Top stories of 2022: Challenges in education stall return to ‘new normal’
In 2022, lingering pandemic challenges festered and boiled over in school districts across the country.
Educators, parents and students entered 2022 hoping it would be the start of a “new normal,” but in many ways, the calendar year was far from a return to the status quo.
Test scores
This year, Connecticut learned the extent of pandemic learning loss.
State assessments from the 2021-2022 school year revealed that average student performance in either English language arts, mathematics and, or science decreased from pre-pandemic levels in nearly 89% of Connecticut school districts, and achievement gaps among minority students continued to persist.
In August, the Connecticut State Department of Education estimated that fourth and fifth graders trailed up to three months behind their expected achievement levels. Middle-schoolers were, on average, seven months behind in ELA and possibly more than a year behind in math.
Despite the troubling figures, education experts say that Connecticut schools largely fared better than other states during the pandemic. Additionally, with signs of accelerated academic growth, officials are hopeful for recovery, but the state remains a ways away from its pre-pandemic achievement rate.
“There’s a lot of work to be done to catch students up,” Jan Hochadel, the president of the Connecticut branch of the American Federation of Teachers, said.
Hochadel said that for educators, deciding between helping students understand in-depth concepts before moving on or staying on track with the fast-paced pre-pandemic curriculum presents “a daily struggle” in the classroom, and the continuing teacher shortage crisis is not aiding the recovery.
Teacher shortage
“We started before the pandemic with a teacher shortage, and now it’s just exacerbated,” Hochadel said. “It’s a learning crisis for the students as well.”
Districts across the state are reporting an increase in midyear departures, and more than 1,000 teaching, special education and paraprofessional positions remain open, driving larger class sizes and workloads for the staff that remain. Recruitment and retention of diverse educators also continue to lag.
In November, the Connecticut Education Association sounded alarm bells after a report by the union found that 74% of kindergarten through 12th-grade educators said they were “more likely to retire or leave education earlier” than planned compared to just a few years ago.
“If we don’t do something about that, public education is going to really be in trouble,” Hochadel said.
Hochadel said that many district leaders this year reevaluated their operations to meet teachers in a better place.
“I think 2022 was the ‘take a breath moment,’” Hochadel said. “There were many districts where the leadership really learned to be more collaborative with the educators and the support staff. [They] looked for their voices, [to] gain their trust and the respect.”
But despite these improvements, Hochadel said teachers continue to feel overwhelmed and undervalued. This year she said teacher stress was compounded by a series of political battles fought in classrooms and school boards across the state.
A political ‘battlefield’
“It’s really not the parents because teachers, they rely on parents. They’re their best hope of getting their child where they need to be. But it’s those other critical influences now that are the really the hardest part,” Hochadel said. “It’s the anti-public education extremists politicizing some of the school issues. …The last couple of years, it’s all of a sudden become this battlefield and teachers are the targets.”
At the start of the school year, controversy erupted after the far-right undercover activist group Project Veritas released video of an assistant principal from a Cos Cob school admitting to avoiding Catholics, older people and conservatives in the hiring process.
Parents’ rights groups that gained traction fighting school mask mandates, found new purpose in fighting what they perceived as liberal indoctrination and “critical race theory” in the classroom.
One such group held an ‘Education, Not Indoctrination’ rally in Southington after a sophomore English teacher circulated a packet titled, “Vocabulary for conversations about race, gender, equality and inclusivity,” to students. In that case, outside educators, and the Southington school board, stood with the teacher.
Executive Director of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents Fran Rabinowitz said that as the conversation about parents’ role in the curriculum has progressed, school districts have become more transparent about what is taught in the classroom.
“There were certainly accusations that we were teaching CRT and that we were teaching things we shouldn’t be teaching, which couldn’t be farther from the truth,” Rabinowitz said. “We were teaching about respecting every child in every classroom, no matter who that child is or who that family is. That’s one of our moral objectives, I believe, in education.”
Swatting calls
Other major disruptions in 2022 included a series of school lockdowns and closures as a result of hoax “swatting” calls. On Oct. 21, more than a dozen community police departments received prank calls reporting an active shooter or bomb threat in a local school. The calls occurred when much of the state’s police force was attending the joint funeral of slain Bristol Police Lt. Dustin DeMonte and Sgt. Alex Hamzy.
“All of the bomb threats and the gun threats — it’s just major upheaval,” Rabinowitz said. “It has died down right now, but certainly I hope that they can find ways to eliminate it, because every time you have to evacuate a school, I know from personal experience, you just lose a lot of learning time, and we can’t afford that right now.”
Mental health crisis
Amidst these challenges, 2022 also saw several successes with continued federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Funding, massive grant awards for school upgrades to aging heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems, and other pieces of legislation supporting students and educators.
Arguably, one of the most significant steps Connecticut legislators took in the 2022 session was the passage of three mental health bills to address the state’s youth mental health crisis.
“The sheer numbers of students that [school psychologists] are needing to support are increasing across all of our school districts,” said Tom Brant, the Connecticut delegate of the National Association of School Psychologists.
Brant said that more students across the state are seeking help for anxiety, depression, school avoidance, self-injurious behavior and substance abuse. Teachers, he said, are also seeking support.
Connecticut legislators’ mental health bill was a major boost for funding school psychology programs, but Brant said that there is a shortage of school psychologists in the state, and continued outflow from the profession has kept mental health departments overwhelmed and in crisis. He said that simple steps like offering paid internships to students who are required to work 1,200 hours before entering the profession and implementing automatic credentialing for psychologists with a national certification could help draw more school psychologists and keep them in the state.
“We’re really hopeful that with the school mental health bill if we can get mental health staff to stay in Connecticut, it could really help our schools,” Brant said. “Community-based mental health services are overwhelmed with basically catching up from the pandemic. So now the reliance is on the schools [to] support students.”
Rabinowitz said that the shift towards addressing not just the academic but also the social and emotional needs of students is a positive one.
She said this year, Connecticut educators “are really concentrating on the whole child.”
“There was incredible joy at the opening of school, and I heard that from so many superintendents and administrators and teachers that they just felt so good to be in person with their children,” Rabinowitz said. “I am looking forward to many different innovations that I see happening and incubating right now … I see infinite possibilities for our kids.”
Alison Cross can be reached at across@courant.com.
