Pandemic learning loss: How much happened in Shasta County schools?

The coronavirus pandemic dragged down learning scores across Shasta County schools, as it did around the state.

Now, elementary students are working to make up what they lost.

Take the case of Kim Hein's 9-year-old twins, who are fourth graders at Junction Elementary School in Palo Cedro. Student test scores measured in that school district this spring fell 1.97% in English and 8.69% in math.

Weeks of school shutdowns and remote learning played a part in those district-wide dips. So did having teachers, other staff and students get sick with COVID-19, or have to stay home and quarantine if they'd been in contact with someone who was infected.

Since the pandemic, overall California students' performance dropped about 4 points in language arts and as much as 7 points in math, said Enterprise Elementary School District Superintendent Heather Armelino.

Math typically suffered more statewide and locally, she said, because it's a subject where students need in-classroom instruction. "You can read at home and become a better reader ... but math is not quite the same," she said. "You really have to have good, clear instruction to continue to build skills in math."

Still, some bright spots emerged.

Out of the 23 Shasta County districts that reported test scores this year, four districts saw a rise in their students' math test scores in 2022 compared to 2019. English test scores rose in seven of the districts during the same period.

Bucking the odds, test scores in both math and English rose for two small, rural Shasta County districts — Igo-Ono-Patina Union Elementary School District and North Cow Creek Elementary School District.

A major assist, said Igo-Ono School Principal Kim Miller, came because the school's 30 prekindergarten through grade 8 students missed only one week of school due to the pandemic, when virus cases there briefly rose.

The rest of the time, she said, students distanced and case rates remained low, meaning classes could continue in person. After-school tutoring and extra classroom support for struggling students also took place. As a result, math scores at the Igo-Ono school rose 8%, while English scores there were up 15.33% in achievement levels measured by the state's 2022 Smarter Balanced assessments.

But many schools in Shasta County were more impacted by COVID-19 and fared like Junction Elementary, which the Hein children attend.

Distance learning leaves behind kids, parents

This spring marked the first time that Kim Hein's twins were old enough to take the state’s math and English language arts tests.

Since her children hadn’t taken any statewide tests before, it was “kind of hard on my end” to know exactly when they started falling behind, said Hein, mother of the youngsters who are both in the same class.

Remote learning was far from easy for the family during the height of the pandemic, when both parents and their youngsters were working from home in alignment with the state's pandemic shutdown rules.

“When you have younger-level learners and (they) are going online, you really have to be there, next to them, to get logged on, click the microphone on and off, on and off,” Hein said about some of what was required to make distance learning work.

When the siblings returned to modified in-person classes, the situation still remained on shaky ground. "Every time someone got a COVID case, it kind of shut the classroom down," Hein explained.

With such attendance inconsistency, she said, "Has there been a learning loss? I would think so. Yes."

School districts try to close COVID learning gap

Junction Elementary, along with other Shasta County schools, responded with a combination of extra instruction and programs that included summer school, occasional Saturday sessions and in-classroom attention to help struggling learners.

For the most part, Armelino said Shasta County school districts avoided big losses in student performance and "that’s probably because our kids came back to campus a little bit sooner" than children elsewhere in the state.

Still, she acknowledged, last school year was a disappointment.

While students were mostly back in their classrooms then — finally trading distance learning for rotating in-school shifts, wearing masks and other protective health measures — "there were lots of quarantine rules and lots of illness still being passed around," Armelino said.

"I think we all thought that the pandemic was pretty much behind us and that things were going to be normal," said Armelino. "And then it wasn’t at all normal."

School offices struggled, too.

They were "really bogged down with trying to track all that and provide the notification and help with testing. It took a lot of our focus away from what we want to be spending our time on," she said.

While the most recent state test scores focused on students' achievements as of the spring, Armelino said that learning levels in her district are recovering, according to findings from localized tests given in the months after the state's exam.

Armelino is aiming to continue improvements in student achievement by using state money allocated to schools during the pandemic to keep one "literacy coach" at each of its seven traditional schools. Those former classroom teachers work with struggling readers four days a week. They also train teachers on best approaches to help individual students improve. "They're our experts at each school site," said Armelino of the role of literacy coaches.

"We know that (learning) loss didn’t happen overnight. It does take a little time to regain that. But we are absolutely seeing those gains and that recovery taking place," she said. "Based on how our students performed last (school) year, by the end of this (school) year, we should be close to back to what we should be. Good things are happening, we are making up ground."

It also wasn't a perfect year at the Gateway Unified School District.

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Students in that school district saw scores fall in math between 2019 and 2021. However, the 2022 scores math achievement by Gateway's students "stayed the same, if not ticked up," District Superintendent James Harrell said.

Students who were used to "self-paced" learning outside the classroom before the pandemic were able to thrive during forced distance learning, while the same environment caused others students to fall behind. The challenge — helping all students to raise their personal achievement bar.

As part of their strategy, in late November the Gateway Unified district tested a crop of recently-recruited paraprofessional educators. Those adults generally help teachers, supervise students outside of the classroom or provide administrative support for teaching.

The paraeducators also assist students in small groups who need extra help.

The district launched after-school tutoring as well as summer school to help students catch up, efforts made possible by COVID-19 relief funding.

"There are daily interventions happening every day on each campus to meet the needs," Harrell said.

Mom finds ways for twins to thrive in education

Kim Hein said her twins attended summer camps held in 2020 and 2021, the years the pandemic upended schools the most. Rather than focus on reading and math abilities, Hein said those summer programs were more science-based.

Still, said Hein, “I think it was good for their social and psyche and things like that,” although not as much for strengthening their readiness in reading and math.

Deep in the pandemic, her children were among about a dozen youths in grades 1 through 6 who for a time joined what was known locally as a “pandemic pod.” Based at one family’s home, the small group worked together on their school-provided homework for several hours a week with the assistance of a newly-minted college education graduate that the parents all pitched in to hire.

Going forward, one of Hein's twins is involved in private tutoring one hour a week, which is helping that child's language abilities. The effort came in addition to school-offered math tutoring that happened twice a week for several weeks.

Hein is hoping the school-based tutoring will resume, but there’s no word on that yet.

With all these efforts, both her children are “getting closer” to performing at grade level, she said.

Hein remains optimistic that with all the extra support, “by the time the end of the school year comes…I think they’ll be fine.”

Michele Chandler covers criminal justice issues for the Redding Record Searchlight/USA Today Network. Follow her on Twitter at @MChandler_RS, call her at 530-338-7753 or email her at michele.chandler@redding.com. Please support our entire newsroom's commitment to public service journalism by subscribing today.

This article originally appeared on Redding Record Searchlight: Pandemic learning loss: How much happened in Shasta County schools?