History: Contributor Chad Aldeman has some bad news: The effects of COVID-19 are likely to linger for decades. And if the Spanish Flu is any indication, babies born during the pandemic may suffer some devastating consequences . Compared with children born just before or after, babies born during the flu pandemic in 1919 were less likely to finish high school, earned less money and were more likely to depend on welfare assistance and serve time in jail. The harmful effects were twice as large for nonwhite children. It may take a few years to see whether similar educational and economic effects from COVID-19 start to materialize, but these are ominous findings suggesting that hidden economic factors may influence a child’s life in ways that aren’t obvious in the moment. Hopefully, they will give policymakers more reasons to speed economic recovery efforts and make sure they deliver benefits to families and children who are going to need them the most. Read the full essay .

Pittman & Darling-Hammond: Surveys Find Parents Want Bold Changes in Schools — With More Learning Inside and Outside the Classroom

Future of Education: Whatever they thought of their schools before the pandemic struck, parents now have strong opinions about what they want them to provide. They are looking beyond fall reopenings to rethink schooling, and they care about having good choices for interest-driven learning opportunities beyond the classroom . Two national parent surveys released in May shed new light on how to think about the often-used phrase “more and better learning.” Among the key findings, write contributors Karen Pittman and Linda Darling-Hammond: Parents want bold changes in schools, to make public education more equitable and learner-centered. But they also believe that home, school and extracurriculars play complementary roles in imparting the broad set of skills children need for their future success. This means educators and policymakers must support learning that extends beyond the school day, the school walls, the school staff and the traditional school approaches. Read the full essay .

High-Quality, High-Dosage Tutoring Can Reduce Learning Loss. A Blueprint for How Washington, States & Districts Can Make It Happen

Personalized Learning: There is near-unanimous, bipartisan agreement that tutoring is among the most promising, evidence-based strategies to help students struggling with learning loss . Decades of rigorous evaluations have consistently found that tutoring programs yield large, positive effects on math and reading achievement, and can even lead to greater social and motivational outcomes. It isn’t just the research community buzzing about tutoring — it is gaining momentum in policy circles, too. Which means there is a real opportunity — and responsibility — to design and deliver tutoring programs in a way that aligns with the research evidence, which is fortunately beginning to tell us more than just “tutoring works.” Contributors Sara Kerr and Kate Tromble of Results for America lay out a blueprint for how Washington, states and local school districts can make high-quality, high-dosage tutoring happen .

COVID-19 Raised Fears of Teacher Shortages. But the Situation Varies from State to State, School to School & Subject to Subject

Teacher Pipeline: Is the U.S. facing a major teacher shortage? Relatively low pay, a booming private sector and adverse working conditions in schools are all important elements in whether teaching is becoming an undesirable profession. But, writes contributor Dan Goldhaber, the factors that lead to attrition are diverse, so treating teachers as a monolith doesn’t help in crafting solutions to the real staffing challenges that some schools face. There is no national teacher labor market per se, because each state adopts its own rules for pay, licensure, tenure, pension and training requirements. And nationally, tens of thousands more people are prepared to teach than there are available positions. But while some schools have applicants lined up when an opening becomes available, others, typically those serving economically disadvantaged students, draw far fewer candidates. And schools tend to struggle to find teachers with special education or STEM training. The pandemic certainly raises concerns about teacher shortages; what is needed is a more nuanced conversation about teacher staffing to come up with more effective solutions to real problems. Read the full essay .

Clash of Cultures, Clash of Privilege — What Happened When 30 Low-Income Students of Color Were Admitted to Elite Prep Schools

Analysis: Programs like Prep for Prep and A Better Chance have long been regarded as groundbreaking solutions to the lack of diversity in the nation’s most elite prep schools. Teens who join these types of programs undergo a transfer of privilege that starts with their education and bleeds into every facet of their lives, forever altering their trajectory with opportunities that otherwise would likely be unattainable. But what assumptions do these programs subscribe to? And what lessons can be found in the experiences of the participants? In her Harvard senior thesis, contributor Jessica Herrera Chaidez followed 30 participants in a program that grants select socioeconomically disadvantaged students of color in the Los Angeles area the opportunity to attend famed independent schools. She found that the experiences of these students can be understood in various forms of twoness associated with this transfer of privilege, an internal struggle that begins with their introduction to the world of elite education and will come to mark them for their entire lives in a way that they aren’t even able to comprehend yet. Read more about her findings, and what some of these students had to say .

Steiner & Wilson: Some Tough Questions, and Some Answers, About Fighting COVID Slide While Accelerating Student Learning

Case Study: How prepared are district leaders, principals and teachers as they work to increase learning readiness for on-grade work this fall? That’s the question posed by contributors David Steiner and Barbara Wilson in a case study examining how a large urban district sought to adapt materials it was already using to implement an acceleration strategy for early elementary foundational skills in reading . Among the insights to be drawn: First, planning is critical. Leaders need to set out precisely how many minutes of instruction will be provided, the exact learning goals and the specific materials; identify all those involved (tutors, specialists, and teachers); and give them access to shared professional development on the chosen acceleration strategies. Second, this requires a sea change from business as usual, where teachers attempt to impart skill-based standards using an eclectic rather than a coherent curriculum. It is not possible to accelerate children with fragmented content. All efforts to prepare students for grade-level instruction must rest on fierce agreement about the shared curriculum to be taught in classrooms. What we teach is the anchor that holds everything else in place. Read the full essay .

Schools Are Facing a Surge of Failing Grades During the Pandemic — and Traditional Approaches Like Credit Recovery Will Not Be Enough to Manage It

Student Supports: Earlier this year, failing grades were on the rise across the country — especially for students who are learning online — and the trend threatened to exacerbate existing educational inequities. The rise in failing grades appears to be most pronounced among students from low-income households, multilingual students and students learning virtually . This could have lasting consequences: Students with failing grades tend to have less access to advanced courses in high school, and a failing grade in even one ninth-grade course can lower a student’s chances of graduating on time. Addressing the problem, though, won’t be easy. In many school systems, the rash of failed courses could overwhelm traditional approaches to helping students make up coursework they may have missed. In a new analysis, Betheny Gross, associate director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, implored school and district leaders to be especially wary of one long-established but questionable practice: credit recovery. Read more about her warning — as well as her recommendations for how districts should seek to reverse this learning loss .

Riccards: The 1776 Report Is a Political Document, Not a Curriculum. But It Has Something to Teach Us

Analysis: The 1776 Report was never intended to stand as curriculum, nor was it designed to be translated into a curriculum as the 1619 Project was. It is a political document offered by political voices. But, writes contributor Patrick Riccards, dismissing it would be a mistake, because it provides an important lesson . The American record, whether it be measured starting in 1619 or 1776, is hopeful and ugly, inspiring and debilitating, a shining beacon and an unshakable dark cloud. American history is messy and contradictory; how we teach it, even more so. For years, we have heard how important it is to increase investment in civics education. But from #BlackLivesMatter to 2020 electioneering to even the assault on the U.S. Capitol, the basics of civics have been on display in our streets and corridors of power. What we lack is the collective historical knowledge necessary to translate civic education into meaningful, positive community change. The 1776 Report identifies beliefs espoused by our Founding Fathers and many Confederates and reflected by those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6. They are a part of our history that we must study, understand, contextualize and deconstruct. The 1776 Report becomes the proper close to the social studies lessons of the past four years. As the next chapter of American history is written, it is imperative to apply those lessons to significantly improve the teaching and learning of American history. Our nation’s future depends on better understanding our past .

There’s Lots of Education Data Out There — and It Can Be Misleading. Here Are 6 Questions to Ask

Student Data: Data is critical to addressing inequities in education. However, it is often misused, interpreted to fit a particular agenda or misread in ways that perpetuate an inaccurate story . Data that’s not broken down properly can hide gaps between different groups of students. Facts out of context can lead to superficial conclusions or deceptive narratives. In this essay, contributor Krista Kaput presents six questions that she asks herself when consuming data — and that you should, too .

Educators’ View: Principals Know Best What Their Schools Need. They Should Have a Central Role in Deciding How Relief Funds Are Spent

School Funding: The American Rescue Plan represents a once-in-a-generation federal commitment to K-12 schools across the country. The impact will be felt immediately: The $122 billion in direct funding will support safe school reopenings, help ensure that schools already providing in-person instruction can safely stay open and aid students in recovering from academic and mental health challenges induced and exacerbated by the pandemic. How these funds are distributed will shape the educational prospects of millions of students, affecting the country for decades to come. As they make rescue plan funding decisions, write contributors L. Earl Franks of the National Association of Elementary School Principals and Ronn Nozoe of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, states and districts should meaningfully engage and empower school principals throughout all phases of implementation. Principals, as leaders of their school buildings and staff, have unequaled insights into their individual schools’ needs and know which resources are required most urgently. Read the authors’ four recommendations for leveraging this expertise .

Case Studies: How 11 States Are Using Emergency Federal Funds to Make Improvements in College and Career Access That Will Endure Beyond the Pandemic

COVID Relief: The Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund gave states more than $4 billion in discretionary federal dollars to support K-12 schools, higher education and workforce initiatives. These were welcome resources, coming just as the pandemic accelerated unemployment and exacerbated declining college enrollment, hitting those from low-income backgrounds hardest. But as contributors Betheny Gross, Georgia Heyward and Matt Robinson note, most states have invested overwhelmingly in one-time college scholarships or short-term supports that will end once funds run out. In hopes of encouraging policymakers across the country to make more sustainable investments with the remaining relief funds, the trio spotlights efforts in 11 states that show promise in enduring beyond COVID-19. Read our full case study . 

In Thousands of Districts, 4-Day School Weeks Are Robbing Students of Learning Time for What Amounts to Hygiene Theater

School Safety: Last April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made clear that having good ventilation and wearing masks consistently are far more effective at preventing the spread of COVID-19 than disinfecting surfaces. This clarification was long overdue, say contributors Robin Lake and Georgia Heyward of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, as scientists had long suspected that deep cleaning and temperature checks are more hygiene theater than a strategy for limiting the spread of an airborne virus. Thousands of school districts, however, had already built complex fall reopening plans with a full day for at-home learning. The result was a modified four-day week with students receiving significantly reduced live instruction. Eliminating a full day of in-person teaching was always a high-cost strategy from an education standpoint; now there is confirmation that it was totally unnecessary. Lake and Heyward argue that we cannot afford to throw away an entire day of learning and student support based on a false scientific premise .

Teacher’s View: How the Science of Reading Helped Me Make the Most of Limited Time With My Students & Adapt Lessons to Meet Their Needs

First Person: March 12, 2020, was contributor Jessica Pasik’s last typical day in the classroom before COVID-19 changed everything. When her district closed, she assumed, as did many, that it was a temporary precaution. But with each passing week, she worried that the growth in reading she and her first-graders had worked so hard for would fade away . Many pre-pandemic instructional approaches to teaching reading were already failing students and teachers, and the stress of COVID-19 has only exacerbated these challenges. When Pasik’s district reopened for in-person classes in the fall, they were faced with difficult decisions about how to best deliver instruction. One factor that helped streamline this transition was a grounding in the science of reading. Having extensive knowledge of what they needed to teach allowed educators to focus on how they would teach, make the most of the limited instructional time they had with students and adapt lessons to meet their needs. There are multiple factors that teachers cannot control; one person alone cannot make the systematic changes needed for all children to reach proficiency in literacy. But one knowledgeable teacher can forever change the trajectory of a student’s life. Students will face many challenges once they leave the classroom, but low literacy does not need to be one of them. Read her full essay .

Homeschooling Is on the Rise. What Should That Teach Education Leaders About Families’ Preferences?

Disenrollment: With school closures, student quarantines and tensions over mask requirements, vaccine mandates and culture war issues, families’ lives have been upended in ways few could have imagined 18 months ago. That schools have struggled to adapt is understandable, writes contributor Alex Spurrier. But for millions of families, their willingness to tolerate institutional sclerosis in their children’s education is wearing thin. Over the past 18 months, the rate of families moving their children to a new school increased by about 50 percent , and some 1.2 million switched to homeschooling last academic year. Instead of working to get schools back to a pre-pandemic normal, Spurrier says, education leaders should look at addressing the needs of underserved kids and families — and the best way to understand where schools are falling short is to look at how families are voting with their feet. If options like homeschooling, pods and microschools retain some of their pandemic enrollment gains, it could have ripple effects on funding that resonate throughout the K-12 landscape. Read the full essay .

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Bev Weintraub is an Executive Editor at The 74

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Class Of 2025: Follow Students From 1st Grade To Graduation

The covid generation: class of 2025 students on how the pandemic changed their school experience, it’s been four years since covid-19 shut down schools. the class of 2025 was in 7th grade. as juniors in high school, they’re still feeling the effects..

When COVID-19 first shut down schools in March 2020, the Class of 2025 was in 7th grade: the middle of middle school. School buildings shuttered and education shifted online for all students, forever disrupting the learning experience for the cohort at the heart of Oregon’s long-term graduation goals .

Johnathan has always been a fast learner. When he was younger, he could talk on and on about the motorcycles or the cars he worked on with his dad.

Like many of the students in OPB’s Class of 2025, when COVID-19 hit Oregon, he was at Ron Russell Middle School in Southeast Portland.

“The first four or five months of COVID, I don’t remember anything,” he said.

FILE: A sign reminds visitors to mask up at Prescott Elementary school, in February 2022. Students and teachers are continuing to adjust to learning in a post-COVID environment, years after Oregon schools returned to in-person instruction.

Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB

Now, Johnathan has his driver’s license, balancing a busy work schedule at an auto parts shop with school. He’s an 11th grader at the David Douglas Online Academy, a program that didn’t exist before COVID.

After an interrupted 7th grade and a fully online 8th grade, getting back into the habits of school after distance learning proved difficult.

“I think that kind of led to a lot of procrastination among myself and definitely some other people around my age as well,” Johnathan said.

Now a junior, Johnathan has fallen behind on getting the credits he needs to graduate. On a recent winter afternoon, he wears a hoodie and a ball cap, armed with two energy drinks.

“‘How do I get back into this jam that I had before in middle school, before all of this stuff?’”

National and state reports may tell us how students perform on academic tests , or how many students experienced the loss of a parent due to COVID-19. But those raw data points only scratch the surface of how distance learning and other COVID-related changes interrupted their academic careers and undermined their paths to graduation and life afterwards.

Students and teachers are continuing to adjust to learning in a post-COVID environment, nearly three years since Oregon schools returned to in-person instruction.

For some students, their relationship with school has changed significantly.

State officials have changed their focus too. Leaders talk less about the goal for 100% of students in the Class of 2025 to reach graduation next year, instead zeroing in on literacy efforts for the state’s youngest learners.

Leyna, another student in the Class of 2025, said her life feels like a constant state of adjustment.

“To be a teenager right now is all about change because you have to adapt to like a lot of new technologies and a lot of new — just like a lot of new everything.”

Lost motivation, a “space missing”

Math has never been Leyna’s favorite subject. This year, she recalls struggling with square roots and trigonometry.

Though she feels more independence and freedom now compared to the COVID lockdowns, Leyna also senses a gap in her learning, starting when she first arrived in high school three years ago.

“I feel like the curriculums changed and then my brain kind of changed because I wasn’t able to keep up with what we were doing,” Leyna said. “It felt like there was a space missing.”

She now knows she learns better in person. She says it’s been challenging trying to form “genuine connections” with teachers and friends.

During the time at home in distance learning, Leyna found it difficult to stay motivated. She still struggles with that today. She said that lack of motivation sometimes contributes to attendance issues, a problem plaguing education officials statewide and nationally.

Leyna is a junior and one of the students in OPB's Class of 2025 project. She said being a teenager these days is "all about change".

Elizabeth Miller / OPB

She says if she could give her younger self a piece of advice, it would be to stay focused on school and keep putting in the effort.

“Don’t give up, even though it sounds corny — it’s easy to give up,” she said. “I did give up a lot of times throughout my life but I think the biggest part where I did give up and it affected me really on a large scale was probably last year.”

Tracy Apple, an English teacher at David Douglas, said it is tough to keep students engaged. She sees a lot more students tuning out than she did before the pandemic.

Before COVID, every week, Apple would assign students to take notes and turn them into a written analysis.

“Now I do one every three or four [weeks] because the kids get overwhelmed,” she said. “They can’t keep up and soon as they hit something that doesn’t make sense, they’re just like, ‘I can’t do it.’”

But sometimes that flexibility and extra support isn’t enough for struggling students — and they don’t pass a class.

If a student fails a class at David Douglas, the main option to make up for that lost credit is through a virtual credit recovery program students can access during the school day, after school, or in summer school. An analysis from the David Douglas School District shows that a higher percentage of students are making up more failed classes than they were before the pandemic.

Between decreased motivation, a reliance on technology, and the emotional toll of COVID, Apple worries how students might fare after graduation.

“A lot of schooling isn’t just education, it’s social and emotional development,” Apple said, noting that the pandemic also had a disproportionate impact on students in low-income households.

Some students are still recovering from COVID-related disruptions to school. The way students respond to these disruptions may show up differently — in behavior, in attendance habits, and on a report card. It’s hard to know how this time will affect students five or ten years down the line.

Alternative education environments

Less than two miles from David Douglas’ sprawling high school campus, a neon sign welcomes you to “Fir Ridge Campus,” a much smaller alternative to the main high school.

It’s lunchtime at Fir Ridge, and teacher Jessica Classen is sitting in her mostly empty English classroom. Students pop their heads in to ask if they can grab a snack from her drawer. A couple of students sit at a table finishing their assignments.

The flexible, supportive environment at Fir Ridge is by design, as a “dropout prevention program” for high school students who aren’t succeeding in a traditional school environment. The small school of about 200 students is built around individual attention, mainly helping upperclassmen get the credits they need to graduate.

Students often get referred to Fir Ridge from David Douglas, a school of more than 2000. Here, classes are smaller and students ask Classen for help with a simple, “Hey, Jess.”

“It’s a lot harder for kids to just go unnoticed,” Classen said.

This campus existed before COVID, with the same goals. But among her students, Classen says she initially noticed a greater reliance on technology, like phones, and a reluctance to engage in conversations — something she didn’t see when she was a teacher before COVID.

FILE: Social distancing reminders like this one from 2021, were a common sight during the pandemic. Teacher Jessica Classen says when students returned to the classroom, she initially noticed a greater reliance on technology, like phones, and a reluctance to engage in conversations.

Brandon Swanson / OPB

Classen has had conversations with her own teenage daughter, who doesn’t attend Fir Ridge but has still felt the lasting effects of COVID and its disruptions to school.

“She’s like ‘mom, I think it stunted me,’” Classen recalled her daughter. “She’s like, ‘I really feel like that time stunted me.’”

Classen’s classroom at Fir Ridge is set up to help students connect more — tables are organized in a “U” shape, with students facing each other and Classen’s own desk in the center. Handwritten agreements on the wall address how both teacher and students should treat each other and hold each other accountable.

While Fir Ridge has long been an option for David Douglas students, a new, different school structure popped up in the last four years: The David Douglas Online Academy.

Online learning and shifting priorities

Initial efforts at distance learning were widely panned by students and teachers alike. For Class of 2025 junior Johnathan, online learning was a difficult, sudden change. But that’s not his feeling toward learning online now, three years later. He’s different and the program is different.

When the David Douglas Online Academy first started in 2021, principal Shawna Myers said families chose the school for COVID-related reasons, staying at home to avoid crowds and potential exposure to the virus.

Myers says now students enroll in DDOA because it works for them.

“They’re choosing to be here and it’s great to see them wanting to be here and then excelling in here,” she said.

Students want to graduate early, or they’ve struggled in person due to anxiety, or they just work better on their own.

Students’ main reason to go to DDOA? Flexibility.

That’s part of what Johnathan loves about it, now that he’s trying to balance finishing high school with a part-time job.

“Let’s say I’m off one day, cool, I could start doing school work at 10 a.m.,” he explained. “If I’ve been working all day, cool, when I get home I’m going to start doing school work at 10 p.m.”

Johnathan, one of the students in the Class of 2025, is an 11th grader at the David Douglas Online Academy. He said the online program gives him flexibility to do schoolwork around his work schedule.

Johnathan says he would never have considered online school if COVID hadn’t happened. Because of the school’s flexibility, he’s able to work more hours at the auto parts store, where he’s picked up more responsibilities.

“I’m glad that I’ve been able to help out as much as I can,” he said.

But Johnathan’s priorities have shifted. He says he enjoys work more than school and that it has taken priority over school.

“I’m getting too, almost too focused on work, which is why I’m getting kind of less and less in school,” he said. “I think I need to go back, present more of myself in school, because I know I only have a year and a half left of it at this point.”

Johnathan said he fell off track during his first two years of high school. Earlier this school year, Johnathan talked about those failed courses as holes in his “boat down the river of graduation”.

“It’s like half filling up with water almost, I just want to make it through before I sink,” he said then.

Now, in March, Johnathan says there’s still water coming through the “cracks of the floorboard,” but now he’s focused on building a whole different vessel: his career.

”I’ve started to kind of build a bigger ship rather than focus on those little cracks and I think I kind of need to stop building, go back to those cracks and start filling them.”

He learns things at work that he can’t learn at school, such as how to interact with people of different ages and from all walks of life.

Myers, the DDOA principal, says she sees a lot of students who need to catch up. Students who were in distance learning during middle school often have to develop study or resilience skills they didn’t build during the pandemic.

“It’s a whole strategy too, not just the content but learning how to pace yourself and how to make sure that you finish,” she said.

Maintaining high expectations and pressure

The range of student experiences is broad, and the pandemic’s impact on school careers played a larger role in some students’ lives than others.

There are always going to be students who take advanced courses for college credit in high school, or who graduate early.

Statewide, data from the Oregon Department of Education show that the percentage of high school students taking advanced placement and other courses declined after the pandemic, but has rebounded a bit. In the 2022-2023 school year, 21.9% of Oregon high school students enrolled in at least one of those advanced courses, compared to 20.7% in 2021-2022.

A David Douglas High School district analysis of data tells a similar story. But this school year, participation in advanced courses trends downward.

Class of 2025 student Anna is in advanced classes, and has been for years. But she said she struggled with motivation back in middle school, before anyone had heard of COVID-19. She would procrastinate and put off homework or other assignments.

So in 7th grade, she wrote herself a letter.

“I said in the future, you need to focus on yourself a lot more, you need to actually do stuff on time instead of pushing yourself to do it last minute.”

Her 7th grade letter is in line with the expectations she’s set to go to college after high school. The pandemic and distance learning didn’t really change that. In fact, she was “enraged” when schools statewide shifted their grading policy to pass/no pass when schools first closed.

Class of 2025 student Anna, now a junior, wrote herself a letter back in 7th grade, telling her to focus on herself more and procrastinate less. The pandemic and distance learning didn't really change the plans she's made for herself.

But despite her own achievements, she still thinks about the skills she never learned.

“I felt that year was really important about learning grammar rules and learning about different types of clauses and sentence structure and whatnot,” she said.

As the range of student needs and capabilities appear to have grown since the pandemic, what students learn — and how they learn — varies greatly.

During distance learning in 8th grade, Johnathan said he struggled with “mind-bogglingly repetitive” instruction.

“The teachers were really doing the best that they could with what they had, but it was so difficult for most of us … to kind of get that focus and have the motivation to like ‘oh, let’s get on the computer and just kind of sit around for the next six hours,” he said.

Anna, on the other hand, missed the opportunity for more repetition and practice, something that was harder to get online.

“When it comes to really important topics, in order for you to grasp them, it has to be ingrained in your brain, you have to keep being taught the same things over and over again and that’s how it sticks in your brain,” Anna said.

When she studies for a test, she physically writes out all her notes and makes online flashcards.

“I tend to study a bit too much,” Anna said.

Sometimes students know exactly what they missed out on during distance learning. For Anna, it was an 8th-grade lesson on rocket science that couldn’t really work online.

Now as a junior, Anna says she still thinks about what she told herself in seventh grade. She says she procrastinates less than she used to, in part because if she falls behind, her heavy homework load makes it almost impossible to catch back up.

Shawna Myers, the David Douglas Online Academy principal, said she hopes students have come out of the last four years knowing that “they can get through anything” and that help is always available.

“I think it’s gonna be a long time before we actually get through it,” Myers said.

“It’s not that we’re just back in school and we’re fine. I think we’ve got years to come of putting pieces back together and healing everyone.”

FILE: Signs at Richmond Elementary in southeast Portland require masks to enter the school. Portland Public Schools started the school year online because of COVID-19.

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Zoom Parties, Missed Proms, Uncertain Futures. High School Seniors Share What It’s Like to Come of Age During a Pandemic

G en Xers graduated as 9/11 changed the world forever. Millennials graduated into a job market decimated by the Great Recession. Now, in 2020, Gen Z could very well be renamed Generation Pandemic. The young adults graduating from high school this year will be defined by their Zoom educations and viral TikToks, but also by their lost summer jobs and unpredictable futures. Fourteen high school seniors from around the world told TIME what it’s like to enter a society that’s being completely reshaped.

Lorraie Forbes, 17

Lorraie lives in Brooklyn and recently joined the U.S. Navy.

I am supposed to report for boot camp in September. I’m trying to prepare myself physically and mentally, but it’s hard because the gyms are closed. I’m upset about pools being closed too, because part of the Navy physical–screening test is swimming. I’m a terrible swimmer. This was the time I needed to practice. I’ve been working out three to six hours a day at home. I have a barbell, dumbbell and a pull-up bar and am using random household items: chairs for dips and my scale to measure out 10 lb. of books or bags of sugar.

I pray all the time. Meditating on the Word I get on Sunday helps me keep myself sane. It also helps to keep myself occupied, so I’ve been making myself and my sister a detailed schedule every day. Online school has been a challenge, especially because I can’t look at a computer for long without my vision getting blurry and getting headaches. And my school isn’t teaching right now—they just hand you work, give you a due date, and that’s it.

I’m also involved in social- and political-justice activism. All the accounts of recent police brutality have made me rethink my career after I leave the Navy. We’ve been seeing how the system wasn’t made for people of our kind. All of these incidents, especially in my area in Brownsville, have made me want to pursue a career in law enforcement: to change the system from within. —As told to Andrew R. Chow

Louis Maes, 17

Louis lives in Bordeaux, France, and hopes to pursue a law degree but has not committed to a university.

Before the lockdown , I was living a nonstop life. Between preparing for my final exams and attending competitive handball competitions, I never stopped. But when I found myself stuck at home with my two younger siblings and parents with an unlimited amount of free time, I turned toward the thing I love most: making music .

Since lockdown began, I have written more than 20 songs—polyphonic electronic music with lyrics. When you find yourself in a bubble, alone, it forces you to reflect. I write music about my life, which lets me reflect on who I want to be when lockdown ends and my adult life begins. My songs are about love, solitude and growing up. It’s also given me the chance to appreciate the life I’ve had so far. Spending so much time with my family during my last year living at home has brought us closer.

Before lockdown, my dream was to work in the music industry. But these past few weeks have shown me that music can be a huge part of my life without being my career. It will always be there.

In some ways, this has shown me that all difficult periods can be nourishing. Of course, there have been hard days. I love solitude but not for this long. But the bad days have helped me create some very sincere music.

Over the past few months, I’ve realized that life will always be unstable. If you look at history, there have always been crises —moments of uncertainty and unrest. I think it’s about learning how to live within them. —As told to Mélissa Godin

Kamryn Sneed, 18

Kamryn lives in Durham, N.C., and received a scholarship to attend North Carolina Central University in the fall.

I cried the whole first month. I was just watching my senior year go by, and it really hurt. I’ve seen each class have a prom, I’ve seen each class graduate. We’re having a drive-in graduation ceremony at Southpoint [Mall].

All the families have to stay in their cars as the graduates walk across the stage, 6 ft. apart . I like that they’re doing this, but it’s still not the same. We didn’t get our senior pictures taken, so my mom’s sorority sister bought me a photo shoot [at home]. I was having so much fun. My family bought me a prom dress, and I’m going to have a miniprom in my yard.

Colleges are saying they’re going to close campus. People always say those are the best four years of their life, and I want those to be my best four years. I don’t want college if I don’t get the full experience. Walking on campus, meeting new people, going to the caf, making beats on the table. I want that. I don’t want just schoolwork. So far we had a virtual open house—that was actually fun.

I want to be an oral surgeon and a dentist. I still want to be a doctor. It’s been my dream since second grade. I feel like we’ll grasp the virus before I graduate college, but the future is a huge fear. We can’t live life like we did before. It’s made me think of the road differently. Right now we’re just floating. —As told to Jamie Ducharme

María Victoria Cárdenas Guerra, 18

María Victoria lives in Buenos Aires and plans to attend the University of Buenos Aires.

I thought I had lived through every kind of crisis. I’m Venezuelan, and the political and migratory crisis brought me to Colombia and then Argentina. I grew up acutely aware of how fragile our society and economy were. But I never worried about health.

Since the pandemic started, my worldview has completely changed. I grew up in countries where the government was not doing what they were supposed to do, but I always thought that Europe and North America had it figured out—I saw them as these utopias. But when I watched the news and saw how badly some authorities there were handling the crisis , it made me angry. This pandemic has made me want to study political science and economics so that I can positively influence people’s lives.

In many ways, this has forced me to become an adult. My parents were visiting family in Venezuela when the lockdown was announced and have not been able to re-enter the country. I’m living on my own, taking classes throughout the day and caring for the household in the evening. My parents send me money for food and things like that. In my spare time, I’ve been working on an auto-biography, and a series of short stories about feminism in Argentina. I’ve always loved writing, and lockdown has been an opportunity to focus on projects I’ve been dreaming about since I was 13 years old.

Of course, there are days when I feel sad. I watched the graduating class celebrate together last year and was so looking forward to experiencing that myself. But when I look at how many people are suffering, it makes me really grateful that I can stay home, eat and finish my education.

I don’t know if this pandemic will make us—our generation—paranoid. But I think it will make us really involved in everything from health to economic to political issues. I don’t think it is a negative thing to grow up like this. After all, this pandemic shows us how far we can go when we do what is best for everyone. —As told to Mélissa Godin

Lauren Ulrich, 17

Lauren lives in Rolla, Mo., and plans to attend Indiana University Bloomington

My main passion in life is the environment. It’s what I’ve been working so hard for: to have an impactful career and work to protect it. But while I was spending all my time in classes, journalism, internships and advocacy groups, I kind of lost touch with why I cared about the environment. With this free time, I’ve been able to spend more time in nature.

I live pretty close to part of the Mark Twain National Forest. I’ve been hiking a lot—I even went swimming in a river near my house, even though it’s pretty cold here still. When I was little, I would just go swimming somewhere for the fun of it. But I haven’t done that in a long time. When I jumped back in, that was a special moment for me: to let go of how serious I’ve been these last few years. I’ve been almost like my old self again.

I’ve almost been intentionally trying to take a break from worrying about issues that aren’t in my immediate control. Climate change is something I am incredibly passionate about, and I believe we need to be doing everything we can do to prevent it. But I’m learning through this experience that I can’t do everything. I need to make sure I’m as healthy as possible, so that I can make a bigger impact in the future. Knowing our economy is so unstable right now definitely makes me nervous, because I didn’t have a stable career path in the first place, and I especially don’t now. But I’m still going to do it: I know it’s what I’m meant to do. —As told to Andrew R. Chow

Kiana Aaron, 17

Kiana lives in Chicago, Ill., and plans to attend the University of Vermont in the fall.

I go to Chicago Bulls Prep; it’s a public charter school, a really good school, and I’m not just saying that. I went to a bad middle school; we didn’t really learn anything. Usually, I would get to school around 6:45 a.m. Sometimes I would work out, but most of the time I’d go to office hours, usually for chemistry. I had my AP Chem test yesterday and it went OK. But it’s weird; I don’t know how I feel about the AP testing this year, I don’t know if it’s fair. I did the best I could. After school, I would stay for more office hours or go to Wicker Park and stay there as long as possible, because it’s really hard to do homework at my house. I don’t have the best home life, so being at school is always more comfortable. Not being there feels weird. I miss my friends and especially my teachers.

Time feels so warped now; the days don’t feel separate. I wake up, eat breakfast, try to do some work. I’m just stuck with my mom and my brother’s dad and my little brother. I love him, and I love helping with him, but he’s always loud. It’s more the aura in my house; as soon as I walk in, it’s like, “Ugh!” My mom went back to work two weeks ago, and now I just wait for her to come home everyday. She provides everything for me and my siblings, but I have to do everything at home during the day, basically, now that she’s working. I help my brother with his classes, too. I have my phone, but I’m waiting to get a laptop from my school, because Bull has been sending laptops to kids.

My friend and I started an Instagram account sharing our class’s college plans. A lot of kids have messaged saying they’re really appreciative. The expectations are really high for us, so that’s what makes not having a graduation and not having a prom the sad part. Our school is so strict, that is the one time to have fun, and now we’re not having it. I had already gotten a dress — thank God it was not super expensive. It’s red, and on the top it’s a corset, and sparkly. I miss getting dressed up, but I have been doing my makeup; it’s really calming.

I applied for a summer enrichment program with the University of Vermont, but that might just be online now. I’ve been trying to get a job, but it’s really hard. I’m frustrated. My birthday is May 27, and I guess I’ll dress up, do my makeup really nice, have a photo shoot by myself. I want to make some cookies I’ve seen on TikTok . That’s pretty much it. —As told to Raisa Bruner

Zoey Meyer, 18

Zoey lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and hopes to attend university but has not yet committed to one.

Since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to be a lawyer. I’ve always liked the idea of giving people justice. But seeing how some police officers have treated black and white people differently under lockdown has made me want to be a lawyer even more. It is not fair that two groups of people are treated so differently.

Lockdown has been hard for me and my family. Before all of this, I worked at a restaurant. I loved my job. And I needed to work because my parents can’t afford to give us extra things. We have food and a roof over our heads, but we pay for extra things like going out with our friends, clothes, toiletries. It not only gave me the money I needed but it helped me come out of my shell. I was shy, but that job forced me out of my comfort zone. Now, my boss says she won’t be able to give me another shift until they can recuperate their losses. My dad also lost his job. My brother and I have run out of toiletries. We don’t have a lot to begin with so this is really affecting us.

The thing I miss most is going to school. I miss having a purpose. Online school is not the same. Not everyone has wifi or data—mine cuts out a lot—so online classes are really difficult for some of us. There are also so many moments we will miss: our matriculation ball, walking around in our grad jackets and feeling proud.

But I know that all these challenges will make me a stronger, harder working and independent person. Before the pandemic, I already faced adversity. I don’t live in a very safe area. It terrifies me to think that there is crime right out my window. And now, this lockdown has made life more difficult. But I’ve learnt that we can put a stop to the whole world and that we will still be OK. —As told to Mélissa Godin

Addison Bilodeau, 17

Addison lives in Greenland, N.H. She plans to attend Coastal Carolina University.

To pay for college, I need to work. I usually work at a restaurant across the water in Maine, and throughout the school year I was like, “Oh, I’ll just work in the summer and put in more hours.” But now that the restaurant is closed I don’t know if that’s a possibility anymore, which is kind of nerve-racking. It definitely could impact going to college for me. I already put my deposit down, and my parents are helping me a lot. But there’s housing, books, meal plans. Hopefully the restaurant will reopen or I’ll find somewhere else to work. I will probably also have to take out more in student loans. My mom works for Marriott Hotels, and she’s on furlough. She’s very stressed but also embracing it: she’s started so many projects around the house. Our whole house is painted a different color now.

@addiemorocks_24 #아웃웨스트챌린지 this account is becoming very pet friendly ♬ OUT WEST (feat. Young Thug) - JACKBOYS & Travis Scott

I’ve also been getting back into crafts. Yesterday the superintendent allowed us to come into school for a socially distant pottery class, where we were allowed to glaze our finished pieces and take them home. Today I’m taking old clothes and sewing and tie-dyeing them. I started gardening, and we just got chicks to raise as chickens. And I also started taking part in a pen-pal program through school with seniors at a nursing home, who aren’t allowed to see anyone or have anyone come in.

These projects are definitely a good distraction because when I turn on my phone, it’s just all news about the outbreak and it’s overwhelming. In some ways it does allow me to get off my phone more. Before, I would come home from school, get on my phone, watch TV, do homework. Now I get off Zoom and just want to go outside. Being able to do something that takes my mind off of it and makes me feel normal is really helpful. —As told to Andrew R. Chow

Buey Grossman, 17

Buey lives in Ketchum, Idaho, and is an aspiring ski racer. His home county had one of the highest COVID-19 case rates in the U.S. by early April.

I’m an alpine ski racer, and I compete in four different events: slalom, giant slalom, Super G and downhill. This was my second year as a FIS athlete, which means competing with everyone 17 and up. We were actually at a race here, one of the last qualifiers, when we found out about coronavirus. At that race, I figured out I had qualified for U.S. nationals, but then the next day, I also found out that U.S. nationals were canceled. I’d like to ski at least D1 in college, so my plan was to take a gap year with the Team Clif Racing Academy, and go down to New Zealand in the summer. We’re hopefully still trying to do that, but I’m not sure what’s going to happen because of the circumstances.

I didn’t really think anyone I knew was going to get it when the virus first came here, but a lot of my friends got it, and a lot of our parents’ friends got it, and I know a few people who have died from it. I wasn’t expecting that. When we first started quarantining, my parents were really strict, not letting me leave the house whatsoever. I use my phone, but I’m not the most social person online, so that was tough. It got a little better when I was allowed to go backcountry skiing or hiking or just started taking my dog for a walk. Prom was canceled, and our senior quest [outdoors trip], and graduation. The school decided we’ll be doing a drive-by diploma pickup.

For spring term of senior year at my school, you can either take classes like normal or do a senior project. I chose to try kayaking blindfolded, and to run a Class 5 rapid with my blindfold on. I’ve always been a kayaker, so I started paddling local runs with a visual impairment and getting down the guiding technique. I decided to test it this month, right at the confluence of the Payette River where the South Fork and North Fork meet. The biggest takeaway was understanding the difference between perceived danger and actual danger, and being able to cope with the fear you’re feeling, but not let that control you or take over. You have to focus on the actual dangers that are there, and be prepared. But it’s good to adapt and make the best of it. —As told to Raisa Bruner

Megan Lee, 17

Megan lives in Hong Kong and hopes to go college in the fall, but is undecided.

In Hong Kong , lockdown started in late January or early February. So we started our online learning very early. Our school was able to adapt really well. I lost a lot of time with my friends, but getting to spend more time with my family is -really nice. My brother was in university in Canada, but he came home. I was scared our living habits would clash, but I think it actually brought us a lot closer because we were forced to spend time together. It kind of like made our friends closer too—we were able to find out who our true friends are.

On House Party (a group video–chatting service), seven or eight of us like to play Cards Against Humanity. It’s usually a game we play in person with real cards, but we tried it virtually, and it was actually really fun. And we love to make TikToks. They’re very bad. We have very low engagement, but it’s always fun to do them and laugh at each other.

It’s my last year playing basketball. Every single year I would represent the school at our Southeast Asia competition. This was supposed to be my last year. We were supposed to go to Singapore with the team. It got canceled, and I was very sad about it because it’s the last time I would get to play with my team and my friends.

I know that the rest of the summer will be kind of like how things are right now. My family was hoping that maybe when the quarantine measures are relaxed, we can go somewhere close like Vietnam or Japan to celebrate the end of high school. My universities that I’ve applied to haven’t said that the fall term will be postponed until January or will be online classes, so I’m looking forward to being able to resume normal life again, kind of, but in a different environment, whether it be at the University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong or St. Andrews in Scotland. I’m just hoping, but I don’t think U.K. schools will postpone their fall term.

A lot has changed. Because I don’t know whether or not I’ll get to go to school—medicine is something I feel like I really need to be taught in person—I’ve been considering maybe taking a gap year. A lot of my friends have taken this into consideration as well. I would spend half of the time traveling and doing volunteer work and the other half probably gaining work experience and, like, doing internships and stuff. Not only that, but because of corona, I’ve learned a lot about the medical field and the different departments that need help. It’s kind of changed my thoughts about medicine—I’m maybe considering going into the intensive-care unit. —As told to Amy Gunia

Romy Stevens, 17

Stevens lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and is applying to universities for next year.

In these past weeks in lockdown I have completely cycled through the five stages of grief. Denial: I’m living my life exactly as I always do except everything must be done from inside the house. Plus no wasting time in traffic. Anger: way too many projects. Online school is really awful. We are definitely still learning and getting all our work done, but there is something physically and emotionally draining about sitting in front of the screen for 6 hours a day. And then when school is over you still have to do homework. You can never escape school because the borders between school and home have become blurred. Bargaining: I missed this stage, but most of the country went through it as we tried to get rights to go outside (we can now exercise outside from 6-9 a.m. yay). Depression : last week I was miserable. Definitely a case of the lockdown blues. Acceptance: This week I am feeling much better. I probably just had to go through the stage of crying for three days to feel a bit better.

Generally the whole situation really sucks because we are missing out on all the fun parts of our matric [senior] year. This is the last year to spend time with our friends, many of whom will be travelling overseas or going to different universities next year and so we won’t see them anymore.

I do have it much better than the majority of our population. We have a very resourced school which is still able to teach us during lockdown and most of us are relatively safe and comfortable in our houses with Internet access—so many students have no access to education at the moment, and may not have enough food or a safe place at home.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by 7k ieb victims (@ieb.memes_2020)

The one good thing that has come from this is we are forced to make more of an effort to connect with people. You do not just have the school day in common with everyone anymore and you cannot just rely on seeing people at school so you have to make an effort to contact them. For my group of friends it has been really nice because we’ve had time to contact the exchange students and our friends who have emigrated again. I have never had so many video calls in my life. Being able to contact my friends on Instagram, Microsoft Teams and WhatsApp video call is absolutely amazing and it is keeping me sane but it would really be nice just to give them a hug.

This Instagram account is the most wonderful representation of how South African teens are feeling at the moment: ieb.memes_2020 . Every year a different student runs an account that represents our final year. Usually it just consists of subject related memes with a lot of stressing and procrastination, but this year there is obviously a COVID twist. —As told to Mélissa Godin

Dhruv Krishna, 17

Dhruv lives in Allentown, Pa., and plans to attend the University of Virginia this fall.

We were on spring break when the corona hype hit the U.S. At first we were like, “Oh, this is cool, we get another couple days.” But those days turned into months, and then it hit us we would never see each other in person as a group again. We’ve been working for seven semesters, and this was supposed to be the best one.

We just finished AP-exam week. To celebrate, me and my friends are probably going to go to the parking lot. I’ve also been trying to manage the Team Arnav Foundation, which is definitely a struggle at this point. I founded it for my twin brother, who passed away from osteosarcoma in 2018. I didn’t want anyone else to have to go through that. We’ve raised about $60,000 to sponsor new [cancer] research so far. We had plans to do a charity run this spring. Of course, that can’t happen anymore. As a small business, it’s hard to keep going because the resources aren’t there. But we’re scheduling another run for when this is all over. This is a lifelong pursuit.

A silver lining has been reconnecting with so many old friends—elementary school friends, summer-camp friends—on Zoom calls. Everyone’s craving connection. Our school does Netflix parties. The most recent one was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. We also FaceTime and stay up really late, like 4 or 5 a.m., just talking about stupid things. I wasn’t big on video games before, but now we’re doing ones we can all join in, like Call of Duty. My parents are very understanding because of the situation, but they’re also urging me to get outside and not spend all day looking at the screen. I’m working my way through reading the classics, which is a tedious challenge. Right now I’m on Jane Eyre. I just finished Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations.

This fall, I’m supposed to go to the University of Virginia, and I’m keeping all my fingers and all my toes crossed we can go on campus. I’m excited to not only be away from these same four walls—my house, my bedroom—but also to meet new people and try new things. At home there are a lot of memories of my brother. This is the first time I’ve been alone for a summer at home, so it all feels foreign and different. I’m not entirely confident life will go back to normal, but I’m hopeful we can put all of this behind us. —As told to Raisa Bruner

Enrique Carrasco, 17

Enrique lives in El Paso, Tex., since emigrating from Mexico as a child. He plans to attend La Salle University in the fall.

At school, I would find happiness by bringing happiness to other people. Whenever I see someone who’s down, I feel like it’s my responsibility to bring them back up, to make them feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. And that’s without a doubt much harder to do from home. I’ve been making memes of inside jokes for my classmates. I’ve kept in touch with the kids from my class because we have a big group chat going, but my best friend and I aren’t really the type to text each other, so we’ve kind of drifted apart because of that. He lives in Mexico, so I haven’t seen him in a really long time.

I was also president of El Otro Lado, which is Spanish for “the other side.” In the program, we take schools from out of town, and we show them what life is like on the border. The moment that things started getting real bad [with the coronavirus], the schools that we had left canceled all their trips. I was really, really disappointed.

It’s really a feeling of worry that has clouded over me. This idea that I’ve built for myself since the beginning of the year—the classic going out of state to college, you know, small town to big town, meeting new people, the whole college experience—might not be possible. I signed D1 for water polo, and I’ve been practicing from home, so that come August if the school does reopen and my season is still on, I can still be competing at the level that I was competing at before. The pools are closed, but I have a pool at home. I spend about six or seven hours a week practicing, and, apart from that, and schoolwork, I’ve been spending a lot of time with my mom. We recently finished watching Narcos: Mexico and The House of Flowers .

I’m worried about what’s going to happen, but, mostly, I miss seeing my friends. Hanging out, doing our shenanigans, and just making memories—that’s the biggest part. —As told to Anna Purna Kambhampaty

Milly Parvin, 18

Milly lives in London and plans to attend University College London.

With all the uncertainty, I don’t know if I’m going to experience the first few months at a university campus like I’d planned, so I’m quite nervous and confused about my short term future. Longer term, I’m inspired by the work I’ve seen teachers doing. The education system isn’t going to be the same after this, and the pandemic has shown that teachers are key workers too. Now I want to be a headteacher and run a school one day; I want to be the person that pushes others to reach their goals.

Through this time, I’ve wanted to add spirituality into my routine a bit more, and to work on my relationship with God. Now that it’s Ramadan, we have a lot of traditions. Normally I would help volunteer at my local mosque when we pray at night. A really big thing for us is sharing food—for the first three days of Ramadan, our family shares food with our community. This time, my sister and I realized how much we missed being together and sharing our neighbor’s brownies. For Eid, we would get dressed up and go out for dinner, but of course that’s not going to be happening. It’s just quite sad that we can’t enjoy our traditional routines.

Sometimes you just need to scribble down your thoughts, and I do that with poetry. My mum will always say, “Why don’t you give your friends a call?” I find that hard because I want to see my friends, not just call them. When you scribble down the words—whether it rhymes or not—it allows you to express how you feel at that time. I like to post it online to relate to other young people.

In my poetry, I say that we will greet everyone with salaam , which means peace. Peace is what we really need after all of this, and I’m looking forward to just being able to say that we got through this, and being so proud that we did it. —As told to Suyin Haynes

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The Impact of COVID-19 on High School Student-Athlete Experiences with Physical Activity, Mental Health, and Social Connection

Heather a. shepherd.

1 Sport Injury Prevention Research Centre, Faculty of Kinesiology, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada; [email protected] (T.E.); [email protected] (S.G.); ac.yraglacu@ienhcsjk (K.J.S.); ac.yraglacu@yremeac (C.A.E.); ac.yraglacu@kcalba (A.M.B.)

2 Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada; ac.yraglacu@abelyodp (P.D.-B.); ac.yraglacu@setaeyk (K.O.Y.); [email protected] (D.C.K.-S.)

3 Hotchkiss Brain Institute, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 4N1, Canada

4 O’Brien Institute for Public Health, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 4Z6, Canada

Taffin Evans

Srijal gupta, meghan h. mcdonough.

5 Faculty of Kinesiology, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada; [email protected]

Patricia Doyle-Baker

6 School of Architecture, Planning and Design, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada

Kathy L. Belton

7 Injury Prevention Centre, School of Public Health, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E1, Canada; ac.atreblau@notlebk

Shazya Karmali

8 BC Injury Research and Prevention Unit, BC Children’s Hospital, Vancouver, BC V6H 3V4, Canada; [email protected] (S.K.); [email protected] (S.P.); [email protected] (G.H.); ac.rhccb@ekipi (I.P.); ac.rhccb@lubabs (S.B.)

Samantha Pawer

Gabrielle hadly.

9 Department of Pediatrics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada

Stephanie A. Adams

10 Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada; [email protected]

11 Clinical Psychology, School of Health in Social Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AG, UK

12 Institute for Sport, Physical Education and Health Sciences, Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 8QA, UK

Shelina Babul

Keith owen yeates.

13 Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada

Daniel C. Kopala-Sibley

14 Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 4N1, Canada

15 Department of Psychiatry, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 4N1, Canada

16 Mathison Centre for Mental Health Research and Education, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 4Z6, Canada

Kathryn J. Schneider

17 Sport Medicine Centre, Faculty of Kinesiology, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada

Stephanie Cowle

18 Parachute, Toronto, ON M4P 1E8, Canada; ac.etuhcarap@elwocs (S.C.); ac.etuhcarap@illesufp (P.F.)

Pamela Fuselli

Carolyn a. emery, amanda m. black, associated data.

The data are not available due to privacy and ethical restrictions.

COVID-19 restrictions led to reduced levels of physical activity, increased screen usage, and declines in mental health in youth; however, in-depth understandings of the experiences of high school student-athletes have yet to be explored. To describe the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic on student-athletes’ physical activity, social connection, and mental health, 20 high school student-athletes living in Calgary, Alberta participated in semi-structured interviews, designed using phenomenography. Participants reported variations in physical activity, social connections, and mental health which were influenced by stay-at-home restrictions and weather. Access to resources, changes to routines, online classes, and social support all influenced engagement in physical activity. School and sports provided opportunities for in-person social connections, impacted by the onset of the pandemic. Participants reported their mental health was influenced by social connections, online classes, and physical activity. Findings from this study will inform the development of resources for high school student-athletes amidst COVID-19.

1. Introduction

In 2020, the novel coronavirus disease, COVID-19, spread rapidly around the globe [ 1 ]. To control the spread of COVID-19, health authorities enacted policies to increase physical distancing and limit person-to-person contact [ 2 , 3 , 4 ]. This included closing schools, community centres, parks, athletic and fitness facilities, and halting organized sports [ 5 , 6 ]. Canadian health authorities provided guidelines to maintain physical activity safely, including engaging with people from the same household or small groups, while maintaining physical distancing [ 7 , 8 ]. Options for physical activity included in-home exercise programs (e.g., yoga, online fitness classes), outside activity during non-peak hours, and appropriate hand hygiene practices before and after activity [ 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 ].

COVID-19 has led to the rapid dissemination of research examining the impact of the pandemic on physical activity, social connections, and mental health. A study of parents in Italy and Spain reported that >85% of their children decreased physical activity levels, increased screen time, and increased maladaptive emotional and behavioural signs [ 12 ]. In Germany, increased isolation and decreased social connections were associated with increased psychological distress [ 13 ]. In China, 40% of youth experienced psychological distress (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder [14%], negative coping, stress) after COVID-19 was announced as a public health emergency [ 14 ].

In the United States, a study of high school student-athletes reported elevated self-reported anxious and depressive symptoms in females when compared to males [ 15 ]. McGuine et al. [ 15 ] also reported increased self-reported anxious and depressive symptomatology in grade 12 students, when compared to lower grades. Schools may provide opportunities for mental health supports (e.g., guidance counsellor) [ 16 ], and without these supports in place, coupled with increased isolation, change in routine, and decreased opportunities for socialization, the mental health in high school students is of concern.

Physical activity and social connection are important determinants of mental health [ 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 ]. Researchers reported that youth who participate in team sports had better mental health scores than youth who engaged in individual sports [ 18 ]. This is in contrast to the results reported by McGuine et al. [ 15 ] who found that during the first few months of COVID-19, team sport athletes self-reported more anxious and depressive symptoms compared to individual sport athletes. As such, the effect of COVID-19 may be more difficult for team sport athletes.

In addition, physical activity of any kind has been positively associated with mental health among youth [ 20 , 21 , 22 ]. Schools traditionally facilitate opportunities for group-based physical activity and social connection through physical education and extra-curricular sport activities [ 23 ]. However, physical distancing measures enacted during COVID-19 and the suspension of in-person schooling might reduce important social connections and physical activity opportunities for student-athletes.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Canadian youth is not yet well understood. Few researchers describe the experiences and perceptions of Canadian youth during the pandemic. Existing studies rely on survey methods to examine youth experiences during COVID-19; however, they are limited in understanding the depth and variations of youth perceptions during COVID-19 and have not focused on the Canadian student-athlete population.

Stopping or modifying school, sports, and/or recreational opportunities may greatly impact health behaviours including engagement in physical activity, social connections, and mental health among high school student-athletes. The aim of this study was to describe and interpret Canadian high school student-athletes’ experiences with physical activity, mental health, and social connections during the COVID-19 pandemic.

2.1. Methodological Paradigm

This study employed a second-order phenomenological perspective (phenomenography) [ 24 ]. Phenomenography seeks to understand variation in the subjective nature of experiences, perceptions, and conceptualizations of a phenomenon [ 24 , 25 ]. It aims to characterize descriptive categories that differ from one another, and can be used to identify health-related concepts that can be targeted for change [ 26 ].

2.2. Participants

High school student-athletes from Calgary, Alberta were purposively sampled from participants currently enrolled in the three-year pan-Canadian Surveillance in High Schools to Reduce Concussions (SHRed Concussions) cohort study, and who engaged in at least one of 10 high-risk concussion sports (e.g., rugby, ice hockey, soccer). Participants were initially invited to participate in this sub-study by a member of the research team and were provided an overview of the study purpose. A total of 166 participants were contacted, 99 of whom expressed interest in participation. The 99 participants were then sampled for variation on: (1) sex; (2) gender; and (3) sport participation (i.e., whether they participated in a spring season sport or not). Participants were then purposively sampled, using maximum variation sampling, including variation in sport participation, season of sport, and individual or team sport participation (see Figure 1 ). Participants were then invited to participate in an interview. Sport information was retrieved from a physical activity participation survey included as part of the larger study.

Overview of participant recruitment and data collection.

Participants were informed that all information collected would remain confidential and de-identified. Participants provided verbal consent to participate. The study was approved by the University of Calgary Conjoint Health Research Ethics Board (#REB18-2107).

2.3. Data Collection

Semi-structured interviews were conducted via phone or Zoom and were scheduled to be 45–60 min in duration (see Supplementary Materials for interview guide). At the conclusion of each interview, each participant received a debrief e-mail outlining mental health resources and support services. All interviews were completed by HAS and TE (first and second author, respectively) in June 2020, during Phase 1 when certain COVID-19 restrictions (e.g., day camps, summer school, parks) were lifted in Calgary, Alberta. Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim via Rev.com [ 27 ]. Each transcript was validated against the audio recordings by two reviewers.

2.4. Data Analysis

The data analysis process was guided by steps outlined by Kinnunen and Simon [ 25 ]: (1) data familiarization by reading transcripts and listening to all audio recordings of interviews; (2) identifying emergent codes; (3) refining and redefining categories; (4) finalizing categories and providing a thorough description of the categories; and (5) discussing relationships between categories. Sex/gender and sport participation were considered during Step 5. Although listed stepwise, the process was iterative. The lead author completed all steps in the analysis in consultation with the research team. NViVO 12 [ 28 ] was used to support the data analysis process.

Bracketing and Reflexivity

To enhance trustworthiness, bracketing and reflexivity practices were adhered to throughout the research process [ 29 ]. Bracketing refers to researchers suspending judgement and focusing on the inductive analysis of experiences as described by the participants [ 29 ]. Prior to data collection, all members of the data collection and analysis team underwent training on bracketing and reflexivity. Interviewers and transcript reviewers kept reflexive memos to record their interpretations, their experiences of the interview, and potential ways they may have influenced interviews (e.g., interpretation of participant responses, rapport building) or interpreted transcriptions. To increase credibility, peer debriefing was completed after interviews and after each stage of the data analysis process. To support dependability, an audit trail was used to track all aspects of decision making. Additional author information is provided in Supplementary Materials .

Thirty-six participants were contacted to participate, of which 20 completed an interview. Fourteen participants could not be reached, and two participants declined to participate (see Figure 1 ). All interviews were conducted between 2 and 9 June 2020 and ranged from 28 to 80 min in length. Interviews were conducted via telephone ( n = 19) or Zoom ( n = 1), based on participant preference. All participants (10 males and 10 females, ages 15–17 years) identified as cis-gendered. Five female and five male participants typically participated in a high school spring sport (March–June 2020) and five female and five male participants typically participated in a high school sport in another season (see Table 1 ). Although sampled on sex, gender, and spring sport participation, no reported differences on experiences of physical activity, mental health, nor social connections were apparent between males and females or based on season of sport participation.

Participant characteristics by gender/sex, age, and spring sport, and physical activity participation.

Note: a Spring sport; b Club spring/all year sport.

3.1. Overview

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Calgary, Alberta, when school and organized sports were cancelled (15 March 2020), led to variations in physical activity, mental health, and social connections amongst high school student-athletes ( Figure 2 ). Participants reported that school and sports both provided opportunities for physical activity and social connections, and that these were altered with the onset of the pandemic. Poor weather, including snow and ice, affected student-athletes’ engagement in physical activity, predominantly limiting them to indoor exercises, disengaged from their peers, and reports of declines in mental health. Participant 2-M shared that the restrictions made him feel like he was, “ stuck inside ”, a sentiment shared by others. The lifting of restrictions (14–25 May 2020) coincided with an improvement in weather, increased opportunities for physical activity outdoors (e.g., biking, walking), and increased opportunities to connect with friends outside while observing physical distancing measures. Participants expressed how their increased physical activity and social connections were associated with an improvement in their mental health, “I’m seeing my friends a little more…I’m walking around more…I’m not stuck at home” (P19-F) , and that these improvements were a shift towards normal, or a “new normal”. Participant 10-M described his perspective of the lifting of restrictions, “it’s better… you can kind of go outside and do stuff a little more…Like I’m feeling good you know. Everything’s kind of getting back to normal”.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on high school athlete’s experiences with physical activity, social connections, and mental health.

3.2. Variations in Mental Health and Well-Being

3.2.1. initial covid-19 restrictions led to increased anxiety for most student-athletes.

Most participants reported their mental health worsened at the onset of COVID-19 restrictions, expressing feelings of anxiousness, fear, and shock. Participant 15-F shared, “I had anxiety attacks all throughout the first week”. Two participants reported no change in their mental health, and one reported the cancellation of school “felt like…a longer and extended weekend” (P6-M) .

3.2.2. The Impact of Changes to Physical Activity and Mental Health during the Pandemic

Participants reported that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, physical activity helped them to manage emotions, decreased their stress, and supported their physical and mental wellness. Physical activity and mental health declined at the onset of restrictions and at the onset of school resuming online for most participants, with many reporting improvements in physical and mental health at the time of the interview. Participant 20-M explained how the onset of restrictions “ affected me mentally ‘cause I was used to putting all my energy into a sport, but then suddenly I didn’t have anywhere to put that energy… it just made me feel very um, impatient or like, um, restless” . A few participants shared that the COVID-19 restrictions enabled them to stay physically active throughout the pandemic, and that this helped maintain their mental health. Participant 5-M shared his experience saying he, “just focus[es] on my weight training, just help alleviate stress” .

3.3. The Suspension and Modification of School Routine Affected Social Connections, Physical Activity, and Mental Health

3.3.1. the loss of school and sports led to a decrease in social connections.

The cessation of school and sports decreased opportunities for social connection for some participants and led them to feel disconnected and lonely. Participant 1-F discussed how it affected her, stating, “It impacted me a lot… how I stay connected with people is going to practices and talking to them there”. This contrasts with a few participants who shared that the pandemic did not alter social connections, “I only ever really see them in practice…and never really hung out with them, so we aren’t too close” (P18-F).

3.3.2. Online Physical Education Classes Lacked Physical Activity

Students enrolled in physical education classes discussed how their class, once focused on experiential fitness, activity, and health, transitioned to writing about how to engage in these activities, or to tracking their physical activity using the honour system. Participant 2-M shared, “I found it was pointless because like we don’t really do any physical… We just like list down stuff that we did” . One participant shared that her friend who attended a different school used a freely accessible phone application: “it pretty much tracked their steps and their running” (P9-F) , which she was interested in trialing for her physical education class.

3.3.3. Returning to School Online Affected Mental Health and Well-Being Differently in Student-Athletes.

When school resumed online, many participants reported increased stress and frustration, citing lack of support from teachers, unclear expectations, and challenges with self-directed learning. Participant 9-F expressed that online “classes stressed me out” . However, others reported an improvement in their mental well-being when school resumed, citing the return to a routine helped structure their day. Participant 6-M shared how his prior experience with online learning helped ease the transition, “ I was doing online English at the time… so it was kind of just a transition into that” and was less stressful than it may have been for his peers.

3.4. Changes to Physical Activity Programming Affected Engagement

3.4.1. covid-19 restrictions decreased the amount and intensity of physical activity.

Participants reported their physical activity decreased at the onset of COVID-19 restrictions. Reasons for decreased activity included limited access to equipment, decreased motivation, and change to school and sport routines. Participant 4-F shared, “I definitely stopped running as much. My endurance got a lot worse” when describing her physical activity at the onset of restrictions. No participants explicitly reported that their physical activity levels increased at the onset of COVID-19 restrictions. However, most participants reported that their physical activity had increased at the time of the interview compared to the onset of restrictions, and some reported their activity had returned to pre-COVID-19 levels. Participant 15-F shared how her “physical health is got, is definitely a lot better” , at the time of interview than at the onset of the pandemic.

3.4.2. Changes to Resources Led to Changes in Physical Activity

Access to a broad range of resources, including equipment, personnel, and knowledge of training plans, provided support to student-athletes to engage in physical activity pre-COVID-19. Access to resources was hampered by COVID-19 and affected student-athletes’ engagement in their pre-pandemic physical activity and sport-specific training. For some, the lack of resources required them to modify their activity, “I wasn’t able to swim anymore, then I started…going on runs” (P11-F ), or work on other skills, “I’ve been pretty bad with my cardio. And now it gives me a chance to work on that [sic]” (P2-M) . Whereas other participants indicated that the lack of resources could be detrimental, “I feel like you’re taking a step back from your potential” (P8-F). Although lack of resources was a barrier to many, some participants were well-equipped to continue with their physical activity, “we have a gym in the basement” (P13-M) .

Creativity with Household Items as Fitness Equipment Increased Physical Activity

Some participants who lacked fitness equipment adapted household items either through their own creativity, or following the advice of their teachers, “I have some PVC pipes that I used as my bar and then milk jugs on either side and used it as um, as like a bar weight” (P14-F) .

Access to Training Programs Affected Engagement in Physical Activity and Social Connections

The cessation of school and organized sports resulted in the suspension of planned training (e.g., practices, physical education classes), resulting in some participants feeling at a loss of how to train, “I didn’t have a coach to teach me anymore” (P13-M) . Other student-athletes turned to friends, social media, or the Internet to educate themselves on how to develop a training plan, “…so I Google like weight training routines” (P12-F) . Meanwhile, some participants reported accessing training plans provided by their sports organizations, which provided structure for their training and guidance on what physical activities to perform. Participant 4-F discussed how her soccer team maintained a weekly schedule, “Thursdays are always the running days and Saturdays are always the workout days” , which facilitated her ongoing engagement in physical activity.

Some sports clubs and teams used social media platforms to complete training online via video conferencing which supported not only engagement in physical activity, but also supported connection with teammates and coaches. Access to virtual training was desired by participants who did not have access to such resources. Participant 8-F expressed her desire saying, “since the rugby season got cancelled, I think it would have been cool if like we had like virtual practices or something” .

3.5. Changes to Social Support and Connections In-Person and Online

3.5.1. social support was important for engaging in physical activity for some student-athletes.

Many participants shared that family, friend, and teammate support and encouragement (e.g., verbal praise) were more important to their engagement in physical activity during then pandemic than prior to the pandemic. For some, engaging in physical activity with their family members was helpful, “we all just kind of connect in a way” (P11-F) . Talking with friends or exercising together virtually helped some participants to follow through on their training, “if we’re both doing it, then I’ll be more likely to actually follow through with it” (P11-F) . However, other participants reported that they were self-motivated, “I said to myself… maintain that goal” (P3-M) and engaged in physical activity independent of their family, friends, teammates, or other external motivators (e.g., competition).

3.5.2. Social Media and Physical Distancing Were Not Adequate Forms of Connection

Participants engaged in multiple means of connection, including texting, calling, social media, and, when permissible, physically distanced in-person meetings. Many participants shared that connecting with friends, teammates, and family was helpful to them, “being able to be able to talk to other people has been—is really helpful” (P5-M) . Social media allowed for communication over numerous platforms and platforms with video (e.g., Zoom, FaceTime) were preferred. Participant 18-F expressed her preference for interactive platforms saying, “[I] feel like my personality is coming through… Whereas like texting… sometimes you don’t read it as well” (P18-F) . However, some participants reported that the reliance on social media for communication was difficult and tiresome, “[it] kinda gets like a little bit stale” (P16-M) . Participants shared that although physical distancing was an improvement to social media, it still altered their normal interactions. Participant 17-M stated, “it’s definitely different ‘cause you’re usually… be closer and… like, wrestle… you have to stay six feet apart and you can’t” and Participant 4-F shared, that she “miss[es] also being able to hug my friend” . Some participants shared how the lack of in-person connection led to a decline in their mental health. Participant 7-M shared his experience stating, “I’m not seeing those people that I have fun with for long amounts of time… the mind starts going into, into darker places, I guess, and isn’t feeling as happy” .

4. Discussion

The aim of this study was to describe and interpret high school student-athletes’ experiences during COVID-19, and how their physical activity, mental health, and social connections were affected by the pandemic. Results highlight the multifaceted experiences and perspectives of these youth, with variations occurring both across and within individuals in all three domains (i.e., physical activity, mental health, social connections) during the initial three months of COVID-19 restrictions in Calgary, Alberta.

In Calgary, engagement in physical activity and in-person connections came to a halt for most high school-aged students when the Alberta Government announced, on March 15, 2020, that schools would be closed [ 30 ]. Schools traditionally provide opportunities for physical activity through physical education classes and extra-curricular sports, social relationships through classes and extra-curricular activities, and access to mental health resources and supports, such as school counsellors. Consistent with previous surveys [ 12 , 15 , 31 , 32 , 33 ], the stoppage or modifications to school and sports led to decreases in physical activity, social connections, and self-reported mental health for most student-athletes in our sample.

The descriptions provided by the participants highlight specific strategies that may assist with mitigating the negative effects of COVID-19 restrictions. Specifically, the loss of organized sports and loss of connection with teammates led student-athletes to express desire for virtual training provided by their coaches. Online options may increase access to regularly scheduled activity, create routine, and facilitate access to prescribed training plans, eliminating the need for adolescents to create their own. Virtual training may also increase social connection with teammates and coaches, especially if conducted in real-time, such as through Zoom or Skype. Training with others may also increase activity duration, intensity, or motivation as per the Köhler effect, which may further support engagement in physical activity [ 34 , 35 ]. The uptake of online platforms to support physical activity and social connection among student-athletes may be potential solutions for schools and for sport organizations. Student-athletes not presently enrolled in physical education class or extra-curricular sport may benefit from similar virtual training programs provided by community organizations.

The design of online training programs should include exercises that can be completed with limited or no equipment. This may help to reduce potential barriers, such as lower family socio-economic status, to participation in physical activity at home. Lower socio-economic standing is associated with decreased sport and physical activity participation and decreased access to resources to support physical activity [ 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 ]. Student-athletes who had access to resources, or maintained their physical activity throughout COVID-19, did not report changes to their overall health and wellness. This further supports evidence that physical activity acts a protective factor for mental health and physical health [ 11 , 40 , 41 ]. Thus, recommendations must consider accessibility for all student-athletes.

Efforts to raise awareness of freely accessible resources (e.g., Nike Run Club, ParticipACTION) by sports organizations, schools, and health organizations may increase physical activity and reduce barriers imposed by limited resources. Although research outlining types of at-home physical activity is limited, public health authorities continue to stress the importance of remaining physically active [ 42 , 43 ]. Further, resources outlining at-home physical activities have been developed, but further dissemination work is needed to translate this information to high school student-athletes and those stakeholders whom interact with them [ 10 ].

The change in school structure led to disruption in routines and subsequent declines in mental well-being among participants. The return to school online increased stress and frustration among many participants, who cited lack of preparation, poor communication with teachers, and unclear expectations as increased stressors. Available mental health resources should be promoted to student-athletes, including access to peer support, mentorship, and registered mental health professionals. Raising awareness of supports and resources that can be accessed through telehealth or virtual means should be highlighted considering the pandemic. Schools should also provide education to teachers on ways to support students via online learning. Implementation of existing mental health programs, such as MindMatters [ 44 , 45 ], a mental health promotion program, may help to support student-athlete mental health not only during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also after the pandemic has ended.

In-person communication provides opportunity for nonverbal communication to occur [ 46 ], and its absence was highlighted by the student-athletes when communicating via social media. A survey conducted in Britain found that 65% of students wanted to return to school for socialization purposes [ 47 ], highlighting the importance of school as a facilitator for developing and maintaining social relationships. In the wake of another wave of COVID-19 restrictions, schools should offer alternative means for students to connect, with increased opportunity for physically distanced, but in-person communications. If this is not possible, then opportunities for increased use of video communication, or social media platforms that permit two-way exchange, allowing for non-verbal communication, would be desirable.

Social media provided platforms for student-athletes to stay connected to family, friends, and teammates. Participants reported using different platforms for different forms of communication. For example, Snapchat and FaceTime were used to communicate with close friends, as they exhibit body language and tone of voice, whereas Pinterest and Instagram feeds were used to share resources (e.g., exercise routines). Social media can support mental health when it fosters social connections [ 48 ]; however, it can also decrease mental health, including feelings of increased isolation and depression among youth [ 33 , 48 ]. Although social media allowed for connections throughout COVID-19, the heavy reliance on social media may have negative health consequences for youth. Participants in this study shared that the reliance on social media became tiresome, and that reliance on it impacted their ability to communicate using non-verbal channels with their peers.

At the onset of COVID-19 in March 2020, Calgary was still experiencing winter weather and still in the midst of winter, most physical activity and socialization was restricted to indoors. The better weather and lifting of restrictions were associated with increased engagement in physical activity, particularly outside, increased social connections, with opportunities to connect with others via physical distance measures in outdoor spaces, and improvement in mental health. Most participants reported that their overall health and wellness improved at this time. Increased access to outdoor public spaces and green spaces may provide more opportunity for physical engagement and social connection, in addition to improvements in mental health [ 49 , 50 ]. Adapting school curricula and sports programs to allow for physical activity and social connection in a safe manner may help to promote mental health among high school student-athletes. Resources that promote outdoor physical activity in cooler temperatures may help to foster a sense of normality and the continued engagement in physical activity, especially in colder climates [ 51 ].

Strengths and Limitations

A phenomenographical design allowed for the expression and understanding of variations of student-athletes’ experiences throughout the COVID-19 pandemic to be captured. The wide range of perspectives illustrate the importance of individual experiences within the broader context of the pandemic, with each participant’s experience and perception valued and represented in the results. The inclusion of physical activity, mental health, and social connections helps to better understand how these health determinants intersect, and how they might shape each other in the health and well-being of student-athletes. The study findings highlight the variation in potential strategies that could be used to improve high school student-athletes’ experiences as pandemic restrictions continue, or should another pandemic occur. Participant experiences described in this study also highlight that it is not necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach, and that tailored approaches, or alternatives to the norm should be suggested as resources and supports are developed for high school student-athletes.

Although the study asked about changes in mental health throughout the COVID-19 pandemic restricts in winter and spring of 2020, we did not inquire about participants’ natural fluctuation in mental health and thus alterations in mental health reporting may have been due to external factors (e.g., seasonal changes). Additionally, to promote discussion and reduce stigma, the term “mental wellness” was used with participants rather than mental health, which may have impacted whether participants were willing to speak openly about struggles with their mental health. Further, interviews via phone may have provided less opportunity for rapport building, as body language was lost in the communication, limiting a sense of security and safety when talking about mental health. However, questions pertaining to mental health were asked after rapport building questions and questions pertaining to physical activity. Additionally, two females spoke openly about their mental health challenges and one male discussed change in his mood throughout the pandemic.

5. Conclusions

This novel phenomenographical study explored high school student-athletes’ experiences of physical activity, social connections, and mental health and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study highlights the interactions amongst these health determinants and provides insights into what resources and supports these student-athletes accessed and found helpful, and what areas of support were lacking. Findings provide direction on how best to support student-athletes moving forward.

6. Recommendations

• Provide options for physical activity programs via synchronous online platforms that allow for participant engagement and observation of body language through the platform
• Share and disseminate free or low-cost fitness applications, websites, or YouTube channels with youth to facilitate their engagement in physical activity
• No equipment or low equipment exercise programs should be disseminated to schools, sports organizations, and youth
• Cities and communities should allocate increased walking space or green space to facilitate physical distancing when outdoors
• In colder climates, increased opportunities for cold-weather activities (e.g., skating, cross-country skiing, walking) should be facilitated by the city or community (e.g., plowing sidewalks and paths, creating cross-country ski tracks)
• Schools should facilitate increased opportunity to seek support from teachers (e.g., office hours where students can ask questions)
• Schools should implement mental health programming and wellness initiatives
• Schools and sports organizations should develop peer support programs
• Mental health resources and supports and how to access the supports should be communicated to youth
• Communicating information to youth should be done via social media (specifically Instagram), through teachers and school boards, and to parents and coaches.

Acknowledgments

The Sport Injury Prevention Research Centre is one of the International Research Centres for Prevention of Injury and Protection of Athlete Health supported by the IOC. We acknowledge the support of the high school student-athletes who participated in this study and of the SHRed Concussions research team for their support.

Supplementary Materials

The following are available online at https://www.mdpi.com/article/10.3390/ijerph18073515/s1 , Interview Guide, Researcher Characteristics, Interviewer Characteristics, Peer Debrief and Mentor Characteristics.

Author Contributions

All authors (H.A.S., T.E., S.G., M.H.M., P.D.-B., K.L.B., S.K., S.P., G.H., I.P., S.A.A., S.B., K.O.Y., D.C.K.-S., K.J.S., S.C., P.F., C.A.E., A.M.B.) contributed to the conceptualization and design of the study. H.A.S. and T.E. conducted all interviews. T.E., S.G., S.K., S.P., G.H., and A.M.B. supported the transcript verification process. H.A.S. conducted all data analysis, with mentorship from M.H.M., S.A.A., P.D.-B., K.L.B., and A.M.B. The paper was initially drafted by H.A.S., H.A.S. and A.M.B. take responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis. They led the design, acquisition of funding, all research activities, as well as critically reviewed the analysis and manuscript preparation. All authors (H.A.S., T.E., S.G., M.H.M., P.D.-B., K.L.B., S.K., S.P., G.H., I.P., S.A.A., S.B., K.O.Y., D.C.K.-S., K.J.S., S.C., P.F., C.A.E., A.M.B.) critically reviewed and edited the manuscript before submission. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

We acknowledge funding through the Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute, the Integrated Concussion Research Program, and the Faculty of Kinesiology, University of Calgary. Carolyn Emery holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Concussion.

Institutional Review Board Statement

This study was approved by the University of Calgary Conjoint Health Research Ethics Board (#REB18-2107).

Informed Consent Statement

Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

Data Availability Statement

Conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Writing Prompts, Lesson Plans, Graphs and Films: 150 Resources for Teaching About the Coronavirus Pandemic

This cross-curricular resource collection, including math, history, science and music, helps students process, deepen and challenge their understanding of the pandemic and its effects on our society.

By The Learning Network

Since January, The Learning Network has published over 150 resources to help students process, deepen and challenge their understanding of the pandemic and its far-reaching effects on our society.

Via our daily writing prompts, we’ve asked students to share their experiences: finding joy in the face of isolation, staying fit, and managing social distancing and online schooling. Through our daily lesson plans, we’ve encouraged students to explore topics like the science of the virus, the history of global pandemics and the effects of social class.

Our graphs have encouraged students to analyze how interventions can slow the spread of the coronavirus, and our short films have helped students consider how the crisis has contributed to growing racism and inequality — and a need for ice cream. We also have a quiz to help educate students on the basics.

While our regular daily and weekly features are on hiatus during the summer, we’ll be back in September with many more resources for the new school year. Let us know what else we might add to this collection as the world continues to battle the virus by making a comment or emailing us at [email protected].

Teaching Resource Collections

A good place to start exploring the Learning Network’s materials on the coronavirus pandemic is our three in-depth resource collections below. Each includes student-centered activities and projects as well as a wealth of links to New York Times coverage.

Coronavirus Resources: Teaching, Learning and Thinking Critically

12 Ideas for Writing Through the Pandemic With The New York Times

7 Ways to Explore the Math of the Coronavirus Using The New York Times

Student Opinion

Every day of the school year, we publish a fresh Student Opinion question that invites students to read a Times article and respond with their own ideas. Some of our questions ask students to make an argument, while others invite personal writing. Teachers tell us that these daily opinion questions are a good opportunity to practice writing for an authentic audience.

Here are over 40 coronavirus-related Student Opinion writing prompts that cover an array of topics, like family life, dealing with anxiety, life without sports, voting during a time of social distancing and missing your prom.

How Will We Remember the Coronavirus Pandemic?

What Have You Learned About Yourself During This Lockdown?

Where Should We Draw the Line Between Community Health and Safety and Individual Liberty and Privacy?

Do You Prefer to Dwell in the Past, Live in the Present or Dream of the Future?

How Has Social Distancing Changed Dating for Teenagers?

How Is Your Family Dividing Responsibilities During the Quarantine?

Should Students Be Monitored When Taking Online Tests?

Do You Enjoy Going On a Walk — Especially Now?

What’s the First Thing You Plan to Do After Quarantine?

What Makes a Great Leader?

When the Pandemic Ends, Will School Change Forever?

What Do the Objects in Your Home Say About You?

Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist?

Is It OK to Laugh During Dark Times?

What Are Your Hopes for Summer 2020? What Are Your Worries?

What Do You Miss Most About Your Life Before the Pandemic?

What Are Your Favorite Games?

How Do You Greet Your Friends and Family?

How Can You Tell a Story About Your Life Right Now Through a Few Simple Numbers?

How Are You Feeling About Missing Prom?

Is Your Family Experiencing Greater Conflict During a Time of Self-Quarantine?

What Weaknesses and Strengths About Our World Are Being Exposed by This Pandemic?

Should We All Be Able to Vote by Mail?

What Acts of Kindness Have You Heard About or Participated In During Coronavirus?

How Are You Getting Your Sports-Watching Fix?

How Has the Coronavirus Changed How You Use the Internet?

Holidays and Birthdays Are Moments to Come Together. How Are You Adapting During the Pandemic?

Should Schools Change How They Grade Students During the Pandemic?

What Are Some Ways to ‘Travel’ Without Traveling During the Pandemic?

Is the Coronavirus Pandemic Bringing Your Extended Family Closer Together?

What Role Should Celebrities Have During the Coronavirus Crisis?

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Has Your School Switched to Remote Learning? How Is It Going So Far?

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How Do You Think the Primaries and 2020 Presidential Election Should Proceed?

How Are You Staying Healthy and Fit?

What Are You Reading, Watching, Listening To, Playing and Cooking? A Place for Recommendations

How Is the Coronavirus Outbreak Affecting Your Life?

What Songs Matter to You Now?

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Is It Immoral to Increase the Price of Goods During a Crisis?

What Is Your Reaction to the Latest News About the Coronavirus Outbreak?

Stress, Worry and Anxiety Are All Different. How Do You Cope With Each?

How Concerned Are You About the Coronavirus Outbreak?

Lesson of the Day

Every school day we offer a fresh “ Lesson of the Day ” based on the most interesting, important and student-friendly news that The New York Times has published that week — on topics like sports, music, politics and world issues. Each lesson includes an engaging warm-up activity, questions for students to discuss or write about, and activities that allow them to apply what they’ve learned in creative and challenging ways.

Below are over 30 Lessons of the Day that explore subjects and stories as varied as wild animals venturing into public spaces while humans shelter in place, why e-sports are providing a space for community and fun during the pandemic, and how the disease is disproportionately infecting and killing African-Americans.

‘ Lionhearted’ Girl Bikes Dad Across India, Inspiring a Nation

Athing Mu Might Be America’s Fastest Teenager. How Much Faster Will She Be in 2021?

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How Pandemics End

A 92-Year-Old Piano Teacher Won’t Let Students Miss Bach in the Pandemic

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The Next Year (or Two) of the Pandemic

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D.I.Y. Coronavirus Solutions Are Gaining Steam

Learning About Coronavirus and the Class Divide

Online, Virtual Games Escape the New Reality

Olympians Have Another Year to Prepare for Tokyo. It’s a Blessing and a Curse.

The Digital Divide: Researching the Challenges of Online Learning for Many Students

5 Key Things in the $2 Trillion Coronavirus Stimulus Package

Welcome to the Virosphere

Photos From a Century of Epidemics

Food, a Basic Pleasure, Is Suddenly Fraught

We Live in Zoom Now

Coronavirus Cost to Businesses and Workers: ‘It Has All Gone to Hell’

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What’s Going On in This Graph?

Each week in “ What’s Going On in This Graph? ” we spotlight an engaging graph previously published elsewhere in The Times and pair it with a simple set of questions: What do you notice? What do you wonder? What do you think is going on in this graph?

On Wednesdays, teachers from the American Statistical Association provide live facilitation in our comment section to respond to students as they post analyses and consider what story the graph is telling. Then, at the end of the week, we add a “reveal” that shares the original article containing the graph, highlights from the moderation, related statistical concepts and helpful vocabulary.

This year, graphs included high school sports injuries and the changing size and calories of fast-food menu items over the past 30 years. Here are seven “What’s Going On in This Graph?” posts addressing the coronavirus pandemic:

Easing Lockdowns

Estimated Time for Covid-19 Vaccine

Pandemic Consumer Spending

Pandemic Intervention Models

Coronavirus Protective Measures

Flatten the Curve

Coronavirus Outbreak

Each week in Film Club we feature a short documentary film from The Times — most are under 10 minutes — and ask students to think about themes like race and gender identity, technology and society, civil rights, criminal justice, ethics, and artistic and scientific exploration.

To encourage thoughtful and honest dialogue, we pose open-ended questions: What moments in this film stood out for you? Were there any surprises? Anything that challenged what you know — or thought you knew? What messages, emotions or ideas will you take away from this film? What questions do you still have?

Film Club entries explored how the pandemic is exposing education’s digital divide; how it is bringing out fears, stereotypes, xenophobia and racism; and life lessons for navigating our difficult times from an astronaut.

Are Ice Cream Trucks Essential? In These N.Y.C. Neighborhoods, They Are

Concert for One: I.C.U. Doctor Brings Classical Music to Coronavirus Patients

What My Spacewalk Taught Me About Isolation

‘It’s a Pretty Big Bummer’: Olympic Dreams on Hold

She’s an Honors Student. And Homeless. Will the Virtual Classroom Reach Her?

Coronavirus Racism Infected My High School

Fear, Humor, Defiance: How the World Is Reacting to Coronavirus

Picture Prompt

We publish a Picture Prompt — a short, accessible, image-driven post that uses a photograph or illustration from The Times to inspire student writing — on our site Tuesdays through Fridays. These writing prompts invite students to create short stories and poems; share experiences from their lives; tell us what they think an image is saying; weigh in on hot-button issues; and discover, question and explain scientific phenomena.

Teachers tell us they use these prompts in all kinds of ways. Some use them to encourage students to develop a daily writing habit . Others use the prompts as an exercise to practice inferences, spark discussion or support reading .

We published more than 30 Picture Prompts during the pandemic that included images of an empty movie theater, protesters demanding the reopening of America, and strangers helping one another from falling into an abyss.

Restaurant Food

Crystal Ball

The Front Page

Strange Times, Strange Dreams

Songs of Hope

Open and Shut

Teenage Drivers

Magical Chores

Graduation in a Pandemic

Ramadan in Isolation

Across Divides

Instagram Challenges

Carrying the Weight

Funny Flicks

Endless Conversation

Pandemic Projects

Home Cooking

Looking Back

Your Learning Space

Flickering Sign

Empty Spaces

Trapped Inside

Social Distancing

Helping Hands

Working From Home

Current Events Conversation

Each Thursday during the school year we showcase our favorite student comments to our writing prompts as part of our Current Events Conversation . The weekly series provides a great snapshot of what teenagers are thinking about, and teachers tell us that students get excited to see their names and writing celebrated in The New York Times.

The coronavirus dominated our Current Events Conversations from this spring as students weighed in on issues like the challenges of remote learning and whether it’s OK to joke during dark times:

What Students Are Saying About Quarantine Dating, Ghosts and Songs of Hope

What Students Are Saying About Online Test Proctoring, Favorite Books and Driving Tests

What Students Are Saying About Post-Quarantine Plans, Leadership and Masks

What Students Are Saying About Humor in Tough Times, Expectations for Summer 2020 and Apologies

What Students Are Saying About ‘Life by the Numbers,’ Accents and Pandemic Protests

What Students Are Saying About Family Conflict in Quarantine, Starting Over and Health Care Heroics

What Students Are Saying About Acts of Kindness, Internet Habits and Where They’d Like to Be Stranded

What Students Are Saying About Remote Learning

What Students Are Saying About Public Preschool, Staying Healthy and Being Trapped Inside

What Students Are Saying About Living Through a Pandemic

What Students Are Saying About the Coronavirus

Additional Resources

We also published other pandemic-related resources that don’t neatly fit into the categories above, such as our special coronavirus-related news quiz and winning entries from our Student Editorial Contest.

Weekly News Quiz for Students: Special Coronavirus Edition

Dangerous Numbers? Teaching About Data and Statistics Using the Coronavirus Outbreak

What’s Going On in This Picture? | May 18, 2020

Not American Yet

The Class of 2021 Could Change College Admissions Forever

This Land Was Made for You and Me

How Animal Crossing Will Save Gen Z

Harnessing Boredom in the Age of Coronavirus

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Va. School Boards Association hosting essay/speaking contest for high school students

This is the fourth year the competition has been held; the topic this year is “Kind Hearts, Strong Schools.”

The winner will have the opportunity to present their essay to an audience of more than 200 school board members and administrators at the VSBA Conference on Education July 23 in Short Pump and will also be eligible to attend the 2024 Student School Board Representative Workshop at the Williamsburg Lodge in Williamsburg Nov. 20.

VSBA officials said they hope the contest will showcase the bright, thoughtful, and accomplished students from Virginia public high schools.

To learn more about the contest and to view the guidebook, click here .

Was this article informative? Help us write more like it.

Trustworthy, non-partisan local news coverage is a vital component of our democracy – it’s why the press is the only private institution mentioned by name in the Constitution. But it costs money to keep a newsroom like ours at the Henrico Citizen alive, and we no longer can rely upon advertiser support alone.

That’s why we’re asking readers like you to support our independent, fact-based journalism . We know you value it – you wouldn’t be here otherwise. Help us keep this critical source of fair coverage alive in Henrico County by making a contribution today: https://henricocitizen.fundjournalism.org/contribute/.

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School resource officers help homeless student by fixing broken van he lived in

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV/Gray News) - Two school resource officers in Tennessee made a major difference by helping a high school student living in a broken van to repair the vehicle and get to a shelter, WSMV reports .

La Vergne High School SROs Cody Didier and Jeremy Gregory helped a homeless 17-year-old student get parts to fix the broken van he lived in. The pair also helped with the repairs and filled his van up with gas, according to the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office .

The coordinator for the high school’s ATLAS program, which provides services for families in transition, learned the student was living out of the van in January. She found a shelter for him, but he couldn’t drive there because his van was broken.

That’s when Didier and Gregory stepped in to help the teen repair his van. The SROs got him a new alternator from AutoZone, which was donated by the store’s manager after hearing about the student’s situation.

The SROs worked with the high school’s students to install the alternator before the pair noticed the van was out of gas. They then used their own money to fill up the tank, according to the sheriff’s office.

SRO Sgt. John Acton commended Didier and Gregory for going above and beyond to help the 17-year-old.

“Their types of actions represent the true definition of what it is to be a school resource officer in the Rutherford County Sheriff’s SRO Division,” he said in a Facebook post.

Copyright 2024 WSMV via Gray Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Fort Collins High, Lesher orchestras earn right to perform at Music for All National event

Orchestras from two Fort Collins schools got to complete an opportunity their predecessors had cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic late last week, traveling to Indianapolis to participate in the Music for All National Festival.

Forty-seven students in Fort Collins High School’s Symphony Orchestra and 21 students in Lesher Middle School’s Advanced Chamber Orchestra made the trip. They were the only two school musical groups from Colorado selected to participate in the three-day national festival for school ensembles.

“The competition is getting there, so once you’ve made it, the competition is over, and it’s a celebration of those who are there,” Fort Collins High orchestra director John Hermanson said Monday.

A highlight of the festival, Hermanson said, was the opportunity each group was given to perform in the Palladium, a 1,500-seat concert hall in Carmel, Indiana, that combines centuries-old architecture with state-of-the-art audio technology, according to its website. The two Fort Collins orchestras were among just eight in the country — along with three from Texas, two from Florida and one from Virginia — that were given that opportunity.

“That’s just a stunning hall; it’s really cool,” Hermanson said. “That performance was the best given by the Fort Collins High School Symphony Orchestra. They did a fantastic job, and their work leading up to it was remarkable.”

More: Preston Middle School team advances to National Science Bowl for 5th time in 6 years

Fort Collins and Lesher both had orchestras selected to participate in the Music for All National Festival in 2020, he said. They each traveled there for the start of the event on March 12 but had to return early as travel restrictions and shutdowns for the pandemic began. Lesher’s orchestra was able to perform a day earlier than originally scheduled that year, Lesher director Loni Obluda said Tuesday, but Fort Collins High’s orchestra didn’t get the chance.

“Fort Collins High School was due to perform the next day,” she said. “We had all those kids out there; they worked so hard, and then they didn’t even get the chance to play.”

The two schools hadn’t entered the Music for All National Festival since, she said. That is, until this year, when both were again selected through a rigorous audition process involving judges who are nationally recognized in their areas, Hermanson said.

“I told the students prepping for something like this is very similar to climbing a fourteener; it’s just a long haul,” said Obluda, who is in her 15th year at Lesher. “There are moments when it just feels awesome and other moments when all you want to do is sit down and quit, because it’s so much work.”

One of the judges who selected the Fort Collins High Symphony Orchestra, he said, was Jeff Grogan, an internationally known conductor and music educator who has led performances by youth orchestras at some of the best-known concert halls in the world, including Carnegie Hall in New York and the Musikverein in Vienna, Austria.

Grogan and other judges provided feedback to the school orchestras based on their audition recordings and performances at the festival, Hermanson said.

“His comments to us were that our performance was really outstanding,” Hermanson said. “He complimented the kids on their artistry and told them he was moved. That’s a pretty big deal coming from somebody like that. …

“All the judges said it was just an outstanding performance, which is true. The kids really brought it and did excellent work.”

Hermanson, who is in his 11th year at Fort Collins High, said he gives his orchestras the opportunity to enter their work through auditions in various competitions every year.

“I feel like that’s part of their orchestra experience, to travel and get exposed to other things,” he said.

This trip was particularly meaningful for him and his students, though. Steve McNeal, who began teaching orchestra at Fort Collins High in 1962 and spent 36 years as a music educator there and at Lesher, traveled to Indianapolis with the students. And Matt Spieker, who taught orchestra at Fort Collins High after McNeal retired and before Hermanson began, now teaches at Ball State University in Indiana and joined the group in Indianapolis.

The performing arts center at FCHS is named in honor of McNeal.

“Together, that’s 62 years or orchestra experience at Fort Collins High School,” Hermanson said.

Three of Fort Collins High’s five orchestras will participate in the state orchestra festival April 11 at Metropolitan State University of Denver, he said. The Symphony Orchestra will also perform locally in Fort Collins High’s annual honors concert at 7 p.m. May 21 in the McNeal Performing Arts Center.

Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at  [email protected] , x.com/KellyLyell and   facebook.com/KellyLyell.news .