This year’s high school seniors lost half of their seventh grade year to COVID school closures. They finished middle school either virtually or attending school in person while wearing masks and sitting six feet from their peers.
These students started kindergarten in 2013 — the year after the Sandy Hook massacre. Lockdown drills became almost as common as a math test for them. They know nothing of reverence for our political leaders, and I love them for that. They were born after the iPhone came out, and they don’t know life without social media.
It’s when we look deeper and when we listen that we understand how the COVID years changed them. The high school students where I work no longer take things at face value. There is a constant question of “why” in their minds: Why do this assignment? Why attend class today when everything can be made up online from home? Why do we have to accept things as they are?
It is now quite difficult to convince a student to complete that worksheet when they know it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. They have called our bluff on busy work or any work that they do not see as having a direct connection to their lives.
Some educators will say COVID changed everything five years ago and irreparably scarred a generation of students. But in my experience, I’ve found that the school population most affected by the pandemic are the adults.
Some of my fellow educators are simply stuck.
I’ve spoken with adults in our building who carry lingering anxiety from when we came back to campus part-time in 2021. Things were quiet — creepy, even — in the building then. Everyone was in masks, and no one spoke during passing periods. Thousands of kids were in the halls, the only sounds being their footsteps. Each day seemed to bring or lift new COVID mitigation policies.
The imagery and about-faces haunt educators. So, too, do the words of families and community members during that time. It seemed to come from all sides. One parent who was opposed to reopening campuses told me that “the blood of your students will be on your hands.” Other parents who wanted schools fully open called me a coward, a sheep, and a medical tyrant.
There was one time I had to evacuate a 10th grade chemistry class because the student refused to wear his mask and his teacher was having a panic attack. My attempts to convince the student failed. When his parents arrived, they explained that God told them that their children should no longer wear masks in school.
Educators who worked through COVID don’t get to graduate or be promoted to the next grade or next school. Many adults are still in the same classrooms and offices they occupied in March 2020. And they may not have appropriately processed the impact of the COVID era on our profession. When the pandemic began, we adapted on the fly and then adapted some more. Then schools reopened, and we adapted again.
Some of my fellow educators are simply stuck. They wish so deeply that COVID had never happened that they now blame any kind of deviation from the norm on the fact that the kids learned bad habits from their time in hybrid or virtual learning.
Others, specifically high school educators, are quick to point out that they’ve never been able to get back to teaching grade-level content due to the year of learning lost to shutdowns. They attribute mundane teenage behavioral challenges to COVID closures. I agreed with that when we were fresh out of lockdown. But I’m afraid some folks now overuse this line of thinking.
Five years after the halting and realigning of our educational world, I find myself appreciating the maturity of today’s high school students. Their questioning of how we’ve always done things doesn’t come from a place of apathy or an inability to complete the tasks. Instead, their questions come from a more profound and thoughtful place.
People are quick to point to the school closures of March 2020 as the turning point in public education. Yet the polarizing political climate in the United States, the prevalence of social media opinions, the rise of AI, and the ubiquity of misinformation have also played a role in student behavior.
And we, the educators, act as a sort of Charon, ferrying the souls entrusted to us through high school, ending anywhere and everywhere. I often wonder if our own trauma keeps us down, keeps us focused on how things used to be in “the before times.” Are the students as negatively impacted today as we tend to believe they are? Or are we, adults, impacted and clinging to how we used to do school?
Dr. Brandon McCoy is a high school administrator in Kansas City, Missouri, where he lives with his wife and three children. He writes about life, and public education at The Worst Kids Always Become Principals.