Schools Reopened after Covid — But the Kids Never Returned

Throughout the 18 months of virtual learning during the pandemic, former Waukegan, Ill., high-school history teacher Frank McCormick said most of his students never turned on their Zoom cameras. He eventually left the profession in frustration over what he claimed was gross mismanagement by the administration that led to plummeting standards. 

In September 2021, most schools nationwide resumed in-person teaching after an extensive and exhausting online transition that imposed an unquantifiable burden on children, working families, and teachers, who had to adapt with no warning or preparation. The abatement of the Delta (and then the Omicron) variant was the long-awaited green light to attempt a return to normality in the education setting and schedule. But in many districts across the country, a rebound in student attendance and participation hasn’t happened. School is back in session, but where are the kids?

Public-school systems in many states are experiencing chronic absenteeism, a trend that partially predated the pandemic, especially in underprivileged areas, but, in many cases, seems to either have worsened or at least has not stabilized as predicted in the aftermath.

“Absenteeism and chronic difficulties that interfere with accessing the curriculum existed before and became more magnified during Covid-19,” Rebecca Mannis, learning specialist and founder of learning center Ivy Prep, told National Review. “What Covid-19 did was take issues that were there before and put them on steroids.”

In his northern-Chicago high-school gym class, 17 of the 34 students on the roster never showed up for the fall semester, a teacher of over 20 years, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution, told National Review. This past semester, 19 kids failed his PE class, all of which cases were attendance-related, he noted.

The teachers and experts National Review interviewed revealed a perception among students that school is more or less optional, largely because it was for months on end. The prolonged shutdowns and remote/hybrid learning models that schools implemented during the public-health crisis had a trickle-down effect that created an indifference to education among many students and faculty members that remains even now that schools have reopened, McCormick said.

In the gym teacher’s situation, he said attendance was poor pre-pandemic, given that his school is in an urban, under-resourced area with a high minority concentration in which parent involvement and student accountability is minimal. “The apathy towards learning got even worse during the pandemic,” he said.

Attitudes also did not improve when kids came back to school in September of 2021, he said.

“It was a free-for-all,” he said. Kids were skipping class, roaming the hallways, and fights were breaking out. There was little incentive for kids to behave better and get to their seats on time, as the district had eliminated its strict (and effective) tardy policy years earlier, he said.

Under the old rules, three late arrivals to class earned recalcitrant students a four-hour commitment in Saturday school, effectively detention. “That fixed tardiness in about 25 days. It was enforced. But then they got rid of it, and now we have kids who have about 97 tardies per semester. That’s working real hard not to be in class, and we don’t do anything about it,” he noted.

In some districts, however, it’s not necessarily the kids’ fault that they’re not in class. Kim, a mother of a high-schooler and a middle-schooler in Howard County, Md., told National Review that her district’s arbitrary quarantine policies make it nearly impossible for well-meaning students to keep up their attendance. She said the school sent her “perfectly healthy,” although unvaccinated, preteen home for ten days because of a “cohort outbreak,” defined by the state’s Department of Health as “three or more laboratory-confirmed Covid-19 cases among students/teachers/staff in a specified group with onsets within a 14-day period.”

“Seven negative Covid-19 tests can’t get my kids back in school. And there’s no instruction provided to them during quarantine,” Kim added. While the administration will dismiss kids from school on a public-health whim, she said, it’s been terribly disorganized in keeping track of attendance. For example, the school sent her an email saying, “Your child didn’t show up for one or more classes,” even though quarantine absences are excused.

“My kids have missed between 25 and 30 days of school this year,” Kim said.

Besides the absences for quarantine, parents and students have lost the tolerance and will to consistently attend a school that they feel has neglected them for two years, she said.

“As a parent, you expect us to jump back into this? They’re not acknowledging learning loss, emotional trauma, the screw-up. We’re chugging along as though everything is normal when it’s not,” she said. Kids are getting into trouble left and right, she said. But there’s been no reckoning for the district.

Overall, parents in Howard County have been receiving cues from the administration on whether to take school seriously, Kim said. “The loosey-goosey mentality still persists,” she said.

“We’ve gone on vacation during school. We went to Disney for a week, then my daughter came back to school, got quarantined and was home again. In April, she was in school for maybe five days,” she said.

In 2018, Kim said her kids would have never missed so many days of school. “But what are the consequences now?” she said. “You can make up the work whenever. It’s easy grades. My kids have good grades, so we’re going to Disney!”

While such testimonies suggest a real absenteeism problem in America, statistics from the past two years are hard to come by, as many states don’t collect and report this data uniformly, Nat Malkus, the deputy director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told National Review.

“Many students were remote last year, and it’s hard to count them as logged in if they don’t have their camera on,” he said. Malkus doesn’t blame teachers, who he said shouldn’t be relied on for data collection on top of all of their other duties.

Some states, such as Connecticut, diligently maintain education data. Connecticut had prioritized “full-time, in-person learning for all students” sooner than some other states, with 86.3 percent of districts offering a predominantly full in-person learning model by May 31–June 4, 2021.

However, the percentage of all students chronically absent in Connecticut schools has increased from 19.9 percent in 2020–2021, when Covid-19 was still very prevalent, to 23.8 percent in 2021–2022 (year to date as of April 2022). That 3.9 percentage point spike was driven by student groups of various socioeconomic backgrounds, according to the data.

Connecticut defines chronic absence as “missing 10 percent or greater of the total number of days enrolled during the school year for any reason,” according to the state website. Chronic absence differs from truancy, which refers to repeated unexcused absences that may merit eventual court intervention, as it includes excused, unexcused, out-of-school suspensions, and in-school suspensions that last more than one-half of the school day.

The lesson here, Malkus suggested, is that “you can’t just reopen the school and hope everybody comes back. This is pandemic fallout.”

“What we are not seeing is what we hoped to see, which is, kids are back in school, so kids are back in school,” he said. “We’re seeing chronic absenteeism this year, at least in Connecticut. Disruptions in 2021 are not confined to district decisions and policy decisions that can be ended discretely and things go back to normal.”

In Waukegan, a low-income district, McCormick said “absenteeism was always an issue, but it became more of a problem over the pandemic. Schools have lost legitimacy and perceived authority among parents and students because of their actions over the last few years.”

He claims that his former high school’s progressive policies, which emphasize coaching rather than disciplining students for bad behavior, have also emboldened students to physically, and mentally, check out of school.

“The school just stopped having any consequence for skipping class. From the student’s perspective it was kind of optional,” he said.

The onus of academic performance was passed on to teachers, who were encouraged to give make-up days and accommodate students as much as possible, McCormick added.

“If the students weren’t reciprocating, then the school blames it on the teacher and says, ‘Maybe you’re just not engaging the kids enough,’” he said.

“Kid is using his cellphone in class? Well, he didn’t find your class engaging,” was the excuse the administration leaned on, McCormick claimed. During his Zoom history class periods, he said “it became a joke to students.” One or two students would turn the camera on to prove they were ‘checked in,’ then turn it off.

“As standards got lower, they figured we couldn’t fail all of them because the administration wouldn’t back the teachers up. I had classes in which 75 percent probably deserved to fail because they wouldn’t do a quarter of the work. But that wasn’t allowed. Administrators told us to either find a way to make it work or we’ll discuss why you’re a bad teacher,” he said.

The Chicago-suburb PE teacher said he has a colleague who had a child absent from class all semester this year. Right before summer vacation, the teacher contacted the student and allowed her to make up every assignment in the last week of the school year, after which she passed the class with a C, he claimed.

“You don’t have to be present, and you’ll still be passed,” he said. “The educational language they use is ‘mastering learning.’ If the kid shows ‘mastery,’ they get credit for it. There are unlimited attempts to ‘master’ assignments or tests, so kids don’t care about anything. You get as many do-overs as you want.”

In Illinois, he noted, kids get up to five “mental health days” for the year. Connecticut also offers students in K–12 two mental-health wellness days, which cannot be taken consecutively. “We have kids use Covid-19 as an excuse not to come to school,” the Chicago-suburb teacher said.

Kim, the Howard County mom, suspects that the absenteeism issue is not going away anytime soon, and the school system is to blame. “I feel like I’ve been in a war zone for two years. I come back and everyone keeps telling me everything is fine, but it’s not,” she said.