Consequences of remote learning ripple through SFUSD four years on

Four years later, the coronavirus pandemic continues to reshape the world. Many of Curiel’s middle-school students in 2020 are now on the verge of graduating from high school, making them the first incoming college class whose high-school experience began with remote learning.

But it remains unclear just how much of an effect the pandemic lockdown had on children and their ability to navigate the world — and finding clarity is especially pressing for San Francisco’s students, as California lagged behind most states in returning to fully in-person learning.

San Francisco Unified School District spokesperson Laura Dudnick told The Examiner in an emailed statement that the district has focused on rebuilding the community and “meeting students where they are at” since returning to fully in-person learning in 2021.

“While providing distance learning, our district worked hard to make sure students and families had sufficient technology access and while we continue to use technology platforms for learning, we have infused greater relationship and community building into our in-person learning practices,” she said.

“We have continued to work with the City and community partners to meet the needs of our students and staff and respond to the evolving public health guidance as best we can,” she said.

Looking back on The City shutdown four years later, parents, families and teachers wonder what a generation of students has lost.

Almost 56,000 K-12 students were enrolled in SFUSD as of last year, according to state education officials. More than 16,000 were enrolled in private schools as of 2022, according to U.S. Census data.

Yvette Byes Edwards said her two children were in first and third grade when the pandemic sent SFUSD students home. While the pandemic doesn’t seem to have affected her younger child as much, she said, she has seen how her eldest is still struggling to adapt four years on.

“Those last few years of elementary school are critical in making sure that children are prepared for middle school,” she said. “I tell my seventh-grader even now — I feel like he leaves conversations like he just left a Zoom meeting.”

Students across the country have suffered significant learning losses due to the pandemic. The average student had fallen behind by a one-half of a year in math and one-third of a year in reading by spring 2022, according to joint research from universities across the country including Stanford and Harvard. SFUSD’s reading and math scores fell relative to the U.S. average between 2019 and 2023, the research showed.

In California, around 6 million children were forced to transition to remote learning during the pandemic. Of them, an estimated 1.8 million — mostly students of color — lacked digital access at home, according to a UCLA report published this year.

Curiel, a teacher at Visitacion Valley Middle School at the time, said she and her colleagues were not prepared for these challenges.

“We are trained to do this job for years,” she said. “Never have any of us been trained to do this job from within our student’s home or within ours.”

Edwards said she was fortunate enough to be able to work from home during the pandemic and that she feels neither of her kids is behind academically, but extended remote learning diminished something essential, especially in her eldest.

Despite him having an “amazing” third-grade teacher at the time, Edwards said she was left “just watching that real-time love of learning sort of disappear because of the isolation.”

Part of the issue, she said, is that remote learning went on for far longer than it should have, leading her and other parents to organize the San Francisco Parent Coalition during the summer of 2020 to raise awareness about the difficulties some families were dealing with and advocate for a return to in-person learning.

“We were working with so many families during that time, who were in Wi-Fi dead zones, and they would have to drive them to places just to access Wi-Fi,” said Meredith Dodson, another San Francisco Parent Coalition founder, who also has two kids in SFUSD. “There were these extreme inequities in the system.”

Dodson and others still approve of San Francisco’s decision to close earlier than many other parts of the country, but they said they felt that schools took too long to return. They argued it widened gaps for lower-income and disadvantaged students.

“Families were getting desperate. There were so many families working on the front lines, they were working in restaurants, buses, hospitals,” she said. “They were like, ‘I can’t support my kids learning at home.’”

This led to turmoil within the district, and, eventually, a recall election of three board members in 2022. San Francisco Parent Action was a driving force behind the recall, but organizers weren’t the only ones who felt that the district should have opened up sooner.

Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at UCSF and the author of “Endemic: A Post-Pandemic Playbook,” argued school closures and reopenings became politically motivated as the pandemic wore on.

“The United States followed party lines in terms of their school openings and closures,” she said. “In general, the blue states, blue cities — and San Francisco being the most blue city in the most blue state — kept their schools closed longer than states that were Republican.”

Gandhi advocated for the reopening of schools early on, and she said that the effects are now apparent across the board.

“There’s widespread agreement even among the left that school closures led to mental illness, mental-health concerns and also significant learning loss,” she said. “That learning loss really affected Black and brown communities more than white because learning loss also went along poverty lines.”

Other countries around the world reopened their schools as early as May 2020, she said, and were able to continue in-person learning safely from that point on.

Kevin Robinson, a substitute teacher in SFUSD who served on a district reopening panel in 2020, said there are a number of options for the district to address students’ learning gaps. He said expanded summer school could be an option, as could holding students back.

“Some of these kids might be ready socially and emotionally, but are they ready academically to go on to the next grade?” Robinson asked, acknowledging that repeating grades is a “controversial” option.

For other current teachers, investing in personnel remains paramount. The teachers union avoided a strike last fall by agreeing to a contract last fall that included substantial raises, which the union said would help the district retain teachers and avoid burnout.

“We meet students where they’re at,” said Tom Anderson, a special-education teacher at Dolores Huerta Elementary School who also has two kids enrolled in the district. That includes hiring more special-education teachers and other educators who can give extra attention to students who need it.

“At this point, we have to move forward, but also we’re not given — in special education and in the districts — the resources we need to help those same students from the district,” he said.

Curiel no longer teaches at Visitacion Valley Middle School. She said she keeps in touch with some of her former students, and she said their college considerations excited her.

“The biggest question right now for them is that they are mentally grappling with whether the cost of college is worth it,” she said.

Curiel said she was grateful for the chance to teach them, even during such a challenging time.

“It (the pandemic) was not a good thing, I wouldn’t want to do it again, I can definitively tell you that,” she said. “At the same time, there were a lot of amazing bright spots, and really impactful memories that they have from that experience that happened as a result of being able to be on Zoom with us.”