A year after the nation’s schools experienced a historic decline in enrollment, new data shows that many urban districts are still losing students, and those that rebounded this year typically haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Whether families withdrew to enroll their children in online charters, school them at home or fled to far-flung suburbs with more affordable housing, the pandemic has triggered population shifts that could change the composition of U.S. school districts for years to come.

Data from Burbio, a company that tracks COVID-related education trends, offers the first look at the degree to which states and districts have recovered from a punishing year of lockdown and remote learning. Out of 40 states and the District of Columbia, few have seen more than a 1% increase compared to 2020-21, when some states experienced declines as high as 5%.

Flat enrollment this year “means those kids did not come back,” said Thomas Dee, an education professor at Stanford University. “Parents were making these enrollment decisions last summer. There was still a great deal of uncertainty. Parents wanted stability for their kids.”

shows that last year’s losses were concentrated in the early grades. Those who opted not to enroll their young children in public schools last year, or found an in-person option somewhere else, might never return for middle or high school, Dee said. 

While enrollment in many of the nation’s urban districts was already shrinking before the pandemic, school closures and economic upheaval forced many families to make decisions they might have put off otherwise.

Barring further pandemic disruptions, student population trends will likely return to their pre-COVID pace, Dee said, but added, “The effects of the sharp, recent enrollment declines may be long-lived. The fiscal consequences will remain for some while.”

New York experienced the sharpest decline, a 2% drop — more than 48,000 students — since last year. That’s on top of the previous year’s 3% decline. Enrollment in Florida saw the biggest bounce at 4%, or more than 111,000 additional students — a reflection of higher birth rates, job growth and fewer COVID restrictions under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, experts say. 

Of the 10 largest districts in the nation, only Florida’s Orange and Hillsborough counties, home to Orlando and Tampa respectively, saw enrollment surpass pre-pandemic figures.

“Florida was continuing to grow when other states came to a plateau,” said Susan MacManus, a political scientist from the University of South Florida. “Things were open and you could still work.”

State data offers a glimpse of what will likely be further enrollment growth in Arizona, Florida and Utah — states with more affordable housing, growing tech sectors and outdoor living that became an important draw during COVID. At the same time, fewer people are moving to the Northeast from other states and countries, citing . 

District-level figures — provided exclusively by Burbio to ����Ӱ�� — offer a richer picture of what happened to students after the pandemic began. The data, combined with state-level reports and interviews with district officials and parents, shows many urban districts lost students to growing exurbs. And some districts with no population growth added thousands of students in virtual schools.

Districts with enrollment loss could face tough decisions about layoffs and school closures in the near future. Meanwhile, smaller districts that are rapidly gaining students are struggling to hire staff and preserve the kind of close-knit environment that drew many parents in the first place.

“The pandemic kind of accelerated some of those pre-existing trends,” said Alex Spurrier, an associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a think tank. While school closures forced many parents to look for other options, housing and rental prices were also pushing families out of major metro regions. “All you have to do is go to Zillow and see the year-over-year changes,” he said.

In December 2019, Tanner and Miranda McCutchan relocated from northern California to Boise, Idaho — one of 10 metro areas that saw the most growth between 2020 and 2021, according to recent . That leaves two fewer children who will enter California’s schools in the coming years. Miranda stays home with 4-year-old Paige, who attends a Montessori preschool, and 18-month-old Emery, while her husband runs a glass company. 

“We couldn’t afford a house where we lived,” she said. “It was keep renting or move somewhere we could buy a place.”

The fiscal cliff & ‘Armageddon’

In California, Burbio collected data only from Los Angeles, Oakland and San Diego. All three saw declines, due in part to California’s high-priced . With the state’s school-age population expected to keep over the next decade, district leaders are bracing for a to their budgets.

The Oakland Unified Public Schools offers a preview of what other districts with declining enrollment and birth rates will soon confront — the painful and unpopular decision to close schools. In February, the district, which saw a 5.6% enrollment decline compared to last year, decided it would over the next two years. Four others will merge or reduce grade levels.

In the Granite School District, near Salt Lake City, enrollment fell 2.4%, down to 60,371 this year, even though the state’s overall enrollment is up. 

The district has seen a decline in birth rates and an increase in families fleeing to “cheaper areas to build larger homes within [Salt Lake County],” said Benjamin Horsley, chief of staff for the district, adding officials anticipate “leveling out around 55,000 students.” The district has already closed three schools and expects to shutter 10 to 14 more in the next five to seven years. 

Districts experiencing similar losses should have been making those tough calls before the pandemic, said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

“Federal [relief] money is delaying it a year or two, and the fact that state budgets are healthy is delaying it a year or two,” she said about closing schools. Roza advises a network of over 40 urban districts nationwide, the majority of which are shrinking. “Federal money will run out, and enrollment for some of them isn’t isn’t going to come back. These cost factors are going to just slam down on people.”

Los Angeles Unified, for example, saw a 5.9% decline this year and is expected to by fall of 2023. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said Monday that he’s not yet considering closing schools, but added that at the end of his first 100 days — in about two more months — he will discuss “technical corrections” and “belt tightening” measures to respond to the loss of students. 

He agrees with Roza about the dangers of the approaching fiscal cliff, and didn’t mince words about what would happen to the district if it didn’t turn enrollment trends around by the time federal relief funds dry up in 2024. “Armageddon,” he said. Then he added, “It’s going to be a hurricane of massive proportions.” 

The student population in the Clark County School District, which includes Las Vegas, began dropping about five years ago. Superintendent Jesus Jara attributes much of the decline to the growth of charter schools. 

“The anti-charter discussion — that was in the ‘90s. They’re not going away,” Jara said. “The discussion is how are we more flexible and how we are more agile for our communities.” 

Despite declining enrollment, the district needs to build and renovate 33 schools to better serve its current population, he said. That includes breaking up some large, 4,000-student high schools to offer more “boutique” and career-focused programs to compete with charters.

‘Has not slowed down’

Districts with falling enrollment are strategizing how to keep the students they have. But accelerated growth comes with its own challenges, Roza said, putting pressure on leaders to act fast, especially if they need to recruit staff amid a nationwide hiring shortage. Schools might be “digging deeper and deeper into applicant pools” and not necessarily choosing the best candidates, she said. 

Liberty Hill Independent School District, northwest of Austin, Texas, didn’t lose students during the pandemic. Enrollment, at 5,539 last year, is now over 6,800 — a 23% percent leap. It’s a bedroom community that just got its first H-E-B, a “big box” grocery store, and is conveniently located near a toll road with easy access to Apple’s new complex near Austin. 

During the pandemic, the community “actually saw a 40 percent rise in residential home builds, and it has not slowed down,” said Superintendent Steven Snell. The district has eight schools now and will open a ninth next year. 

Parents value the district’s small-town atmosphere and the sense that educators know their families well, he said — connections that could be hard to maintain as the district adds 1,000 students a year. Meanwhile, the district has raised salaries for substitutes because of shortages, and there’s a scarcity of available bus drivers, custodians and cafeteria workers.

“When you have a salary that is causing you to live paycheck to paycheck, you’re going to jump ship for a little more money to survive,” Snell said.

Many of the enrollment swings this year reflect the success of online programs in meeting the needs of families for consistency amid the pandemic’s many disruptions.

For some virtual charters, the enrollment spike was temporary. Oklahoma’s Epic One on One, an online program, had 17,106 students in 2019-20. Enrollment roughly doubled last year and is now down to 23,156, according to state data.  

“Many parents decided to enroll their student in Epic once the pandemic hit, but it appears that trend has slowed with this year’s enrollment numbers,” said Carrie Burkhart, a spokeswoman for the Oklahoma Department of Education.

But whether parents are concerned about COVID or found that online school better suits their children, virtual programs remain in high demand. 

South Carolina’s enrollment has increased almost 2%, due in part to “skyrocketing enrollment in virtual charters,” said Ryan Brown, spokesman for the state’s education department.

The student population in the Huntsville Independent School District, about an hour north of Houston, shot up 40% this year because it operates the Texas Online Preparatory School. And in Colorado, Harrison School District 2, near Colorado Springs, began a partnership with The Vanguard School, a virtual program and one of three charter systems affiliated with the district.

“Many might see it as a public school district versus charter battle,” said Harrison Superintendent Wendy Birhanzel. “We believe this makes us stronger and responds to the needs of the community.”

Homeschooling trends

While Burbio data offers an incomplete picture of where lost students have gone, others have been trying to fill in the missing pieces. The Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey showed that homeschooling jumped from about 5% of households to the fall after the pandemic began. By the start of this school year, it had settled back down to about 7%, according to August 2021 data.

Others have left for more established private schools. Michelle Walker, an Oregon mother who became an advocate for school reopening last year, withdrew her daughter from the Canby Public Schools, near Portland. She secured a spot — and financial aid — at a private school for fourth-grader MacKenzie. She also took out a loan and received money from family to help cover tuition.

“I drive 80 miles roundtrip every day to make sure she goes to a good school,” she said. “It would take a lot for me to put her back in public schools.”

shows many other parents are following suit. According to Burbio, most districts in Multnomah County, which includes Portland, and nearby Clackamas County have seen enrollment declines this year. 

Some district leaders are still hoping to lure back students they’ve lost. The Bernalillo Public Schools, north of Albuquerque, serves families in Pueblo and Hispanic communities, including many in multi-family households concerned about COVID risk. 

The district was the last in the state to lift its mask mandate. Superintendent Matt Montaño said he’s encouraged that enrollment, while still below pre-pandemic figures, has picked up slightly since last year. 

The district’s pre-K program, with 190 students at three schools, earned a five-star rating from the state education department — an accomplishment Montaño hopes will help recruit new students.

“Once we get them in our doors,” he said, “there’s no reason why they should leave us.”

That’s how long it’s been since more than half the nation’s schools crossed into the pandemic era.

On March 16, 2020, districts in 27 states, encompassing almost 80,000 schools, closed their doors for the first long educational lockdown. Within nine days, the nation’s remaining districts followed suit.

Since then, schools have reopened, closed and reopened again. The effects have been immediate — students lost parents; teachers mourned fallen colleagues — and hopelessly abstract, as educators weighed “pandemic learning loss,” the sometimes crude measure of COVID’s impact on students’ academic performance.

To mark what will soon stretch into a third spring of educational disruption, ����Ӱ�� spoke with educators, parents, students and researchers about what Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, called “a seismic interruption to education unlike anything we’ve ever seen.” They talked movingly, often unsparingly, about their missteps and occasional triumphs, their moments of despair and fragile optimism for the future. [You can scan through our expanding archive of testimonials right here.]

As spring approaches, there are additional reasons to be hopeful. More children are being vaccinated. Mask mandates are lifting. But even if the pandemic recedes and a “new normal” emerges, there are clear signs that the issues surfaced during this period will linger. COVID heightened inequities long baked into the American educational system. The social contract between parents and schools has frayed. Teachers are burning out.

“There are kind of two camps,” said Beth Lehr, an assistant principal of Sahuarita High School, south of Tucson, Arizona. “There’s the one camp of ‘This too shall pass,’ and then there’s the other camp of ‘Yeah, it’s going to pass, but I don’t know if I want to wait for it to.’”

But none of this was on anyone’s mind on March 16, 2020.

The World Health Organization had a pandemic only five days earlier. Two days after that, then-President Donald Trump called a . And in the Northshore School District, a system of 22,000 students northeast of Seattle, schools had already been closed for over a week. In late February, one of its schools shut for deep cleaning after an employee traveled out of the country with a family member who had become ill. The district’s closure offered a glimpse into what many thought would be a short-term disruption.

‘I realized it wasn’t science fiction’

Susan Enfield, superintendent of Highline Public Schools in Washington: A very good friend of mine who works in the called me, end of February, and said, “I think we’re going to close … and I think the rest of you won’t be far behind.” I said, “No way, there’s no way they’re going to close schools.” I mean, I really was incredulous.

Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education: I was having brunch with my sister in Kirkland, Washington, when the news broke that there were multiple cases and deaths at the Life Care Center nursing home just a few miles away. My husband sent me a text telling me to get out of Kirkland right away, and everything felt ominous.

Marguerite Roza, Seattle-based director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University: My daughter and I were driving to go pick up some fish for dinner. In the car, they announced the governor’s order — it was with a bigger lockdown kind of order — and we walked into the fish market place, and the guy behind the counter goes, “Have you heard anything yet?” We were like, “Yep.” And he goes, “What did he say?” We said, “Lockdown.” And he [grunts], “Uhhhh.” Already, the streets were pretty empty, and the first person we talked to was the guy packaging up our salmon.

Tony Sanders, superintendent, School District U-46, near Chicago: I was asked to serve on a statewide panel of superintendents … to provide guidance to school district leaders across the state. Our first meeting, held on Sunday, March 15, was attended by prominent legislators, state health officials, the deputy governor for education and state superintendent of schools. Hearing the projections of worst-case scenarios should we not “flatten the curve” was surreal. At the conclusion of that meeting, where we worked to socially distance, but had no idea yet about the need to wear a mask, I made the four-hour journey home in complete silence and disbelief.

Michael Mulgrew, president, United Federation of Teachers, New York City: We started tracking this during the Christmas holiday. We had some teachers who were in China. We had them quarantine when they came back. I didn’t realize [things had changed] until March 16, the day after the New York City public schools closed. I was in my car driving around the city and I was shocked that the streets were empty. That’s when I realized it wasn’t science fiction. 

Bridgette Adu-Wadier: freshman, Northwestern University, graduate of T.C. Williams High School in Alexandra, Virginia: By the end of March, Gov. Ralph Northam basically announced that all the schools would be closed due to the pandemic for the rest of the school year. I watched the livestream, and I was texting my friends. One of them was actually really upset and crying about it, just because it was such a stressful situation to be in — like, things are never going to be the same again.

‘We were completely unprepared’

Parents, superintendents and others — many in a state of shock — had little time to plan as events unfolded at frightening speed.

Toni Rochelle Baker: family liaison for Oakland REACH, a parent advocacy organization, Walnut Creek, California: They gave us curfews in our city and then they told us to stock up for food. I don’t live my life like that. I’m a single mother. I go grocery shopping when I can. We get what we need, and now you’re telling me to stock up on food? That was scary. I didn’t have a deep freezer. I didn’t have extra money just laying around [to] go spend $300 on food. I didn’t have Wi-Fi at the time because I didn’t really need it. I have my phone, and now I need Wi-Fi for three people.

Maria Amado, family child care provider, Hartford, Connecticut, who opened her program for school-age children during remote learning: [Translated from Spanish] Educators, including myself, sewed masks for the children, and we looked for resources to support each other. Some gave fabric to make the masks, others the elastic. It may not have been in big ways, but they all contributed. And now I remember this and think, “Where did I find the time to make the masks?” It was the adrenaline to survive, knowing this would protect me and I had to do it.

Tony Sanders: We needed to place emergency orders for Chromebooks and other devices. We had to completely transform our approach to food service so that by March 17 we were feeding our students and community at food pickup locations throughout the district. There were decisions that had to be made that I would never have thought of. We had to determine how we would ensure employees would continue to be paid. During the first days of the pandemic, I recall sitting alone in my office. The view from my window was a large parking lot with one vehicle.

Sherrice Dorsey-Smith, deputy director of programs, planning and grants, San Francisco Department of Children, Youth and Their Families: I had to figure out how we were going to open what we called emergency child and youth centers. These were spaces for essential workers to leave their children for the day while they were at work. Child care centers were closed, schools were closed, but some people needed or were required to continue working. They needed a safe place for their children during the day. I had to figure out how to get breakfast, lunch and snacks to all the sites. I remember working through the weekend nonstop, literally 48 hours.

Michael Mulgrew: It was a mad scramble to get everyone trained quickly how to get their classrooms up. How do we teach parents how to help their kids? It was non-stop. It was hundreds of decisions every day. Even though everything was closed, we were still moving stuff literally, like laptops and iPads and different things, trying to get them to our members’ houses so they had something to work off. [Former] Mayor [Bill de Blasio] had resolved never to close the schools, so he would not allow the Department of Ed to put any contingency plans in place. On the Friday before the schools closed, at 3 p.m., the mayor would be banging on the table saying he was going to keep the schools open. And that Sunday afternoon he closed the schools. So we were completely unprepared.

School, interrupted

As the deadline for lifting lockdown kept slipping away, some took longer to grasp the new reality: Life wouldn’t be returning to normal anytime soon.

Mariela Garcia: freshman at the University of Houston, graduate of Eastwood Academy High School in Houston: It was during spring break when we ended up having two weeks instead of one. And two weeks turned into three. This went on for a couple of weeks before we noticed that we weren’t going to go back to school. Stores started closing down, schools started closing, many things started closing because everyone was scared. That’s when I noticed that this was becoming very serious.

Dale Chu, senior visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute: I realized everything had changed … on May 10, 2020. How do I remember the date? My at-the-time 5-year-old daughter — after nearly two months on Zoom — drew a picture of her class for me. Seeing Kellan’s classmates through her eyes on a Zoom grid really hit things home for me.

Ricardo Miguel Martinez, president, Latino Parents for Public Schools, Atlanta: I had people worried about getting kicked out, evicted, lights being turned off, not having groceries. These are people who weren’t making excuses. The people who are fighting masks and stuff, they have a choice to either follow the data or not follow the data. God bless them in their fight. But these people didn’t have a choice. They got thrown into the chicken factories and died. They got thrown into manufacturing and died so that we could have chicken at the grocery store.

Mourning the lost

Some felt the pandemic’s effects up close: sick parents, dead teachers. This month, the number of deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. , with an estimated 2,200 of them educators. Many of the effects have been harder to measure, but are certain to leave lasting damage. Recent four out of five secondary school principals experienced “frequent job-related stress” last year, and educator surveys show over students’ mental health, including anxiety and suicidal thoughts.

Susan Enfield: We lost two middle school students to suicide early in the pandemic. We lost staff members.

Michael Mulgrew: I had to read the names of our members who passed away. I had to make the phone calls to those families. We lost a lot of members, and I always think that if we could have closed earlier, how many more would we not have lost.

Shawnie Bennett, a COVID-19 investigator, Oakland, California: I lost my brother [from COVID] in May of 2020. He was only 32. As a family, when we would gather to try and go see him or just sit outside the hospital window. We were afraid to touch each other, so it was hard to comfort each other. [My son] came home [from college] for Christmas, and he saw me so weak and broken. He had always seen a very strong Black woman as a mother. I was gone, emotionally wrecked, mentally, physically, and it broke him down to the point that he did not want to return to school. He’s in Atlanta now, got an apartment and he’s just trying to figure life out. He was very close to my brother. That loss, on top of what he physically saw me go through, was detrimental for him.

David Brown, principal, Hillcrest Heights Elementary, Prince George’s County, Maryland: Family vacations, going out to eat, visiting family — I think all of those things disappearing created a milieu where it was tough to manage. And when you’re in charge of leading a large group of individuals, how do you help and support them? How do you keep your teachers upbeat? Because the mental health of every adult who receives a paycheck from our county impacts the mental health and the wellness of children who are just simply here to learn. I remember there was discussion that we’ll be able to eat and enjoy ourselves come the 4th of July, and then that didn’t happen. You’re holding out hope that it’s going away, but it’s not, and [you’re] trying to remain that positive, invigorating leader that the principal has to be.

Bridgette Adu-Wadier: Graduation was a really tough time. I don’t remember enjoying it, honestly. Just collectively, it was like a year or so of the pandemic, and then also, my family was impacted a lot financially, which was stressful. I was basically helping my two younger brothers through virtual school for the whole year. I had a lot more family responsibilities, and it took a toll on me mentally. I had trouble balancing things, especially with Zoom class sessions while my brothers needed help or were playing loudly in the other room. I relied on music and audiobooks as a form of escape.

Ashiley Lee, tech and operations coordinator, Para Los Niños, a Los Angeles charter school, where last year she taught seventh-grade history: I remember being in a class full of blank screens, because we no longer required cameras on, and then after that, putting my grades in for the semester and realizing just how low they were. I was trying to brainstorm with my team: What is something, anything, we can do to encourage our students to at least get the one assignment we post a week in by the end of the semester? My kids, it was so funny, we started a joke where I would call on a student to answer a question and they wouldn’t be there — kind of a ghost in the call. And the kids would comment in the chat, “Ghostbuster! Ms. Lee caught him.”

Marguerite Roza: The hardest part was when it looked like there was no reopening school. This was November of 2020. The governor had established these metrics by which you could open schools, and as far out as the modelers had modeled, it was never going to reopen. My then-high school daughter [a cross-country runner] was getting more and more discouraged. You could just see it was really not healthy for her, just to be home all alone every day. And you, as a parent, start to feel desperate. I used to listen to press conferences constantly. You could see that there wasn’t going to be any movement. I was very worried about her. The sports season had come and gone. School was online. I think that was probably the darkest time, which coincides in Seattle with it being really dark, [at] like 3:45. 

Mariela Garcia: Hundreds and thousands of people were dying because of COVID, and I was scared. I remember I had no interactions with the outside world for — I kid you not — at least three months straight. My family just did not want to leave our home. At the time, we had to adjust to online school. I had no Wi-Fi or laptop at the time, so it was hard to be in class and even submit assignments from my phone. It was definitely a very hard time, especially when family members started to get COVID.

Toni Baker: I had two kids at the table with computers doing virtual learning and I had no idea what that meant. They told us to sign on to some Zoom that I’ve never heard of before. I’m in love with my kids, but my kids were on my last nerves during the pandemic. Those four walls just weren’t enough.

Couch sitting, watching ‘Friends’

The monotony of being stuck at home sparked new coping strategies: Cooking, at-home workouts, walking the dog — and of course . Some took long couch breaks. Others became entrepreneurs. Mariela Garcia started baking and ran a business from a local farmer’s market.

Mariela Garcia: My family actually bought the DVD set of “Friends” and we just watched “Friends” over and over and over. We’ve already seen each episode at least 10 times. We just keep it playing throughout the whole day because we don’t have any Wi-Fi or anything at home. I would not have started my business if it wasn’t for being in quarantine. I had so much more free time. I hate being that person, but the first time I ever tried my empanadas, they came out great, and I have not changed anything. 

Susan Enfield: A group of female superintendents from around the country — we refer to ourselves as “sister supes” — had a standing Sunday afternoon Zoom where we would just check in and get together. In the early months, that proved to be incredibly helpful, just remembering that we weren’t alone. Going for walks with my husband and also, frankly, allowing myself to feel pain and to grieve. I think as leaders we do need to inspire hope and let people know it’s going to be OK and be strong, but we also have to balance that strength and courage with vulnerability. There were weekends where I didn’t get off the couch. I’ve been pretty honest about that in conversations with others. I said to someone once, “If one more person says, ‘You got this,’ I’m gonna smack ‘em.” A year and a half ago, I didn’t “got this,” and people were just lying. I’m sorry, they were just lying. I don’t think we do ourselves or our colleagues or anyone any service by faking it.

Beth Lehr, assistant principal, Sahuarita High School, Sahuarita, Arizona: I do not check my email at all on the weekends.

Toni Baker: I had a support system. They gave us vouchers for food. They gave my kids free computers. They gave us Wi-Fi. They had these teachers — I don’t even know where they found these beautiful teachers with these loving hearts for these kids. There was a teacher who had a grandma’s touch and a mom’s heart, and she was just so warm. This is through a computer. I’ve never met this woman to this day in real life. I had the community of Oakland REACH behind me. I wouldn’t have made it without them.

David Brown: When we were in person, I had “lunch bunches” where I would eat lunch with the kids. So I went back to eating lunch virtually with the kids, and I found that really gave me a lot of positive energy. You find that you are equally, if not more, excited to see them in this virtual world than they are to see you. So it’s the, “Hey, Mr. Brown.” It’s the big smile. It’s the camera coming on. It’s the home environment. It’s the parents waving in the background. I think all of that does a good amount to lift your spirits.

‘The system itself is not changing’

Confusing guidance and vitriolic debate left many parents feeling lost. They watched helplessly as their children disengaged from learning, but also worried that their kids would get sick if they returned to school. School leaders were caught in what felt like a non-stop, high-volume war of words with unions, parents and state officials. 

Pedro Martinez, CEO, Chicago Public Schools; former superintendent, San Antonio Independent School District: Texas did not prioritize teachers [for vaccines] in the first round, but they were pushing hard and threatening districts about keeping schools open. Meanwhile, the positivity rate, I remember in San Antonio, was over 21 percent. The death rate was five times higher in my district than it was in the more affluent parts of the county. I just remember the frustration. You want these things, but yet you’re not providing vaccines to my staff, who actually want to keep the schools open. 

Michael Mulgrew: The city doctors are telling us it’s going to be nothing but a cold and the schools could remain open. The kids are going to be fine. They’re not going to get it, and we’ll create herd immunity, and we’ll be safer faster than everybody else. Literally, that’s the conversation I was having with the mayor and his doctors. Our doctors are telling us the absolute opposite. They’re saying, “Listen, children might not be getting this at this point in time, but this is a serious virus and people are going to die.” The big conflict was that first one. 

Marguerite Roza: I’m a data person. I really study the numbers, and I didn’t understand how a lot of people were driven by fear and couldn’t recognize what I was seeing. [They’re saying], “Your child could die,” and I was like, “Well, not really. The numbers here say, really, your child isn’t going to die. I promise you, driving to Grandma’s is more dangerous for your kid than this thing.” You’re having two different conversations if you’re talking about numbers and you’re talking about fear. The fear was so dominant that the numbers people probably felt, out of respect, we should step back and be quiet. I don’t want to tell somebody who’s having a panic attack, “You’re overreacting.” Looking back on it, I think that I probably kept my real views about the data quieter than I should have. I thought people were going to bounce out of it.

Mariela Garcia: We were able to pick whether to go back in person or stay online. I definitely wanted to go back. I missed my friends. I missed having class with a teacher right in front of me. My parents thought it was not a good idea. I was conflicted in making a decision, but for the good of my family, I decided to stay online for my whole senior year. That also meant no sports. I was so heartbroken because sports meant everything to me. I was unable to play my senior year. I had already claimed the captain position in my previous year playing, and I was looking forward to a great season. 

Parent power

The pandemic has dramatically changed parents’ relationships with their public schools, prompting some to seek new options and others to demand more from the schools their children attend. “I think the pandemic has created some sort of awakening in parents that we’ve not seen before,” Roza said. “I don’t think there’s any putting that genie back in the bottle.” 

Wendy Neal, executive director of My Child My Voice, a Houston-based advocacy group: I’m not saying the teachers are bad, I’m just saying that the parents were finding creative ways of being more of a teacher to their own child. Some parents were like, “Well, if you’re not going to help my child, I’m pulling my kid out of your school. Either I’m going to homeschool, go to an education pod or go to a private school.” Some of these parents really didn’t believe in charter schools either, and then all of a sudden, they’re putting their kid in a virtual charter school.

Marguerite Roza: In March of 2021, [my daughter’s school] finally got around to having their cross-country season outside, and they banned all parents from coming. They run three miles. They’re outside. It just got to the point where it was eye roll upon eye roll. A lot of parents showed up anyway, ’cause how are you going to keep parents off of a three-mile course, right? And we’re popping out of the bushes waving at each other. [It had been] a year, and we knew better. I should have marched out and said, “The evidence suggests we’re fine here,” but they were going to ban you and ban your team if you weren’t cooperating.

Sonya Thomas, executive director, Nashville PROPEL, a parent advocacy group: You would think that a pandemic would bring about a sense of urgency. We’re talking about decades of educational inequities, and what I’m seeing is that the system itself is not changing. It has actually grown richer in money. It has grown more savvy in messaging. And it’s hurtful. I’ve got tears coming down my face now. I just had a friend who died this weekend. He couldn’t read. And I have to ask myself, “What has changed?” 

Toni Baker: When this school year came around, the COVID was just everywhere. The previous year, they did the COVID tests, they did the sanitizer, they did the masks, they did all these precautions. And when school started back the next semester, all of that went out the window. I let it slide the first two days of school, but by the third day, I’m like, “What’s going on? Where are the masks? Where is this? Where is that? We’re still in this stuff, and it’s worse now.” I had to make an executive decision as a parent. My kid’s class got exposed and I didn’t like the safety of it. I was worrying, like I had knots in my stomach. I had to remove my children from there. [My son’s] class went on quarantine for a week and then I just never took them back.

Beth Lehr: I have one teacher. This is her ninth year. She has already resigned for next year. She said, “I can’t do this anymore. I dread coming to work every day.” She goes, “You know, I love the day-to-day of being in front of our kids. The second I have to open my email or grade their assignments is when I realize why I resigned.” The emails. The constant onslaught of the very vocal unhappy parents. We have some amazing families, but we don’t hear the “Thank yous” as often as we hear the “You sucks.”

Lost learning

Educators love jargon. It’s not surprising, then, that lockdown introduced new terms like “COVID slide” and “pandemic learning loss” to describe the academic fallout students experienced from months of remote learning. In June 2020, researchers at nonprofit assessment group NWEA were among the first to predict the extent of the chaos. The return to in-person learning helped. But as recently as December, from McKinsey & Co. showed that academic recovery has been uneven and gaps between Black and white students have widened. Educators also report challenges with student behavior, which many to the lack of socialization during remote learning.

Beth Lehr: The learning loss is going to be there. There’s going to be a new norm, but trying to jam more and more and more down their throats is not helping. Continuing to create these high-stakes environments and making kids feel less than because of something that was totally out of their control is not helping. Meeting kids where they are is. Why do they have to learn all these things, right? They have to learn it to be successful in the future. Great, what does that success look like? How are we redefining success, because honestly, right now, for some of these kids, success is getting out of bed and showing up.

Mariela Garcia: I’ve always struggled in math, and since it was online I feel like I wasn’t really learning as much as I could. When I got to college, I took trigonometry, and it was difficult. I had to get a tutor or stay after school. I had to study more on my own time. I had to take a test in person for the first time in two years. I struggled the first couple weeks, but once I got help and once I started studying, it’s just like riding a bike.

Ricardo Martinez: Seems like we’ve already stopped talking about it. A lot of people refuse to acknowledge it. They’re trying to change the conversation to CRT [critical race theory], anti-CRT. Let’s not worry about what’s not really happening and worry about what’s actually happening. Kids are getting more aggressive. They’ve lost social skills. We’ve lost a lot of learning, and I don’t think that the parents have been able to help because we barely know how to do what they’re asking us to do. I hope that we’re talking about learning loss until we catch back up, which should be in a few years.

Beth Lehr: [Students are experiencing an] emotional stuntedness, for lack of a better term. Freshmen are notoriously immature, but what we’re used to seeing as freshman behavior isn’t even freshman behavior. The “devious licks” stuff [a TikTok challenge that included school property damage] — that was 100 percent only freshman. Oh my God, the soap dispensers were destroyed over and over and over again. We had to replace sinks. We had to replace toilets — not because they were stolen, but because they were destroyed. The older students were super-annoyed by the freshman because then we ended up having to lock our bathrooms during lunch. We’ve also had an increase in sexual infractions — not necessarily assaults. It’s consensual, but it’s much more frequent on our campus this year. This is my seventh year as assistant principal, and this year, hands down, we have had more issues with kids getting caught in positions that high schoolers should not be in.

Hosea Born, art and robotics teacher at Hope Academy of Public Service, Hope, Arkansas: We will be talking about it as long as there is the overwhelming reliance on standardized testing. The pandemic has shown us that adaptability is key, yet we are still measuring our students on how well they can take a test. Teaching a non-tested subject has allowed me to see the flexibility and amazing ways that students learn when there isn’t a looming requirement hanging over their heads. Some of my students haven’t had an art class since the start of the pandemic, but it is key for students to be able to create, and when given the opportunity, they have jumped right back in, and to me, are exceeding all expectations. 

Pedro Martinez: Last year, our district had 100,000 students who were disengaged, including seniors who would have dropped out. We got the majority of seniors to graduate. Same thing happened in San Antonio. What I heard from teachers directly was, “These kids are coming every day. These are the same students who we couldn’t get to engage in remote. They’re coming every single day.” I saw the first-quarter grades. There are still gaps, but significant improvements over the remote year, and specifically with our kids of poverty and kids of color. That gives me a lot of hope. When we have the children in our schools, they actually do perform better.

Robin Lake: I think we will grapple with [learning loss] for as long as the COVID generation is alive. We’ll be looking at the immediate impacts for probably a decade, but there are sure to be lasting effects on individuals and on the economy for many decades unless we can change the trajectory of our response. The question is how we’ll be talking about it. Will the story be that we failed this generation of children, or will it be that we pulled together and found solutions for this generation, and designed a better education system for future generations?

A ‘five-alarm crisis’ for teachers

As they looked back, some recalled moments of doubt about perservering. According to from the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, more than half of teachers intend to leave the profession sooner than they originally planned. While some are dubious about “the Big Quit,” NEA President Becky Pringle called teacher burnout and staff shortages a “five-alarm crisis.”

Michael Mulgrew: I think most people in this profession thought of quitting throughout this thing. There were some really really tough times. The only way out of this is to go through it.

Susan Enfield: I don’t think I ever thought of quitting. There were moments where I thought I don’t know if I can do this, but that’s different than quitting. I never just was like, “I’m out of here,” and my was not a response to the pandemic. I’m ready for a fresh challenge and Highline is ready for a fresh leader.

Beth Lehr: I’m so torn. I’ve applied for a principal position within the district, but at the same time I’m like, “Why? Why did I just do that? What am I thinking?” I haven’t yet gotten to the point where the stuff that I dislike about my job has outweighed the stuff that I like about it, but it’s hit or miss on a daily basis. 

‘I don’t use the term normal anymore’

Like a sequel to a bad horror movie, the Omicron variant arrived just as educators and families thought they’d made it through the worst of the crisis. The sparked a spike in cases, resulting in further school closures and quarantines. But now, with increasing vaccination rates and a recent decline in positive cases, some states are lifting mask mandates. The nation’s three largest districts aren’t ready to let masks go, but some are starting to use a word they haven’t uttered in a while: hope.

Pedro Martinez: We’re now at a point where cases have been very steadily declining. Our city is now close to an over-70 percent vaccination rate. There are still gaps within my district, but I’m seeing good momentum, especially with 5- to 11-year-olds. We’re close to maybe half of our district that should be fully vaccinated within the next couple weeks. Over 90 percent of my staff are fully vaccinated. So it really gives me hope that we’re on the other side of this. There’s a chance that by springtime we could be talking about not wearing masks.

Susan Enfield: I am hopeful that in the coming weeks and months we are going to collectively adapt to a way of living, a way of working, that will feel more familiar to what we knew prior to the pandemic. I don’t use the term “normal” anymore. I think entering that phase gives me hope.

Michael Mulgrew: The buildings built after the last pandemic have these really big windows. They actually were built that way so that you could open them to keep ventilation in case there was another pandemic. That literally became part of the code for schools after the pandemic of 1918. For a period of time last year, the teachers kept opening up the windows the whole way, and it’s like 7 degrees out. So, we had to produce this video for all the teachers about how you only have to open like half the windows about 3 inches each and you’ll be fine. One of the first cold days when we got back last month, I was in a school, and one of the teachers had windows open all the way. And I’m looking at the windows, and she touched my arm and she goes, “I know I don’t have to open it that much, but my team teacher for 20 years died of COVID a year ago.” I said, “You keep that window open any way you want.”

Shawnie Bennett: I don’t think I will ever take off my mask.

Mariela Garcia: I’ve always been the type of person to talk to anybody, but it was different seeing people that I’ve never met before [at the University of Houston]. People have been socially awkward, and it’s hard to start a conversation. With my personality, I’m a happy person and I talk to anyone. So I’m going up to someone [last fall] like, “Hi, nice to meet you,” and they’re just like, “Whoa, 6 feet apart.”

Beth Lehr: It’s so hard to see the end, and it’s so overwhelming. What I’ve heard more this year from my teachers than anything is, “We thought that last year was hard. This year is 10 times harder.” We’ve had very, very low turnover. I do not foresee that being the case next year. There are kind of two camps. There’s the one camp of “This too shall pass,” and then there’s the other camp of “Yeah, it’s going to pass, but I don’t know if I want to wait for it to.”

‘A true hunger for doing things differently’

Two years of scrambling and false starts has offered ample opportunity to think about what has — and perhaps more to the point, what hasn’t — worked for schools. If there’s another pandemic — and scientists say there undoubtedly , and soon — will anything change?

Christopher Nellum, executive director, Education Trust West: I think we now appreciate mental health in a different way. The past two years have been traumatic. We have been scared, sick, overworked, unemployed. We have missed vital human connection and even lost loved ones. We have witnessed a surge in racially motivated hate crimes and a national reckoning over police brutality toward Black and brown Americans. It’s OK to be struggling to feel OK in the face of all of that. It’s OK to talk about it. And we all deserve access to the resources we need to address it. 

Sonya Thomas: Parent engagement is not what we want. When you engage us, what you’re doing is bringing your own agenda and you’re saying, “This is what we’re going to do, so get with the program.” That’s what engagement means, right? “I’m bringing something to you, this is what you’re gonna get and you gotta just walk in line with it.” I think what they’re learning is that we’re not going anywhere and we want parent partnership. We don’t want to be engaged. Throw that in the trash. That has never gotten anything for our children. What we want is true partnership. We want school districts to partner with us, intentionally take our feedback and use it. That builds trust. It’s not a talking point or a PR move. 

Dale Chu: If anything, we’ve learned what doesn’t work. For example, asynchronous learning [without live teaching ] — homework, study hall — stunk. We also learned that huge doses of it left millions of students isolated from their peers, the toll from which we’re just starting to come to grips with.

Robin Lake: I hear a true hunger for doing things differently. People are saying, “You know, the way we ask teachers to teach alone in a classroom, trying to be expert in all things and serve vastly different needs, is crazy.” I believe there is a powerful confluence of parents, educators and civic leaders who know things have to change and are determined to make that happen.

Michael Mulgrew: We never said [remote learning] was going to be the be-all-and-end-all. It was always a way for us to keep in contact, to keep our students engaged. Through the end of that [2019-20] school year, it really was more of a lifeline between teachers and students and their families. We thought it should have been more of a centralized process, but [the department] figured it’s better off to just let every teacher do their own thing. The majority of students really do regress in a remote setting. There was a small percentage of students who actually thrived in remote, so that says there’s something there we have to look at. If there’s a subset of children who were not doing well when they were going to school — and there’s all sorts of different reasons for that — who all of a sudden did really well in a remote setting, we have to look at this going into the future.

Marguerite Roza: We have seen districts jump in and be nimble in a way that we never thought districts could be nimble before. People always say, “You know, turning a district around is like turning an aircraft carrier.” I’m like, an aircraft carrier turns around in a day. Why is everybody using that as something that’s slow? I was in the military. [From 1988 to 1992, Roza served at the Navy Nuclear Power School in Orlando.] Aircraft carriers are pretty maneuverable. There are thousands and thousands of people on an aircraft carrier, and that thing could spin around and change direction with the wind. I do think that we had thought districts couldn’t adjust, and many of them did.

Beth Lehr: I’ve had a lot of teachers really rethink their philosophies — some of my most dyed-in-the-wool [teachers]. This has truly opened their eyes when they’ve seen the disparities. Not everybody’s home looks the same. When we first started doing all of the remote, we had a lot of really serious conversations about requiring cameras to be on or not. A lot of our teachers were like, well, “Why wouldn’t the camera be on?” They never took into account that there might be 10 people in a two-bedroom house. There might be somebody being slapped, hit, cut, whatever while they’re there. They might be embarrassed because they’re doing your class from their car in the McDonald’s parking lot.

‘So long and so short’

Seven hundred days have flown by for some and painfully dragged on for others. For many, it’s been a bit of both. 

Michael Mulgrew: It feels like 7,000 days.

Laurie Corizzo, counselor, Ridge Ranch School, Paramus, New Jersey: This whole pandemic, the virus, the water cooler conversations are never-ending. If someone isn’t discussing a vaccine, a booster, the virus, who has it, who had it, who passed, it seems that conversations are stagnant. My point is, it encompasses every single aspect of our lives. It is as if there were some sort of imaginary force field that prevents any semblance of any other conversation to happen anywhere on the planet. In a word, it is quite exhausting.

Christopher Nellum: I hope that 700 days in, we are seeing our education systems for what they are and what they have been for a long, long time: profoundly inequitable.

Susan Enfield: I didn’t know that 700 days could both seem so long and so short simultaneously. I think the last couple of years have felt like a lifetime in and of themselves, and yet, at the same time, it feels like it’s gone by in a flash.

Marguerite Roza: I mean, wow — what a seismic interruption to education unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Normally, we would say a 1 percent change in enrollment from one year to the next is earth-shattering to finance. We’re seeing 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 percent enrollment shifts in some districts. And some of those are large districts. Those kinds of things are going to change the structure of education forever.

Lead Image: Rippowam Middle School principal Matthew Laskowski looks on from a socially distanced cafeteria in September 2020 in Stamford, Connecticut. (John Moore / Getty Images)

State officials are still tabulating this year’s count. But preliminary numbers suggest that since the start of the 2019-20 academic year, Minneapolis Public Schools has lost more than 12 percent of its students, while St. Paul has lost almost 10 percent. 

Like most states, Minnesota funds schools primarily according to enrollment. A loss of even 3 percent of a district’s student body — — can be destabilizing financially. Double-digit losses? There’s no playbook for that. 

Both districts have . In Minneapolis, 74 percent of white students passed last year’s state reading test, compared with 24 percent of children of color and Indigenous students. In St. Paul, 67 percent of white students read at grade level, versus 23 percent of students of color. Similar disparities are seen in math.

Each is also slated to receive more than a quarter-billion dollars in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund aid to help their school systems and students recover from the pandemic. But here, the two cities’ tales diverge.

St. Paul is proposing to over the next two years, to reflect the current, reduced student head count. Minneapolis plans to use nearly half of its stimulus funds to plug an ongoing budget gap in hopes enrollment will rebound. It is an approach that experts warn will likely create a fiscal cliff that the district will have to deal with when stimulus funds run out.

St. Paul’s reconfiguration plan does not specifically target chronically underperforming schools, but rather buildings the district says don’t enroll enough students to offer all the academics and enrichment classes called for under state standards. The goal is for every school to have at least 350 students, which district leaders say would allow for instruction in music, art and science, as well as support staff such as nurses, counselors and librarians. It’s a controversial plan, slated to be taken up by the school board Dec. 1. But because the vote is being held before four newly elected members are sworn in, it may provide some political insulation for officials willing to say yes.

By contrast, Minneapolis is succumbing to the temptation to spend stimulus funds — more than $108 million — on existing budget deficits. The Council of the Great City Schools, for one, has about using the money to hire staff they won’t be able to continue to pay or ink contracts that lead to more inequitable teacher employment. Districts should recall, the group says, that when federal aid from the Great Recession ran out in 2011, tens of thousands of educators were laid off —a disproportionate share of them teachers of color. 

“There is a broad appetite across districts to not make too many big cuts right now,” says Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. “The thinking is, ‘We’re in this chaotic moment, we should protect what we have.’ Of course, if you do that, it’s hard to invest in getting students back on track.” To be most effective, she says, the stimulus dollars need to be targeted as closely as possible to the needs of specific groups of students. Keeping underenrolled schools open and teachers employed does not necessarily mean a district will have the right staff to meet students’ needs.

‘Making some progress right now … is the better play’

Arriving in two allotments to be spent before fall 2024, the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding will pump more than half a billion dollars into the Twin Cities’ core school systems. St. Paul Public Schools is slated to receive $299 million, while Minneapolis is in line for $234 million. 

Both districts — still reeling from the racial upheaval that followed the murder of a Black man, George Floyd, by a white police officer — have made addressing historic inequities centerpieces of their strategic plans. Both say making sure long-neglected schools get their share of resources is a priority. 

Both have also seen dramatic enrollment declines since the 1990s, when the student population totaled 91,000, distributed virtually equally between St. Paul and Minneapolis. Birth rates have declined, and families have increasingly chosen charter schools or taken advantage of open enrollment to send their children to suburban districts. In Minneapolis, the exodus has been most pronounced among Black students. In St. Paul, Southeast Asian students have left in large numbers. Both districts now serve slightly less than two-thirds of the school-aged children who live within their city limits. 

Between its larger slice of American Rescue Plan dollars and its decision to deal separately with the challenges posed by decades of falling enrollment, St. Paul has far more money — some $297 million — to spend helping students recover from the trauma and losses of the pandemic. 

St. Paul, Roza says, nationally for separating its pandemic recovery efforts from its plan to deal with long-term demographic changes: “Making some progress right now while we’re in chaos — and COVID is chaos — and people are understanding of it is the better play.” 

The district’s includes $90 million for academics, including $24.5 million to be sent directly to schools to be spent on their most pressing needs, $23 million to place additional teachers in schools to support reading and math efforts, and funds for more instructional time. 

Some $11.5 million will support students with specialized needs, such as Indigenous pupils and children with disabilities, and almost $10 million will support a racial equity plan that includes recruiting and retaining diverse teachers. As that proposal was being created, the administrator responsible for each initiative had to specify what would happen when the federal dollars ran out.  

Still, efforts to “right-size” the schools have met with stiff political opposition. 

Some of the buildings that would be reconfigured under St. Paul’s consolidation plan had been slated for closure or reorganization in 2016. A teacher union-led campaign to organize parents around several flashpoints that year resulted in the election of a school board that fired the superintendent and scrapped the effort.

One of the programs targeted for closure in 2017, Galtier Community School, had 156 students at the time, according to state data. Last year, it enrolled 157, despite district hopes that a renovation would make it more attractive. Now, district leaders want to merge it with nearby Hamline Elementary, which last year enrolled 236 students. Slated for closure are four other elementary schools, Highwood Hills, John A. Johnson Achievement Plus, Jackson and Wellstone, as well as LEAP, a program for high school students who are that went from 341 students in 2013 to 133 today, according to state enrollment data. 

Other changes are designed to respond to families’ preferences, such as replacing a Montessori middle school with a Hmong dual-language immersion, a kind of program popular with many Southeast Asian families who have removed their children from district schools over the last decade. 

Confronted with its own underenrolled schools, Minneapolis has repeatedly drawn down reserves and asked voters to approve referenda to deal with budget deficits that by 2018 to $33 million. The district’s chief financial officer has warned that even if enrollment begins to rebound, structural changes are needed. 

Several years ago, Minneapolis leaders started talking to families, about 80 percent of them of color, about why they pulled their children out of district schools. The top three answers were a lack of academic rigor, safety concerns and lack of a welcoming feeling, according to Eric Moore, senior accountability, research and equity officer.

Shortly before the pandemic began, Minneapolis launched a redesign that is moving magnet programs, language immersion schools and other popular options into parts of the city that are home to predominantly people of color. These new school attendance boundaries are also geared toward shifting students to the smallest schools and cutting transportation expenses. 

District leaders say they expected the shift to be a factor in several more years of enrollment drops before beginning to draw families back around the 2025-26 school year. Though this year’s decline was bigger than anticipated by more than 1,600 students, the plan has reduced the number of schools that are hypersegregated from 21 to 12 and the number of underenrolled schools — which Minneapolis defines as having 250 students or fewer — from five to three. 

“It’s a social justice plan, aimed at deconstructing our system of white supremacy that has contributed to years and years of underachievement of students of color, special education students and students in our [English learner] programs,” says Moore. “It’s reinvesting in what our families are saying they want.”

‘This is what it looks like when it gets put off for a long time.’

Because of different ways of calculating enrollment, state and district data differ on the exact size of the student body in any given year. The state has yet to post its 2021-22 tallies, but district leaders say this year Minneapolis has 29,120 students, down from 31,254 last year, 33,202 students for the 2019-20 year and 34,088 in 2018-19. Reach back two more years to 2015-16, and enrollment has dropped 18 percent. 

In addition to the unknowns of the pandemic, Moore says, Minneapolis’ larger-than-normal enrollment decline may reflect the racial unrest that has swept the city, either because of white flight or other displacement.  

Before the federal stimulus funds were announced, Minneapolis officials had predicted the district would be insolvent by fiscal year 2024. Using recovery funds to make up shortfalls will push that out until 2027, though the district would need “constant enrollment growth” and substantially reduced expenses to avoid completely depleting its funds, according to a recent presentation to the school board’s finance committee. Current enrollment projections show that by that year, the district will need 220 fewer licensed teachers.    

Officials say they do not yet have a budget for the stimulus funds that will support “continuity of services, staffing and programs” beyond the $108 million. Of the remaining $126 million, Minneapolis is budgeting $41.3 million for “impacts to learning.”

At the board meeting, Superintendent Ed Graff defended the decision. “Enrollment has declined over the years, and the number of schools that we have does not align with the number of students we have,” he said. “While that is an accurate observation, it’s also an observation that we had never spent the level of investment or the adjustments of our resource allocations in an equitable manner.” 

Roza is skeptical. Even if Minneapolis succeeds in drawing back some families, she says, it will have spent funds that could be used to retrain educators and otherwise ensure that any school that grows is appropriately staffed for its students. And if the district has bet wrong, and ends up with a budget in the red, it could land in receivership. 

“What usually happens is the state steps in and says, ‘You’re going to become insolvent’ — and then there’s going to be really large pain,” she says. “This is what it looks like when it gets put off for a long time.”

In each instance, the emails warning Jason Matlock of “QUESTIONABLE CONTENT” pointed to a single culprit: Kids were watching cartoon porn.

Over the next six months, Matlock got nearly 1,300 similar emails from Gaggle, a surveillance company that monitors students’ school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts. Through artificial intelligence and a team of content moderators, Gaggle tracks the online behaviors of millions of students across the U.S. every day. The sheer volume of reports was overwhelming at first, Matlock acknowledged, and many incidents were utterly harmless. About 100 were related to animated pornography and, on one occasion, a member of Gaggle’s remote surveillance team flagged a fictional story that referenced “underwear.”

Hundreds of others, however, suggested imminent danger.

In emails and chat messages, students discussed violent impulses, eating disorders, abuse at home, bouts of depression and, as one student put it, “ending my life.” At a moment of heightened social isolation and elevated concern over students’ mental health, references to self-harm stood out, accounting for nearly a third of incident reports over a six-month period. In a document titled “My Educational Autobiography,” students at Roosevelt High School on the south side of Minneapolis discussed bullying, drug overdoses and suicide. “Kill me,” one student wrote in a document titled “goodbye.”

Nearly a year after ����Ӱ�� submitted public records requests to understand the Minneapolis district’s use of Gaggle during the pandemic, a trove of documents offer an unprecedented look into how one school system deploys a controversial security tool that grew rapidly during COVID-19, but carries significant civil rights and privacy implications.

The data, gleaned from those 1,300 incident reports in the first six months of the crisis, highlight how Gaggle’s team of content moderators subject children to relentless digital surveillance long after classes end for the day, including on weekends, holidays, late at night and over the summer. In fact, only about a quarter of incidents were reported to district officials on school days between 8 a.m and 4 p.m., bringing into sharp relief how the service extends schools’ authority far beyond their traditional powers to regulate student speech and behavior, including at home.

Now, as COVID-era restrictions subside and Minneapolis students return to in-person learning this fall, a tool that was pitched as a remote learning necessity isn’t going away anytime soon. Minneapolis officials reacted swiftly when the pandemic engulfed the nation and forced students to learn from the confines of their bedrooms, paying more than $355,000 — including nearly $64,000 in federal emergency relief money — to partner with Gaggle until 2023. Faced with a public health emergency, the district circumvented normal procurement rules, a reality that prevented concerned parents from raising objections until after it was too late.

A mental health dilemma

With each alert, Matlock and other district officials were given a vivid look into students’ most intimate thoughts and online behaviors, raising significant privacy concerns. It’s unclear, however, if any of them made kids safer. Independent research on the efficacy of Gaggle and similar services .

When students’ mental health comes into play, a complicated equation emerges. In recent years, schools have ramped up efforts to identify and provide interventions to children at risk of harming themselves or others. Gaggle executives see their tool as a key to identify youth who are lamenting over hardships or discussing violent plans. On average, Gaggle notifies school officials within 17 minutes after zeroing in on student content related to suicide and self-harm, according to the company, and officials claim they saved more than 1,400 lives during the 2020-21 school year.

“As a parent you have no idea what’s going on in your kid’s head, but if you don’t know you can’t help them,” said Jeff Patterson, Gaggle’s founder and CEO. “And I would always want to err on trying to identify kids who need help.”

Critics, however, have questioned Gaggle’s effectiveness and worry that rummaging through students personal files and conversations — and in some cases outing students for exhibiting signs of mental health issues including depression — could backfire.

Using surveillance to identify children in distress could exacerbate feelings of stigma and shame and could ultimately make students less likely to ask for help, said Jennifer Mathis, the director of policy and legal advocacy at in Washington, D.C.

“Most kids in that situation are not going to share anything anymore and are going to suffer for that,” she said. “It suggests that anything you write or say or do in school — or out of school — may be found and held against you and used in ways that you had not envisioned.”

Minneapolis parent Holly Kragthorpe-Shirley had a similar concern and questioned whether kids “actually have a safe space to raise some of their issues in a safe way” if they’re stifled by surveillance.

In Minneapolis, for instance, Gaggle flagged the keywords “feel depressed” in a document titled “SEL Journal,” a reference to social-emotional learning. In another instance, Gaggle flagged “suicidal” in a document titled “mental health problems workbook.”

District officials acknowledged that Gaggle had captured student assignments and other personal files, an issue that civil rights groups have long been warning about. The documents obtained by ����Ӱ�� put hard evidence behind those concerns, said Amelia Vance, the director of at The Future of Privacy Forum, a Washington-based think tank.

“The hypotheticals we’ve been talking about for a few years have come to fruition,” she said. “It is highly likely to undercut the trust of students not only in their school generally but in their teacher, in their counselor — in the mental health problems workbook.” 

Patterson shook off any privacy reservations, including those related to monitoring sensitive materials like journal entries, which he characterized as “cries for help.”

“Sometimes when we intervene we might cause some challenges, but more often than not the kids want to be helped,” he said. Though Gaggle only monitors student files tied to school accounts, he cited a middle school girl’s private journal in a success story. He said the girl wrote in a digital journal that she suffered with self esteem issues and guilt after getting raped.

“No one in her life knew about this incident and because she journaled about it,” Gaggle was able to notify school officials about what they’d learned, he said. “They were able to intervene and get this girl help for things that she couldn’t have dealt with on her own.”

‘Needles in haystacks’

Tools like Gaggle have become ubiquitous in classrooms across the country, according to forthcoming research by the D.C.-based In a recent survey, 81 percent of teachers reported having such software in place in their schools. Though most students said they’re comfortable being monitored, 58 percent said they don’t share their “true thoughts or ideas” as a result and 80 percent said they’re more careful about what they search online.

Such data suggest that youth are being primed to accept surveillance as an inevitable reality, said Elizabeth Laird, the center’s director of equity in civic technology. In return, she said, they’re giving up the ability to explore new ideas and learn from mistakes.

Gaggle, in business since 1999 and recently relocated to Dallas, monitors the digital files of more than 5 million students across the country each year with the pandemic being very good for its bottom line. Since the onset of the crisis, the number of students surveilled by the privately held company, which does not report its yearly revenue, has . Through artificial intelligence, Gaggle scans students’ emails, chat messages and other materials uploaded to students’ Google or Microsoft accounts in search of keywords, images or videos that could indicate self-harm, violence or sexual behavior. Moderators evaluate flagged material and notify school officials about content they find troubling — a bar that Matlock acknowledged is quite low as “the system is always going to err on the side of caution” and requires district administrators to evaluate materials’ context.

“We’re looking for needles in haystacks to basically save kids.”
—Jeff Patterson, founder and CEO of Gaggle, which analyzed more than 10 billion online student communications in the 2020-21 school year.

In Minneapolis, Gaggle officials discovered a majority of offenses in files within students’ Google Drive, including in word documents and spreadsheets. More than half of incidents originated on the Drive. Meanwhile, 22 percent originated in emails and 23 percent came from Google Hangouts, the chat feature.

School officials are alerted to only a tiny fraction of student communications caught up in Gaggle’s dragnet. Last school year, Gaggle collected more than 10 billion items nationally but just 360,000 incidents resulted in notifications to district officials, according to the company. Nationally, 41 percent of incidents during the 2020-21 school year related to suicide and self-harm, according to Gaggle, and a quarter centered on violence.

“We are looking for needles in haystacks to basically save kids,” Patterson said.

‘A really slippery slope’

It was Google Hangouts that had Matt Shaver on edge. When the pandemic hit, classrooms were replaced by video conferences and casual student interactions in hallways and cafeterias were relegated to Hangouts. For Shaver, who taught at a Minneapolis elementary school during the pandemic, students’ Hangouts use became overwhelming.

Students were so busy chatting with each other, he said, that many had lost focus on classroom instruction. So he proposed a blunt solution to district technology officials: Shut it down.

“The thing I wanted was ‘Take the temptation away, take the opportunity away for them to use that,’” said Shaver, who has since left teaching and is now policy director at the education reform group EdAllies. “And I actually got pushback from IT saying ‘No we’re not going to do that, this is a good social aspect that we’re trying to replicate.’”

But unlike those hallway interactions, nobody was watching. Matlock, the district’s security head, said he was initially in the market for a new anonymous reporting tool, which allows students to flag their friends for behaviors they find troubling. He turned to Gaggle, which operates the anonymous reporting system SpeakUp for Safety, and saw the company’s AI-powered digital surveillance tool, which goes well beyond SpeakUp’s powers to ferret out potentially alarming student behavior, as a possibility to “enhance the supports for students online.”

“We wanted to get something in place quickly, as we were moving quickly with the lockdown,” he said, adding that going through traditional procurement hoops could take months. “Gaggle had a strong national presence and a reputation.”

The district signed an initial six-month, $99,603 contract with Gaggle just a week after the virus shuttered schools in Minneapolis. Board of Education Chair Kim Ellison signed a second, three-year contract at an annual rate of $255,750 in September 2020.

The move came with steep consequences. Though SpeakUP was used just three times during the six-month window included in ����Ӱ��’s data, Gaggle’s surveillance tool flagged students nearly 1,300 times.

During that time, which coincided with the switch to remote learning, the largest share of incidents — 38 percent — were pornographic or sexual in nature, including references to “sexual activity involving a student,” professional videos and explicit, student-produced selfies which trigger alerts to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

“I’m trying to imagine finding out about this as a high schooler, that every single word I’ve written on a Google Hangout or whatever is being monitored … we live in a country with laws around unreasonable search and seizure — and surveillance is just a really slippery slope.”
—Matt Shaver, former Minneapolis Public Schools teacher

An additional 30 percent were related to suicide and self-harm, including incidents that were triggered by keywords including “cutting,” “feeling depressed,” “want to die,” and “end it all.” an additional 18 percent were related to violence, including threats, physical altercations, references to weapons and suspected child abuse. Such incidents were triggered by keywords including “Bomb,” “Glock,” “going to fight,” and “beat her.” About a fifth of incidents were triggered by profanity.

Concerns over Gaggle’s reach during the pandemic weren’t limited to Minneapolis. In December 2020, a group of civil rights organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California that by using Gaggle, the Fresno Unified School District had violated the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which requires officials to obtain search warrants before accessing electronic information. Such monitoring, the groups contend, infringe on students’ free-speech and privacy rights with little ability to opt out.

Shaver, whose students used Google Hangouts to the point of it becoming a distraction, was alarmed to learn that those communications were being analyzed by artificial intelligence and poured over by a remote team of people he didn’t even know.

“I’m trying to imagine finding out about this as a high schooler, that every single word I’ve written on a Google Hangout or whatever is being monitored,” he said. “There is, of course, some lesson in this, obviously like, ‘Be careful of what you put online.’ But we live in a country with laws around unreasonable search and seizure — and surveillance is just a really slippery slope.”

The potential to save lives

To Matlock, Gaggle is a lifesaver — literally. When the tool flagged a Minneapolis student’s suicide note in the middle of the night, Matlock said he rushed to intervene. In a late-night phone call, the security chief said he warned the unnamed parents, who knew their child was struggling but didn’t fully recognize how bad things had become. Because of Gaggle, school officials were able to get the student help. To Matlock, the possibility that he saved a student’s life offers a feeling he “can’t even measure in words.”

“If it saved one kid, if it supported one caregiver, if it supported one family, I’ll take it,” he said. “That’s the bottom line.”

Despite heightened concern over youth mental health issues during the pandemic, its effect on youth suicide rates remains fuzzy. Preliminary data from the Minnesota health department show . Between 2019 and 2020, suicides among people 24 years old and younger decreased by more than 20 percent statewide. Nationally, the has surged during the pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but for people of all ages show a 5.6 percent decline in self-inflicted fatalities in 2020 compared to 2019.

Meanwhile, Gaggle reported that it identified a significant increase of threats related to suicide, self-harm and violence nationwide between March 2020 and March 2021. During that period, Gaggle observed a 31 percent increase in flagged content overall, including a 35 percent increase in materials related to suicide and self-harm. Gaggle officials said the data highlight a mental health crisis among youth during the pandemic. But other factors could be at play. Among them is , creating additional opportunities for Gaggle to tag youth behavior. Meanwhile, the number of students monitored by Gaggle nationally grew markedly during the pandemic.

But that hasn’t stopped Gaggle from as it markets a new service: Gaggle Therapy. In school districts that sign up for the service, students who are flagged by Gaggle’s digital monitoring tool are matched with counselors for weekly teletherapy sessions. Therapists available through the service are independent contractors for Gaggle and districts can either pay Gaggle for “blanket coverage,” which makes all students eligible, or a “retainer” fee, which allows them to “use the service as you need it,” . Under the second scenario, Gaggle would have a financial incentive to identify more students in need of teletherapy.

In Minneapolis, Matlock said that school-based social workers and counselors lead intervention efforts when students are identified for materials related to self-harm. “The initial moment may be a shock” when students are confronted by school staff about their online behaviors, he said, but providing them with help “is much better in the long run.”

As the district rolled out the service, many parents and students were out of the loop. Among them was Nathaniel Genene, a recent graduate who served as the Minneapolis school board’s student representative at the time. He said that classmates contacted him after initial news of the Gaggle contract was released.

“I had a couple of friends texting me like ‘Nathaniel, is this true?’” he said. “It was kind of interesting because I had no idea it was even a thing.”

Yet as students gained a greater awareness that their communications were being monitored, Matlock said they began to test Gaggle’s parameters using potential keywords “and then say ‘Hi’ to us while they put it in there.”

As students became conditioned to Gaggle, “the shock is probably a little bit less,” said Rochelle Cox, an associate superintendent at the Minneapolis school district. Now, she said students have an outlet to get help without having to explicitly ask. Instead, they can express their concerns online with an understanding that school officials are listening. As a result, school-based mental health professionals are able to provide the care students need, she said.

Mathis, with The Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, called that argument “ridiculous.” Officials should make sure that students know about available mental health services and ensure that they feel comfortable reaching out for help, she said.

“That’s very different than deciding that we’re going to catch people by having them write into the ether and that’s how we’re going to find the students who need help,” she said. “We can be a lot more direct in communicating than that, and we should be a lot more direct and a lot more positive.”

In fact, subjecting students to surveillance could push them further into isolation and condition them to lie when officials reach out to inquire about their digital communications, argued Vance of the Future of Privacy Forum.

“Effective interventions are rarely going to be built on that, you know, ‘I saw what you were typing into a Google search last night’ or ‘writing a journal entry for your English class,’” Vance said. “That doesn’t feel like it builds a trusting relationship. It feels creepy.”

Through the pandemic, schools in Republican states offered in-person learning at nearly twice the rate of those in Democratic states, according to new data, amounting to an estimated 66 additional days — or 432 hours — of face-to-face instruction for those students.

The numbers, provided to ����Ӱ�� by the school calendar tracking website , deliver a cumulative view of schooling decisions throughout COVID-19 and reinforce evidence of a partisan divide long highlighted by researchers.

Averaged from September through May, states that voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election gave students the chance to learn in the classroom 74.5 percent of the time, compared to 37.6 percent of the time in states that voted for Joe Biden. Red states account for over 22 million K-12 learners and blue states account for over 28 million.

The full impact of that disparity remains largely unmeasured, says Chad Aldeman, policy director at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. But he suspects the effects on students could be vast.

“Time is a rough proxy for learning,” he told ����Ӱ��. “So lost instructional time is likely to lead to lost learning.”

Virtual learning schemes, says Aldeman, rarely offered as much live instruction as traditional schooling models, instead trading asynchronous opportunities like worksheets and practice problems for real-time teaching. He calculated that his first-grade son, a student in Fairfax, Virginia public schools, was scheduled to receive less than half a typical school year’s worth of face time with educators in 2020-21. Other districts provided even fewer hours of real-time teaching.

“This means a lot of kids are missing out on a lot of live instruction with teachers and live interactions with their peers as well,” said Aldeman.

Using Burbio’s data, ����Ӱ�� calculated the average days and hours of in-person learning in each state based on a 180-day school year and a 6.5-hour school day. Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche, with help from his data team, has been mapping out learning models across America’s top 460 districts over the past year. Very quickly, partisan trends in reopening became clear to Roche. An outsider to education policy, he opted to present Burbio’s information on a map shaded purple to avoid association with one political party or the other. Regardless, the patterns were obvious, he said.

“It started to look like an electoral map pretty intensely by the mid- to late fall,” he told ����Ӱ��.

Deeper purple, representing a higher share of in-person learning, swept through the middle of the country and the Southeast, while near-white shades, meaning mostly virtual or hybrid learning, occupied the West Coast and Northeast. There were even light purple “swing state” regions, Roche noted, that had in-between rates of classroom instruction.

Burbio’s numbers reinforced academic findings, which since last summer had pointed to strong links between local support for then-President Donald Trump and the choice last fall to return students to classrooms. Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Jon Valant published much-discussed findings that counties’ partisan lean was more far more predictive of its school reopening decision than were coronavirus case rates in the surrounding community — a trend he says mirrored other responses to the pandemic, beyond just education.

“This whole pandemic has broken on political lines in lots of different places, and schools are just one of them,” Valant told ����Ӱ��.

Differences in reopening across Republican and Democratic states were most pronounced in late fall and early winter, also coinciding with the most deadly surge in coronavirus cases. In February through the end of the current school year, the gap began to tighten, with near-universal progress toward higher rates of in-person learning. Democratic states, which had more ground to make up, saw accelerated gains.

Valant attributes much of the break toward reopening starting in February to having a new president in the White House.

“The Biden administration signaled very early on that … it wanted to get students back into schools in person as quickly as it was safe to do so,” he said. “It turned down the temperature a little bit on the politics of school reopening.”

Growing availability of coronavirus vaccines also undoubtedly played into returning students to classrooms, the Brookings researcher noted. “I think [COVID-19 shots] put a lot of minds at ease.”

Toward the end of winter and into the spring, Roche, who scrupulously reads updates from superintendents across the country, noticed a trend. Districts were announcing plans to return in person, spurred by mandates from state governors, education commissioners and directors of health.

“It was almost immediate,” Roche remembers. New Mexico was a prime example, he said, in response to state officials changing their stance.

In many cases, however, the rhetoric could be hard to decode. Nearly every district nationwide maintained that it was committed to face-to-face learning as soon as it was safe to do so, said Roche, but the definitions of safety varied.

In Oregon, Marc Siegel, communications director for the Oregon Department of Education, said community transmission rates were the determining factor in school reopenings. “In areas with little or no spread, schools could operate very close to pre-[pandemic] conditions. In areas where that was not possible, we made sure the guidance covered best practices for distance learning,” he wrote to ����Ӱ�� in an email. Oregon, however, ranked among the lowest nationwide both in rates of in-person learning and .

Florida, on the other hand, took “bold steps” to reopen schools in the fall, spokeswoman Cheryl Etters told ����Ӱ��. Schools enforced precautions to maintain student safety, she noted, and many offered virtual options. Yet some schools , despite statewide infection rates .

Thanks to the superheated climate surrounding reopening, “districts, it could be argued, were making wrong decisions in both directions,” observed Georgetown’s Aldeman.

Bucking the trend, Rhode Island, a Biden-voting state with a Democratic governor, made a strong push to reopen schools.

“It was very clear from early on that the question was not if we reopened our schools but how,” Rhode Island Department of Education spokeswoman Emily Crowell wrote to ����Ӱ��, attributing much of that effort to guidance from state leadership, such as then-Gov. Gina Raimondo, who was an outspoken advocate for in-person learning from the outset of the academic year and now serves as Biden’s commerce secretary.

In Georgia, a Biden-voting state with Republican leadership that returned students to classrooms more quickly than many others, moves toward in-person learning reflected community priorities, said education department spokeswoman Meghan Frick.

“Our focus was not on politics but on listening to constituents — parents, educators, students, communities,” she explained over email.

Ryan Brown, chief communications officer for the South Carolina Department of Education, was candid about the role politics played in his state’s reopening plans.

“It’s a very Republican state, that certainly played into it,” Brown told ����Ӱ��. But while the push for in-person learning was most prominent among conservative lawmakers, many Democratic officials also voiced support.

“Everyone saw the benefit [of in-person school],” he said. “The majority of students learn well when they are face-to-face with a high-quality teacher.”

But in South Carolina, like practically every other state in the nation, reopening classrooms didn’t guarantee that students actually returned. School leaders made calls and knocked on doors, Brown said, “almost begging [students] to come back.”

According to the most recent federal data, which dates back to March, , with elevated rates for Black, Hispanic and Asian youth. The share of middle schoolers sticking in online options was even higher, at 40 percent overall. Many families, especially families of color, have .

The nuance of family decision making is not reflected in the Burbio data, which communicates the percentage of students whose schools offer them the opportunity to opt into in-person models. The Burbio numbers also reflect certain assumptions, such as that hybrid learning models represent half as much classroom learning as traditional models, though some schemes offered more and others offered less. In addition, some districts cut their “traditional” learning schedule to just four days, but were still counted as fully in-person.

With millions of students nationwide having not stepped foot inside a classroom since the dawn of the pandemic, Aldeman, who has studied past learning disruptions and recovery from events like natural disasters, says the onus now falls on school districts to help get young people back to speed.

“A lot of kids are going to need some additional time than normal going forward,” he said. It’s about “identifying which students are struggling and targeting resources for that.”