Driving past Scarsdale High School, a pretty brick building just a smidge under 30 miles north of New York City, you might forget — just for a second — that a global pandemic has rocked the world. On the sunny day when I pass by this March, there are cars parked up and down the street and clusters of students eating lunch at tables outside. Chatter is in the air.
Then I walk inside, and reality seeps back in. On the floor, red tape directs me where to stand. Six-foot tall signs tell me to wear a mask, wash my hands, and keep a safe distance from others. Right outside the door, I see students comfortably talking and waiting for their rides to arrive; inside, the hallway is silent.
This school is my alma mater, but in many ways it is unlike the one I remember attending. Last March, three months before graduation, Scarsdale became one of New York’s first to close its doors due to COVID-19. Its picture appeared in The New York Times, encapsulating the silence and emptiness permeating the campus. For a fleeting moment, the novel coronavirus, which had already turned neighboring New Rochelle into a siege zone, put Scarsdale on the map.
In the following months, the same fate befell thousands of other schools across the nation. As cases of coronavirus in the U.S. escalated from a trickle to a tsunami, over 50 million of America’s public school students plunged into a sudden and wholly unexpected trial with remote learning. Sluggishly, spring turned into a summer of cautious relief, and schools were placed in the unenviable position of planning for the fall of 2020 which, although merely months away, was still mired in uncertainty.
A few Southern and Midwestern states, embracing the reopening cause, ordered schools open in September, while a handful of Democratic states such as California mandated schools shut. Most states, including New York, merely guided local school districts as they made their own decisions. A look at the K-12 School Reopening Tracker made by Burbio, a data compiler, throughout the fall indicates that this patchwork tangle of state regulations, varying caseloads, and the messy local politics of education have divided the country on yet another geographic axis.
If any northeastern school district could break these regional divides through the strength of its sheer resources, one would think Scarsdale would be a prime candidate. With an average household income of $452,000, it is the second richest town in America and the richest on the East Coast. A Google search of the town’s name generates questions such as “Does Beyonce live in Scarsdale?” and a stroll through Scarsdale village is likely to yield five to seven Tesla sightings, at minimum. Its population is 80% White, with three quarters of the remainder being Asian American. In short, Scarsdale is anything but “normal” — and neither, for that matter, is the surrounding county of Westchester, which has a median household income nearly $30,000 higher than the New York average.
Still, the Scarsdale school system has undergone many of the same convulsions over the past year as other districts in the state. Though its abundance of technological resources — 98% of households in the town have broadband internet access — may have made distance learning much more comfortable last spring, since then the district has found itself in a similar position to many of its neighbors: attempting to strike a precarious balance between anxious parents, fearful teachers, and students suddenly thrust into the role of main actors in one of America’s great dramas.
Education in America has rarely been so melodramatic, yet the typical lack of intrigue around K-12 schools belies their pivotal place in America’s social and economic fabric. At the individual level, research shows that one additional year of schooling equates to significantly lower odds that a student will eventually be unemployed, on welfare, or living below the poverty line. The American dream of poor children climbing the economic ladder to achieve greater heights than their parents did becomes reality through education: Research from Raj Chetty and other economists at Opportunity Insights suggests that one of the most common attributes of high-mobility areas, or areas where low-income children tend to rise up the most, is strong schools.
COVID-19 represents the biggest shock to that dream since the Great Recession. Even Scarsdale, where intergenerational mobility is no matter of great concern, stands to lose if educational slides dent the overall economy and the “Zoomers” suffer permanent impediments to their development.
So, I set out to learn how COVID-19 changed schooling in my area. I expected to find that kids were made to unjustly labor through online schooling for too long, or that in fact the virus made any other outcome impossible. In reality, I found that both were true to some extent, but that each town demands its own story — one plotted by principals and superintendents but also politicians and regulators. Assigning blame is tempting, fulfilling even, but understanding what students have lost, and what they might have gained, strikes me as much more important. Only then will the pandemic offer lessons, rather than painful memories, for the future of education.
Reopening, Part I
This abnormal school year begins with the nail in the coffin of the previous one. On May 1, 2020 Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that New York schools would remain closed for the rest of the school year. Instantly, schools turned their focus toward the foreboding task of planning for the fall. In lower Westchester, most schools began their initial reentry planning in June, though some districts formed research committees as early as May.
At that point in time, the prospect of bringing any students back into classrooms by September was murky, at best. COVID-19 cases had fallen statewide and in Westchester, but the horrors of April, when daily cases were in the thousands and deaths in the high hundreds, remained etched into New Yorkers’ memories. Throughout the summer, the outlook steadily improved. On July 13, Cuomo announced that schools could reopen for in-person instruction in the fall with some parameters, and promised to confirm that decision in August. On August 7, a day when the state’s infection rate hovered at 1% and there were five deaths from the virus, Cuomo confirmed his choice. Triumphantly, he said,“If anyone can open schools, we can open schools.”
Such optimism belied the intense pressure being placed on schools boards and administrators, a group accustomed to intense scrutiny from aggrieved parents, to make some of the most difficult decisions of their careers. Robert Glass, superintendent of schools in the nearby town of Eastchester, told the HPR, “It was a time of high anxiety for me, and for everyone I think.”
In many ways, approaching reopening required a paradigm shift in the minds of educators. Ken Bonamo, Scarsdale High School’s principal, told the HPR that he often turns to a modified Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs when mulling important decisions: first, its impact on students’ physical safety; next, on mental health and well being; and finally, on curriculum and instruction. He said that during normal times, “We can often assume that one and two are in place, and focus on number three.” During the pandemic, though, everyone was reminded why exactly the first two factors reigned supreme. “That was clarifying,” Bonamo says.
As part of their restart process, schools formed webs of subcommittees to consider each of the three priorities that Bonamo mentioned. Districts such as Scarsdale and New Rochelle tasked up to 20-person subcommittees with addressing mental health and socio-emotional well being, while other districts, like nearby Byram Hills, convened teacher representatives from each subject department to plan modified curriculums. Most of the districts I examined made earnest efforts to amplify community voices, elevating parents and even students to committee roles to broaden the discussion. Rishika, a junior at Scarsdale who served on the district’s restart committee, described the process to the HPR as “taking on this new, unknown challenge and just trying to figure out the best way to tackle it.”
When viewed through the lens of Bonamo’s hierarchy, committee members had their work cut out for them. The research that had shaped the schooling debate up until then pointed to clear costs when school doors remained shut and somewhat murkier dangers if they opened up too quickly.
The clearest consequence of keeping schools closed was damage to curriculum and instruction. A bevy of studies conducted at the end of the 2019-2020 school year illustrated that, for many students, remote learning was hardly learning at all. (To the dismay of parents and students alike, this drop-off appeared on report cards in many fully-remote districts in the fall). Likewise, surveys from the spring which documented feelings of depression among students, combined with longstanding research about how going to school bolsters students’ mental health, painted the alarming picture of kids struggling both inside and outside of the virtual classroom.
Despite the costs of virtual education, the notion that open schools could become incubators of touchy, sniffly virus vectors inspired visceral emotions for all parties involved. Even with low rates of infection in Westchester and the broader New York area, Bonamo recalled a “tremendous amount of fear” in August over the prospect of the virus spreading through schools. The science on kids and coronavirus indicated that children under age 10 were less likely to test positive, but the literature at the time was nascent at best, leaving media coverage, statements by individual scientists, and general public perception as powerful motivators. Further, since American schools had no way to reliably estimate how the virus would behave in a dynamic school setting, they had to reconcile reports of successful reopenings in Sweden and China with nightmare scenarios, such as that of an Israeli high school which reopened in May 2020 only to be battered 10 days later by a large outbreak.
Ultimately, the final decision for many of the schools I examined in Westchester boiled down to a fairly mundane metric: how much space there was in any given school building. New York state guidelines, rather ambiguously, recommended that schools take one of two paths regarding social distance between students: either space desks six feet apart, with masking, or place desks closer than six feet apart and use physical barriers to compensate for the lost protection. In Westchester, mirroring Bonamo’s safety-first mentality, the broad consensus favored the first option. For the county’s larger districts, such as Scarsdale and New Rochelle, a full return to in-person learning was therefore untenable.
On August 28, Scarsdale School District sent out a letter to the community announcing a phased-in hybrid model, in which each school would divide its student body — not including all-virtual students — into two groups in order to reduce density within the school. At the high school and middle school levels, kids would be in school two days a week, with the former having half-days and the latter having full days in person. Wednesdays were designated as all-virtual, teacher-planning days. Elementary students would be in school either five mornings or five afternoons per week.
This end-of-month announcement, punctuating the imminent end of summer and the return of school, came after a month of back-and-forth discussions between the administration, parents, and teachers. In Scarsdale, as in many other nearby districts, parents were able to secure more time in school for their children, but fell well short of a full in-school schedule. Some smaller districts in Westchester, such as Bronxville, were able to fully reopen their elementary and middle schools, but the vast majority of the county’s schools rang in the school year in a completely different way than ever before.
The parents with whom I spoke expressed a range of reactions in response to these decisions about their children’s mode of education, from relief that their children would receive some time in school to gratitude that they were not the parents of six-year olds compelled to learn on a computer. Their opinions evolved throughout the year according to a number of factors, including the question of whether their children risked contracting the virus — a sticky one that turned many into amateur epidemiologists.
The Virus Lurks
If school administrators felt as if they were stumbling around in a dark cave last summer, the astounding amount of scientific research that has been conducted since then means now they have a flashlight. Due to the medical field’s preoccupation with the novel coronavirus, a wave of peer-reviewed publications and preprints has elucidated much about children, schools, and COVID-19.
First, the early idea that children and young people are less susceptible to contracting the virus has been largely borne out by investigators. In a JAMA Pediatrics review of 32 studies evaluating infection rates through contact-tracing and population screening, subjects under age 20 had 44% lower odds of being infected with COVID-19 when they were exposed. These findings, which were especially concentrated in those younger than 14, track well with how the pandemic has evolved in the U.S., with the CDC reporting that less than 10% of recorded COVID-19 cases have been among those ages 5-17.
The fact that children are less susceptible to infection is separate from the question of whether children transmit the virus at lower rates than adults. Intuition would posit that if children contract the virus at lower rates, naturally they would represent less of a risk to transmit the virus to adults; still, in settings such as schools, where hundreds of low-risk children could plausibly create a cumulative high-risk scenario for more vulnerable adults, transmission is important to examine on its own. The JAMA review concluded that data were insufficient to comment on transmission, but the CDC’s science brief on transmission in schools suggests that transmission among students is “relatively rare” based on a number of studies published as early as June 2020.
Schools may have been able to utilize some of this research on COVID-19 susceptibility as they were planning for the 2020-2021 school year. Still, the river of publications was flowing well into the fall, and the debate over how students would transmit the virus within a school setting remained wide open. This set the stage for real-life experiments within schools that reopened in some capacity.
Researchers measured COVID-19 transmission in schools throughout the fall and published their findings in the winter. What they found was fascinating. Out of 5,530 students and staff members in one Wisconsin study, 191 contracted the virus; just seven of these 191 infections were attributed to in-school transmission. Researchers in North Carolina documented similar results in a cohort of over 90,000 students and teachers, finding only 32 cases of in-school spread.
These two studies, which were corroborated by subsequent studies in Missouri, Ohio, and Florida, crystallize two major insights: first, that schools could successfully stay open even if the surrounding area was being racked by the virus (in the Wisconsin study, local test positivity rates peaked at 40%); and second, that student-to-student transmission was rare. Dr. Bill Hanage, an Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, put it this way in an interview with the HPR: “There’s a big difference between introductions and transmissions. If you have a raging pandemic outside the schools, and yet in the schools you are enacting mitigation strategies — you’re mandating masks, you’re doing regular testing and all that stuff — then you’ve done your job and the schools can stay open.”
Mandating masks is straightforward enough and remains a universal characteristic of successfully reopened schools. In the Wisconsin study, the self-reported rate of mask-wearing was over 92%, while schools in Florida which opened last fall without mandatory mask policies had higher rates of COVID-19 incidence than their masked-up counterparts. S Across eight elementary schools in Georgia, researchers identified nine clusters of transmission from students to educators or vice versa; five of these clusters involved inadequate mask use by students and all nine involved “less than ideal” physical distancing. The authors of that study also pointed to students eating in classrooms as a possible facilitator of spread. Hanage offered a similar account of eating-sans-masks leading to in-school spread within one Massachusetts school, this time the spread taking place between adults who weren’t complying with mask rules. This near-complete absence of student-to-teacher transmission when masking is strictly enforced flies in the face of teacher union fears from last fall.
Masking is much easier to implement than other mitigation procedures such as testing, however. Hanage laments that “testing is extremely difficult because school districts have enormously different resources, which is just one of those depressing facts.” Hanage was referring to monetary resources, but he could just have easily been referring to the precious resource of physical space. Many schools around the country, like Scarsdale, found it physically impossible to bring all students back and still space desks six feet apart. Instead of cutting density drastically, however, many of these other schools decided to settle for less than six feet. This group includes the aforementioned Wisconsin schools, as well as a group of 20 schools in Utah which registered low in-school transmission despite the median distance between students being only three feet.
This distancing distinction has received a great deal of scrutiny on its own. In March, a study specifically focused on the merits of three feet distancing versus six feet found similar case rates between schools employing the former and those using the latter. The paper was received with a swarm of media coverage because of its crucial topic and its impressive scope: the authors conducted a statewide analysis of Massachusetts schools, representing over 240 school districts and 600,000 combined students and staff.
For advocates of reopening schools, this study seemed huge. A major constraint on student density could seemingly be relaxed without courting disaster, as long as other mitigation procedures were up to snuff. To those studying the science of disease spread within schools, though, the dubiousness of the “six foot rule” in schools was hardly novel.
Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings program at the Chan School, argued last November that treating six feet as a “magical cutoff” stemmed from a poor understanding of aerosols. His position was bolstered by an evaluation of 172 studies published in The Lancet which found no significant reduction in risk at six feet of distancing versus three feet, assuming low risk in the first place. Allen, in an interview with the HPR, referred to the data he cited at the time as “grounded in good exposure and risk science principles by field.” He cautioned, though, that the focus on three feet obscured the larger picture: “Very often, I see the conversation about three feet distancing without any other context around it. It works when everyone’s masked, and there’s good ventilation, and when you consider the costs of the arbitrary six foot rule, which is what’s ultimately keeping millions of kids out of school.”
How did the six foot rule become so enshrined in the educational lexicon? State regulators, those of New York being no exception, certainly played a part. But so did the CDC, which has contorted itself in every which way as the school year has gone on to settle on a steady set of actionable recommendations.
The CDC Chimes In
In February, under new director Rochelle Walensky, the CDC released its first updated guidelines on school reopening under the Biden administration. Despite rising momentum for a relaxation of six feet within classrooms, the guidelines stated that “Physical distancing (at least 6 feet) should be maximized to the greatest extent possible.”
When it came to reopening decisions, the agency devised a color-coded system that, maddeningly, put enormous stock into a factor that the aforementioned studies discounted: community levels of transmission. The four-tiered system ran from blue, or low transmission, to red, or high transmission. By measuring new cases per 100,000 people over the previous week and the percentage of positive test results, the agency used these four tiers to make recommendations, first for schools that weren’t screening students with COVID-19 tests, and then for those that were. In districts with high levels of community transmission and no screening testing — a group that included over 90% of the country when the guidelines were released — middle and high schools were urged to close.
Perhaps, at least, this bifurcated system based on testing would incentivize schools to invest in the costly endeavor of screening students and faculty? Doubtful. The CDC dictated that schools with orange or red-level community transmission should not fully reopen even if they were conducting screening testing — rather, it simply gave the nod to remain in hybrid models. After the February release, Walensky came under fire for the guidelines’ emphasis on community transmission, and last month the CDC was embroiled in controversy after a New York Post report revealed that prominent teacher union officials had suggested language that eventually found its way into the CDC guidance.
One could make a fair argument that the importance of such federal guidelines are overstated. School districts, as this pandemic has emphasized, are the living embodiment of “all politics is local”; they often operate as fiefdoms of their own prerogatives. Especially for districts that receive little federal funding, like many Westchester districts, state guidelines and the preferences of local parents and teachers trump anything from the CDC in Atlanta. Still, at least for the medical intelligentsia, the guidelines represented a missed opportunity to translate cutting-edge research into well-reasoned recommendations and to clarify misconceptions stemming from the beginning of the pandemic.
Take ventilation, the classic example of a boring, esoteric mitigation procedure that receives far less attention than clean surfaces (despite the fact that there has not been a single documented case of COVID-19 spreading through surfaces). Given that COVID-19 is an airborne infection, and a whopping ⅓ of American schools don’t even meet minimum ventilation standards for comfort, cycling more clean air into classrooms should be paramount. Yet the CDC, on page 13 of the updated guidelines, merely recommends opening more doors and windows, several bullet points below its advice to regularly clean surfaces such as playground equipment and school busses which are highly unlikely to transmit the virus. Open windows are a start for schools which lack mechanical ventilation systems, but the agency spurned other upgrades such as increasing the level of HVAC-system air filters and making use of portable air cleaners.
Perhaps most dismayingly, the February update skimped on cutting-edge technologies. One of the most intriguing of these is the lateral flow device, a type of rapid-antigen test which delivers results in mere minutes. Mass adoption of these tests would make COVID-19 testing similar to pregnancy testing: fast, cheap, and at-home. Although epidemiologists such as Dr. Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, have been promoting these rapid tests since last fall, the CDC’s attention to such novel technologies has been scant.
This overlook represents a massive missed opportunity to schools: Imagine a world in which students can test themselves in the morning before leaving for school and quarantine themselves in the event of a positive result. Sadly, this idea looks set to remain unhappily confined to the imagination.
The CDC updated its guidelines in March, this time revising its stance on distancing and rectifying its overreliance on community transmission. Still, the month-long interlude between guidelines represented a month of potential progress, foiled. When Allen and I spoke in March, a week before the new update, he expressed frustration at the lackadaisical state of affairs. “As we wait for new guidance, and wait for everyone to be vaccinated, month after month ticks by with kids out of school … I don’t understand how society is okay with retail shops and restaurants and bars being open, while the nearby school is still closed. It speaks to a shocking failure of society’s response. We’ve let down our kids.”
Toward the end of my conversation with Hanage, he summed up the great challenge of schools and a deadly virus interacting, saying, “One of the difficulties is that the thing about schools has never been about science really, it’s all about how people feel.” I couldn’t agree more.
Are the Kids Alright?
To put my finger on the pulse of Westchester’s schooling scene and try to find out how each stakeholder was feeling, I disseminated a 45-question survey to high school students and parents in the area. In total, I received approximately 400 responses — the greatest geographic weight landed in Scarsdale, but results were buttressed by respondents from the towns of New Rochelle, Eastchester, Edgemont, Bronxville, Tuckahoe, Rye, and Byram Hills.
The student respondents, 84% of whom hailed from the Scarsdale area, provide a glimpse into what it was like for kids to log into school everyday, as well as how they felt toward the expansion of in-person schooling. More than half of students gave their school a “Good” or “Excellent” rating on its overall response to the pandemic, although students with less favorable opinions expressed their views openly and critically.
At the end of the survey, I left respondents with the opportunity to add any additional thoughts about their school district and the pandemic; for some, an airing of grievances commenced. One student, writing about Scarsdale High School, wrote, “Our school did not listen to students or teachers when making decisions about the school year. They made decisions by listening to parents, then told us in the end what they had decided.” Another, addressing New Rochelle High School, wrote, “NRHS thought that there were bigger risks to opening up the school but I think that there were bigger risks to not opening because many kids lost a year of socialization and education.”
When I went to interview some of the survey respondents to hear more about their individual experiences, I wondered if any of them fell into the group that the student above described: the “lost year” cohort. I spoke to nine students, and none of them gave the impression that this year had been a total wash. Rather, it had simply been very different — presenting many pitfalls but also some unique opportunities.
Some pitfalls stemmed from the inherent pain of staring at a fixed point on a screen for hours on end. Students this year have probably gained the most intimate understanding of the syndrome known as Zoom fatigue. Vivian, a senior at Scarsdale High School, told the HPR, “It’s like you come out of class, and then your energy levels drop, and your eyes are all red and sore. And everything feels tired.” Ronan, a junior, said that he used to wear blue-light glasses for protection, but over time he’s built up a sort of acquired immunity to the fatigue.
In addition to the 4-6 hours each day that a student might spend on video conferencing apps, the almost complete elimination of paper homework and classwork — even for hybrid learners — led most students to report spending at least eight hours a day on a computer or tablet device. This preponderance of screen time was unsurprisingly a major concern for parents, some of whom recalled their children cycling between online school on computers and online entertainment on phones, often all at once and throughout their waking hours.
The problem with online school has always been about more than the vagaries of Zoom, though; it’s an instructional nightmare to keep kids engaged when the wealth of the internet, not to mention the comforts of home, are right at their fingertips. Barking dogs, disruptive siblings, and the irresistible sound that accompanies the receipt of a text message are hardly elements conducive to learning. They are also distractions that traditional schools have left children wholly ill-equipped to handle. Brian, a junior at New Rochelle High School, told the HPR, “If you’re in a classroom and the teacher is there, you’re not going to go watch videos and start texting people because there’s a force beyond your own self. We’ve never been taught how to pay attention on our own like this. We’ve never signed up for an online course.”
Other students, however, appreciated the lack of an external policing force. Ronan, a junior at Scarsdale High School, told me in an interview that being at home this year allowed him to enter “the zone” and tune out the noise of other people. Khushku, a junior at Eastchester High three miles down the road from Scarsdale High, saw the lack of teacher enforcement in class not as a burden but as an opportunity to assume a more independent learning pace. Often, if she finished the assignment the teacher had given the class, she would move on to work from other subjects — a decision that requires much less secrecy in the Zoom realm than the physical world: “If I were in the physical classroom, it’d be kind of inappropriate to pull out a calculator during an Italian class.”
Ronan and Khushku are representative of the potential advantages of remote learning, namely the ability to self-pace and construct a learning environment to one’s own preferences. Unfortunately, these benefits cater to highly motivated and well-situated students, the ones whom teachers may treasure but certainly not the ones who keep them up at night. From a curriculum perspective, schools have simply been able to teach much less with fewer students in the classroom. Of the students I surveyed, 40% reported that they had learned “much less” in school this year compared to prior years, and only 2% reported learning more. These statistics are less alarming when they are inevitable, given that administrations and teachers curtailed the curriculum in many subjects intentionally. They are still tough to swallow for many, though, especially considering the amount of learning that was lost last spring.
Fortunately, most students expressed at least some confidence in their teachers’ responses to such a radically altered way of delivering instruction. The majority of students I reached said teachers had “somewhat effectively” or “very effectively” dealt with varying learning structures this year, while a number of parents I spoke to lauded the adaptations teachers made to keep students engaged. Personally, I’ve witnessed educators adopt a cornucopia of new educational platforms, from Jamboards to EdPuzzles to Gimkits. Virtually overnight, these tools have become important parts of the learning process.
Although all students were exposed to new resources this year, only those going into school had the opportunity to interact with their teachers in a closer setting and solidify their learning gains. The students who were totally virtual, about 20% of the cohort I surveyed, conveyed more difficulty participating in class and engaging with teachers, most of whom were juggling a class sitting in front of them as well as a smattering of students online. Virtual students told me how it was hard for them to hear discussions and answers being shared among in-person students, making attending class at all feel futile at times. Others said that they squinted to see blackboards projected through a camera, which would have been much easier to read if they were sitting inside the classroom.
Simultaneously, one of the more nerve-wracking aspects of Zoom for anxious high schoolers, the experience of one’s face being displayed to everyone at once, was amplified for some Zoomers. Some teachers would use the SmartBoard at the front of the room to display the Zoom call containing remote students, leaving them perennially in the view of their in-person peers as they tried to stay engaged in class. This in-school panopticon seemed to reinforce a sense of isolation among all-virtual students, emphasizing the distance between them and the students in school. “They can see you, but you can’t see them,” said Rishika.
Building connections among students spaced six feet apart would hardly have been easy even if every single kid were in school. In many cases, though, the student population in school dropped well below the half-density or partial-density expectation, due to a combination of contact tracing and kids switching from all-virtual to hybrid ad nauseum. Brian, the New Rochelle senior, said he was able to build relationships with his teachers when he went into school — mainly because in most of his classes, he would be alone or virtually alone with the teacher. The social interactions he craved with students, the interactions that drove him to enroll in the hybrid model, were missing.
In the survey, 59% of students reported that they felt either somewhat or very disconnected from other students in their classes. Exactly 50% felt disconnected from their teachers. For some students, the pandemic has fundamentally altered the way that they view school. One student wrote on the survey, “I now think of school in a different way. It used to be a learning hub and where I interacted with my peers, but now I think of it as simply a place I’m supposed to be.”
The loss of human connections and a sense of purpose within schools has come at a time when students are in dire need of both. When school becomes simply “a place I’m supposed to be,” a major anchor of adolescent life disappears, and kids can become unmoored. If these students fall through the cracks in their time of crisis, they might never find their way back.
Waving Through a Window
Today’s generation of adolescents, referred to as Generation Z, is the most lonely, stressed, and depressed on record. Just 45% of Gen Z individuals said that their mental health was good or excellent in 2019, while more than 1 in 8 Americans ages 12 to 17 experienced at least one major depressive episode in 2017. This youth mental health crisis has followed the rise of a number of stressors unique to young people in the 21st century: A majority of American teens fear a shooting could happen at their school, and a slightly larger majority have experienced some form of cyberbullying.
The pandemic has introduced a new trauma to a generation reared in it. Data on youth suicide rates from 2020 are scarce, but child psychiatrists and emergency room doctors across the country have spoken of more children and teens attempting suicide. Social isolation due to school closures, the loss of in person mental health services, and unstable home environments have created a perfect storm of mental malaise. In one Nevada school district, 19 students have died by suicide since the shutdown last March.
This escalation of the youth mental health crisis is evident in the answers and accounts of students in the Westchester area. When asked to select which emotions they had experienced over the past 24 hours, the three most common student answers were anxiety, boredom, and sadness, in descending order. 64% of respondents said that their mental health had worsened since the beginning of the pandemic. One student wrote about a lack of motivation, while another described a perpetual feeling of tiredness.
According to the administrators I spoke to, mental health was a consistent concern of educators. Indeed, by all accounts in Scarsdale, students received frequent surveys inquiring about their well-being. Yet, across the board, students questioned the effectiveness or even existence of mental health support from schools. Khushku, at Eastchester High School, couldn’t recall any direct outreach from her school concerning mental health. Vivian, speaking of Scarsdale High School, said, “They just send out emails. I don’t even remember what they say. That’s how much I don’t pay attention to them. They say, ‘If you need help, you can reach out to the school psychologist.’”
The inherent challenge of this kind of broad-based outreach is that it places the onus on kids to seek out help from their schools. Although research demonstrates that students in this generation are more likely to seek treatment for anxiety or depression than those in previous generations, in school communities like Scarsdale, which has been described as a pressure-cooker, admitting mental health struggles can be seen as a sign of weakness. Rishika said, “There’s still a very large stigma in Scarsdale around mental health and the perception of not being able to handle it.”
In the eyes of most students in the area, the shortcomings described above have hampered their schools’ responses. When asked how well their school had provided resources to address mental health this school year, just 5% of students said “very well” or “extremely well,” while 37% said “not well at all.” While it is true that this issue, which predates the pandemic, is to some extent a matter of resources — the average school psychologist nationwide oversees a whopping 1,381 students, though at Scarsdale each psychologist oversees approximately 375 — it is also cultural, an issue that Vivian raised. “The mental health crisis is more structural, in how much stress students feel and the culture surrounding college apps. If schools did more to combat that by making classes more engaging and more about learning rather than tests, I think that would be most beneficial to our mental health.”
In any case, the pandemic’s exacerbation of the crisis has had real consequences for the students who are most vulnerable. The students whom I interviewed, although honest about their stress and isolation, did not seem like the pandemic pushed them to the edge of crisis. Rather, the parents I heard from provided more of a window into those most in need of care.
Tara Fishler, a New Rochelle parent, enrolled her 17-year-old daughter in a specialized education program affiliated with the school district prior to the pandemic, due to issues with cutting class. When COVID-19 hit, she watched as her daughter’s motivation to engage with her course material evaporated and her behavioral issues rapidly escalated. “She’s a very social kid,” Fishler told me, “so to be told that she could not see her friends was like a death sentence to her.” Tara’s daughter ran away and was hospitalized multiple times, forcing Tara to move her into a residential treatment center in Utah last October.
Throughout the entire ordeal, Fishler characterized the New Rochelle school district as unresponsive and ignorant as to her daughter’s whereabouts. Despite giving New Rochelle High School notice of her daughter’s move out of the state, Fishler received a call in March about her daughter’s 28-day absence from a teacher who evidently lacked the knowledge that Fishler’s daughter hadn’t been enrolled in the school for months. “They don’t even realize that she’s not there. So if she actually were here in New York, would it take 8 months for them to say ‘Hey, where’s your daughter?’” And while she told me that COVID-19 may have led to more scattershot communication and record-keeping, the district’s inability to assist kids struggling the most ran deeper. “We were begging them for help. We didn’t know what to do with our daughter who was acting out. And they didn’t know what to tell us.”
Fishler’s experience was the most serious mental health issue I encountered among students, but other parents also expressed their concern that socioemotional health felt passed over. One mother in Scarsdale wrote that she “understands trying to keep children physically healthy but mental health has been ignored.” Others drew implicit links between the alleged prioritization of teachers over students, less in-person school, and mental health consequences that followed, as did one mother who suggested “fear drove the decisions.” Writing anonymously, she went on to assert that in Scarsdale there had been at least nine attempted suicides, and that Scarsdale High School “is not equipped to handle the mental health fall-out moving forward.”
I was unable to verify this parent’s claim about suicide attempts in Scarsdale. Some of the parents I interviewed were aware of kids who were struggling mentally, but none to the extent described above. When I contacted one of the school psychologists at Scarsdale High School, Dr. Peter Faustino, he directed me to a recording of a Scarsdale Board of Education meeting during which mental health was discussed. The speakers didn’t address the issue of student suicide directly, although Superintendent Thomas Hagerman mentioned that the district had encountered “numerous crises” in the mental health arena throughout the year. Interestingly, Dr. Eliot Cohen, another psychologist who works for the district, discussed two subgroups of students who had especially struggled this year, even when enrolled in hybrid models. Both displayed a deep, complex form of depression. In one, however, this condition persisted no matter the situation, while in the other, kids were able to take refuge in one setting: inside the school building.
The Barriers that Separate Us
The arrival of spring this year brought a potential saving grace for those kids and parents crying for more time in school with their peers. With local and national case rates falling from their winter highs, new CDC and state guidance allowing for more flexibility on density requirements, and the vaccination campaign in full swing, schools in the area moved in lockstep to expand their in person offerings. Most of them planned to welcome all of their students back for five days a week, restoring a sense of normalcy to school schedules.
I expected to see an almost universal outpouring of joy over the return to school. Instead, I found that students seemed to be much more ambivalent, having grown accustomed to the status quo. Of the 94% of surveyed students who said that their school had announced a date to return to fully in person learning, 56% said that their school was making the right decision and 25% were unsure.
One reason for some students’ lukewarm embrace of traditional school was that for most of the year, hybrid models led to more relaxed assessment policies, allowing students to take exams from home and consult outside resources. Even tests intended to be taken individually and closed-note often devolved into collaborative ventures among students in the same class, who shared answers and harvested information online in their pursuit of a better score. A jarring 68% of students said that they have seen “much more” cheating or academic dishonesty this year. Bonamo was acutely aware of this phenomenon at Scarsdale, and saw it as a factor that could significantly alter the traditional model of evaluation and assessment. “It is a continual challenge for us as progressive educators to think of ways of assessing that assume resource access, that assume collaboration. Because that’s just the world in which we work.”
Students also may have hesitated to dust off their everyday backpacks because they were concerned about the safety of everyone returning to school at once. When hybrid systems were still in full swing across the area, the dedication of students at different schools to COVID-19 mitigation procedures seemed to vary, as did enforcement measures by adults. In the survey, 98% of respondents said that they wore their masks in school at all times, but only 76% could report the same of their peers. Physical distancing procedures fared much more poorly, with 33% of respondents saying that distancing rules were followed “very loosely” in hallways and other areas of the school.
Of the teachers, parents, and administrators I talked to from Scarsdale, none recalled seeing any serious violations of COVID-19 rules in school. Rather, the latter two groups often expressed amazement at the ability of children and teens to wear their masks so dutifully. Multiple parents told me that upon getting into the car after school, their kids would keep their masks on for the ride home, forgetting it was even there.
The experiences of students I heard from in other schools were less inspiring. Skyler, a senior at New Rochelle High School who chose to attend all-virtually, let out a laugh when I asked if her in-school peers kept their masks on in the building. She told me that on social media she saw kids playing fast and loose with the mask rules, especially at lunchtime. Khushku, the junior in Eastchester, recounted that amidst the winter surge in cases and a tightening of travel restrictions, a girl in her Italian class approached the teacher with her mask half down and boasted that her family would be skipping the mandatory quarantine after their trip out of state the previous weekend.
If such a cavalier stance were to become widespread among students, it would bode poorly for a safe and successful remainder of the school year. Schools have a number of factors working in their favor on safety, however, from warm weather to student vaccinations. Furthermore, districts have invested in new techniques to counteract the effect of reduced distancing between students. In a number of districts, plexiglass barriers were purchased in bulk and mounted on desks in each classroom — constituting well over a $100,000 investment for Eastchester schools, per Dr. Glass, and $180,000 in Scarsdale, per the superintendent. In typical pandemic fashion, the CDC’s updated school guidelines, which were released shortly after some schools began using plexiglass in March, removed a previous recommendation to erect such barriers between desks, citing a lack of evidence in their effectiveness. Now, “these flimsy plastic barriers,” as one student endearingly called them, have apparently become unwieldy obstacles in the classroom, making it harder to hear other students and see teachers, due to the glare of light bouncing from barrier to barrier. Ronan told me, “My teacher was saying ‘Hi’ to me the other day. It was the first day back. I didn’t see him at all through the plexiglass.”
So it isn’t exactly the glorious return to their caverns of learning that some may have hoped for. But few are complaining. Carlos Bedoya, a history teacher at Scarsdale High School, told the HPR that he asked his students if they ever expected to be so excited to return to school after a long hiatus. He described how the prevailing mood in his classroom had noticeably changed since students had returned en masse. In a year consumed by the constant battle to keep virus particles from spreading through the air, I thought I detected a whiff of something else: hope.
Final Marks
If students can’t always see the whiteboard now through their personal plexiglass, returning to school once again has at least given them, and their parents, a crystal-eyed perspective to reflect on this bizarre school year. When I was conducting interviews in late April, the minutiae of schedules and reopening plans often escaped a parent or student, but the strongest emotions that they had felt lingered.
For some, there was predictably a sense of frustration that they had been mostly homebound for so long. The reasons that students gave for missing school were not always what I expected, however. A number of them told me that what they missed most were the “little things” — the small idiosyncrasies and comforts that only became obvious when absent. Exchanging notes with your classmate in class. Sneaking a forbidden snack into the library. Dropping by a teacher’s office to chat, on a whim. This last point was one that administrators raised to me as well: In the hyper-coordinated, ultra-controlled school environment of this crisis, spontaneity was dead. Even the smallest of serendipitous moments, “the things that make school tolerable,” as one student put it, were regulated into oblivion.
But, as always, these regulations and reconfigurations created their own unique forms of escape. One student, seeing the glass half-full, told me, “I won’t go to whisper to my friends in class, but I can text them.” A few of the students told me how they embraced the additional free time that they had due to hybrid or all-virtual set-ups. Ronan, in his freed-up spare time, dedicated himself to calling up seniors and booking vaccination appointments for them. So far he’s secured the jab for over 1,000 people. Lydia, a junior at Scarsdale, told the HPR, “I’ve just been able to do a lot more things online than I would have ever been able to find in person,” as she listed hackathons and a newfound interest in astronomy as her pandemic discoveries.
It must be said that countless kids across the nation, outside of the trappings of wealthy suburban life, lacked the opportunity to capitalize on their altered situations. While those in the top 10% of the income bracket, who were vastly overrepresented in my investigation, escaped the economic crash largely unscathed, the effects on low-wage workers have been severe and long-lasting. The children of these workers have been exposed to financial instability and food insecurity, both of which risk stunting their cognitive and social development, all while struggling to log into online school. Many have labored to learn remotely and simultaneously support their families financially, while up to 3 million students may have simply vanished from schooling altogether — a tragedy for America’s youth.
Parents in Scarsdale were cognizant of this backdrop and of the vast benefits that they and their children enjoyed; for them, one of the most common takeaways from this year was a sense of gratitude. They were thankful that they had the resources to find caregivers for their younger children, to seek emotional support for their older children, and to remain generally afloat at a time when so many families were beset by plague and penury.
Even educators, finishing up what was likely the most trying year of their careers, found some solace in the quantum leap that education technology took when schools shut down. The possibilities for educators in a post-pandemic world where a reliance on technology is a luxury, not a necessity, are vast. Bedoya, referring to tech in teaching, said, “There’s no going back.”
He’s right, in many ways. The world will never return to normal; “normal” has changed. Students, whose surroundings were thrown into disarray as they grew into themselves, will never again go to school exactly like they did before. The fallout from this pandemic on young Americans and the adults who support them is still being charted. In the meantime, I fall back to the simple advice one student gave me, based on her experience:
“Don’t take anything for granted.”
Image by Sam Balye is licensed under the Unsplash License.
Image by Rubén Rodriguez is licensed under the Unsplash License.
Correction: June 11, 2021
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the director of the CDC. Her name is Rochelle Walensky, not Rochelle Wolensky.
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Dr. Michael Mina’s title. He is an assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the associate medical director in clinical microbiology in the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, not the Director of Microbiology at Brigham.
